e3b0c · HackerTrans

7 yıl öncediscuss

If by the wealth you mean land, then yes it's finite. But the ownership of man-crafted things is not. You can always create new apps or websites that generate values. Those man-crafted things can become useless someday as well. For example, a 3.5" floppy disk drive probably isn't worth what it used to be anymore.

e3b0c

7 yıl öncediscuss

This is definitely a problem worth more innovations. But it should be kept in mind that the core idea of coming up with such a model is literally to design a contract. By recognizing that, it becomes evident that the contract must benefit, and be voluntarily acceptable, by both counterparties.

In finance, we already have a lot of innovations, thanks to the significant reduction of the transaction/contract-enforcement costs. I guess that is why it has not happened in other fields like employment contracts or partnership agreements. The designing and enforcement costs of any innovative contracts are just too high (considering you have to hire a layer to confirm all those changes and when you have to sue someone for violations).

e3b0c

7 yıl öncediscuss

It can be seen as an energy storage technology for renewables.

e3b0c

7 yıl öncediscuss

> Rognlie, Matthew. 2015. Deciphering the Fall and Rise in the Net Capital Share. Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 46(1): 1–69

The paper briefly mentions it but does not address or refute the point further.

e3b0c

7 yıl öncediscuss

In my opinion, `git add -p` should be the default, and a `-a` or alike to forcibly commit the entire working tree. I have developed a habit that I wouldn't feel comfortable if I haven't reviewed the chunks I am going to make into the commit.

e3b0c

7 yıl öncediscuss

That risk assessment assumes only the technical aspects. But there are still institutional, management and other 'people' issues that could render any engineering guarantee fruitless. Otherwise, the delivery of nuclear plants would have no way to off schedule.

I have no objection to the development of nuclear technology. But as I understand, what concerns people is not entirely the 'likelihood' of the disasters but rather the 'severity' of them. After all, People make mistakes and organizations corrupt. So, I think any tech progresses on the scale-down of the worst case where all safety is off would be far more helpful in convincing the public.

e3b0c

7 yıl öncediscuss

As far as I know, China's grid and power plants are not run by the government either.

e3b0c

7 yıl öncediscuss

Has anyone read Schopenhauer's books like The world as will and representation?

His idea doesn't seem to be talked about much. However, I would admit that I don't fully comprehend the ideas of that book either.

e3b0c

7 yıl öncediscuss

I recently realized that there are roughly two kinds of people, namely people who are good at symbolic/abstract ideas and people who are good at real/physical/touchable things, which can be considered orthogonal to the extrovert/introvert categorization. For a software engineering team, I find it tends to be suboptimal to have a physical-thinking oriented manager who dislikes abstract, symbolic notions, even though they are brilliant and would probably a good fit for say electrical or mechanical engineering teams.

My sampling space isn't large enough, but it's interesting to keep an eye on the personalities of the managers in your organization from that perspective.

e3b0c

7 yıl öncediscuss

That assumes the demand and the supply are independent variables.

More people would mean smaller pieces if the size of the pie held constant. But what if there are also fewer people making the pie?

In reality, it's even more complicated in that the contribution of the pie making is not proportional to the headcounts either.

e3b0c

7 yıl öncediscuss

That would probably be true if all other conditions held constant.

However, Silicon Valley can pay handsome money because many companies located there run well and outperform their competitors for a fertile global market. And those companies can beat their competitors because (at least part of the reasons) they have the best talents available. If the skilled engineers from China, European, India all went back to their home countries, would the competitiveness of those SV companies be no different relative to their foreign competitors? If companies in SV were losing its advantage to another tech hub outside the united states, would they still be able to pay so well? I doubt that.

e3b0c

7 yıl öncediscuss

My point is not about how an individual player gets their enjoyment from the game. Some players would want to beat every other to the death, even in the real world.

My point is individual player tends to complain how the game sucks from his standpoint without second-thought about the consequences to others, to the system, or even to themselves in the long run. I am more concerned about the non-leaner responses from changing the incentive structure. For instance, what would it turn out if, let's say, a gaming event where 90% of your income (EXP, game money, skill points, etc.) would be redistributed to others in the period of that event? Would anyone get excited about it? or people would say, "we gonna work on other things and wait for the freeriding," which is the most rational, economical decision for personal resource management. I would expect that every player of the game would spend more time with their family and we see drastically decreased MAU of the game as a result.

e3b0c

7 yıl öncediscuss

Imagine that we are designing an MMORPG world. We know that individual player would seek to maximize their "gains" and to advance their ranking in the game as a part of the gaming experience. Meanwhile, as the game operator, we don't want the inequality to be too extreme between the top players and the casual players so that no hopes for the newcomers to advance their ranking, which hurts their gaming experience and they would quit for other games. But is it a wise idea to brute-forcibly transfer the 'wealth' of the most hardcore, talented, or just luckiest players to the others to make the game more enjoyable for the bottom players?

If we were thinking about it in a way that "you're not one of the players, but the designer of the game," and you want the game to be sustainable and reputable, I believe the answer would not just that simple.

e3b0c

8 yıl öncediscuss

If "the business interests of the upper class" makes governments do all the evils, why do you think this time will be different?

e3b0c

8 yıl öncediscuss

I learned that Git stores data as DAG at the very beginning when introduced to it. But I came to get clicked until I realized that it is not only a DAG but an immutable one. That is, existing nodes of the DAG are never changed once created. The only operation supported by the system is more or less: create. Also, using the plumbings to peek into the content of the objects and refs inside the .git helps a lot as well.

e3b0c

8 yıl öncediscuss

Comparing nuclear waste with other waste like those from manufacturing solar panels does not help. You don't need to build the facilities like the Yucca Moutain Project to contain the waste from making silicon chips. (Yes, comparing the waste from making silicon chips to solar panels makes more sense)

e3b0c

8 yıl öncediscuss

Monorepo could be a decent choice if your software stack does not require too much external dependencies. Or more precisely, the ratio of own code to the third-party code is reasonably high.

Let me give a concrete example. The Android open source project (AOSP) which builds the system of Android devices has the code size close to the scale of tens of GB (let alone all the histories!). It is already a massive monorepo in itself. And typically you would have many of them from different OEM/SoC vendors of different major releases. In such a scenario, it would turn into 'a monorepo of monorepos,' which is quite unpleasant to imagine.

e3b0c

8 yıl öncediscuss

When talking about "efficient communication" between the computer and the programmer, it does not necessarily imply the characteristics of the runtime performance.

For instance, Fortran is very performant in numerical computing, even outperforming C, but it has difficulty in accessing I/O mapped registers or implementing an interrupt handler, a jump table, or just cleaning a particular chunk of memory addresses.

e3b0c

8 yıl öncediscuss

C is a language designed to enable more efficient communication between the computer and the programmer in mind.

C++ is a language designed to enable more communication between the compiler and the programmer.

Go is a language designed to enable more efficient communication between programmers.

e3b0c

8 yıl öncediscuss

> In my opinion, if you're a start-up and you've got all those boxes checked, you're possibly doing the right things in the wrong order, and that's a red flag for me.

In my opinion, that depends on the experience/background of your staff. I have even seen open source projects (not backed by companies) get all the boxes checked in a very short period of time. For a project maintainer who has prior experience, it just takes several hours at most to set up a git hosting server and the CI/CD infrastructure. The time saved for fixing a single regressing can easily pay off the investment.

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