Menge

> With one diesel engine not being that technologically different from the next how are the independently verified figures of the various other brands working out.

A few months back I heard that VW was pushing for new legislation further lowering diesel emissions to start to remove all its competition from markets. Back then it was rumored that VW had invested in and patented a slightly different direction that worked. Really, you just have to pretend to have succeeded and then cheat to create a monopoly.

Thanks to IP law, there was little incentive for their competition to investigate a system they couldn't use or wager on developing alternative designs given how impossible the claimed results were.

I think VW should be on the hook to meet their current claims while their competitors should not be.

> Travel agents in 1980 did less physical work than ER nurses do in 2015 whether measured in micro-tasks, macro-tasks, steps per day or anything else.

My point is that that is an assumption, if we choose to believe 1% of the last 30 years of technological innovation in convenience is real then the environments are a better explanation than changes to their inhabitants.

A travel agent in 1980 may walk to work, clean the house without a vacuum, scrub the floor, lift and lug all sorts of heavy devices, reference books, carry and hang laundry, etc... Anyone today has higher odds of having to drive to work, having a roomba and easy surfaces at home, carrying a tablet or just a phone, having no steps in their living area and an elevator at work, not cooking at all by 1980's standards, having a private washing machine, being afraid to walk after dusk...

Then for the 40 hours they actually spend at work, there are various equipment and practices to no longer lift patients frequently in the ER, etc. Many nurses are spending a lot of time reading things, comparing numbers, following (manual?) push carts and entering pill data. A few ER nurses may be doing more exercise now, but the average could look shockingly low to a travel agent from 1980.

I would expect the articles premise if I ran the study. That makes me more suspicious of the outcome; we find what we expect to find when a study can't be perfectly controlled. Swapping the 1980s and 2010s environments is a perfect example of poor control.

This is an excellent example. The other thing I would assume is that a lot more of everyday activity in the 1980s required a little more human physical input and a little less waiting for a machine to stop. Using or even moving typewriters, manual steering, prepping food, cleaning without machines doing small prep instead of standing in front of a microwave, getting up to change the TV station.

While we could construct modern measures, I doubt we have good measures for all of the micro-tasks in the 1980s..

I'd agree if you are saying that's no coincidence? The profit from the ads on the target site are the fuel to push its content to the top of results over better or more relevant content with less financial motivation or efficiency.

In other words, blocking ads on a large scale causes a readjustment that is not necessarily bad for the overall ecosystem since most of that money is actively winning a zero sum game against better content with less (desperate) backing.

Spammers who bother with email based registration sites at all, often take the time to routinely acquire one address from a major free provider and use it everywhere they can't use a throwaway as well as get naive people to send email to it.

For other people who kind of don't trust your site, its future, or its security, but are too lazy to create extra accounts, you are forcing them to do a full evaluation in a way that adds additional weight to the possibility the site is an actual data broker today instead of an existential spam threat.

Personally, if I decided a site was bellow the threshold for my real email on an initial encounter and then I saw it perform this kind of detection, I wouldn't touch the site again.

> (2.07 general population vs 1.27 for males without one of those issues)

Since substance misuse and the other disorders influence mortality rates of the ADHD population, it is not surprising that they affect mortality in the general population.

For the inference you seem to be making, I think you would need the mortality rate of males with no ADHD AND no substance misuse/etc. Based on the data given, I see no reason to think that is above 1.27.

Why not vote with your spending power instead? If a small percentage of consumers appear willing to permanently boycott some goods from the participating countries then it would get industries complicating the negotiations.

I.e. do you really care if you buy jeans that are from China v.s. Vietnam? Probably not as much as the textile industry of Vietnam does..

It is possible to get actual transferable higher education credits for around 100 euros for some european MOOCs. The US MOOCs offer odd bits of paper at this price range because the US credential market is not free at all. Accreditation provides specific barriers to entry in the US to make education cost enough to satisfy the institutions.

