2
points
gbacon
Joined 1,311 karma
- Had to be expected. Buffett was a once in several generations talent.
- This is HN. We understood exactly what “exposed … confidential files” meant before reading your overly dramatic scenario. As overdone as it is, it’s not even realistic. A likely single mother is likely tiny potatoes in comparison to deep-pocketed legal firms or large corporations.
The story is an example of the market self-correcting, but out comes this “building code” hobby horse anyway. All a software “building code” will do is ossify certain current practices, not even necessarily the best ones. It will tilt the playing field in favor of large existing players and to the disadvantage of innovative startups.
The model fails to apply in multiple ways. Building physical buildings is a much simpler, much less complex process with many fewer degrees of freedom than building software. Local city workers inspecting by the local municipality’s code at least has clear jurisdiction because of where the physical fixed location is. Who will write the “building code”? Who will be the inspectors?
This is HN. Of all places, I’d expect to see this presented as an opportunity for new startups, not calls for slovenly bureaucracy and more coercion. The private market is perfectly capable of performing this function. E&O and professional liability insurers if they don’t already will be soon motivated after seeing lawsuits to demand regular pentests.
The reported incident is a great reminder of caveat emptor.
- > As COVID-19 sent the world indoors, Ann Bedsole found herself in a position like the rest of us — holed up inside with no idea how long she would be there. Not one for inactivity (or squandered time), she decided to use the opportunity to write her life story.
> Bedsole had plenty of material to work with. Born in Selma in 1930 and raised in Jackson, she eventually moved to Mobile, where she became the first Republican woman elected to the Alabama House of Representatives and the first woman elected to the state Senate. Oh, and she was also a founder of the Alabama School of Math and Science, a founder of Mobile Historic Homes Tours and chairman of the Mobile Tricentennial Committee. The list goes on.
- Verbing weirds language.
- Rather than an absolute lie, I’m more inclined to characterize it as naïve or black-and-white thinking, outside of CRUD apps and undergraduate intro projects.
- > Die Mathematiker sind eine Art Franzosen: Redet man zu ihnen, so übersetzen sie es in ihre Sprache, und alsbald ist es etwas ganz anderes. (Goethe)
- All over this discussion, the big negative has nothing to do with missing out on stellar education, skill development, or expert teachers. Instead, it’s the perpetual handwringing that homeschooled kids won’t be Properly Socialized, i.e., be exposed to and have to endure mistreatment, disruption, and sometimes assault from other maladjusted, cruel, or even mentally ill peers — because that’s “the real world.”
This is not the W for the government schools that proponents seem to think it is.
- Perhaps unlike in some ways, but some aspects of school life persist in so-called adult life, e.g., jocks, nerds, freaks, party animals, slackers, and teacher’s pets are all still around — now with zeros on the end.
- Very close, as in one step of arithmetic.
- If the pro-regulation side refuses to admit that cookie banners are bad regulation, then engaging with these True Believers is a complete waste of time.
- Regional and commercial jets cost tens and hundreds of millions of USD. The greediest caricature capitalist will want to protect this investment. Their insurers will demand certain terms to accept the risk of having to replace such a costly asset. Our greedy capitalist villain wants repeat business. Dead customers don’t pay again. Lawsuits are costly. Their friends and family will be reluctant to book fares with airlines they perceive as being unsafe. “Qantas never crashed.”
- This is the Schoolhouse Rock version that ignores the real phenomenon of regulatory capture, formalized by Stigler way back in 1971.
“We propose the general hypothesis: every industry or occupation that has enough political power to utilize the state will seek to control entry. In addition, the regulatory policy will often be so fashioned as to retard the rate of growth of new firms.”
- Which purpose do you mean? Stated purpose? Intended purpose? Regulators’ purpose? Legislators’ purpose? Donors’ and other special interests’ purpose? Harm as defined by whom? The field of public-choice economics rests on the insight that employees of agencies and bureaus act in their own self-interest, which is not always the same as the public interest.
- A giant helping of hubris may be a factor in this tendency. ‘Programming a computer is thrilling enough; imagine programming an entire country of people!’
Those who think this way need to read Bastiat: “Oh, sublime writers! Please remember sometimes that this clay, this sand, and this manure which you so arbitrarily dispose of, are men! They are your equals! They are intelligent and free human beings like yourselves! As you have, they too have received from God the faculty to observe, to plan ahead, to think, and to judge for themselves!”
- See also the perlrun documentation[0].
