Only slightly related, but a Japanese friend of mine has a story of interviewing a few engineering candidates for their remote crypto company. They all applied under Japanese names, claiming they were Japanese citizens in Japan. When the interview came around, they all spoke English with a Korean accent, and when asked if Japanese would be better they admitted they could not speak Japanese. When my friend asked around it sounded like many founders in the space have encountered this profile of applicant, and many suspect these are people working for the North Korean state.
If this is indeed North Koreans trying to get remote jobs, I've been wondering if their game is:
- Getting a job for themselves to bring income to their own household
- Getting a job for themselves to bring income to the North Korean state.
- Getting a job in a crypto company with plans of figuring out vulnerabilities and siphoning funds to themselves/the state.
- Getting a job for others, and selling the service of passing the interview.
It's number 2 - Getting a job for themselves to bring income to the North Korean state and number 3 - Getting a job in a crypto company with plans of figuring out vulnerabilities and siphoning funds to t̶h̶e̶m̶s̶e̶l̶v̶e̶s̶/the state.
I went through my school's version of this class on xv6, and wow, what a trip. After thinking hard and working hard on things I never had a solid grasp on - filesystems, virtual memory, interrupts, multitasking - I now appreciate and understand things going on after a call to fork() or exec().
For my final project I implemented a simple threading library based on the interface that pthread() uses. It's amazing how beautifully simple kernels can be.
I am confused by the way the Economist phrased Mr. Rognlie's argument. The crux of Piketty's argument is that when global returns on wealth (r) is more than global economy growth (g), capital will start snowballing into the hands of the few very quickly.
The mechanism of r getting bigger than g is not an increase in r, but a decrease in g. The increase of the global economy is dominated not by increasing technological efficiency, but by population growth. There is an upper limit of the number of people we can fit on this rock (whether 9 billion or 100 billion, we will hit a limit at some point). Once we bump into that ceiling, growth will slow dramatically, and those who have already managed to create a sizable stash, or who have the talent to regularly beat the market, can accumulate wealth to no end.
In short, as I understood Piketty's book, the fact that r might not increase if we put the right limits on housing development, doesn't change the overall hypothesis made by Piketty.
I think the point is that if you move towards rent-seeking vs. value creation, people with a critical mass just hoover up capital and get richer. Even if the economy contracts, you can still take more chips off the table.
We have historical examples of this as populations start bumping against local ceilings that illustrate that this scenario is very possible. The Roman aristocracy was living it up, while the plebeians in many cases were subsisting on bread and circuses.
You seem to be under the assumption that the population is going to grow towards infinity. The UN projects that we will stay under 10 billion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_growt...) and even the highest only have us at 16 billion at the end of this century (compare that to the growth in the 20th century).
So unless there is a relatively low limit for total humans on this planet, we won't reach it before we become a spacefaring race, at which point the limit will be the carrying capacity of the Universe.
> So unless there is a relatively low limit for total humans on this planet, we won't reach it before we become a spacefaring race, at which point the limit will be the carrying capacity of the Universe.
But even in that case, you can only have at most polynomial growth (human habitat spherically expanding with speed of light) instead of an exponential one.
I'm sure you've seen this, but to those who want to get a start on a curated resource of longform articles, I've always liked the aptly named http://longform.org
A non-profit organization can solicit donations big and small, via grants, memberships, and other common mechanisms.
A non-profit organization can also sell things at a markup. There are alarmingly profitable for-profit tote bag businesses riding the back of non-profits everywhere.
Here's a proof I came up with a few days ago (and it became relevant so quickly!)
Assume by contradiction that there is a computable function f that grows faster than the busy beaver problem. We can then make a Turing Machine that takes input n, calculates f(n), and then constructs and simulates every n-state Turing Machine for f(n) steps. Since f grows faster than the number of steps the most productive TM would take, any simulated machine in not in the halt state would never halt, and we could select the busiest beaver out of the remaining Turing Machines. We have constructed a TM that computes the busy beaver problem, which is a contradiction. Thus, there can be no computable function that grows faster than the busy beaver function.
Coq is essentially a verification system and functional programming language all in one. The functional programming language that the proofs are based on has similar (identical in some places) semantics to OCaml. Remaining faithful to these semantics, especially in a verifiable way, quickly becomes herculean. Even formalizing the semantics of a language is a process that takes months.
I understand better, so basically before doing anything you will first need to define what each "part" of the language "means" in term of "logical operation" (like what does the dot operator '.' means in PHP, which type it accepts and it transforms them etc) Right ?
Coq itself is already a programming language, but pure in the sense there cannot be any side effects (like IOs). For this pure part there are already an interpreter and a compiler to OCaml, Haskell or Scheme.
If this is indeed North Koreans trying to get remote jobs, I've been wondering if their game is: - Getting a job for themselves to bring income to their own household - Getting a job for themselves to bring income to the North Korean state. - Getting a job in a crypto company with plans of figuring out vulnerabilities and siphoning funds to themselves/the state. - Getting a job for others, and selling the service of passing the interview.