Disqus - Latest Comments for aleax

Re: How to Block Fireworks Noise for Adults, Kids, and Pets

aleax — Wed, 03 Jul 2024 15:11:00 -0000

It is, in my experience, a core part of a strategy to get involved in your city's politics regularly and steadily - NOT just on a single issue such as fireworks: pitch in on any issue facing your city. In fact that's reason #1 I chose to naturalize as a US citizen a few years ago: not so much for Federal or State level issues, but city (in my case, Sunnyvale, CA) and maybe county ones, where I'm much more likely to make a difference.

I admit that so far it hasn't yet worked all that well for me (Sunnyvale won't have big official firework shows tomorrow the way nearby cities such as Mountain View or San Jose will, but the overall amount of noise, esp. tomorrow [Jul4] night, is still going to freak out my puppy)... but, it HAS been just a few years, and, now that I'm retired, I have the time to increase my involvement in local politics and maybe make a positive difference.

Re: The yearly S&P 500 chart paints a compelling picture

aleax — Fri, 29 Dec 2023 17:28:54 -0000

You forget to mention the elephant in the room -- DEBT. Public, individual, corporate... if anything brings the economy crashing down (far from impossible!), debt will be it.

- Inflation's rapidly coming back into control (what's this "persisting" about when it's less than HALF today than it was at the start of the year?!);
- US demographics are more favorable than any other large economy (China, Russia, Japan, Europe... are the ones with "demographic problems", not us!);
- US corporate tax rate is 21%, vs 35% just 6 years ago.

So your choice to highlight these "concerns" (which are currently not concerning at all!) is perplexing to me. Even Krugman, a notorious anti-austerity, pro-debt major economist, is getting scared by the debt levels we're at, today -- see his column of 2 months ago at https://www.nytimes.com/202... (paywalled)...

Re: medrxiv viewer

aleax — Tue, 04 May 2021 17:26:25 -0000

1 case out of 225 is 0.44%, definitely NOT 0.0041%.

Re: James Damore Official Fundraiser

aleax — Thu, 10 Aug 2017 00:12:39 -0000

Wrong: James does not have a Master degree -- he was pursuing one but dropped out. See https://everipedia.org/wiki... .

Re: James Damore Official Fundraiser

aleax — Thu, 10 Aug 2017 00:11:33 -0000

It's an acceptable use, since there are other doctorates than PhDs. My dentists are "Dr. X Y, DDS" and "Dr. K T, DMD" -- and that's really no problem.

Re: James Damore Official Fundraiser

aleax — Thu, 10 Aug 2017 00:08:15 -0000

Per https://everipedia.org/wiki..., "former Ph.D. student at Harvard" is incorrect; rather, quoting everipedia, "He was pursuing a ***Master's*** degree" (and didn't complete). Why the gratuitous counterfactual!? It's not as if it would be hard to research -- one web search finds the everipedia entry. There are other counterfactuals in the text (not so easy to disprove from published references, but I bet you can't prove them either, since they're falsehoods) -- since you're in touch with James, simply sending him the text to vet (amazing if you haven't done so!) should have fixed them. James definitely does not need and I suspect would not appreciate being defended with falsehoods: please fix these "alternate facts" that you wrongfully assert.

Re: Google firing of engineer: Was it right?

aleax — Wed, 09 Aug 2017 23:52:06 -0000

Damore is a Jew, per https://everipedia.org/wiki... (like Google's founders Brin and Page). Doesn't that count as "minority" any more?

Re: Top 3 Useless Stock Metrics that Investors Use

aleax — Thu, 17 Oct 2013 18:56:57 -0000

Hi Jae and tx for posting my remarks on PSR before. Ken was essentially the one who introduced PSR as a key metric in his first (of many!) best-seller, `superstocks` -- but in his recent books he's pointed out that like any very popular metric it loses predictive power because the market prices based on it (and hints at where it still works -- e.g, most foreign markets). O'Shaughnessy still sees it as one of the two best predictive metrics though (alternating with EV/EBITDA, essentially).

Re: The anatomy of the perfect technical interview from a former Amazon VP

aleax — Tue, 27 Aug 2013 13:47:16 -0000

Yep, I mentioned that exact `hiring trap` as part of my `Good Enough is good enough` talk, http://pyvideo.org/video/17...

Re: The anatomy of the perfect technical interview from a former Amazon VP

aleax — Tue, 27 Aug 2013 13:45:12 -0000

I think a great answer would be `I am a great believer in luck, and I've found that the harder I work the luckier I get` (attributed, probably apocryphally, to T. Jefferson)...

Re: HP mocks Dell buyout. Really, HP?

aleax — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 14:19:20 -0000

AAPL's P/E is about 10, MSFT's about 15, so there must be something wrong with your "should be at $390": if AAPL's P/E grew by 50% its price would go up likewise, back to close to the 700 peak. I'm way into Open Source too, but that doesn't mean I can't do arithmetic;-).

