gbhn

10 ms·

1.
by gbhn 4y ago
There are roughly a million violent crimes a year. It is not credible there are 3x as many defensive uses of firearms that are somehow being missed. The page you reference indexes a few thousand over several years. Seems likely an undercoun
2.
by gbhn 4y ago
A good example of this is comments on this post. They're basically awful and reduce worthwhile traffic on this site by driving away more people than they attract. The reality of every forum, as the original author says, is that unless
3.
by gbhn 5y ago
Ultimately wouldn't these rates be set politically? As in, there'd be one politician who says "raise the tax and do this" and another who says "lower the tax and stop doing that" and voters just pick what they
4.
by gbhn 5y ago
Another key factor is enforcement cost. Enforcing a land tax is really easy for a government. You just... Go there and get it. There's no moving the land offshore or having complex relationships or offsets. If someone won't pay th
5.
by gbhn 5y ago
That's kind of the thing that makes APIs possible, right? It sounds to me like "what if programming were done in a completely flat global namespace in which abstractions, encapsulation, and structure were impossible."
6.
by gbhn 6y ago
I think the theory is "there are few enough we didn't notice." There's other weird effects going on -- some countries that look really really similar have vastly different experiences with the virus. (Canonical example i
7.
by gbhn 7y ago
See also Krypto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krypto_(game) Some friends and I were hooked on this game in college. We eventually wrote a program to solve particularly tough hands. It turns out there are a few potentia
8.
by gbhn 7y ago
From the discussion on this I've read, I think a good direction would be to consider statistical tests like this as simply not "publishable" at all the way we currently think of it. That is, if you have a theory about how a G
9.
by gbhn 7y ago
Are you suggesting the Chinese market is more competitive due to the government being big enough that companies in the market have to exist in an impartial regime? This isn't the impression I get from many other sources.
10.
by gbhn 7y ago
A local coin/stamp person was completely uninterested in my old stamps from like 35 years ago. I think the shrinking number of collectors is outstripping the number of collections getting thrown out, and the whole idea of collecting st
11.
by gbhn 8y ago
By "open standards people" I mean "people who prefer open standards". Nothing more sinister than that. :-) (I am one, BTW) This is already a very small subset of the population -- they've bothered to take a stand on
12.
by gbhn 8y ago
Fatalities per passenger mile is a good metric for passengers, but for the FAA, I think crashes per vehicle mile is a better target. That is, the plane isn't inherently 100x safer if you just fly it empty.
13.
by gbhn 8y ago
I have some direct experience with this. It is summed up as "open standards people are extraordinarily hard to work with, uncompromising, and subject to infinite fine splitting of the space. Meanwhile, 5 billion users do not care and w
14.
by gbhn 8y ago
The authors' point seems to be "if you ask people questions whose real answers correspond to informal statistical judgments, then they will give the right answers." This isn't really that informative, but the strongest f
15.
by gbhn 8y ago
The point of the article is that your intuition is incorrect. By inhibiting zipper merging you are forcing congestion backward, and leaving carrying capacity of the road unutilized during congestion when it is most at a premium. Pushing con
16.
by gbhn 8y ago
Did anyone else find the variance illustration completely baffling? It's got little to do with an intuitive feel for the variation in outcome for a random variable
17.
by gbhn 8y ago
The history is that 'fake news" was used to refer to fabricated stories. Following it's surge in.popularity following the 2016 election, Trump realized the term was catchy and claimed falsely to have invented it, but used it
18.
by gbhn 8y ago
I learn the opposite from NYC: if the city is successful enough to draw a lot of real estate development, the result will be even higher prices. This more closely matches the actual trajectory of cities like NYC, Tokyo, London, etc.
19.
by gbhn 8y ago
Interesting! Do you have a book on the subject to recommend?
20.
by gbhn 8y ago
google.com/search?q=human+echolocation brings up a ton of related stuff. The thing is "what do you type into the search engine." I, for one, would never think to type in any of probably tens of thousands of topics that, havin
21.
by gbhn 8y ago
I read over a couple of the papers. The descriptions of them by the authors did not match the content of the papers. For instance, the one they call "Hooters" is described as "A gender scholar goes to Hooters to try to figure
22.
by gbhn 8y ago
You'd appreciate sandstorm.io
23.
by gbhn 8y ago
I listen to the show a fair amount. It tends toward the "human interest" side rather than "expert interview" side. In other words, the format doesn't seem to me to have a lot of in-built preference for subject matte
24.
by gbhn 8y ago
Sure, but a main point of a crypto currency is realizing there's no reason to back a monetary currency with anything. It's just a shared hallucination. There's no rational reason a new currency would be "based" on b
25.
by gbhn 8y ago
I read it as saying something a little more subtle, which is that there is a lot of uncertainty in a couple of our critical estimates, and given that uncertainty what we see (no other life in the galaxy) is not that surprising. (That is,
26.
by gbhn 8y ago
Perhaps a better analogy: let's say you're hiring people with the offer that you'll pay them $2M the first year, then nothing for 20 years. The danger is that the person will quit. So it is more conservative to offer a deal w
27.
by gbhn 8y ago
Looking at hash rate shares historically, it is incomprehensible that market share would remain so stable through several generations of mining tech. So the existing system is precisely a cooperative benevolent monopoly, albeit an informal
28.
by gbhn 8y ago
My conclusion is that since this is true, the real thing maintaining the system is mutual cooperation of sufficient mining interest. When you look at the theoretical division of hashpower in btc, it looks too stable over generations of hard
29.
by gbhn 8y ago
I've enjoyed this translation many times, and wondered how difficult a job it must have been to adequately do this translation!
30.
by gbhn 8y ago
There are Bird scooters where I work in LA. They seem really cool! I see people buzzing around on them all the time. I haven't seen any sidewalk blockages or anything, but I can see how at high traffic locations that might be a thing.

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