For European systems, any student who is taking MOOCs is cutting their costs instead of threatening their profit model. Many students in Europe wont have financial incentives to use MOOCs for their primary area of study, but the European model doesn't really offer unlimited free higher education in what one wants whenever one wants locally.

I think this analysis method is rather suspect.

If you ask an average person with no great accomplishments about their hobbies they are inclined to downplay them into temporary activities. When you go to make a biography of someone after an accomplishment everything they did seems like it may be of significance.

Hobbies that leave a lot of artifacts may have been a passing phase and not how the person would describe their hobbies 95% of the time when randomly polled.

Taking Feynman as an example, if his drawing weren't his official hobby then his percussion playing would be. Both of these could have been rather sporadic and therefore wouldn't be his responses as an anonymous scientist most of the time. He may also have been more into percussion, but drawing was much more likely to leave artifacts in those times.

These stereotypes are very similar to the ones misapplied in helping the impoverished. What studies actually found is that if you give the impoverished money they spend it pretty well.

If you gave a developer company accounts to spend as they saw fit then they would probably make good decisions too. Why a developer would give their own money is a mystery to me as any time they save has to still be used for their employer.

Instead, at best a manager can make these decisions and even they are usually limited by corporate policy which must deal with the complexity of tax and corporate law.

If you want to fix the problem, push a tax compliant product that startups can use to supply their developers with quarterly funds for this purpose and then advertise it as a benefit of their work environment.

With 56 tests and looking at 2 dimensions, having ~6 false ideas certainly isn't surprising even if you calculate to 95% CI..

But despite our focus on the null hypothesis, it is actually just the cost break even to make false conclusions when two variants are equally effective. So you are even less likely to make a mistake in a real A/B test the larger that mistake is going to be and cost.

Emulating statistical theories poorly is the essence of many methods of AI that despite occasionally ridiculous results are quite powerful.

If you instead simply measure your conversion rate of each campaign, you can not tell if you are negatively trending in terms of the content because there will be outside factors of user engagement especially if you lack an adequate source of new subscribers. Only the most engaged humans will pull the signal out of that noise enough to get better over years without an external system. (If I were not going to A/B test, I would at least first estimate conversion rates and then track my Brier Scores over time.)

I don't have any experience with email campaigns, but what I see with web ones is that most organisations are fairly delusional when it comes to understanding their actual audience and communally they are rarely open to accepting corrections from people with less domain knowledge, (but domain knowledge is primarily a fancy form of bias.)

For example, if your product caries risk, many of the customers who contact you will be the most risk averse looking for security, but 95% of your customers will probably be risk tolerant. I've repeatedly corrected some via an A/B test where the B versions conversion rate continued to apply long after it became the only version, but their staff will implement A style changes whenever given an opportunity to do changes without testing. I'd guess that customers they deal with give them a false impression and our repeated demonstrations that there are significantly more customers with a different view is not an adequate correction.

Not using outsiders it is harder to get such a full corrections to your biases, but you can at least get a new employee's (or spouses or critical customer's) idea tried out in a way where they are much more likely to quantitatively show promise in way that demands acceptance rather than being chalked up to noise using the human emotional system.

> Embrace, extend, extinguish?

Only the 3rd properly applies to Chrome and Flash. Chrome didn't embrace an API they could extend; they shipped a plugin providing an ~ABI of a foreign/closed API then still had to make atomic decisions like this one.

> it seems like the budget batteries are about 1000mAh less than the flagships

But the flagships I'm aware of have non-removable batteries which is not a fair comparison as swap-ability has pay offs that make up for all the plastic and more robust circuit designs.

They want me to run an infinitely misconfigurable copy of windows directly on hardware too slow for virtualization? Uh, no. Android tablets are much more likely to move into chromebook's position. With the gradual merger of APIs and store contents, I don't think that will take away much from my netbook experience.

