lkrubner

47 ms·

211.
by lkrubner 4y ago
Portugal conquered Goa in 1510 -- that's more than a month of travel. The Netherlands conquering Java in 1619? A lot more than a month. And these conquests lasted for centuries.
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by lkrubner 4y ago
"ready for the level of risk in the COVID response as a routine thing" Are patients ready for that level of risk? Are children ready for that level of risk? Outside of emergencies, does anything justify that level of risk? "W
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by lkrubner 4y ago
Given that this is a ratio, with both a denominator and a numerator, we should step carefully when declaring which part of the ratio seems abnormal. Either side of the ratio could be wrong, but for different causes. If, for instance, women
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by lkrubner 4y ago
No, I was being light-hearted, but "taking detailed notes about every poop" is the essence of what made the 4 crop system different. His focus on different kinds of poop lead to his focus on turnips, which is what made his system
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by lkrubner 4y ago
He invented the 4 crop rotation system, which involved the strategic use of farm animals and their poop. You might want to do some research on this.
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by lkrubner 4y ago
Do you understand what the 4 crop rotation system is? The key thing is what he did with animals on the fields that were fallow. He brought in animals and had them poop on the fields that were fallow, so in future years they'd be more p
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by lkrubner 4y ago
Consider the agricultural revolution of the early 1700s, Charles Townshend, walking around after his cows, noting every poop, taking detailed notes about every poop, and then a year later, what grew where that poop was, and what were the co
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by lkrubner 4y ago
I wrote about this at length in my book, and hopefully this part will fit within the limits of a Hacker News comment. What I got wrong: I thought this work needed to come in-house, but in the end that was not the crucial issue. The crucial
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by lkrubner 4y ago
About this: "If you had asked me right after I got laid off how long it would take me to get back to work, I would have said three months – including two months of vacation. It took me a year." That is fascinating. I'm glad t
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by lkrubner 4y ago
"Tesla has plummeted 56.5% over the past three months through Friday, while the S&P 500 has gained 5.4%" Much of Tesla's value was propped up by the personal brand of Elon Musk. And he has done significant damage to that
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by lkrubner 4y ago
"while using use the State (~millions of people) as their support network" That is such a misreading of what I wrote I have to wonder if you are being deliberately obtuse. I wrote "There are only 8 or 9 people in the world wi
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by lkrubner 4y ago
These two items have always been true, they do not describe the future. For instance: "If I take position A on something and you take position B, it's possible that we can both believe the other person is conversing in good faith.
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by lkrubner 4y ago
"One coping mechanism is double-checking to see if a primary source really does say what a secondary source claims." For many categories of research, especially works in other languages, this strategy won't work in the future
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by lkrubner 4y ago
A year ago, traders were lucky if they read the economist Paul Krugman and understood his point about interest rates. He's written several times, over the last few years, that crypto has dynamics similar to gold, and gold gains value w
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by lkrubner 4y ago
This is what I liked about the open blogosphere of 2000 to 2008. Whereas something like Twitter is optimized for the fast-take and the brutal one-liner, blogs allowed actual conversations. You could write something serious, develop the idea
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by lkrubner 4y ago
There are systems of voting that would allow voters to both "protest vote" and yet also vote for policy. So-called "approval voting" (where the voter gets an infinite number of votes) helps mute the damage done by blind-
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by lkrubner 4y ago
I continue to short Tesla.
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by lkrubner 4y ago
Sort of, but gravitational lensing has been seen in places where there is no visible matter. If dark matter doesn't exist, then you'd have to come up with another explanation for the gravitation lensing: https://kipac.s
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by lkrubner 4y ago
The simplest version of the story is this: Russia has gained tremendously thanks to the unusually high price of oil. Should the price of oil fall back the average of the last 10 years, then Russia's situation will appear far more preca
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by lkrubner 4y ago
Exactly. Another example is Martha Stewart, who engaged in insider trading in 2001 but who didn't go to prison till 2004.
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by lkrubner 4y ago
At one point Scientific American had an article which reported that the pigments used in the cave paintings in Spain, circa 25,000 BC, had come from Italy, suggesting goods were traveling long distances as early as 25,000 BC. Either one tri
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by lkrubner 4y ago
Since the 1990s there's been a massive effort to get rid of all the secretaries, and this was coupled by the idea that the secretaries were not doing crucial organizational work. The end result is that secretarial responsibilities have
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by lkrubner 4y ago
Some of this material was posted during October of 2020, when Trump was President, so it wasn't the "White House" asking that this material be taken down.
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by lkrubner 4y ago
I've hired several developers straight out of dev boot camps and I've had good experiences with them. I wrote about that here: http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/the-grace-hopper-divi...
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by lkrubner 4y ago
Studies show that roughly 1% of the population is psychopaths, and these people are over-represented among CEOs of corporations. From that we can assume there are rewards for psychopathic behavior, and this includes bullying. Starting in sc
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by lkrubner 4y ago
If you have the slightest interest in the history of operating systems, I strongly recommend reading Joe Armstrong's thesis. While it is mostly about Erlang, he also goes into detail about many of the experimental systems of the 1960s,
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by lkrubner 4y ago
The chart shows that the uptick begins in 2014, roughly when the meth epidemic became a true epidemic, spreading to every part of the USA, so meth in particular, and drugs in general, are the most likely explanation. So these deaths fit in
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by lkrubner 4y ago
A fun fact (and I'm not violating any NDA here) my client https://paireyewear.com is growing very fast and last year they raised $73 million from VC investors. They have their main store on Shopify, so they didn't need
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by lkrubner 4y ago
These are vaccines. They train the immune system to respond a particular way to particular proteins: that is a vaccine, full stop.
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by lkrubner 4y ago
That's the same as saying the CRM doesn't drive value, in which case we might ask why companies spend tens of millions of dollars customizing their CRMs? If you're the VP Of Sales, presumably you need some way to manage the s

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