Suncho

34 ms·

211.
by Suncho 11y ago
> Because if you spend more than you make, you are essentially borrowing from the future (with compound interest). Not if you never pay it back. > Eventually the quickly-compounding interest and principal overwhelm you and you have to
212.
by Suncho 11y ago
Interesting. I like what he says about debt-to-GDP, but I'm not sure I understand his leap to the conclusion that we should be striving for full employment. I understand why we'd want to scale production to meet the increased dem
213.
by Suncho 11y ago
Why? As we produce more stuff, we also need to spend more to keep prices stable. Printing money and throwing it at the economy is one way to make that happen. As long as our rate of spending remains in line with our level of production,
214.
by Suncho 11y ago
I'm not sure how useful it is to pass judgment over whether other people are wasting their time. If I'm doing something that's fulfilling to me, is that really a waste? Besides, we really don't need most people to spend
215.
Our Moral Compass Is Broken(suncho.com)
1 points by Suncho 12y ago|0 comments
216.
by Suncho 12y ago
It depends. The trick to using new correctly is to put it in a function whose sole purpose is to immediately store new's result in the smart handle. I.E. You're writing a function that's analogous to the make_unique functio
217.
by Suncho 12y ago
#1 should really say, "Avoid new and delete." new and delete are for experts. The average C++ programmer should go nowhere near them. If heap memory is used internally by a class that was written by someone who knew what they w
218.
by Suncho 12y ago
#3 should really say "make polymorphic public base class destructors virtual." There are reasons why you might want to use public inheritance that have nothing to do with run-time polymorphism.
219.
Burdens(slatestarcodex.com)
2 points by Suncho 12y ago|0 comments
220.
by Suncho 12y ago
Even today, only the superstar authors actually earn any decent money from their writing. You're absolutely right that we need to find a way to provide people food, shelter, and health care. It's true today and it will be true in
221.
by Suncho 12y ago
In the end, I think writers, publishers, and Amazon alike will all lose in their efforts to profit from the sale of information. Information is moving closer and closer to being free. And that's a good thing.
222.
by Suncho 12y ago
True. But is being inert and lazy a bad thing? Can we get more out of life by allowing ourselves to relax?
223.
by Suncho 12y ago
Most people will "squander" their time in the sense that they'll never accomplish anything that contributes meaningfully to society. That's totally okay. Like beat said, society is advanced mostly by a small minority o
224.
by Suncho 12y ago
I'm sitting in my mom's attic as I type this. I pretty much sit here all day. And yes, I'm happy. Thanks for asking. If Jamie is happier working a job, then fine. But was he born wanting to get a job? How much came from
225.
by Suncho 12y ago
I did not intend my comment to be stigmatizing. But I do feel that one of the most degrading aspects of our society is the expectation that people have to earn a living by working at some kind of job. Especially in an economy where we&#
226.
by Suncho 12y ago
I found this article disturbing. Why are we forcing developmentally disabled people -- or anyone, for that matter -- to get jobs? Is there a dire shortage of low-skilled labor that I'm not aware of? "Whenever we talked about his
227.
The Intellectual Property Cold War(suncho.com)
1 points by Suncho 13y ago|0 comments
228.
by Suncho 13y ago
It's hard to believe that we have no surplus of labor when politicians are clamoring to create new jobs. What's wrong with wages as an incentive to work? Why should the government provide an additional incentive to work by depriv
229.
by Suncho 13y ago
Yeah. I often encounter really amazing stories, then go to post them on Hacker News only to find that they were submitted a few days ago and got little attention. This is an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=74
230.
by Suncho 13y ago
When you say "MOOCs will only work if..." it really depends what you mean by "work." Does it make sense for the goal of education to be jobs? Like you say, high quality MOOCs can really help people learn. The reason I m
231.
by Suncho 13y ago
I think a lot of the rise in tuition has to do with jobs. Society tells people they need to earn a living through a job. This makes people desperate for jobs to the extent that they'll generally pay whatever it takes to maximize thei
232.
by Suncho 13y ago
Hmm... Now I find myself hoping that I never hit 1000 karma so I won't have to wade through all the never-endorsed comments. Could this feature deter high karma users from logging into the site?
233.
by Suncho 13y ago
Out of curiosity, how would you recommend handling a situation in which a file close fails? My instinct is to have an RAII class whose destructor catches any exceptions, adds the error to some list somewhere, and doesn't rethrow anyth
234.
by Suncho 13y ago
The point of the smart pointers is that they are RAII classes. If you have an object that manages more than a single resource, you open yourself up to all kinds of exception safety and thread safety issues. For example, let's say yo
235.
by Suncho 13y ago
I find it interesting that nobody mentions iterators anywhere in this discussion. One of the main uses of pointers is to iterate through data. Pointers are the most basic form of iterators in C++. STL iterators are based on, and often im
236.
by Suncho 13y ago
No. I'm just saying that we're collecting data faster than we can make sense of it. New discoveries don't necessarily require new data.
237.
by Suncho 13y ago
Okay. But how do you define someone as being a scientist?
238.
by Suncho 13y ago
It's true that certain aspects of science are very expensive. We're generating a lot of data these days through DNA sequencing, particle collision, and various other expensive scientific measurement techniques. But there's a
239.
by Suncho 13y ago
That's a really good point. Many meaningful projects will eventually cost a lot of money. But I like how Brenner provides an environment for scientists to basically do what they want. Some of them eventually get projects funded, but
240.
by Suncho 13y ago
If we want scientists to be able to work on projects that nobody else cares about, we can't be judging who deserves money and who doesn't. What we need is a system that allows people to work on whatever they want without any requ

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