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dbxz

-3 karma · joined May 16, 2018

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dbxz··on Martian Headsets
Joel Spoelsky is one of the greatest software writers of our time. This needs to be made required reading in every software engineering course.
dbxz··on Scientists to grow 'mini-brains' using Neanderthal DNA
They could have saved some time by opening the heads of several politicians.
dbxz··on Tech Companies Are Ruining America’s Image
It's completely true. I do recruiting for non-tech roles (sales, marketing, design). A few years ago, I'd visit a foreign university, and they'd see USA on my badge, and would start flocking to me. Now all I get is heckling about sexism and stealing people's data. We really need to clean up our act.
dbxz··on Statistics, Fast and Slow
To be a statistician is to ignore experience. I once interviewed someone who was a statistics major. When I asked him a performance optimization question, the first thing he told me is that he'd write a program to compute the standard deviation of running time. He could've solved it in two minutes just by running the thing. No hire.
dbxz··on The myth of ‘mad’ genius
I taught gifted education at a prestigious middle school for five years. Over 300 kids came through my classroom during that time.

I saw it all. Seizures. Fistfights. One girl was pretty sure there were secret messages from the principal in the tests I gave. Lots of them started taking drugs early too.

The culmination happened in the Fall of 2012, when one girl convinced her friends that, if they killed themselves, they'd wake up already graduated from college, with school behind them. Luckily, they didn't succeed. And so, in a class of 30 people, I had 6 out and in a mental hospital.

Mad geniuses. They're real.

dbxz··on The Surprising History (and Future) of Fingerprints
People rely on fingerprints to provide proof of identity. But there's not really that much variation in fingers, and fingerprints have a high false positive rate. Fingerprints are going to go the way of the polygraph, and get banned from court.