Given the specs, I would be very interested if I could separate an RTU onto a virtual machine on a desktop and then install something else on the laptop. But even a minimized Linux with a very small VM may be sluggish and would quickly cost me more time than just finding a way to install chromium OS directly on something.

Also, I hope this doesn't signal another campaign to sabotage netbook RAM capacity in vendor designs just to push another budget license no one can actually use.

Not in Mississippi, but just as mayors sometimes run for re-election from state and federal prisons..

It sounds like the SEC should investigate this stock price manipulation scheme and look at the transactions of everyone involved for signs of insider trades before his official actions hit the public register.

Forgive my cynicism, but I see searches for alternate metrics as probable fishing expeditions for silver linings on falling behind.

Looking at the results, and the above example of IE doing well in the past, everything seems to neatly inversely correlate with my experiences when checking caniuse.com for recent standards. (At the few sites where firefox does worse than chrome, I would wonder if the site is written for firefox then made adequate on the others == less -webkit-css and more attentions to the "best" -moz-css animations, etc.)

Since IE was the biggest failure on caniuse but is rapidly being eclipsed by safari, naturally they must pass the best power usage baton as well if they can be coaxed into otherwise equivalent environments.

A standard to handle graceful prioritization and intentional degradation for power saving could perhaps put this trick to sleep.

Maybe the interface is misguided, but it is difficult to pull-off to this level, and I find that it does give an overall feeling of connection to the memory threads of rural chinese life.

I am blocking the flash content; someone else must claim my great uncle's fortune. But it is still a great improvement on what was acceptable content degradation a few years ago.

(edit- So overall I'd say there is far from anything wrong with this article, and it provides an important type of impression that we lacked when I was studying rural china, decades ago.)

This is great, it reminds me of codingbat for practicing basic python and Java syntax.

So the trouble is only when your voters get the information necessary to vote rationally?

The first commercial book on "project SCRUM" was actually just the results of a FOIA request on "psychological techniques against enemies with inferior footwear".

There are great photos of Krushchev appealing to the UN human rights commission after his third stand-up in two days on the corn issue. His bosses replaced him and ultimately it was Gorbachev who had to market baby corn to the Chinese after successfully instituting an open source modeled staged waterfall.

I think your overall point is accurate and would go further to add that there is an ironic safety in storing my data with "hostile" nations (or corporations associated with them) over nations that are "friendly" and readily exchanging data with my own.

The US is in fact far more likely to imprison/traumatize one of its citizens over one of its many obscure technicalities (whether actually violated or not) than say NK is to attempt to use data to somehow pressure that US citizen.

Trying to decipher the underlying perspective of the article, I also find mirth in the apparent angst of all the secret agents and their sponsors; they have no idea what corporation will screw up their cover. Joseph Conrad would be proud of our progress even if it is marginal.

Formally defining is always tricky. For example, I hate seeing "C/C++" and would assume by proxy of the equally absurd but rarely used "C/Objective-C" that I have magically become a C/Objective-C/C++ programmer.

I would consider a polyglot as able to express a full domain of ideas in multiple languages. (For example, knowing latin for biology or religious recitation doesn't make you a normal polyglot, while being able to use it at the breakfast table does.)

So, only if you are one of the few who regularly enjoys the thrill of forcing SQL to do your general computations, would it count in my book towards making you a polyglot in the context of general purpose computing. Similarly, how you choose to use shells would determine whether they count and whether they are each distinct.

> The population is large enough that you're treating each potential hire as a random variable.

This is only true for new grads. The population of engineers with ten years of appropriate corporate experience (that match the technology survivor bias) and at the ~12 locations google can use is tiny.

When I look at my old corporation, only 3 people (of 500+ I would be aware of) were hired by google. One of them is genuinely great, but I doubt he passed the current process as a blind hire. The other two I wouldn't want to work with, but I bet they passed this process precisely because the right kind of focus. (I.e. everything people around them didn't know was their priority and since we normally focus on what's important to completing our project, none of that was so important..)

