pg314

41 ms·

391.
by pg314 10y ago
That already happens sometimes: it's called IVF with PGD (pre-implantation genetic diagnosis). Before an embryo is implanted a cell is taken from it and tested for genetic defects. It's an expensive and convoluted process, so it&
392.
by pg314 10y ago
It becomes a problem if these people following the onion would affect the outcome of an election. Even a democratically elected leader can be a problem (e.g. Mussolini was democratically elected). To function a democracy requires citizens t
393.
by pg314 10y ago
> 'In any normal election year, we’d compare the two presidential candidates side by side on the issues.' You're lifting one sentence out of context. The rest of the paragraph reads [1]: "In any normal election year,
394.
by pg314 10y ago
I don't think this has anything to do with morality. Problems arise when negative externalities [1] are not accounted for. Sure, companies (and their banks) can make a fortune by burning rainforests for palm oil, but that leaves the co
395.
by pg314 10y ago
Some people do have things to hide: they are having affairs, visiting prostitutes, going to Planned Parenthood to have an abortion, going to a cancer center to get treatment,...
396.
by pg314 10y ago
As far as I know the location data a phone company has is not as fine-grained as GPS. But I agree with your point that a person's call data records are very sensitive information.
397.
by pg314 10y ago
Do you have any evidence that Carlos Slim has any influence on the editorial board of the New York Times? Or Jeff Bezos influencing the Washington Post editorial board?
398.
by pg314 10y ago
This was adopted by Clinton too: https://www.hillaryclinton.com/issues/campaign-finance-refor...
399.
by pg314 10y ago
I don't think it is. Differently sized objects can be allocated and released individually. Have a look at part 9 of [1]. In an arena based allocator you typically deallocate all the objects in an arena at once. TeX basically uses a spe
400.
by pg314 10y ago
I agree with the gist of your post, but the pre-optimised libraries are often optimised for the general case. It can be quite worthwhile to dive deeper in some cases. Replacing e.g. the library malloc with your own pool based allocator or a
401.
by pg314 10y ago
You can get surprisingly far without using libc's malloc/free. E.g. TeX, the typesetting system by Knuth, implements its own dynamic memory handling. It has a large static array of bytes, and allocates from that when needed.
402.
by pg314 10y ago
> Of course, if you have extensive experience with PostgreSQL, that may skew the choice heavily to the other direction ;) I have more experience with PostgreSQL than Cassandra, for sure. And I've had negative experiences with people
403.
by pg314 10y ago
> As a rule of thumbs, putting 5TB of data -that are growing exponentially- in a single box is always a terrible idea. Storage capacity is also growing exponentially: Samsung is shipping a 15TB SSD (albeit at $10000), Seagate has previ
404.
by pg314 10y ago
Dropping the RDBM and replacing it with something like Cassandra is fashionable, but sounds like bad advice to me. A quick google gives these stats for Uber[1]: - 8 million users - 160 thousand drivers - 1 million daily rides - 2 billion ri
405.
by pg314 10y ago
I would argue Smalltalk is a far superior language to teach the essence of OOP. Students in Smalltalk will be writing programs in the first hour while their C++ counterparts will still be struggling to understand #includes. To quote Alan Ka
406.
by pg314 10y ago
That's a big assumption. I think few people believe we'll have another 32 years of Moore's law.
407.
by pg314 10y ago
You can write your stored procedures in a number of scripting languages. Out of the box PostgreSQL supports Tcl [1], Perl [2] and Python [3]. There's also a general mechanism to register other languages [4]. On github I found [5], whic
408.
by pg314 10y ago
They could borrow in the US (and they do to finance share buybacks and dividends), while they wait for the next tax holiday [1] to repatriate that overseas money at a low tax rate. The next tax holiday will probably next year. [1] https:&#
409.
by pg314 10y ago
No. Only dividends are subject to withholding taxes (and are taxed twice, once in the US at 15%, the remainder taxed at 27%). It's a crazy system. Before you think of moving to Belgium: US citizens can't escape the IRS, no matter
410.
by pg314 10y ago
If they realise capital gains and they live in the US. E.g. Belgian stockholders of Apple don't pay any taxes (not in Belgium, not in the US) on capital gains.
411.
by pg314 10y ago
Sure, some businesses will employ more people if their income isn't taxed. But many others (especially in the tech sector, like you pointed out) won't. Apple alone accounted for 4.4% of all US corporate income ($72.67 billion vs $
412.
by pg314 10y ago
They are not constrained by money to do more R&D (or they would already be doing it).
413.
by pg314 10y ago
If they return money to shareholders via buybacks, there is no tax. Only when the shareholder sells will potential capital gains be taxed.
414.
by pg314 10y ago
The top five tech companies Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Cisco and Oracle had a total of $504bn of cash by the end of 2015. They have more money than they know what to do with. Lowering their tax rates will create exactly zero jobs and have
415.
by pg314 10y ago
It's the upper bound if you assume perfect information and a perfectly efficient market. It's often hard to measure the value an employee provides, which means there is imperfect information. If you look at CEO compensation, which
416.
by pg314 10y ago
If a voter can validate their vote at any time, the system is susceptible to coercion and vote buying. From what I've read most experts seem to agree that paper voting is the safest.
417.
by pg314 10y ago
It would require a profoundly dumber US population than I believe exists. Only a small fraction of the population needs to believe it to have an impact on the election.
418.
by pg314 10y ago
For those interested to read more: it's called the homo economicus [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_economicus
419.
by pg314 10y ago
Some of the basic premises of a lot of economic theories are questionable. E.g. the homo economicus in many economic theories is a fiction.
420.
by pg314 10y ago
There's an explanation on wikipedia [1]. In the light of the current election, the following sentence from that article sounds ironic to me: 'Hamilton was also concerned about somebody unqualified, but with a talent for "low

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