nhaehnle

68 ms·

601.
by nhaehnle 12y ago
> communist autocracies That's a pretty crazy misuse of the term "communist". Just say "autocracies", the inside setup of typical firms really has nothing to do whatsoever with communism.
602.
by nhaehnle 12y ago
They even have to pay for incoming SMS? I understand the justification of paying for incoming calls, since they don't have separate prefix codes for mobile (which means that the caller does not know they're calling a mobile, and t
603.
by nhaehnle 12y ago
It's an interesting thought, isn't it, especially once you realize that it doesn't just apply to transaction fees.
604.
by nhaehnle 12y ago
Actually, there's an even better solution: simply give the kernel a userspace address range which will be zeroed on fork. There's simply no reason at all why this address range should be restricted to exactly 4KB or a multiple the
605.
by nhaehnle 12y ago
There's no such thing as entropy depletion, but there is such a thing as an insufficiently seeded CSPRNG - which means that /dev/urandom is not secure by design: it does not protect you against that failure mode, and in fac
606.
by nhaehnle 12y ago
Ugh. Whatever happened to not wasting an excessive amount of space? Allocating 4KB for what is essentially a single bit flag seems like a needless waste of space, especially given that we already have syscalls that set up triggers to manipu
607.
by nhaehnle 12y ago
If so, then why ever use /dev/random? Given the lack of the "middle ground" introduced by this patch, you have (had) a choice between the failure mode of "block for a very long time" and the failure mode of &
608.
by nhaehnle 12y ago
The question, from a society-design point of view, is whether it is useful to have a whole class of people who engage in what is ultimately a zero-sum game and therefore an arms race, and whether it wouldn't be better to design markets
609.
by nhaehnle 12y ago
There are two possible solutions. The first solution is to forbid multiple marketplaces for a single virtual asset. Honestly, the service provided by these marketplaces is very simple, and could be provided by a non-profit organization that
610.
by nhaehnle 12y ago
Most people don't put passwords on their laptops either. I don't know about most. Certainly many people do, and it's fairly convenient to have one. On the other hand, the input capabilities of smartphones are so limited tha
611.
by nhaehnle 12y ago
The downside is that smartphones are pretty terrible in terms of security. Lose your smartphone and you give away the keys to everything . Given how easily phones are stolen, that's a pretty bad single point of failure. With my laptop
612.
by nhaehnle 12y ago
Use the presentation mode of a proper PDF reader to go through the slides.
613.
by nhaehnle 12y ago
Why don't you want to talk about salaries? Lack of data is a huge problem in this space. I don't think anybody expects you to name the names of the people involved.
614.
by nhaehnle 12y ago
I have no idea why you were down-voted. It's true: even if, somehow, evolution had managed to at some point kill off all cultures with a certain trait, the same trait is likely to develop again in at most a few centuries. If somebody h
615.
by nhaehnle 12y ago
I'm afraid that saying "just ask the PIIGS" is to miss the crucial point. Those countries are members of the Eurozone, and therefore their governments are currency users rather than issuers. Therefore, an analysis that draws
616.
by nhaehnle 12y ago
Ah, right. I still think there are two mitigating factors here to what I said. First: In the stagflation of the 1970s (which is really the only significant empirical data point we can draw from), increased interest rates were a political ch
617.
by nhaehnle 12y ago
Running a surplus isn't even a positive goal for governments. In US history, periods of federal government surplus were always followed quite rapidly by recessions or even depressions. There are even good, clean, mathematical accountin
618.
by nhaehnle 12y ago
Still, there hasn't actually been any argument as to why a high debt-whatever-to-GDP ratio would cause a recession. I would actually argue the opposite: If debt payments suddenly increased, this would infuse cash into the economy which
619.
by nhaehnle 12y ago
This is the saddest part of it. Wars have economic benefit because of the giant injection of spending and incentives for investment. One could have the same benefit using much less destructive and even beneficial projects such as colonizing
620.
by nhaehnle 12y ago
The US federal government budget is not like a household or the budget of a firm. Households and firms are USD users , which means that they can only make payments in USD if they first obtain those USD (whether as income or by loan). The U
621.
by nhaehnle 12y ago
However, it is hard to imagine that interest rates would increase without a serious uptick in economic performance. Such an uptick would automatically go hand in hand with increased tax revenues and lower spending (because social safety n
622.
by nhaehnle 12y ago
There is no reason for the government to default when B=D. (If you disagree, please take a deep breath and think through the mechanics of exactly how the US federal government could be forced into default.) In reality, B=D is likely to bala
623.
by nhaehnle 12y ago
My point is that there is no difference between software and hardware. You don't need hardware to eliminate memory errors: software can do it as well. Two examples of this are the Singularity system that Microsoft Research built and Go
624.
by nhaehnle 12y ago
I actually agree with this. I believe that, using the right techniques, both software and hardware can be produced correctly. It's a function of their design and complexity how easy it is. It's also worth keeping in mind that mo
625.
by nhaehnle 12y ago
You now rely on chip designers being super-human. The real truth is that the difficulty of containment is proportional to the interface that is available to the contained process. You don't need VM or hypervisor technology to build a v
626.
by nhaehnle 12y ago
What you write is not an argument against what I wrote, and you make incorrect assumptions about what I'm assuming. You yourself talk about the possibility of the emergence of complex structures from simple individual behaviors . In o
627.
by nhaehnle 12y ago
I appreciate your engagement in this discussion. I think the notion of a competitive market as you define it [0] is inherently flawed. To quote: > all participants are price takers, i.e., passive agents incapable of changing the market
628.
by nhaehnle 12y ago
Keynesianism lauds government monopoly power; while neoclassicism and Austrianism foster private monopoly power. Both are evil. At least in the case of government, you may feel that it is evil, but it is necessary [0]. So the more pragmat
629.
by nhaehnle 12y ago
Communism is defined by a complete lack of freedom to change the status quo. I agree that the comparison to communism is silly, but not for this reason. Ultimately, communism is about how the economy is structured, one important feature b
630.
by nhaehnle 12y ago
A related mathematical concept is that of algebraic independence . Two numbers x and y are algebraically dependent (over the rationals) if there is a rational bivariate polynomial p such that p(x,y) = 0. As far as I know, pi and e are not

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