russell

35 ms·

301.
by russell 15y ago
3. I'm not so sure about the effectiveness of the tax on financial instruments. I think it might be more effective to require reserves to be held by the issuer, maybe a few percent They are already required in some cases. A bank is requi
302.
by russell 15y ago
Python is used extensively in Big Science because it has some very powerful, very fast numerical packages such as NumPy.
303.
by russell 15y ago
"No Silver Bullet", Fred Brooks, http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~cah/G51ISS/Documents/NoSilverBulle... He did hold out hope that a bunch of silver bullets might do the trick. Read the article. Most of them seem quite quaint. Nonetheless, Bro
304.
by russell 15y ago
I dont care I'm going to give you my uninformed opinion myself :-) What is the financial condition of the acquiring company? Not being able to come up with a couple of million should be a red flag. What is the reputation of the company an
305.
by russell 15y ago
"if you don't come to the attention of law enforcement you don't have anything to fear from these systems.", Thomas Bush. What utter crap. Everyone comes to the attention of law enforcement or some other govt. data collection agency. I wa
306.
by russell 15y ago
There was a time, before the Federal Reserve, when banks were not rescued, but failed. In the 19th century banks failed and there were panics and depressions every decade or two. What we have now is way better. The problem now is that ba
307.
by russell 15y ago
The original PageRank paper is irrelevant today, except as an introduction. The scheme here dosent work anymore because Google catches it. Remember the "rings" of a decade back, where you added your site to a ring and got a boost because
308.
Ask HN: Have You Written a Book?
6 points by russell 15y ago|4 comments
309.
by russell 15y ago
I commute to SF on a weekly basis and stay in a hotel because it's cheaper than an apartment. And my bed gets made every day. Edit: $65/day including tax * 13 days/month ~= $850. Allowing for holidays, vacation and occasional work from ho
310.
by russell 15y ago
Apologies for being mind-numbingly obvious, but this is an opportunity for being very disruptive, and similar opportunities exist in every hide-bound industry. Unfortunately you cant do it on a ramen or even a YC budget. However if you wor
311.
World Becomming Less Violent(huffingtonpost.com)
2 points by russell 15y ago|2 comments
312.
by russell 15y ago
And why, you ask is the traditional retirement age 65? Bismark decided that too. Very few workers lived more than a year or two beyond 65, if they lived that long. It was a great sop, few collected, but everyone felt protected.
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by russell 15y ago
I just wrote a 300 line Java class to replace a 30 line Python script, so I don't think the criticism is unwarranted. (Python is not an official production language. And no, it's not a hidebound corp. Proposed changes need proof)
314.
by russell 15y ago
I deserved that.:-) It also explains why I'm a devoted reader of your novels. So the non-stupid view of the way forward is that society (and by implication those who generate excess value) must provide for those unable to do so. I just can
315.
by russell 15y ago
Impressive to me. But they seemed to be particularly susceptible to HD failures even with RAID controllers, and compounded by infrequent backups. I suppose this is due to cutting corners on grad student budgets. Comments from others who
316.
by russell 15y ago
Charlie asks a variant of one of my favorite thought experiments: what is society like when everyone lives like the 1% of today, affordable housing, universal health care, robotic servants, cures for nearly all of today's diseases, cheap c
317.
A Cultural Thought Experiment(antipope.org)
82 points by russell 15y ago|32 comments
318.
by russell 15y ago
> The chance of getting the disease is also low, This is quite wrong. About 15 years ago I went on a trip up the Rio Negro in Brazil. My wife and daughters had taken the standard preventative medicines, but they all came down with a d
319.
by russell 15y ago
He says the problem is design by focus groups. Consumers know exactly what they want, but when a company produces it, they go buy something else more interesting. I've tried using focus groups back in the last century. It doesnt produce
320.
by russell 15y ago
Reverse osmosis is getting to be a viable water purification method even if you are not an energy rich middle eastern oil producer. Back in the 90s I lived in a community of about 160 homes in the mountains above Woodside CA. We had our o
321.
by russell 15y ago
It's really a matter of deciding when is the start of the Little Ice Age. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age Some put it at the end of the medieval warn period, others hundreds of years later. I favor 1315, because over the peri
322.
by russell 15y ago
A well reasoned argument -- for those who caused this mess. The 99% are pissed. They want the corruption stopped. They dont want "fixes" that transfer more wealth to the rich, e.g. Cain's 9 9 9 tax reform. They want a Congress that is r
323.
by russell 15y ago
Interesting theory except, as others have pointed out, the Little Ice Age started perhaps 2 centuries before Columbus. The North Atlantic ice pack was growing by 1250. In 1315 the European climate changed permanently for the worse with wi
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by russell 15y ago
COBOL is still alive after more than 50 years. PHP will still be being used in 2050 for government web sites. It wont be getting any respect. but the octogenarians who can still program in it will still be making some pretty change.
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First Ride in Tesla Model S(translogic.aolautos.com)
102 points by russell 15y ago|62 comments
326.
by russell 15y ago
It's a long article, but worth reading. It's analytical and basically non-political. The take away is that taxpayer incomes dropped 5.7% (inflation adjusted) during the Bush years. The number of people earning over $200K, but paying no in
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So How Did the Bush Tax Cuts Work Out for the Economy?(tax.com)
2 points by russell 15y ago|1 comments
328.
by russell 15y ago
>> instead of joining high-potential startups, engineers are founding mediocre companies. ... There are a lot of small teams building small ideas. ... Their deaths will be great for New York tech. [Freeing up money and talent for m
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by russell 15y ago
I'm curious, why? I havent worked with mainframes for a couple of decades. Is it because they are running legacy apps in Cobol? Or havent they figured out how to parallelize the apps to run distributed? (Going from serial Cobol to Erla
330.
by russell 15y ago
When the Bush tax cuts were enacted, I got a check for $300. I remember thinking that wasnt enough to do me any good, and that it would have been better used to apply to the deficit.

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