woopwoop

23 ms·

271.
by woopwoop 8y ago
The benefits of productivity growth are normed to the size of the economy, so the relevant comparison is R&D spending as a percentage of GDP to productivity growth. As fas as I know, R&D spending as a percentage of GDP has been rela
272.
by woopwoop 8y ago
After writing the following, I realized it might come off as more critical than I meant it. I'm genuinely curious, I just wasn't able to understand the motivation for this idea from the Wikipedia page. First, let me attempt a summ
273.
by woopwoop 8y ago
Sure, but if you can't prematurely optimize in HN comments, when can you?
274.
by woopwoop 8y ago
A note about the rejection method: in high dimensions, this becomes very expensive. This is because the volume of a ball inscribed in a unit cube goes to zero (very quickly) as the dimension goes to infinity, so you start rejecting points w
275.
by woopwoop 8y ago
Their formula is neat, but the fact that you can fit any finite set of data to arbitrary precision with a smoothly varying one parameter family of functions is easy. Here is another construction. Let P_1, P_2, ... be an enumeration of the p
276.
by woopwoop 8y ago
If the answer was 100% yes, not enough people would be going to college.
277.
by woopwoop 8y ago
Okay. I am used to this being called a path integral, and the phrase line integral being reserved for the integral of a vector field over a curve. This does not, as far as I know, admit a straightforward definition as an area under a curve.
278.
by woopwoop 8y ago
What is the straightforward "area under the curve" definition of a line integral?
279.
by woopwoop 9y ago
I don't understand why the concentration is relevant. The issue is the amount. Once the permafrost melts, the mercury locked in it will enter the mercury cycle. I don't have a model of how this will change the amount of mercury in
280.
by woopwoop 9y ago
Is a triangle a circle or a disk?
281.
by woopwoop 9y ago
Sure. I think the notion of a manifold wouldn't be very interesting if it didn't have some kind of discrete analogue. But, for me at least, smooth manifolds are much easier to think about than simplicial complexes or PL manifolds.
282.
by woopwoop 9y ago
>Manifolds are just graphs with many vertices. Okay, I'll bite. How? What is the definition of the tangent space? Dimension?
283.
by woopwoop 9y ago
>Additionally, there has been an upswing in youth consumption in the past decade directly. Cite? According to this[1] paper, there was a decline in underage alcohol consumption between 1991 and 2013, but that doesn't quite contradic
284.
by woopwoop 9y ago
Scholze's comment is particularly interesting.
285.
by woopwoop 9y ago
My impression was this was basically not true, that it is very difficult for an H1-B Visa holder to leave their sponsoring employer. According to Wikipedia, "If a foreign worker in H-1B status quits or is dismissed from the sponsoring
286.
by woopwoop 9y ago
As long as H1-B Visa holders cannot change jobs once they get here, they will be underpaid and overworked, and will create distortions in the American labor market. I would say the obvious fix is to untether the H1-B from the Visa holder&#x
287.
by woopwoop 9y ago
I was going to comment that what's going on here doesn't have much to do with the Gaussian distribution. In high dimensions, almost all of the volume of the unit ball is concentrated near the unit sphere. In the first comment, Fra
288.
by woopwoop 9y ago
The following is not commentary on the current climate and politics of college campuses in the United States. It is impossible for two honest, truth-seeking people to disagree about a fact in perpetuity. Eventually, they will realize that e
289.
by woopwoop 9y ago
To clarify, are you claiming that, e.g., the Ford motor company in the 1950's purposefully overpaid its workers based on the belief that, if they were not overpaid, its workers would foment a communist revolution, which would damage Fo
290.
by woopwoop 9y ago
I TA'd for an undergrad ODE course for two semesters. I'm a grad student at a public university with very good undergrad engineering students. Nonetheless, with the course I taught, at least, the main problem was that WAY too much
291.
by woopwoop 9y ago
Right, but a voting stock is a contract that provides some fraction of those Adwords to you. If they accumulate a lot of those AdWords dollars, shareholders will eventually demand that money back to spend for themselves. In the past, this w
292.
by woopwoop 9y ago
My impression is that modern firms "pay dividends" by doing share buybacks, which are equivalent to dividends but taxed less (I'm nowhere near an expert here, if that isn't clear). If you don't have a voting share o
293.
by woopwoop 9y ago
I have a probably naive question. I just learned about the concept of non-voting stock today. Is there typically some contractual obligation for companies that, if they do a stock buyback, some fraction of the shares bought must be non-voti
294.
by woopwoop 9y ago
http://www.thebigquestions.com/2014/04/21/high-frequency-ren... This seems pretty convincing to me. The argument is that, based on the amount that firms are willing to spend on fiberoptic cables to perform hf
295.
by woopwoop 9y ago
It's easy to gerrymander a surface. It's hard to gerrymander a line, or a circle, where the connectedness requirement has teeth. One solution to gerrymandering is to determine congressional districts by birthday, or last name, rat
296.
by woopwoop 9y ago
Wait, that's an amazing claim. 100 is the median IQ for the entire population. So the claim is that the median college graduate has the same IQ as the median person. How could that possibly be true?
297.
by woopwoop 9y ago
"Crude oil prices will drop by half in eight years" seems like the kind of thing you go bet on and make a lot of money off of, not the kind of thing you publish in an article on the internet.
298.
by woopwoop 9y ago
I haven't read Lax's linear algebra book, but I fell in love with his functional analysis book in the summer before I began grad school. His notes on hyperbolic pde are also great. Lax is of course a great mathematician, but he is
299.
by woopwoop 9y ago
It seems to me that whether Walmart gains or loses from a welfare benefit paid to workers depends on the structure of the benefit. IANAE. If the benefit is tied to working, like the EITC, it makes the worker willing to work for a lower wage
300.
by woopwoop 9y ago
The statement "an X is home to all its citizens" is true for any X.

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