ppereira

vor 3 Jahrendiscuss

Artificial lemon flavours that you find in candy and cough syrup taste much more like “sweet lemon” than the typical lemon found in North America. It is sweet when eaten within the first minute or so and bland afterwards. It does not taste acidic at all.

ppereira

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

Many tools used in chip design are controlled with Tcl. It provides a stable repl for these heavy, multi-threaded, efficient, C++ programs.

ppereira

vor 6 Jahrendiscuss

See quantile regression and hinge loss functions.

ppereira

vor 6 Jahrendiscuss

Qualcomm | Engineers | San Diego | ONSITE, VISA | Full Time

https://www.qualcomm.com/company/careers

Qualcomm invents breakthrough technologies that transform how the world connects, computes and communicates

The CAD team is looking for software engineers to build the systems we use to optimize chips with billions of transistors.

If you like working on distributed systems in a high-performance computing environment, then please reach out.

A knowledge of VLSI and EDA is not strictly necessary. Strong quantitative skills and/or experience with probabilistic graphical models is an asset.

If you are interested or have any questions, please contact Paul Pereira at [email protected].

ppereira

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

You may wish to check out the MIT Pantheon project which ranks people not just by page views, but also by the log of birth year and number of languages that their biography has been translated into. With that metric, knowing Aristotle would be much more valuable than knowing Justin Bieber, whose name is likely to decline in importance well within one lifetime, and is perhaps hardly known at all outside certain countries.

ppereira

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

The distincion between creating value and hacking the economic system is interesting.

“Think of Alan Turing, whose genius provided the mathematics underlying the modern computer. Or of Einstein. Or of the discoverers of the laser (in which Charles Townes played a central role) or John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley, the inventors of transistors. Or of Watson and Crick, who unraveled the mysteries of DNA, upon which rests so much of modern medicine. None of them, who made such large contributions to our well-being, are among those most rewarded by our economic system.”

ppereira

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

Yes, but they will link you to a mobile number and then require that you confirm your number on grounds that they cannot identify you from your login. Gmail did not have my number confirmed until I moved and they locked me out of my email, despite answering all security questions. Theory and practice can be very different.

ppereira

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

OpenBSD is very good at suspend/resume, particularly for non-bleeding edge laptops that developers have had a chance to use. I've had better luck with suspend/resume on OpenBSD than on Linux. I recommend Thinkpad X/T series laptops and have also had success with older Asus Eee PCs.

ppereira

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

You have framed this question in terms of your freedom to contract in order to restrict distribution. Although many think contractual freedom is paramount, that is not necessarily so. It may be bounded by other more basic legal principles. In your chips example, it may be bounded by property and competition law.

In property law, there is the concept of a restraint on alienation. In competition/anti-trust law, there is the concept of a post-sale restraint. The idea is simple: after you by the chips, they are yours and you can do with them what you want. Restricting resale also limits competition, which is bad for consumers. Whether this view trumps your freedom to contract is a legal question whose answer has varied over time.

Historically, such restraints were a problem for real property in England. An estate might have been held in "fee tail" to be passed on to heirs indefinitely. Society decided that land was not being effectively used in this way, so fee tails were broken by statute beginning in the 1800's. Your freedom to "devise by will" was limited in favor of the property right of alienation.

Software was traditionally sold to the end user, who could use or sell the product as he wished, subject to Copyright restrictions on making additional copies for distribution. Only recently did this property-like right erode in favour of the current norm where software is licensed under a plethora of contractual restrictions you may never have read (the EULA).

ppereira

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

Why don't you just read the readme? The additional features are at the top, and examples in the body.

ppereira

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

It should be noted that these predictions are not based on the lawyers' pleadings, but on the facts and law sections from the judges' decisions.[1]

There is definitely a possibility of bias in the characterization of the facts. The authors state that for their appellate court, the facts section is uncontested by the parties and derived from the lower court's findings. Even so, it is not clear whether the court's reversal rate is high or low. If low, it could be that the lower court's presentation of the facts was equally varnished.

With some judges, it is possible to predict the outcome of the case from the very first sentence laying out the facts and circumstances. In a famous dissenting judgement by Lord Denning, in which he attempts to save a cricket field, the judge begins as follows:[2]

  In summertime village cricket is the delight of everyone. 
  Nearly every village has its own cricket field where the 
  young men play and the old men watch. In the village of 
  Lintz in County Durham they have their own ground, where 
  they have played these last 70 years. They tend it well. 
  The wicket area is well rolled and mown. The outfield is 
  kept short. It has a good club house for the players and 
  seats for the onlookers. The village team play there on 
  Saturdays and Sundays. They belong to a league, competing 
  with the neighbouring villages. On other evenings after 
  work they practise while the light lasts. Yet now after 
  these 70 years a judge of the High Court has ordered that 
  they must not play there any more.

Even with this critique, I think that this research is an excellent first step. It would be great to use pleadings, which are available with effort from some appellate courts. It would likely be necessary to OCR some PDF files.

I doubt that this textual approach would work for the more technical parts of the law. Many cases are in areas with very few preceding cases from which to train an n-gram based algorithm. While the author's approach worked for certain human rights cases, it would likely fail for cases turning on an obscure tax provision.