This example works on many platforms that have a shell compatible with Bourne shell:
The system ignores the first line and feeds the program to /bin/sh, which proceeds to try to execute the Perl program as a shell script. The shell executes the second line as a normal shell command, and thus starts up the Perl interpreter. On some systems $0 doesn't always contain the full pathname, so the "-S" tells Perl to search for the program if necessary. After Perl locates the program, it parses the lines and ignores them because the check 'if 0' is never true. If the program will be interpreted by csh, you will need to replace ${1+"$@"} with $*, even though that doesn't understand embedded spaces (and such) in the argument list. To start up sh rather than csh, some systems may have to replace the #! line with a line containing just a colon, which will be politely ignored by Perl. Other systems can't control that, and need a totally devious construct that will work under any of csh, sh, or Perl, such as the following:#!/usr/bin/perl eval 'exec /usr/bin/perl -wS $0 ${1+"$@"}' if 0; # ^ Run only under a shell
[0]: https://perldoc.perl.org/perlrun#-Seval '(exit $?0)' && eval 'exec perl -wS $0 ${1+"$@"}' & eval 'exec /usr/bin/perl -wS $0 $argv:q' if 0; # ^ Run only under a shell - We care about Z3 because it is a Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) solver.
Satisfiability: In 1971, Stephen A. Cook established that Boolean satisfiability, given an arbitrary Boolean formula whether an assignment to its variables exists that evaluates true, is NP-complete.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/800157.805047
Translating between NP-complete problems is at most a polynomial (“fast”) amount of work, so every improvement gained on satisfiability (whose worst case is exponential rather than polynomial time complexity) benefits all other NP-complete problems, and thus the rest of NP.
Modulo Theories: We can think of SMT as a high-level language that automates encoding of other problems into raw Boolean formulas. Applications built on Z3 outsource search by encoding problems via one or more theories and then decoding results back to the problem domain at hand.
The benefits of doing this are (1) using an existing robust, well-tested suite of algorithms where (2) lots of research effort is concentrated and (3) improvements to Z3 improve your problem’s results more-or-less for free. According to Microsoft, “Z3 is used in a wide range of software engineering applications, ranging from program verification, compiler validation, testing, fuzzing using dynamic symbolic execution, model-based software development, network verification, and optimization.”
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/z3-3/
See also:
- > These new findings might sound confusing, as if one stated that a kind of cake may exist but that no recipe exists to create it.
> “We would say that it is not the recipe that is the problem. Instead, it is the tools you have to make the cake that is the problem,” says study senior author Anders Hansen, a mathematician at the University of Cambridge. “We are saying that there might be a recipe for the cake, but regardless of the mixers you have available, you may not be able to make the desired cake. Moreover, when you try to make the cake with your mixer in the kitchen, you will end up with a completely different cake.”
> In addition, to continue the analogy, “it can even be the case that you cannot tell whether the cake is incorrect until you try it, and then it is too late,” Colbrook says. “There are, however, certain cases when your mixer is sufficient to make the cake you want, or at least a good approximation of that cake.”
- Behaving like docile, compliant cattle benefits only the farmer.
> Some times you have to find something and work …
Rather than waiting for a perfect choice, I read Hamming as reminding us that are making choices all the time and cannot avoid doing so. Even not choosing, e.g., staying in a less-than-ideal role, is a choice. Given that we have no choice but to choose, Hamming suggests knowing up front where we want to go in the long term and biasing choices in that general direction.
Swizec mentioned Cal Newport elsewhere[0], and Newport’s recommendations around lifestyle-centric career planning provide an interesting bridge between your comments about occasionally needing to weather a storm and Hamming.
Some view titles, particular projects, or certain roles to be worthwhile goals in themselves. “I just graduated law school, so I want to make partner at a big NYC law firm” is a goal that a motivated new attorney might set. Does that career goal serve her if she despises traffic, subway travel, and apartment living? Newport advocates beginning with a vision of an ideal lifestyle and working backward from there by setting career goals to achieve the desired lifestyle.
Where he may be in a conflict with Hamming is warning people about what he calls the grand goal theory, of which the fresh law school grad aiming at partner shows the pitfalls. Hamming’s advice will help you go far. Newport warns that if you’re going to go far, be sure it’s in the direction you want to go.
In the case you mentioned of someone who is long-term unemployed, having a job that produces income is certainly nearer to any Hamming career goal and any Newport ideal lifestyle than that person’s present circumstance of draining savings or, worse, accumulating debt for basic living expenses.
[0]: https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=46354790