ahelwer

65 ms·

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by ahelwer 6y ago
As an employee I might have $100k in MSFT stock after five years. Those buybacks gave me what, a few hundred/thousand bucks at most? Come on. For such a supposed math-literate profession this objection is weirdly common. If you get cas
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by ahelwer 6y ago
Here's a refutation: Microsoft spends $250k/employee/year on stock dividends and buybacks. That's quite a large slice of the pie the union could negotiate for.
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by ahelwer 6y ago
He isn't responding to the claims in the actual paper (which are quite weak - they explicitly say the paper doesn't show masks are ineffective) but rather the crowd of charlatans who have hoisted this paper upon their shoulders to
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by ahelwer 6y ago
Taleb has been going pretty hard all week on how that study doesn't demonstrate what certain people really, really want it to demonstrate: https://fooledbyrandomnessdotcom.wordpress.com/2020/11/25/hy...
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by ahelwer 6y ago
Don't overweight the opinion of someone on their deathbed. I don't think optimizing your life around how you'll feel about it during your final five minutes is a good way to go. Dying is a very lonely experience (every living
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by ahelwer 6y ago
Your solution seems to be somewhere between "lie down and rot" or "just let it happen", so not sure you have standing to criticize.
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by ahelwer 6y ago
No, writing to congresspeople is useless. There are a few possibly viable strategies: one, fill as many elected positions as possible with leftist candidates. Two, build power of labor unions to achieve democratic control over the sources o
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by ahelwer 6y ago
Individuals cannot "do something about" issues like this. Even a lone wolf gun attack against a corporate boardroom would see the victims swiftly replaced by ideological clones. Collective action is the only possible route to reme
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by ahelwer 6y ago
Fitting, since Chigurh views most people as no more than cattle - just going with the flow, no guiding principles - while he rigidly adheres to a chosen set of values to the death. The Partially Examined Life podcast did a great episode on
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by ahelwer 6y ago
There are endless things I could do with my free time that would be far more productive & useful to society than anything I could realistically be paid to do. Having lots of money would enable me to do those things.
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by ahelwer 6y ago
It is astonishing to me that you can look at how technology has impacted labor over the past half-century and believe that this definition of efficiency, which by necessity includes human labor cost as something to be minimized for the bene
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by ahelwer 6y ago
You're just restating what you said and what I accurately interpreted: the costs are higher with smaller farms. You define this as inefficiency. I point out this definition of efficiency only considers amount of surplus generated, not
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by ahelwer 6y ago
Does not follow. I'm not talking about subsistence farming. Nothing stops you from buying food from small farms further away that didn't experience crop failure.
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by ahelwer 6y ago
To be clear, when you say efficient, you mean percentage of profit (value produced/costs) is lower in aggregate than if that same patch of land were part of a much larger farm. I submit this definition of efficiency ignores the distrib
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by ahelwer 6y ago
I used to publish some math-heavy posts on medium (complete with equation images!) before moving it all over to gitlab pages with the hugo static site generator, and equations rendered with katex. If the author is reading this, the translat
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by ahelwer 6y ago
I really wish Microsoft would hire some developers to help Nikolaj. I've done some simple volunteer dev work for Z3 (just creating a nuget package & improving their build/release pipeline mostly) but my impression is there is
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by ahelwer 6y ago
The difference is nukes.
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by ahelwer 6y ago
Dual booting is still a problem. I just tried to install ubuntu as dual-boot on a separate SSD from windows (which I keep around for video games) and I ran into 13 bugs (I wrote them down!) within two hours - including two which caused fata
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by ahelwer 6y ago
I'd say 10 or so?
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by ahelwer 6y ago
Lean is the basis for my favorite puzzle game of the past five years: https://wwwf.imperial.ac.uk/~buzzard/xena/natural_number_gam... It's like enemies & bosses are mathematical theorems you have to prove
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by ahelwer 6y ago
Billable hours != full time hours. Clocking 8 billable hours a day is actually pretty difficult. Think about how many hours of actual solid work you get done a day - for most devs I know, it's 4, maybe 6 or even (rarely) 8 on a day whe
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by ahelwer 6y ago
"will ever" implies a component of time
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by ahelwer 6y ago
Google, Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft all have quantum programs which use "regular" software engineers in various roles - for example, writing software to support researchers working in the labs. That's what I did for Microsoft.
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by ahelwer 6y ago
Glad you enjoyed! I also wrote a couple of follow-up blog posts which examine quantum entanglement & quantum chemistry simulation, respectively: https://ahelwer.ca/post/2018-12-07-chsh/ https://ahel
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by ahelwer 6y ago
If anyone is interested I've also created a short 1.5 hour lecture on quantum computing aimed specifically at software engineers & computer scientists, which has proven popular: https://youtu.be/F_Riqjdh2oM I'
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by ahelwer 6y ago
I use ublock origin on Firefox and have never seen an ad on youtube. No idea why people don't do this. I will probably eventually pay for premium but would be better off just supporting people through patreon directly.
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by ahelwer 6y ago
And this year's Thanksgiving turkey is reporting it continues to be fed more and more each day! The future is bright!
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by ahelwer 6y ago
I encourage anyone who believes social media has divided our society like never before to read a small amount of history of the Vietnam war era. Here's a taste: in 1970, the national guard murdered four unarmed students at Kent State.
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by ahelwer 6y ago
I recall that post being pretty polarizing on HN. I think PG himself showed up and ranted about how the people calling it consumerist schlock had it all wrong, and this was a sign of HN's decline or something. Anyway personally I found
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by ahelwer 6y ago
Vitamin D supplementation has side effects, or at least it does for me. On three separate occasions I've tried to take some X,000 IU pill and spent the next 24-48 hours extremely lethargic and unable to summon the willpower to do anyth

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