noloqy

According to the first article, Shiller said in 1996 that stock prices were at irrationally high levels. In 2005, he predicted a real estate bubble. Noticing that a bubble is developing, I would say, is the relatively easy part; predicting when it will collapse is the difficult part. As Keynes said, "Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent", so there is limited value in betting against bubbles. Paulson may have made billions, but undoubtedly there have been people that followed similar shortly before he did, but lost it all. The reason we know Paulson is because of the survivorship bias.

Though T-Mobile seems to have adopted an interesting strategy in the US - as a European customer I find their proposition not to be notably better than that of other carriers. Here, it takes European commissioners to lower international roaming charges. T-Mobile doesn't rock across the globe.

In Amsterdam, there's almost no houses with garages. Put bluntly, this is why Amsterdam will never be anything like SV.

I just spent 5 minutes looking up what all the acronyms meant.

What's the problem exactly? Job growth has been stagnant for 5 years?

Productivity is the ratio of units of output per unit of input, where you can abstract input as being either capital or labor. Indeed, productivity continues to grow as a consequence of technological advances. When mankind started using oxes to plough fields, landworkers' productivity rose significantly. As we develop more tools to aid us in daily tasks, less labor - and sometimes even less capital - is required to perform those tasks.

During the relatively prosperous past decades, organizations have grown heavy, and were able to do so because of a continuously rising product demand. People started over-working and over-consuming. Then there was an external shock, media started talking about a financial crisis, people started being more considerate of their consumption in the face of job insecurity, and businesses that grew too heavy needed to get back into shape. This is a process that has significant feedback effects. The process of business getting back into shape means the cutting non-contributing jobs (think of excess layers of management), which by itself causes a growth in productivity. In this sense, employment growth and productivity growth can be negatively correlated, and it is not necessarily "technological advances" that drive productivity growth.

Telling us that technology is destroying our jobs is the same as telling us that China is stealing our jobs, though they may affect different industries (I don't see Chinese laborers replacing our butchers.) The thing is that the working population is very flexible, and despite offshoring certain jobs the average American still works over 50 hours a week. Population growth hasn't justified job growth in the US for the past 40 years, so perhaps a stagnant job growth is a good thing in that it draws things back to "normality".

The website or post in no way implies that this is the case.

One reason to choose Syria is that the situation may be more acute than it is in most other places in the world at the moment.

One reason to choose programmers could be that this is also the industry that the founder is active in, perhaps making it easier to approach potential customers.

I think it does hurt the NSA's recruiting position indeed. The NSA naturally hires mostly technical people, and in general I think it is exactly this population that is disgusted most by what the NSA is doing. For me, the issue wouldn't be as much about prestige, but more about morality.

As for the more general public, they're just following the news. The news has devoted a lot of attention to the NSA lately, but will move on to different topics sooner or later, and the general public will forget.

If I were PayPal, I wouldn't primarily be focused on buying items, as it would be very expensive strategy. I'd try sending sellers email first, indicating that you are interested in purchasing their product and asking them if they support PayPal. Having thousands of sellers just visiting your site to see what this "PayPal" is about is a great way of getting your name out there at no cost.

Also, if I'm not mistaking, buyers have no right to force sellers to accept a payment method that the seller did not support. Of course you could try to persuade them after you've bought their product, but insisting goes way too far.

Conversely, if you are graded on the curve, you want your coworkers to be provably lousier than you are.

They might be selling it as a users' benefit, but in the case of the Amazon app, users are at a loss.

As long as the developers submit themselves to Apple's authority, Apple and its related products could offer superior service. Most developers are still accepting the "Apple way", even in cases where it hurts their own business proposition. The reason Apple has such a strong supplier power is that they have a very strong market share. However, Apple's arrogance will one day contribute to their downfall. Developers choose to develop first and foremost for the platform that offers the greatest benefits; as Apple's market shares are falling, the userbase is less of a reason to choose to develop for Apple first. Also, because alternatives are strengthening on various fronts, developers will be less likely to swallow Apple's authoritative terms if those terms hurt their own business model - even if that means offering a suboptimal service to Apple's customers.

This question was answered by Armin Ronacher three days ago.[0]

"Why for instance is it not a good idea to write a library in Go? The reason for this is that Go for needs quite a heavy runtime that does garbage collection and provides a scheduler for it's coroutines."

[0] http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2013/8/18/beautiful-native-libraries...

This was a badly chosen example indeed: in many countries lawyers are obliged to continue studying and completing tests throughout the career. In fact, one of Holland's most prominent lawyers got suspended for not obtaining enough study points for an extended period of time.

Anyway, in a sense I agree with the author. To stay sharp programmers need to get out of their comfort zone. There's multiple ways to do that; side projects is one of them. If you don't get out of your comfort zone, you run the risk of becoming like a pilot who forgot how to land or take off, because you have only been flying mid air for so such a long period of time.

I've abandoned purchases as well. When I know I might be missing out on a coupon, I go hunt for it. Most of the time I don't find the coupon I'm looking for, but I do stumble across (coupons for) other products, which might offer a better deal. I end up purchasing those, or not purchasing anything anymore.

Instinctively I agree with the author: when a customer has effectively made a purchase decision, a webshop shouldn't divert him to random pages on the internet, unless there is a mechanism in place that leads to extra sales. Showing a coupon box during one of the final phases of the purchasing process is a way of diverting customers to random pages on the internet.

Compensating for the movement in the way you mention it shouldn't be too hard I guess.

I'm curious if they will need to compensate for the speed differential between the source and the target. Can anyone explain if the following will cause any problems for this technology? If the source and target move away from eachother quickly, the target will observe an increased wavelength, and vice versa. Apparently this is called Redshift [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshift] and technically there is some similarity to the Doppler effect.

