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.
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'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
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.
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.