I was next.

Got fired at end of financial year, along with a couple thousand others. Had a new job before the day was out (another result of said anxiety).

Another luxury goods market that's reporting a significant decline. Private planes are also down a lot, real estate in Manhattan is dropping. SF real estate not dropping, but not increasing as it used to either. Spending on luxury goods down a lot. Let's go down the list:

Gold prices up ... check. Lots of money flowing (or attempting to) into government bonds ... check. Corporate profits down ... check. Corporate lending up by a LOT ... check. Energy down (demand-side problem) ... check. Goods shipping down (a lot) ... check. Lending standards tightening ... check (except for central bank lending). Spending down ... check. Bankruptcies up ... check. Luxury goods markets down ... check. Asset prices generally going donw ... check. "Sin" stocks rising (alcohol, gambling, ...) ... hmmm ... yes, sort of ... not yet totally pervasive (although CSH is doing almost suspiciously well)

We're in a recession ! Also : f*ck, I was looking at changing my job around.

And ... major wtf: stock prices ... all time high. That's weird.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_Chapter_11_reor...

And then we had 4. We discovered new ones, at one point I believe up to 7. But resistance made it go down pretty much by one per decade, but each next one ended faster. And then it hit zero, in 2012 I believe.

Now we may (maybe) be back up to one. Big whoop. Not going to last.

The problem is that evolution is out-researching us, the problem is that we're losing the war, not any particular battle. Antibiotics used to last 3-5 decades. Now we're down to years. While we do find new antibiotics on a regular basis, the problem is the speed of adaptation. The problem is that science is losing/has lost the "battle with darkness" as it was called 700 years ago. We are now in the situation that there are people dying because they entered hospitals for unrelated reasons (where they were exposed to these bacteria).

The problem is that we need to let millions of people die of curable diseases constantly or risk a Spanish flu like incident that can be reasonably expected to kill somewhere between 500 million and a billion humans today.

They also have serious disadvantages : they can't be memory managed in the traditional way (since they tend to reuse other instances' memory in complex ways), and thus require a GC (refcounting can work, but ...). They are VERY allocation intensive, and they are worse than most non-persistent data structures. Assuming an O(1) allocator they can match non-persistent data structures in O-ness (ie. when making an invalid assumption that is quite popular in academia. In practice memory allocation is O(1) for small values, then O(n^2) once you get close to the system's memory capacity (scanning for holes in a long list) but don't go over it, and then O(oh fuck it let's just reboot this bloody BOAT ANCHOR) when crossing that line).

Clojure is famous for having good persistent data structures. Rich Hickey went touring academia touting the benefits of immutable/persistent/functional data structures : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGVqrGmwOAw&feature=youtu.be...

There's also a famous book: https://www.amazon.com/Purely-Functional-Structures-Chris-Ok...

And when it comes to the bias in the data - bias in the system thing, well, same thing goes for human judgement. Another way of putting this would be garbage in-garbage out. Humans might be able to tell you of bias in the inputs, rather than just using it, but this ability rapidly deteriorates when the dimensionality of the inputs rises. You can tell if there's something weird about combinations of 3 numbers, but you can't tell if there is something off about 150 number sequences.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12021640

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

I don't agree with you at all that it increases your energy. And yeah it came with lots of completely ridiculous rules, like anything religious. If I was a muslim, with that many rules that onerous, I'd refuse to do it just for that reason alone. Such rules only serve to prove someone else's power over you and nothing more. There is no use or purpose other than that. At one point I actually thought different, and so I simply tested it. Nothing, of course, as there is no God that is so extremely petty and meddling as that.

That there are other targets is obviously correct, but I do not feel it really addresses the point.

Security that works by simply creating a juicier target is obviously not security at all.

What happens to security when a bomb goes off ? Well, apparently it is abandoned, and fails open. So you can walk straight through, unopposed. The 2 remaining terrorists (and hundreds of civilians) did just that, and while a police officer shot one of them before he could run into a crowd and that bomb went off in the middle of an open space, apparently without victims [1]. The other one, however did succeed.

