I'm assuming this is for a personal use computer. Can you talk more about the setup here? Sounds interesting. If the OS is immutable, where do you store personal data and how do you perform updates?

If you like TOP better, or think it's more correct, or more wise, that's fine.

(I don't think so, but someone else might.)

I also strongly disagree with some of the sibling comments which insist that Taoism does not have a non-mystical (i.e., non-religious) core. As a disclaimer, I'm not really an expert. But I can see that there is a wise and rational framework there, that does not depend on make believe.

It's a retelling of the Tao Te Ching into plain English, using parent/child relationships to make the points.

I recommend this both to parents, and to children. Which is all of us. We never stop being children of our parents.

I don't have children, nor do I plan to, yet this is one of the most powerful books I've read.

PR gets to harvest its own taxes, whereas the other states are tax fiefdoms for the Federal bureaucracy. This is truly a superpower for Puerto Rico.

In return, PR doesn't get to vote for president, or have senators or congressmen. But I can tell you, all those are worthless. My state's representatives (when I lived in a state) served the Federal bureaucracy in practice, not the people of the state. They are cronies for their political parties.

I personally believe that PR's mediocre economic situation is because their own elites steal all the money they get (like the $80 billion or whatever they defaulted on), and because the vast majority of Puerto Ricans have already gone to the States, creating a massive brain drain. I do not believe it's because of the Jones Act or some other form of colonialism.

"The concrete results are that a foreign ship can enter a U.S. port to drop off its foreign cargo, it can even from there sail to different U.S. ports to drop off other foreign goods, but it is not allowed to pick up any domestic goods in a U.S. port and bring those goods to another U.S. destination if it doesn’t meet the four conditions listed above."

For instance, I used to believe we couldn't get produce from the DR without it first going through a US port (typically Jacksonville).

But in reality, the Jones Act doesn't prevent ships from bringing DR produce directly to PR, even foreign ships.

I'd like to get a specific example of something economically useful that the Jones Act forbids.

For instance, you couldn't have a trade route by a DR ship that goes San Juan -> Ponce -> DR, if you want to be able to pick up goods in San Juan and drop them in Ponce. But is that really useful, anyway?

Perhaps allowing non-US ships to brings goods between Florida and PR would be the biggest gain of dropping the Jones Act? Because shipping would be much cheaper. Like the case in the article where it's cheaper to bring fuel to the Northeast from Africa than from Texas.

Most people here like hearing the sort of stories that your comment serves to actively discourage.

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.1c04277

I'm still digesting this one and would appreciate input from anyone else who wants to read it.

As someone who lives close to the ocean, I'm concerned about the long-term health effects. I guess I'm probably breathing sea spray aerosols all the time. I can hear and see the breaking waves from my home.

I'm referring to the following sentence in the abstract:

> Levels of PFAAs in atmospheric deposition are especially poorly reversible because of the high persistence of PFAAs and their ability to continuously cycle in the hydrosphere, including on sea spray aerosols emitted from the oceans.

It's a little bit hard to figure out if this work is:

a) a fascinating but ultimately impractical thought experiment; or

b) utter bullshit, a pollution of the signal/noise space; or

c) actually possible? maybe? (extremely unlikely...)

From my understanding, it kind of reminds me of physics papers on warp drives. Impossible, but there's still some sort of tantalizing intellectual idea that feels like it could go somewhere.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31740062

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

Wow. This makes me feel like I have to stop using Firefox.

I wonder if others feel the same, or have a different analysis. For example, is the situation with Chrome better?

I was a grad student in CS for 8 years, but left without finishing the PhD. I wasn't in compilers, but that's a reasonable example because I was in some other "niche of a niche." Small community, fairly obscure.

Most of the grad students in my niche really just wanted to be professors. And the way to become a professor was to (a) publish a very high quantity of papers; and (b) make friends with all the senior people in our little niche.

The goal people had wasn't to amass power. It was just to get a tenure-track job. Somebody else in this comment section made a joke about Chinese students. The problem is not at all limited to them. But a tenure-track job at an American university really seems like heaven to someone who's made their way up from the bottom in China, for example. And also to some people from other parts of the world, including America. If publishing tons of low-quality papers is the path to that, and being buddy-buddy with other people, they go for it. It's a "I'll scratch your back, you scratch mine" environment, including regarding "peer" review.

There is a tradeoff between quality and quantity. I was doing empirical research. I couldn't compete with the people doing more pure mathematical/algorithm stuff. They could just spit out papers with some new obscure algorithm (that will never be used anywhere) and a proof of some of its properties. I would have been lucky to have 5 published papers at the end of my grad school career, but a good tenure-track candidate would have like 30.

The senior people, like my thesis adviser, more than enable this kind of behavior. They get grant money basically based on the quantity of papers published. I never understood why my adviser cared so much about grant money. Like, what drove him to put out a super high quantity of crappy papers, to have a ton of students, and get a lot of grant money? What's the point? I never understood it. I mean, he already had tenure. And there were lots of tenured profs I knew who actually just didn't care about grant money and publication count, and didn't do that. Which is great. But you know who all the grant money goes to, and then who has a huge "lab" with lots of students? The ones like my professor who really care about that sort of thing and optimize for it.

I think compilers produces much higher quality than my niche-of-a-niche (which I don't want to name, by the way). But I don't think an area like that is immune to the pressures I'm talking about. It's probably a bigger community (which helps), where the research just has a different dynamic. We could speculate why that might be. But nonetheless I would argue that every area of modern science suffers from the problem I'm describing, to a varying extent between countries and fields and sub-sub fields.

By the way, maybe people go into compilers as PhD students, wanting to go to industry... but the truth is, in computer science, getting a PhD is usually not advancing your career over just putting that many years directly into industry. If your planned route is PhD=>industry, it only makes sense if you want to be in an industry research position and if you care about that more than how much money you make.

Bitcoin's decentralization does not come from miners. It comes from the fact that users will not recognize blocks that do not follow the protocol rules, as being part of the blockchain.

As a consequence, market participants will not pay as much for "bitcoins" that do not come from valid blocks.

The fundamental service miners provide is that proof of work is used as a "tiebreak" so that bitcoin users can determine the "true" chain among all the chains that follow all the protocol rules.

Miners really are just dumb utilities.

A miner staying within the rules of the protocol can do two things that are negative. First, a denial of service attack by mining empty blocks or censoring transactions. Second, executing a "double spend" if he has more than 50% of the hash capacity.

Those are serious considerations. But we cannot claim that bitcoin's decentralization is reducible to those two things. The current allocation of hash power among miners is actually far more distributed than what is really needed for bitcoin.

Implicit in all the above is, miners do not "vote." That can be a helpful analogy, but it shouldn't be taken too far.