I was very interested in google when I was under the impression that (without experiencing menlo park on a daily basis,) I could either walk away with over $500k (gross) in 2- years, enjoy working there for 5 years, and/or work with the best >experienced< engineers in our field. When glassdoor and my own linkedin network revealed my best perspective into their setup, blind applying to them is now just a good filter to test my new age employability skills. So, now they've built themselves a new problem of true positive false positives who are just along for the ride.

The hiring market is already NP Hard for both sides when you are genuinely trying to get a good enough fit for yourself rather than the best deal on the market. If you try to misuse the other side they will see less ethical constraints in using the resources you'll have to put in.

How many developers genuinely want a job they can't do that they will have to be awkwardly fired from in six months and explain at every future interview?

I don't think answers a person gives about their decisions is ever "real" data. For example, a rich male buying who bought an impractical sports car will give an answer that conflicts with how those around him would account for his actions.

This points my thinking back toward impulse control and delayed gratification ability being deciding factors when looking at why the sofa seems compatible with a poor young person and a sports car and a rich older person.

But with near negative interest rates, I wonder whether if the excessive sofa isn't the investment vehicle of the future. Telling your network about that indiscretion (and reminding them in your selfies) may have them thinking of you when new sources of income come up.

> I cannot imagine the feeling of the employees either: those who were fired are the ones who walked away with money + take away everyone else's job.

Given Mandriva is not a new start up in a new market that could go any way, I would hope they realized that they would be the laid off employees eventually and would apparently get an illegally bad deal unless the plaintiffs won.

"Mandriva is making a come back," says management. But they recently needed lay offs to get to those numbers. If you shut down a plant you will have great numbers until the shelves are depleted..

Management wants to put themselves in the best light to get the next job but the reality from the perspective of employees is usually quite different.

The old ones work by turning all lights red which is great for a low density and organized traffic system and make it non-beneficial to hack them unless you are immune to tickets.

If there is traffic crowding and narrow lanes or lane sharing then the ambulance needs the drivers in front of it to also realize they have right of way and the obligation to continue moving out of the way.

This is a common problem in older US/European cities where the streets have not kept up with capacity and are not as wide as would be required by current rules.

Portable Apps is an interesting idea, thanks!

On the matter of open offices being a pre-declared success, I think they are also a bit of a j-curve or "google brain" phenomenon where leaving the open office environment becomes a stressful proposition. Junior workers stay more dependent and become afraid of not having a source of immediate answers that really holds them back from proper growth and self confidence.

I'm not looking for free as in beer, I am looking to not share data that conveniently uniquely identifies the private me to random foreign 3rd parties like Apple just to do my job. Buying media via cash+reimburse or through company ordering is not my money and is often the solution for using commercial OSes with personal privacy outside my employer remaining similar to the unbanked. (But I can't tell if that is a waste of time with Apple, since I obviously need follow whatever procedures for security updates until the next purchasable media.)

From other comments, it sounds like I can dance around to make it possible on OsX, but every other OS (except ebooks?) that I have ever installed either makes opt out a transparent (though smaller button/font) process or has no registration process at all.

I don't like that the machine will be in a very small group of opt-out OsX systems compared to reasonable percentages of other Oses. By not sharing my personal details, I might be risking my coworkers having lower than normal privacy when using OsX machines.

Which leads to: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203905 " If you're using the iTunes Store or App Store for the first time If you're using the store for the first time with an existing Apple ID, you must provide a payment method. After you create the account, you can change your payment information to None."

I've always end up back in UX loops wanting my credit card since I seem to need a new version that is free but in the app store to get security updates..

How do I install any API from apple without providing Apple (and whoever else) with my credit card?

The OsX machine at my office is mystifying, am I supposed to provide my personal credit card to apple to get security updates? That is more secure and insures more of my privacy than not entering my credit card into a system I don't trust?

I view Apple as insulting my intelligence with promises of "convenience" that amount to being able to give them money on impulse.