According to this article the solution to this is what Baghdad airport does ... which is to have vehicle screening before the vehicles get near the airport building. One can only imagine what a nightmare it would be to do this at a high traffic airport but ...

How about we do the other alternative ? Obviously static defenses with long queues effectively make it easier, not harder, for terrorists to strike (talk about obvious). Let's use this opportunity to make sure people don't ever have to wait in security screening, avoiding creating a vulnerable point, and making air travel far more attractive for everybody concerned while we're at it.

[1] (note: VERY graphic violence https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QKYBK04AmA )

https://img.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/files/2016/0...

It's not going to be a good year for either of their images.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-24/down-and-o...

2 things stand out:

Younger people voted remain

The richer you are, the more likely you voted remain. The working class is solidly on the side of Brexit (65%). Middle class is slightly on the Brexit side.

I wonder which of these is the bigger effect. Waiters in central London, for instance, who commute out far to get to their jobs. How did they vote ?

The EU has it's scapegoat: they're blaming the whole thing on David Cameron, for allowing a vote in the first place, in a supreme display of utter disdain for democracy. Of course, every vote save one about whether people wanted the EU saw people reject the EU, so I guess you can't expect Europe to like voters. Scarily a lot of people are going along with them. I don't understand why. Democracy is the central guarantee that protects workers and anything but the largest entrepreneurs from exploitation.

Also I don't understand why Hacker News, who mostly seem to be leaning to the left, are taking such a pro-capital stance. London's wealth is built at least in part, like Luxembourg's, on being a tax haven in the center of Europe, inside the EU but not paying most taxes. That's borderline criminal.

Does anyone here really think that playing on the side of big capital will work out well for you personally ? For 99.99% of the readers here it is simple: you are not a billionaire temporarily embarrassed by a misplaced comma on your bank account balance, you are either working or (maybe) middle class. Unless big capital, and the EU itself loses out big time you will die in poverty (just calculate out what your pension fund performance is when non-core inflation is 3% and interest rates are 0.25%).

No more than 5-15% ever passes through Greek hands.

There is an asset bubble, for instance, at the moment (houses and a lot of other things are more expensive than justified). Gold price seems suppressed. And a government debt bubble. And a China bubble (China is exporting more than is justified by the economics, probably due to state subsidies). There was an oil price bubble, that could reflate (it would take a 5% difference in oil supply, maybe less, for the price to go back to $100 at least temporarily). Renewables could destroy the energy economy (this is happening, could accelerate. E.g. we could find a fantastic new battery principle, easy cheap large scale energy storage. The world would change to accommodate that faster than anyone can imagine). EU disintegration, and related shocks : e.g. a Deutsche Bank bankruptcy. Central banks switching tactics (either to helikopter money or the other way, interest rates back to 4%). More US states/territories cities going bankrupt. Large scale terror attacks.

All of these would be large to massive financial shocks. They're also very likely all going to happen. Most of them are going to be caused by another one in that very list, like domino blocks all lined up, but currently standing up. Only one will really be set off in truly unpredictable fashion, and cause the other dominoes to topple. The question is, how to find (and time) the drop that overflows the bucket. That is not a trivial question and the answer could be that said drop won't fall for another decade (or two, why not). That's unlikely, but certainly not impossible.

Whilst not many people were expecting the Brexit scenario to pass, ever since the Greek crisis (5-7 years ago now, depending on what event you think set it off) people have been worried about EU disintegration. That the EU, for various reasons, from languages, over border protections to finance habits does not have what it takes to stay together. Apparently they were right. The real fear is that it will cause bank bankruptcies. That may be underway. That may already have happened (a lot of EU banks aren't far from bankruptcy)

Now the second-biggest economy is leaving the EU, with unknown implications for lots of financial instruments ...

There is at least a serious case to be made that this could be bad.