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Re: Questions

#231

Post by enraged_camel »

foolfoolz wrote: post #151
tvanantwerp wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I travel to Hong Kong every few years to visit family. Each time, there are more MTR stations--and on some occasions, entirely new lines. The MTR is just as complex as BART, if not moreso. I think it's worth considering why some places can build things like a metro fast, but others can't.

before they build a new station.... do they do environmental impact studies? was enough time given for the study to complete and people to challenge the results? possibly with another study? are there community meetings to discuss the impact? does everyone in the area have a chance to voice their opposition at an open hearing? do all workers on the construction team have strict safety regulations? require certified t…

Yeah but how does any of this explain the 16-month delay in BART due to the installation of the wrong network equipment?

Something is genuinely wrong when it comes to major projects in America.

Re: Questions

#232

Post by bigdubs »

lisper wrote: post #106

> Why are programming environments still so primitive? Because we as an industry made a strategic decision in the late 20th century to value run-time efficiency over all other quality metrics, a decision which has manifested itself in the primacy of C and its derivatives. Everything else has been sacrificed in the name of run time efficiency, including, notably, security. Development convenience was also among the co…

Shocked he mentions Visual Studio Code but not Visual Studio itself.

The .net CLR has a lot of the features that he would want to enable the kind of interactive debugging (variable hovers, REPL) he talks about, and Visual Studio itself supports a lot of them.

Personally going from doing C# development in VS2k15 to doing golang development in VSCode feels like going back in time.

Re: Questions

#233

Post by JauntTrooper »

qaq wrote: post #212
trimbo wrote: post #191

> The Empire State Building was built in 410 days At least one reason is that we have substantially different safety regulations since we're not accepting of deaths on a project like that. 5 people died on that project. 11 died to build the Golden Gate. Original Bay Bridge? 24. They actually had a rule of thumb at the time: 1 death for every $1M spent on a project[1]. Any metric like that would be absolutely unaccept…

This will sound horrible but is it rational? E.g. say you are building a huge hospital and due to the above it will take 4 years longer at 2x the cost so basically you could loose X lives due to hospital not being there and due to increased cost of care.

Yes, it is rational. We should live in a society where the expected human sacrifice of a construction project should be 0.

Pure utilitarianism leads to outcomes that are clearly out of step with almost everyone's moral codes. For example you could kill someone and take their organs to save the lives of 4-5 people. Is it rational that we're not allowed to do that? Why do some people get to keep 2 kidneys when there are others with none?

This is solved at least somewhat by using 'rule utilitarianism' instead of 'act utilitarianism'. Society is better off as a whole if we adhere to rules such as protection of the human body or safety regulations when constructing buildings.

Re: Questions

#234

Post by lobotryas »

JauntTrooper wrote: post #233
qaq wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This will sound horrible but is it rational? E.g. say you are building a huge hospital and due to the above it will take 4 years longer at 2x the cost so basically you could loose X lives due to hospital not being there and due to increased cost of care.

Yes, it is rational. We should live in a society where the expected human sacrifice of a construction project should be 0. Pure utilitarianism leads to outcomes that are clearly out of step with almost everyone's moral codes. For example you could kill someone and take their organs to save the lives of 4-5 people. Is it rational that we're not allowed to do that? Why do some people get to keep 2 kidneys when there ar…

Yes, but only up to a point. If all the rules and safety checks inflate the cost and timeline of projects exponentially then barely anything would get built.

The question, as always, is: "Where do we draw the line?".

Re: Questions

#235

Post by ninkendo »

nkurz wrote: post #190
bostonpete wrote: post #159

> K12 education spending in the US has increased by 2-3X per student per year since 1960. Uh what? That's not even close to true...

I'm not familiar with the statistics, and may be misreading them, but for what I can find with a quick search, 2-3X seems about right, possibly even low. Total expenditure per pupil in average daily attendance in constant 2016 dollars: 1959-60: $3,890 2014-15: $14,013 $14,000 / $4,000 = 3.5x https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d17/tables/dt17_236.55.a... Separately, here's a link claiming a 3x increase for Nevada in…

Maybe it’s just poor phrasing? Because:

> has increased by 2-3X per student per year

reads to me like it’s saying that every year, the cost is 2-3x higher than it was the year before. Which is obviously impossible.

