ef4

21 ms·

151.
by ef4 11y ago
There is a basic assumption that people aren't questioning: that older children are useless in helping teach and supervise younger children. This flies in the face of historical experience, and it robs everyone involved of opportunitie
152.
by ef4 11y ago
Building a healthy community doesn't just happen by accident. Too many open source devs put almost no thought into the cultural aspects of building a community that is (1) not full of jerks, and (2) able to attract meaningful support f
153.
by ef4 11y ago
patio11's stuff is pretty much spot on. You need to solve business problems that people don't necessarily know how to solve by themselves. Generally you do this by applying your technology expertise, but that is not what matters t
154.
by ef4 11y ago
> Is it possible to do it over a period of time? (keep current job and moonlight freelance gigs) Yes, but you may need to pick a different job as an intermediate step: find a job that will let you interact meaningfully with wider open so
155.
by ef4 11y ago
> Real-world rationality is less like mathematics and more like system design where we weave together plans and strategies. You're implying a narrow (but depressingly common) definition of "mathematics". System design is s
156.
by ef4 11y ago
Several advanced economies like Japan have already hit the top of the curve. No starvation needed.
157.
by ef4 11y ago
Worse vs which baseline scenario? You're implying that your baseline scenario is a constant absolute number of poor people in the world. But that scenario is not really constant. If things are getting neither better nor worse, the chil
158.
by ef4 11y ago
That article is highlighting deeply misleading facts. For example: "between 1990 and 2010 there was an increase of 371 million people living on less than $5 a day". But during the same time period, the world added 1.6 billion peop
159.
by ef4 11y ago
Yes. And the two facts are not disconnected. We are seeing global inequality fall to unprecedented lows. If you're in the top 5% (which the American middle class definitely is), then less inequality feels bad to you. Global wages growt
160.
by ef4 11y ago
You see someone tie their boat to a dock and walk away. Then you notice that their knot is terrible, and the boat is about to drift off, so you untie it and re-tie it for them.
161.
by ef4 11y ago
Really disruptive tech: telepresence that's finally almost as good as the real thing. I expect luddite attempts to ban it as soon as they realize it means that everyone in the world is now free to work with anyone else, borders be damn
162.
by ef4 11y ago
> I don't see a way out of this without regulation, and I don't see that happening when the pharmaceutical industry has been so effective at influencing federal laws. For many of these generic drugs, this is a case where market
163.
by ef4 11y ago
Because the red tape is fairly extreme. For proof, look at the prices a company like this will pay to "buy up" a generic drug. You'd think it wouldn't really be possible to sell rights to a generic drug for millions of d
164.
by ef4 11y ago
Did you really just make the argument that getting up to go to the bathroom during a broadcast TV commercial is the same thing as stealing fruit?
165.
by ef4 11y ago
The biggest barrier to doing interesting industrial stuff in space is the energies required. But the whole context of this discussion is a society that has thousands of times more energy available than we do today. That's why it's
166.
by ef4 11y ago
The gap in medicine is a microcosm of the wider gap: female physicians are disproportionately likely to end up in lower-paying specialties like pediatrics and family medicine.
167.
by ef4 11y ago
I remember seeing an electronic gizmo that would supposedly remind you to correct your posture throughout the day. Has anybody tried something like that? I feel like the gentle constant feedback might actually work.
168.
by ef4 11y ago
This may sound entirely wacky, but I have seen it make a major performance impact on nodejs. The reason is that V8 uses heuristics to decide which functions get inlined, and the raw source code length is one of the heuristics. Making the so
169.
by ef4 11y ago
As those bonds mature, the Fed is continually buying more to keep their balance relatively constant. Nothing is "over" until they manage to withdraw all that extra liquidity. Which is the tricky part.
170.
by ef4 11y ago
> If we assume that there is, to a certain degree, a fixed amount of work necessary for society to function... That is a terrible assumption. The scope of work that is both physically possible and economically feasible is constantly shif
171.
by ef4 11y ago
I like Spectacle[0] for this. It works for any window, not just terminals. Though what I really want is native xmonad in OSX. 0. http://spectacleapp.com/
172.
by ef4 11y ago
Centralized is just a degenerate case of decentralized. Stand up a dedicated server running syncthing and poof! , you have a centralized syncthing.
173.
by ef4 11y ago
If a million people suddenly want to participate in a single hashtag, you necessarily also have a million devices able to contribute to the distribution of the content. It's far from intractable. It's bittorrent for tweets.
174.
by ef4 11y ago
Brilliantly done.
175.
by ef4 11y ago
Yes. The author's statement is malformed. Lots of people get themselves into trouble pontificating on how the flow of information makes markets work or not work. What they often fail to notice is that there is also a market for informa
176.
by ef4 11y ago
Of course, just like if you could avoid ever driving in a car it would be better to skip that known -- and much bigger -- risk. Practical limitations apply.
177.
by ef4 11y ago
Not very convincing. In the first two minutes, she has already committed the fallacy of touting a change in relative risk while glossing over the fact that it is tiny in absolute terms. She says -- correctly -- that a CT scan during pregnan
178.
by ef4 11y ago
I didn't want to imply software that's not stable. I was replying to the point about wanting a big stable company to purchase from.
179.
by ef4 11y ago
Right, part of their problem is that they're demanding the wrong thing. Instead of demanding a high degree of stability from one vendor, they should be demanding open standards and real interoperability, so their eggs aren't all i
180.
by ef4 11y ago
A meta-problem for many startups: selling to SMBs at scale at a reasonable cost. Lots of small businesses can unlock significant value with better software, and could be convinced to pay for it. But the upfront cost of acquiring those custo

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