[1] Original paper: https://peerj.com/articles/cs-93/

[2] Miller v Jackson [1977] QB 966, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_v_Jackson

ppereira

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

The mobility between quintiles is not particularly interesting; it is far too coarse a measure. The changes in inequality that we see in the US, Canada, and the UK affect the relative earning capacity of the bottom 90% vs. the top 10%, with the 90th percentile being an inflection point at our levels of inequality.

The relevant reduction in mobility would primarily be within the top 10% tail of the Pareto distribution for income, the dynamics of the bottom 90% are quite different -- although their absolute share vs. the top 10% has certainly declined.

ppereira

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

Just like public utilities don't have a monopoly on the provision of power, because, hey, every home-owner can buy a diesel generator. With the level of substitution you are describing, you've made the word monopoly meaningless.

The regional broadcasters for the Olympics have a monopoly because of their economic power in setting the price for their good. Other than circumventing copyright or using a VPN, there is no competitor that will provide you with the Olympics for less money. Random youtube videos are not a substitute for watching an Olympics broadcast live.

ppereira

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

To increase supply, increase height limits, reduce setbacks, and get rid of zoning regulations that have nothing to do with health and safety.

ppereira

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

This is NIMBYism at its finest. Those who immigrated to Toronto first own prime real estate near commercial centres. New working families have to move out and commute long distances so that retired folk living in Toronto houses can enjoy their land appreciation and sunshine.

ppereira

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

Lack of construction is certainly a problem in Toronto, which has a default 10 meter height limit for new residential construction. All new buildings taller than a house require municipal buy-in.

Between 2001 and 2011, the number dwellings in Toronto increased 11%, while areas 30km from the downtown core grew about 35%. You can clearly see the effects of the 10m restriction on urban sprawl at p. 11 of the city's census backgrounder:

http://www1.toronto.ca/city_of_toronto/social_development_fi...

Detached homes and town-homes use twice as much energy as apartments, and people commuting 30km to the city generally drive. There has been an uptick in apartment construction recently, but these units are generally too small for families because developers find it more profitable to sell mini-suites to young bachelors.

ppereira

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

Please don't cherry pick an (unmentioned) directive in a one-line rebuttal; try to challenge the comment's core arguments.

ppereira

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

There is quite a bit of anger and little fact in this comment. GiveDirectly has been running UBI programs in East Africa for years now. They have an all-star cast of economists examining their performance. Their pilot programs were very successful, which is why they are scaling out further.

East Africa, and Kenya in particular, was carefully chosen for two reasons. First, Kenya has a mobile phone network that makes it easy to transfer funds electronically to individuals and then for those individuals to get cash from the funds at local stores. I wish we had this in the West, but we don't because of banking regulations. Second, poorer households in certain communities tend to use natural roofing materials rather than aluminum, which makes it easy to target funding by satellite.

The UBI is a political football in the West. The Mincome experiment was cancelled because of a change in government. The potential utility benefits from a UBI are so great that it would be a shame to think that we have to wait for it to be politically palatable in the West before we can get any data on its effectiveness. Also, as far as poverty relief is concerned, money really does help.

ppereira

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

I think you meant to say "In Europe civil law dominates".

ppereira

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

I did a similar simulation of income/wealth distributions using US income tax rates over the past century. It was a gloriously hackish combination of a Lisp tax-rate parser, auto-generated C actor model, and R.

I sure hope more economists study these methods because the standard models in Public Economics/Taxation are hopelessly inadequate, if not negligent.

A Nobel Memorial Prize winning economist by the name of James Mirrlees came up with a theory for optimum income taxation in the 1970s that is still used by governments today. It suggested that a relatively flat tax would be optimal rather than the progressive rates then in vogue. Unfortunately, his model is hopelessly incorrect as it essentially assumes that the general shape of the (pre-tax) income distribution is constant. Its starting point is that if you tax people too much, they will just work less than their untaxed income earning potential, hindering your ability to raise taxes.

In reality, progressive tax rates alter the ability of the wealthy to accumulate capital, which alters the Pareto coefficient (power-law constant) of the high-income tail, drastically changing the number of very-wealth individuals and benefiting the bottom 90%. If you tax too regressively, wealth can concentrate and even "condense" in the wealthy -- essentially shifting all earning capacity to a few. This happens because there exist power-law coefficients for high incomes that are not integrable. Beyond a tipping point, wealth will just continue to "condense" in the wealthiest actors.

You can find detailed tax schedules and inequality data for the US for the last century. The details of the actor-interactions are not that important, much like molecular interactions do not make a qualitative difference in statistical mechanics. In fact, analytical stochastic models may be easier to calculate, although they are less flexible.

Income tax progression can explain a large part of the variation, but not all. There are other important factors such as union participation, war-time expropriation, and lending terms. Nevertheless, the income tax schedule is important and easy to change.

Submissions

UN report on extreme poverty and human rights in the USA

Lenovo Thinkpad 25 (Retro) Pictures

Adobe has figured out a way to track people as they switch between devices

AsiaBSDCon OpenBSD papers

Microsoft opens cloud services to select Canadian clients with new data centres

Project Gutenberg inaccessible through VPNs, TOR, or anonymizers

Retro ThinkPad Survey 4: Miscellaneous

Coreboot Blocked from Recent Thinkpads by Intel Boot Guard

10 ways you give up data without knowing it

Afghanistan's Buddhist buried treasure faces destruction

Laundering money with shell companies in India

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