Re: Questions

#237

Post by jim777 »

notdang wrote: post #162
petra wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an Israeli and it comes from a few factors: 1. Israelis basically have no choice. If you want to make a good income, working hard in a technology startup(we have very few big tech companies) is one of the very few good options. 2. The army: at a very young age,a decent percentage of Israelis who join the army lead, in high value, high risk situations. That creates a sense of responsibility and strong ambition at…

>and possibly higher intelligence Interesting what would happen if this is said about any other country

It's not about nationality: Ashkenazi Jews in general -- Israeli or not -- tend to be smarter. ~20% of Nobel prize winners are Jews compared to less than 1% of the global population. So either there's a Jewish conspiracy (which some people believe...) or Jews tend to be smarter.

Some people would say that this is cultural. I doubt it -- I think it's genetic. Intelligence is a physical attribute determined by genes, just like every other physical attribute. It's really no different from the observation that Kenyans and Ethiopians win most marathons.

In general, we should expect different traits to be exhibited at different frequencies by different populations that were reproductively isolated in the past. This doesn't mean prejudice is okay. Not all Jews are smart, and not all Kenyans are going to win marathons. We can acknowledge these correlations without behaving in a prejudiced way toward individuals.

Most people would rather not talk about this. And that's certainly my rule of thumb for in-person conversations. But, hey, we're on the internet.

Re: Questions

#238

Post by csomar »

0x445442 wrote: post #206
csomar wrote: post #9

> Why is US GDP growth so weirdly constant? This is something I noticed too. And it can't be just blamed to "inflation" of the US GDP. Almost any other country I checked does have fluctuations. Goes through booms and bust. China has gone through an exponential rise but slowed down and seems like it broke the pattern recently. The US is the only country so far that has been going decades through a constant rate of cha…

Not sure what you mean by "constant rate of change"? https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-growth looks to me to a noisy overlay of https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/inflation-cpi .

In this case the GDP of the US would have been either constant or linear. In both cases making it different from the rest of the countries which experience booms and bust whilst having inflation.

Re: Questions

#239

Post by johngalt »

qaq wrote: post #212
trimbo wrote: post #191

> The Empire State Building was built in 410 days At least one reason is that we have substantially different safety regulations since we're not accepting of deaths on a project like that. 5 people died on that project. 11 died to build the Golden Gate. Original Bay Bridge? 24. They actually had a rule of thumb at the time: 1 death for every $1M spent on a project[1]. Any metric like that would be absolutely unaccept…

This will sound horrible but is it rational? E.g. say you are building a huge hospital and due to the above it will take 4 years longer at 2x the cost so basically you could loose X lives due to hospital not being there and due to increased cost of care.

It might be more palatable if the benefits accrued to the people assuming the risks.

Reliably the people absorbing the risks capture almost none of the added value.

Re: Questions

#240

Post by seanmcdirmid »

unixhero wrote: post #47
chucky wrote: post #35

> Why are there so many successful startups in Stockholm? Several reasons. First, you need to recognize that any Sweden-based startup will, when it gets to be known internationally, have a Stockholm-based office. So it's not about a city of 1 million inhabitants, it's a country of 10 million that's the true number here. As an example, I believe Spotify opened their original offices in both Stockholm and Göteborg more…

Good observations! You forgot one major thing. This goes for all of Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark. The winter is horribly dark and boring. (Unless you're super rich). Therefore most turn inwards, staying indoors, thinking deeply at problems, spending endless afternoons and nights on things. Be it software development, game development, car tuning, car engine work, engineering, knitting or just reading loads of…

The same is basically true with Seattle. Well, not so dark (the sun is out til 4:30), winters are quite mild, but wet enough to keep everyone focused.
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