evanpw

24 ms·

211.
by evanpw 11y ago
This is exactly the kind of problem that framing your ethical system in terms of "rights" tends to obscure (I'm more of a utilitarian). I think that you are morally justified in stealing to keep yourself from starving, and at
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by evanpw 11y ago
Property rights are the prototypical example of a negative right, so you seem to be defining the concept in a non-standard way. I think the names are poorly chosen, though. A "negative" right is one for which a specific "viol
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by evanpw 11y ago
The post argues that this back-door form of welfare is inferior in just about every way to just cutting people a check, but that we tend to do it this way exactly because "welfare" has negative connotations: 'With all these a
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by evanpw 11y ago
"deprive of" is not a synonym for "not provide". It's completely consistent to say that you have an obligation not to actively hinder someone someone from obtaining food/shelter/etc., but no obligation to
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by evanpw 11y ago
Related slatestarcodex post: http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/12/08/a-something-sort-of-lik... "if your job can be done more cheaply without you, and the only reason you have it is because people would fee
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by evanpw 11y ago
Related (amazing) paper by Scott Aaronson: "NP-complete Problems and Physical Reality" ( http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0502072 ). He proposes "anthropic computing" as a way of solving NP-complete
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by evanpw 11y ago
There are a few (at least in the "whatnot" category), but they think bigger than 1000-person towns, and it's often unpopular with the public: http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/09/01/under-new-manage
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by evanpw 11y ago
One difference is that billionaires (at least the Buffett / Gates crowd) seem to put a lot more of their donations toward projects in foreign countries than the government would. Since the vast majority of people living in bad situatio
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by evanpw 11y ago
Here's a related paper (on HN last month) which tries to find the arrangement of elements in an array which minimizes search time, measuring wall-clock time rather than theoretical complexity: http://arxiv.org/ftp/
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by evanpw 11y ago
(tongue only partially in cheek) They're only cutting costs in areas that potential students can't observe / don't care about, like teaching. They won't cut costs in important areas like admissions staff, gym facili
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by evanpw 11y ago
The summer classes are usually second-class citizens though: the material is divided up into individual classes assuming the normal-length semesters, so summer classes are always rushed.
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A Better Default Colormap for Matplotlib [video](youtube.com)
2 points by evanpw 11y ago|0 comments
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by evanpw 11y ago
So the mechanism by which this harms national security is: Chinese person buys a house for $1 million -> gets a green card -> moves to the United States -> waits 5 years -> becomes a citizen -> elects a pro-Chinese government
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by evanpw 11y ago
Can you be more specific about the mechanism? If they aren't citizens or even permanent residents, what influence do they have? I can understand an argument saying that allowing a larger market is bad because it increases demand and dr
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by evanpw 11y ago
I would expect this to have a positive influence on national security. If rich, influential Chinese people own a lot of property in the United States, that means that they have more to lose from bad relations between the US and China.
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by evanpw 11y ago
Who actually lives up to this standard? If you lived in an area with bad schools, would you send your kids there instead of moving? If you were born in a third-world country, would you stay there instead of emigrating to make a living? Are
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by evanpw 11y ago
I don't know why this article made such a small deal out of it, but there is an income-based repayment program thats caps your payments as a percentage of your income, and forgives the balance after 10 years (20 years for private-secto
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by evanpw 11y ago
Related article: http://phys.org/news/2011-05-mini-black-holes-atoms-earth.ht... TL/DR: 1. Tiny black holes as a dark matter candidate; hundreds might pass through the earth every year 2. Difficult but not impossi
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by evanpw 11y ago
It would hit things, but that just means that it would drill a hole a couple of atoms wide as it passed through the earth and exited the other side.
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by evanpw 11y ago
From http://play0ad.com/game-info/project-overview/ : > “0 A.D.” is a time period that never actually existed: In the usual calendar, one goes from 1 B.C. to 1 A.D. and skips zero. This reflects the historical
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by evanpw 11y ago
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you aren't deliberately trolling me, but you do seem to be deeply confused. I'll just give you a link to some lecture notes that go all the way from the axioms of probabi
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by evanpw 11y ago
...corporate welfare, tax breaks for favored companies / industries, patents & copyright, eminent domain. I take your point though, and I think is a valid criticism in a lot of cases.
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by evanpw 11y ago
Some issues where libertarians disagree with the American right wing: immigration, drug legalization, government surveillance, abortion, gay marriage, jury nullification, right-to-die, foreign wars, ...
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by evanpw 11y ago
This is not true. If you have a discrete uniform distribution, you can only have finitely many elements in your probability space, so it wouldn't make sense to have an axiom which refers to countably-many disjoint sets. The axioms are
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by evanpw 11y ago
Let Ω = R (real line), F = the set of Lebesque-measurable subsets of R, and P(E) = the integral over E of the density function of the standard normal. This is a probability space in the Kolmogorov sense, and my previous example carries thro
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by evanpw 11y ago
Example: The null hypothesis is that X has a standard normal distribution, and you have one observation, with value 0.7. Since you only have one observation, your definition of p-value can only give the values 0 or 1, depending on whether
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by evanpw 11y ago
As TeMPOraL points out, you seem to be defining probability in general. The p-value is a very specific concept in statistics, not an abbreviation for "probability value" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value
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by evanpw 11y ago
It doesn't make sense to say in a binary sense that an observation agrees or disagrees with the null hypothesis, there are only probabilities. The p-value is the probability of seeing a set of values as extreme as your actual observati
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by evanpw 11y ago
It looks like proving that n^2 + 1 is impossible is still an open problem: http://www.wfnmc.org/mc20101.pdf .
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by evanpw 11y ago
Almost all of the transmission is done at much higher voltages (3-4 orders of magnitude higher).

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