Re: HP mocks Dell buyout. Really, HP?

aleax — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 14:16:34 -0000

Debt/equity is over 100% at Dell (OK, significant) but over 125% at HPQ, so it's strange indeed to hear the latter point reprovingly at the former. (Such debt loads need not be killers of course: IBM's over 175% for example).

Re: PyCon APAC 2012 - Keynote

aleax — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 13:29:09 -0000

Awesome summary Martin, and thanks for sharing it! You hit all the key points and phrase them very well. BTW, the video's now at http://www.youtube.com/watc... .

As for how to do software transactional memory (STM) in Python, my main hope is in Armin Rigo and the rest of the awesome pypy team. But, you could try https://www.mems-exchange.o... . Sorry for not giving the references in the talk itself!

Re: Distributed Transactions on App Engine

aleax — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 12:00:37 -0000

In line 6 of `roll_forward`, i.e. `parent=target_key,` , where does that `target_key` variable come from? I don't see it anywhere else. Typo...? Would be a pity to mar such an important post by leaving a typo unfixed, which is why I'm asking... thanks!

Re: Maximum of an empty sequence?

aleax — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 11:15:05 -0000

"Happily lambda survived", eh? Your "happy" use of lambda shows how useless it is (and therefore why it's far from happy that it survived). Instead of the "see what a guru I am" pomposity of

zs = lambda: iter(set())

all one needs is a plain old function

def zs(): return iter(())

[building an empty tuple is 2-3 times faster than building an empty set, as well as more concise, so, given the same effect, it's the one obvious way to do it].

@rgzdev, your proposed:

ist_sum = lambda seq: reduce(lambda x, y: x+y, seq, [])

is pretty weird indeed -- sum does accept an initial value, so sum(seq, []) is just fine... except for the fact that this way to sum up a list of lists is O(N**2), be it through reduce or sum (since K-2 intermediate lists of growing length are built and discarded), and therefore in general a bad solution. An O(N) way to do it is

def lst_sum(seq): return [x for L in seq for x in L]

I detest it when lazy programmers grab for obscure tools such as lambda and reduce without even bothering to think half a second about more appropriate, effective, fast, and readable solutions.

Re: When will housing bottom?

aleax — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 22:42:48 -0000

The "unquantifiable benefits of owning my home" can definitely be very large (depending no doubt on detailed cultural issues about what the landlord gets to forbid his tenants and what he doesn't), for example by owning I get to decide how many pets of what species and breed I choose to have, whether I smoke in the house, what color I can paint the interior walls tomorrow, whether I'm going to keep using that old dishwasher or upgrade e.g. to a new model that saves water and electricity, can I have a friend sleep over on the couch for a couple of nights, and so forth.

Each of these freedoms of choice are often denied by at least most landlords in many parts of the US and some other countries. I suspect that in countries where the vast majority of people of all social classes rent, such as Switzerland, the landlords, typically insurance companies, just don't get to micromanage their tenants' lives to such an extent, be it by law or unwritten cultural custom -- making the benefits of ownership much lesser.

Some US localities are starting to restrict renters' freedoms *independently of the landlord's wishes* -- in Belmont, CA, starting tomorrow, you can't smoke at home if you rent, period (you can still smoke if you own the house you live in, for now -- you can't smoke anywhere else in town in either case); indeed some landlords were (futilely) protesting this new law back when it was passed (just like owners of restaurants and bars have routinely, and just as uselessly, protested against mandated smoking bans in their establishments in the past).

Re: When will housing bottom?

aleax — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 22:21:12 -0000

"In states like New Jersey, property taxes are ridiculously high, say $20,000 for a $600,000 house. Better to rent."...??? How can property taxes ever make it "better to rent" (or, for that matter, worse)?!

Just as, at equilibrium, all corporate taxes must be reflected in the prices the corporation sells products or services for (since nobody would run that corporation at a loss forever), just so property taxes must be reflected in rents -- so if an identical house sells for the same $600k in two localities, and in one it pays $20k in property taxes while in the other it pays $10k, then inevitably it will rent for $10k more in the first locality.

For a transient period after *unanticipated changes* in taxes and other regulations, some investors may get soaked (or may get a windfall, of course) -- some regulations (such as rent control) may stretch out the time needed for adjustment (so you might be well advised to keep renting a rent-controlled unit if you're lucky enough to live in one -- even if it falls apart as the landlord obviously fails to invest in it) -- but if you're moving to NJ today, and only deciding whether to rent or buy, property taxes MUST be immaterial to your decision.

Re: A nose plugin to run JUnit tests via Jython.

aleax — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 20:50:29 -0000

Just ONE thought: a "nose plugin" sounds like a real ECCH...!-)

Alex