Interesting post.

I'm not fond of declaring her mentally ill based on the offenses she has committed. Clearly, she isn't living an ordinary life, but plenty of ordinary people have used drugs, drank alcohol, trespassed and stole during the course of their lives. Prostitution might be a different case, but prostitution ultimately also is a choice. I can even imagine her shoplifting because she wasn't able to obtain the necessary money through different means: nobody would hire her, and whenever she prostitutes she gets arrested. Also, it appears that she doesn't rip out her veins when she isn't incarcerated - otherwise she would be dead by now. Furthermore it is not uncommon for "normal" people who get arrested to be put on suicide watch. The tendency for self affliction perhaps isn't so uncommon for the imprisoned.

I think that if the government would stop disturbing her in her daily life, a Pareto optimum would be reached. Naturally we have the moral obligation to kindly offer help with her problems - rehab, etc. - but shouldn't have the right to force her into anything as long as she isn't a menace to society.

What I'm trying to say is that the system now is turning her into a menace to society. Stop it!

True - you would have to set rules in place that would prevent any kind of incentive for increased occupancy, and then create government bodies that enforce these rules. Also, you would have to set rules in place for many kinds of standards for living conditions for inmates, and set up bodies that enforce those as well.

The thing is that when commercial incentives come into play, companies will go out of their way to find ways to increase profits. Privatization essentially starts a race to the bottom; a race that can only be slowed down by regulatory institutions. In the end, the company always wins and society loses. Banks have showed us that.

How would you describe the central problem you're referring to? I think the main issue here is that "the system" allows for the possibility of an unjust justice system due to commercial interests.

Everybody agrees that what has happened was illegal and should not have happened, and that it is the sovereign's responsibility to create a system in which the risks of such events are minimized, simply because the consequences can be so far stretching. This can be done by ensuring financial independence of judges; eliminating the role of parties who benefit from outcomes that are not necessarily aligned with society's benefits.

I don't yet see how decentralizing decision making reduces this risk.

It's sad that in my country, where prisons are currently run by the government, there exist plans for privatization. With privatization there's almost no benefits, and a lot of opportunities for trouble; it the Dutch government feels the urge to repeat the mistakes of others.

I see your point and you're right. Thanks for sharing :)

It bothered me a bit too.

What also bothered me was that I'm not sure if the conclusion of the research is correct. At least, from the fact that people who were asked to memorize more, we can't deduce that willpower and cognitive processing draw from the same pool of resources. The conclusion could be correct (and I confess that I haven't read the paper), but there is one other obvious reason that may be possible.

If I do physical exercise, I have an easier time allowing myself to eat some chocolate. If I work a long day, I have an easier time allowing myself to sit down and watch TV for a while. If I solve a difficult puzzle, I have an easier time allowing myself to do something fun.

I like to believe that this is not the result of my lacking willpower after cognitive processing or physical exercise, but of a moral justification that it related to the quid pro quo principle: if I do something good, I have deserved the right to do something bad.

Same here. I'm going to read this book and hope to learn more about functional programming and the Haskell language, while (hopefully) not being bothered with the kind of trivial examples that you commonly encounter in tutorials.

You can consider this problem in two ways. Either you see the need for increasing the patent lifetime - at least for certain drugs - or you consider this a weakness of a privatized pharmaceutical industry, and take it as an argument in favor of placing the government in charge of pharmaceutical developments.

Fun fact: in Holland the department of justice has recently obtained the right to force you to decrypt your hard drive.

It is time for software companies to unite. Feds can't just continue roaming around, asking companies for their users' password hashes and other things.

In the current state, some big companies have the means to fight such requests, some big companies are very willing to cooperate, and small companies rarely have the means to go into a legal battle.

Because of the current fragmentation and secrecy surrounding feds' requests with software companies, users do not have the possibility of knowing what they're in for with which company. Also, the divide and conquer tactics used by the Feds really allow them to extract much more information than what would otherwise be the case. Ideally there should be a union for software companies, which makes agreements with the feds concerning their access rights; agreements which then apply to all members of the union.

Currently I have two rules of thumb: 1) for critical services, avoid companies located or significantly involved in the US or UK and 2) at all costs, stay away from Microsoft.

> If you want an anonymous Google account, simply create one

I did. I had to sign up with a "backup" email address though, for which I entered my primary email address. Now, whenever Gmail users send an email to my primary email address, they see the bogus name that I created the anonymous Google account with. Crap.

And Youtube, please stop asking me to use my "real" name. Is it that hard to remember my preferences?

Obama does it again. He tries to play down the domestic upheaval by telling its citizens that they are not the primary subject; foreigners are. He did the same thing with Prism, and I don't know why the rest of the world just accepts it. (By the way, note that most of the EU doesn't care about Prism, and that the EU only became agitated when it became apparent that it's officials/embassies are being wiretapped.)

Furthermore, Obama promises that he will not abuse the right, but he can't vouch for his successors; having such laws in place is just an accident waiting to happen.

This reminds me of page 213 (175 in the book's numbering) of the Unix Haters Handbook, found at http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf

4 stars. Fast; cheap and has a decent camera. Strongly recommended for the backdoor lover.

In statistics there is a "golden rule", that when np > 5 and n(1-p) > 5, then the normal distribution is a good approximation for the binomial distribution. Here n is the number of experiments and p is the conversion rate.

Our A/B testing data results from a Bernoulli experiment, and thus is binomially distributed. So indeed, if we use tests that assume a normal distribution, if we want to approximate the binomial distribution when p is 0.0001, n needs to be roughly 50k.