Helianthus16

And I'm sure it would be an interesting read. However, I feel I should also point out that what makes this article interesting isn't that this technology is out of date, it is that it is a glimpse into a time when we didn't have computing technology and the solutions people found for Very Important Communication.

You missed the point. You're comfortable enough with your equal status to openly deflate their status, _because_ you both know it doesn't mean anything. Fair trade/permission giving: later they can tease you and lower your status.

Then real dicks use that sort of friendship to only lower the status of their friends, which is why we call them dicks.

The fact that _he_ believes it is important which shoulder he touches produces enough an effect that one can be fooled into thinking the touches have the power instead of the belief.

The problem is that sort of video doesn't show the failures, so we have no idea how real the success rate is.

It's that "as if" that is a little bit hand-wavy. Fitting/overfitting is insidious in that it corrupts both the procedure and the data.

I'm not saying that's exactly what happened here, but I am saying that it's a _hunch_ that human brains are following the same steps. It might be a good hunch, but it's still _not_ a scientific statement with the weight of statistical backing.

On the other hand, it's a little flaky that they set a parameter to try to get human-like response times. Statistical fitting.

We built it to hit this number, we're surprised when it does!

Cool calculation process, though.

I don't know why my instinct is to anthropomorphize them, but somehow they're goddamned _cute_. Look! Robots playing ping pong!

A robot dog might be in my future :/

You just 'sucked the life' out of this thread and proved forensic's point about 'chronically negative people.' :(

Also, in a topic like this where we're examining differences between cultures, it's pretty implicit that we're speaking generally. If that's racist, any cultural examination is racist.

No offense, thinking about it is fun, but we're not exactly accountants; and we're definitely not accountants with access to Groupon's numbers. It "seems crazy" isn't exactly a critical argument.

"Techcrunch speculates on revenue numbers, gets caught."

Am I reading this right?

There is no sense in my mind that a cook is not an engineer of the kitchen.

Engineering is just using quantities, directions, and properties to effect a result.

Yes, but (so the argument goes) they were a legal violation, sanctioned by the U.N. or whatever prototype of the U.N. existed at the time.

>I sort of wonder how atheists process someone like him believing in God.

Cognitive dissonance.

I kid, I kid: but I see too many atheists happy to deride a viewpoint with that pop-psychology term as a means of writing it off. Qualifying a behavior as inherently rational or irrational runs the risk of functioning rather like a dogma.

If a country's honor as a concept is ludicrous, why should a country bother to be moral?

Surely you can see that honor and morality are closely tied concepts, such that a country's moral actions define its honor. In what respect can someone deny the validity of honor and still evaluate the quality of a country's actions?

In other words, did America 'do wrong' by Iraq?

My point is that you must treat intrusions as an inevitability when trying to counteract intrusion. And anyone who builds a sandcastle should be aware of the ocean. The kid's breaking into this account is embarrassing.

Just because we can hold individual humans accountable (and should) doesn't mean we shouldn't have the perspective of "CONSTANT VIGILANCE."

You're right, we're not using the same definition. That doesn't mean I don't have a point.

You're judging a point by the way it was made rather than its ultimate goal?

I mean, I'm all for praising gymnastics, but if we're trying for truth here shouldn't endgame be valued over execution?

From the perspective of security protection, intrusions are an act of nature. You should be no more surprised at an especially strong wave than you are at an exceptionally immature child.

Those social mechanisms are a part of culture. I find it hard to conceive a definition of culture that does not include the systems of negative consequences that a society enforces.

I am curious about your opinion of this comment:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2351266

It seems to me that both jokes are in the same vein: referencing a satirical husband-wife power stereotype. But no one is complaining about the male stereotype.

>"Why don't Japanese loot? Because it's not in their culture. How is that culture defined? An absence of looting."

immediately followed by:

>A better explanation may be structural factors: a robust system of laws that reinforce honesty, a strong police presence, and, ironically, active crime organizations.

how is that in any way different from the circular definition the writer just criticized?

which I think indicates the real problem with the 'culture' argument; it's not that it's circular, it's that it is vague, which is why the rest of the (detailed) article is actually quite informative.

alternatively, a way to accurately measure their accounting week by week?

>I agree absolutely, but did this hugely complex system really perform admirably in the case of the tsunami?

Yes. I'm beating a dead horse at this point, but once again, your terminology indicates you're not grasping the problem. There is no perfect system, there will always be flaws.

In what sense is the system worthy of no admiration? Because that is what you are asking for: you're saying that a viewpoint that regards the loss of tens of thousands instead of hundreds of thousands as praiseworthy as somehow "apathetic" when really it's just realistic: things could have been much worse.

This post as a whole is not a comprehensive discussion of the quake. It is explicitly about the media distortion of the event. If your point is valid it remains off-topic.

Additionally, your language indicates you're still not grasping the problem we are examining. There is no "premise that everything went as planned." That is absolutely not his point at all. His point is that there is a hugely complex system that performed admirably, that emergency relief systems are a war against the unexpected.

I think it's pretty self-righteous to prioritize the decision-making that the Japanese will take care of on their over examining and controlling our own reactions, reactions based on a poor understanding of the emergency response and hysterical reporting.

More can always be done. Confining your reaction to the emotional is uninformative and exactly the sort of panic that our media creates and is creating about this event.

If you can't slip smoothly from being sad about the death and destruction to analyzing the disaster response dispassionately, that's your problem.

I dunno, I think it's kinda funny. It's the sort of jab that points out that the kind of person who bluntly asserts raising kids is stupid is happier boozing at status joints and pursuing endless 'city glamor'.

As someone who both 1) checks the comments to see if I should click a link I think might be dodgy, and 2) thinks a lot of links look dodgy, including this one at first, let me give a hearty recommendation to this article. Well worth reading from start to finish.

There is an intellectual purity that is maintained through anonymity. I don't have to be consistent with my previous posts or any future posts I might want to make. I don't have to worry about what people will think of me. Heck, I don't even have to be _nice_.

But because I care about my post, I do have to try to be right. And because all of those other constraints are gone, each post exists independently.

A system that thinks vitriol shouldn't be _allowed_, that it should be actively fought instead of ignored, isn't taking the right tack.

Systems that allow anonymity and provide filtering for what the community views as trash are the right balance, because I get damn angry at things sometimes--we all do, there are a lot of things to be angry about-- and if I cross the line of decorum then at least I have the freedom to cross it (through semi-anonymity), just as y'all have the freedom to downvote me.

I would go so far as always. Power tries to hold onto power.

marginal improvement is still improvement. we could just chill out and accept that microsoft has the right to promote its product and we have the right not to put the banner on our sites.