sethg

103 ms·

961.
by sethg 18y ago
I have seen the argument that this system is more fair to small creditors. Under the current bankruptcy, if I extend $1000 of credit to a financially shaky company, and then some bank extends a million-dollar credit line, and then the comp
962.
by sethg 18y ago
This is indeed an interesting application of game theory, but I should point out that this "Talmudic" rule of division is one of several rules proposed for the same problem, and the rabbis of the Talmud ended up rejecting this particular
963.
by sethg 18y ago
IIRC the areas where things are getting worse, or at least, not getting as good as the GDP statistics would lead one to believe, are: [edited to incorporate some stuff from downthread] - people with only a high-school education don't have t
964.
by sethg 18y ago
I could set up a company that would, in exchange for buying $3000 of my plastic toys, hire someone and let them resign a month later. There are ways to prevent that. For example, the government could require that (a) the employer sponsor
965.
by sethg 18y ago
I think when a pattern is used widely enough, it just fades into the background; when the navigation tools are in their expected places, then the users who have gotten used to the pattern can spend more time paying attention to the content.
966.
by sethg 18y ago
The nickel version of A Random Walk Down Wall Street (which many folks here have recommended) is on Philip Greenspun's site: http://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/money I'd like to call out one small part of that essay: "In every offi
967.
by sethg 18y ago
I would agree that the market is not purely efficient (in the EMH sense). But I don't think the inefficiencies are things that an individual investor with $2000 can reliably make money on.
968.
by sethg 18y ago
I'm gen-Y but my sister who's 4 years older is gen-x? They keep having kids at younger and younger ages....
969.
by sethg 18y ago
I'm not a big fan of capitalism, but if it's OK to borrow money¹ and buy stocks with the hope of profiting on their sale, then it's just as OK to borrow stock and sell it with the hope of profiting when you buy it back again. If there's a
970.
by sethg 18y ago
How do coworking sites like Betahouse manage this issue?
971.
by sethg 18y ago
He didn't have time to pull off such an elborate hack, because the Bush Administration organized this auction in a big hurry, hoping to get as much land as possible leased out before Bush left office. If the whole auction is declared void
972.
by sethg 18y ago
If the sexual-harrassment allegations are true, then I hope the folks being harrassed get vindication in court and appropriate compensation for their damages. But I don't think anyone is arguing that AA is making lots of money because th
973.
by sethg 18y ago
I would add to that list: 3. Higher-order types (Yes, C++ has had this with templates for a while and Java has it with generics, but they bolted it on later, after the syntax and many essential libraries had been fixed.) 4. Type inference T
974.
by sethg 18y ago
As a sort of sequel to "Getting to Yes", I recommend Shell's "Bargaining for Advantage": http://www.amazon.com/Bargaining-Advantage-Negotiation-Strat...
975.
by sethg 18y ago
I'm reminded of the story that one of our VPs told, of a manager who had received far more applications for a certain job than he had time to look through. So he took half of the resumes that had piled up on his desk and said: "These peopl
976.
by sethg 18y ago
He could hire educated employees because they paid for education; it is a engineering company, not McDonalds. And where did these engineers go to school? Did they attend a public or private university? Was the school subsidized by land
977.
by sethg 18y ago
But long-term population shrinkage can be accommodated by raising the Social Security tax (an fund-raising option that was not available to Ponzi or Madoff). As long as the generation-to-generation increase in worker productivity is grea
978.
by sethg 18y ago
Voters. Unless the US economy really goes in the toilet[ ], Congress is not going to substantially cut Social Security benefits for retirees. (The Republicans couldn't get partial SS privatization to pass Congress even when Bush was at t
979.
by sethg 18y ago
Everybody wants to live in the future. IIRC when a magazine has "February 2009" on the cover, it really means "take this off the newsstand by March 2009".
980.
Don't blame Community Reinvestment Act for the subprime mess(blogs.wsj.com)
1 points by sethg 18y ago|0 comments
981.
by sethg 18y ago
Yeah, my wife's immediate reaction to that one was "so it will do as well as Amtrak?"
982.
by sethg 18y ago
I don't want to get into a debate here about what the best techniques for teaching reading are (not to mention how to get teachers in the classrom to actually use the techniques); my point is just that everyone in the system agrees that
983.
by sethg 18y ago
On the one hand, I think it would be great to live in a world where some basic level of "code literacy" was expected of all adults--just like today, every adult in the industrialized world is expected to be able to read and write, and Ph.D.
984.
by sethg 18y ago
I think any non-toy language needs to make it non-painful to program in several paradigms, but I'm not sure about the "comfortably" part; it's good for a langauge to be designed around a central paradigm that can work for most tasks and t
985.
by sethg 18y ago
Agreed. I think the point of learning multiple paradigms is so that you can recognize when idiomatic programming in your preferred (or employer-mandated) language is not the best way to get the job done--recognizing when it's time to writ
986.
by sethg 18y ago
I know nothing about hypergraphia, but I question the assumption that your desire to write could be "channeled" into coding. I don't think it's necessarily true that two superficially similar activities are really scratching the same psy
987.
by sethg 18y ago
Sexual reassignment surgery is not a sexual activity, but it is part of someone's medical history, and I think it is in poor taste to gossip about someone's medical history. If Ms. Fridrich had been hospitalized for depression as a teenage
988.
by sethg 18y ago
Is the proportion of adblock users actually high enough for the ad-buyers to care about their impact?
989.
by sethg 18y ago
I like the general idea, although if I had a kitchen timer ticking on my physical desktop and going off every 25 minutes, my officemates would beat me senseless, which could have some impact on my productivity.
990.
by sethg 18y ago
I can't find the page where I saw the numbers, but a staggering proportion of American adults don't know basic math well enough to figure out which grocery store has the lowest prices. I assume an even more staggering proportion doesn't re

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