srdev

Its getting pretty tiresome for people to host super-alt-right events and then claim that they're moderate or politics-free. If your event is called "BasedCon" then you're knee-deep in politics and those politics are not moderate.

Spinning the spaceship is a pretty hard problem. There's all sorts of constraints on how fast you can spin it for a given radius, and you have to spin it fast enough to be useful. The end result is that you're looking at a pretty huge spaceship that will take a lot of power to start spinning. Its not unreasonable to look at a smaller-scale solution given a world of limited budgets.

Benford's Law requires that the numbers being analyzed typically occur over a wide distribution spanning orders of magnitude, which typically doesn't happen in trading (except over very long time periods).

None of those frameworks are slim and fast. No framework is going to admit that they are bloated, and many will claim to be slim and fast, despite the fact that they are not.

I've gotten a lot of flack for saying that advertising and marketing are terrible industries and need to be chopped down by 95% or more, but I think this only supports my point. They can't stop themselves from trying to hook into everything so that they can track and "engage" the user.

I've gotten a lot of stink eye by strongly pointing out that the users don't want to be "engaged" with your brands and that people are creepy for having that expectation. They just want a product or service that works well. Somehow along the way we convinced ourselves that all of this is normal.

> For the endless commentary on Trump profiting off the presidency, Trump running an "organized crime family", Trump this Trump that, we have actual hard, concrete evidence that a Vice President's cocaine addicted son was selling access to the office (presumably to fuel his addiction), and on top of that his father lied constantly to the American people about it.

The dispute is that we don't agree on whether there is concrete evidence that the vice president's son sold access to his office. Hunter certainly capitalized on his name, but to this point there is no hard evidence that this resulted in political access to Biden, that Biden accepted any money, or that Biden gave any favors with regard to Hunter's associates. If you can't prove any of those things, then hammering on it endlessly with no new evidence or any change in the story would be journalistic malpractice.

From my point of view, its not just about whether the company is private but also how easy it is to substitute the service. Twitter and Facebook are not close to the only means of publishing information. I don't think that people deserve any particular audience for their speech, so the ability to substitute other publishing methods alleviates concerns about censorship on my part.

On the other hand, its much more difficult to switch ISPs, so I would be very concerned about censorship at that level. Things like search engines which are substitute-able but held by few hands and difficult to replicate privately are more of a grey area in my opinion.

Not sokoloff, but that would be a reason to move to another mail provider. If Twitter is censoring speech then the correct option is to move to another service or host your own speech. People talk about social media monopolizing the discourse but the only barriers here are network effects, and people can move to other forums (I, for example, do not use Twitter or Facebook and still manage to have online discourse). This is different than if it were censorship at the ISP level, where there are physical and legal barriers of entry which make switching a difficult or impossible option.

That just demonstrates that there isn't an easily definable political neutral. From my point of view, the "Burisma scandal" got all the attention it deserved. The reason the media isn't harping on it is because it wasn't a scandal, and one political party was desperately trying to make it so.

In the same way, a lot of people would say it would be neutral for media to present arguments that global warming is not man-made, but people who care about scientific fact would claim that even presenting the skeptic argument is non-neutral, sense you are signal boosting an argument with no basis in reality.

Is there much in the way of software development and data engineering? I clicked on some of your links but the focus was on engineering jobs involved with building the physical infrastructure, which sort-of matches my expectations. But it also means theres not much I can reasonably do to contribute.

Can you use mechanical drives for long-term storage? I would expect that any long-term storage would involve a strategy including backups and redundant devices.

Small amounts of money can have outsized effect on a market if it’s thinly traded, which crypto markets tend to be.

It’s used in nearly every climate change discussion. Its not particularly profound or thought provoking.

Ideas like fascism rarely spread because they’re better. They’re simpler which makes them more appealing. Better ideas also tend to be less appealing on the face of things because they’re more complex.

Can you elaborate on what the bin packing problem is?