I have a very old sparc based Tadpole laptop. While the thing will run off batteries, I wonder if they would have done better business by getting in the battery powered electric camp stove business since they have most of that part working fine.

CEOs maybe (and, actually, you do import a lot of those). Doctors and lawyers are a bad example, because they both provide local services. Software is a massive export market for the USA. You need a number of doctors and lawyers proportional to your population. For any industry that is primarily export focussed, you want to have a big chunk of the top talent or you'll find it hard to compete internationally.

Add to that, the cost of living means that you absolutely have to work when you're there. How long does it take to save up enough that you don't have to work for the next 6-12 months if you can't find a job that you really want?

When I was freelancing, I worked with people plus or minus 9 time zones from me. I found it very productive for a lot of things when our work days barely overlapped: I'd work and send them things that they'd then work on for a day when they woke up and then get back to me. Some things require realtime interaction, but for a lot of other things it's far more productive to have an asynchronous workflow.

If you want to find the 20 of the best programmers in India, then you'll probably find it much easier if you have an office in India and are willing to hire locally than if you expect people to locate to the USA. In most parts of India, earning 75% of a Silicon Valley salary will let you live very comfortably and put a lot into savings (there are now some places where the cost of living is comparable, but not many). Moving to the USA and earning the full salary will be a lot of hassle, involve leaving your family, and end up with a lower standard of living. If you're really in the top 1% of talent, then why would you make this choice when there are other companies that will pay you to stay?

If you really want to attract the top talent from the whole world, then you need to make the incentives better, not just lower the barriers. Some are there already. For example, Silicon Valley is by far the easiest place to get VC funding. It's also now in the self-sustaining cycle where people move there because of the job opportunities, which means that there's a lot of available talent, which means that it's a good place for a startup if you want to be able to easily hire competent people.

Not ones with VC backing, which are the kind that Graham will be talking to. They're often constrained by how much the founders are able to delegate, but money is not normally an issue for the first few years. It's only once the VCs start expecting you to have a self-sustaining business model that it becomes tight. For a lot of startups, if the goal is to sell out to Google, Facebook, Microsoft, or whoever, then money is never a constraint: VCs will keep pumping the company until they can sell it for 10-100 times their investment to someone with even deeper pockets.

I wrote a C compiler that would sometimes not compile correctly but it was based on a an attempt to use neural nets to do complex parsing.

That needs a big 'citation needed' next to it, but:

You don't understand risk analysis. He's investing a very small proportion of his wealth in something that may have massive returns. The probability of said returns may be small, but that doesn't make it a bad investment if the potential payoffs are huge, as long as you can afford to take the loss if it doesn't pan out. Most people with his money will invest a few millions in a few fringe ideas, because it only takes one to pay off to more than make up for your investment. The majority of his portfolio will be in relatively safe investments with a close-to-guaranteed return, a bit will be in risky venture.

You missed decay, which is the most common form of nuclear reaction on Earth. Proton capture can technically be thought of as fusion (fusing a hydrogen nucleus with something heavier), but it generally isn't referred to as such. Neutron capture is not fusion and a lot of LENR reactions are neutron capture.

Insertion sort is terrible for the use cases the grandparent described. For one thing, it requires allocating a new data structure for storing the data (an immediate disqualification for a lot of embedded tasks). Second, it has much worse cache interaction because it requires searching the second array. Assuming that your target is an array, then it also requires a bit memcpy for each insert, which means that it likely requires a similar number of memory operations to the bubblesort, but with more temporaries. You can do a bubblesort in-place, with good cache locality, and only a handful of registers (insert base, top, current, and two for holding the current elements). If your CPU has 8 GPRs then the space requirements of a bubblesort are effectively zero - no memory required.

That's only if you don't have the requirement to sort in place. Bubblesort is also a good way of getting students to start thinking in terms of induction. Each step in the bubblesort leaves the array more sorted than it was before.

Insertion sort is one of these good-on-paper algorithms. It's very fast if insertion is cheap. But insertion relies copying unless your data structure is a linked list. If it's an array (worse, a contiguous on-disk store) then that copying can be very expensive. If it is a linked list, then you're going to have very expensive search (sure, you may still be O(log(n)), but that constant multiple is going to be hurt by the fact that you're hammering your cache and killing your branch predictor).

Teaching algorithms separately from data structures is one of the biggest flaws in modern computer science education. It's impossible to reason sensibly about one without the other.

Bubblesort has two advantages. The first is that, because it's only swapping adjacent elements, it has very good locality of reference (which means better cache usage, but can also mean more amenable to fine-grained locking). The second is that it performs well on almost-sorted data (that O(n^2) is the worst case - it's closer to O(n) if your inputs are mostly sorted). These two mean that there are situations where bubblesort can be useful, though they're quite rare.

What is that measuring? The fact that it doesn't say means that it's meaningless, but it looks like they're comparing number of ships, so a coastal patrol boat counts the same as an aircraft carrier...

A statistic that floated around earlier in the year when Argentina was grumbling about the Falklands again: one of the battleships that the British were sending to the area could fire, in one minute, more munitions than were fired in the entire 1982 conflict. I'd imagine that the differences between 1945 and now are even more pronounced.

One constant trend has been that soldiers are less expendable. In the first world war, sending men to walk slowly towards machine guns and throw a grenade if they survived to get close enough was their patriotic duty. By Vietnam, having large numbers of soldiers come back in body bags was politically unacceptable.

In the 1940s, Japan was flying aircraft loaded with bombs into American warships. A few years later, people realised that you could design aircraft for this purpose and make them a lot lighter and able to accelerate more if you removed the human pilot. They called them anti-ship missiles.

The fighter screen that fleets needed to protect themselves from aircraft in the '40s is now replaced by anti-aircraft and interceptor missiles (and dumb projectiles). In the next generation of ships a lot of this will be replaced by lasers, which reduces some of the resupply need (you can't run out of laser ammunition on a nuclear carrier unless your ship is so badly damaged that it's not a good idea to be anywhere near it).

Gradually, a lot of the roles for aircraft are being replaced by drones, which means that you need smaller carriers. They don't need to house as many pilots, they don't need as many support staff.

Another part of this trend is to replace reusable vehicles with single-use munitions. Fighters are more expensive than missiles, so you spend a lot on maintaining them. Drones are a lot cheaper, so you can afford to fly them for a couple of missions and then scrap them (explosively, near someone you don't like).

Comparing numbers, as the grandparent did, is completely meaningless. You may as well compare the size of the air force to the number of soldiers Napoleon had.