decisiveness

I'm unclear on whether the author is yearning to become blase about whether his ideas are valid, criticizing his own writing, blaming his pandering statements on imbeciles, or being cleverly ironic.

He laments having to tone down something he thinks might be interpreted "uncharitably", and in the very next sentence blames it on those who commit "uncharitable actions".

> At times I’ve been tempted to just turn off comments entirely on my blog, and just flat out avoid participating in comment threads on the web

I can relate to internet commenting frustrations, but this conveys real issues with hearing any dissenting opinion. Turning off comments altogether on your blog is like fearfully plugging your ears with your fingers to drown out anything that might be valid criticism.

> There is no basis to conclude, then, that Deputy Burns or Deputy Blake should have known that the field test kits they were using tended to yield false positive results.

How does the deputies claiming they had "no knowledge", were "not aware" or have had "thousands" of other tests used with no issues absolve them? How is the burden of knowledge not squarely on their shoulders as they are the agents administering the tests and submitting them as evidence to the court?

This seems like a pretty unfair generalization of Koreans. Assuming all scientists have the same shameful characteristics of a few doesn't seem very scientific, does it?

They can't possibly share the same set of eyes, so you must be slightly ignoring the backs of both of their heads.

> We hang over each other’s heads, more and more heavily, self-appointed swords of Damocles waiting with baited breath to strike.

Unfamiliar with Damocles [1], I had to look it up. It seems to be quite a vividly pertinent metaphor. The brevity with which statements are made on Twitter delivers shortcuts for others to react, acting as the single thread of the horses tail that holds the sword.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damocles

Whether nationally or at the state level, it helps the movement to have a figure on the presidential stage doing everything they can to bring special interest issues to light. Lessig's strategy was wrong, but don't think its failure should cause those after him to be discouraged. Although he probably would've had better success running for state office, Citizens United needs to be reversed, and I don't think a state-by-state movement while giving the issue little attention nationally is enough.

Although the example of marijuana legislation gaining momentum is relevant, I think it's incomparable as corruption and campaign finance reform legislation would have loads more money invested by special interest groups to oppose it.

I think it's a tough fight to be waged at any level, and the more exposure given to it the better.

Whether or not you agree with this it has always been the core message of Lessig's campaign: Getting special interest money out of politics should be first priority, and until we get enough citizens to care about that, it'll be extremely difficult to pass legislation that goes against any special interest.

Yes, his strategy for getting the message out was broken, but he understands his campaign was quixotic in its initial state (referendum president), and has since agreed the idea was "stupid". Since the beginning, he made known what he really wanted, at a minimum, was the chance to make this issue more of a priority among all candidates.

This is just my opinion, but being a "spoiler" for the party never really appeared to be a likely outcome for Lessig, nor did being an agent for change. The only prospect he ever really had was one of failure. Failure to deliver his message to the masses. And it's a shame, because I think a grass roots movement focused on this message might be successful with the right person and strategy behind it.

Unless you know what exactly caused A to outperform others, you won't really know if the process is biased or what made it biased.

When asserting biases, you must first distinguish them from random noise. Using pg's logic, every selection process that isn't perfect is biased.

Easy-rsa[1] (OpenVPN's key/cert generation/signing tool) version 3 will generate a 2048 bit diffie hellman key by default. Previous versions of easy-rsa used 1024 bit as default.

Here is a comment written in the vars configuration file for easy-rsa 2.2.2:

    # Increase this to 2048 if you
    # are paranoid.  This will slow
    # down TLS negotiation performance
    # as well as the one-time DH parms
    # generation process.
    export KEY_SIZE=1024

So if you used easy-rsa version 2.2.2 or previous to generate your diffie hellman key for the server, and didn't increase the default size in the vars file before doing so, your server uses a 1024 bit diffie hellman key.

[1]https://github.com/OpenVPN/easy-rsa

I wonder, exactly how might a cell "commit suicide"?

I know this is slightly off topic, but after watching the trailer I just can't see Fassbender as Jobs. Fassbender is a great actor, and I can't think of any Hollywood leading man that could do a better job, but their personas are so different that it's hard to watch and not constantly be reminded that you're watching an actor act and not a character in a biopic.

>“The difficulty is getting enough teachers who are trained in it, and trained well enough to make it a good introduction to computer science,” said Barbara Ericson, the director of computing outreach at Georgia Tech’s College of Computing. “And if you are well-trained in computer science, you can make a lot more money in industry than teaching.”

Seems to be the real problem here. What kind of negative effect might result from a bunch of unqualified high school teachers teaching CS poorly? Is some exposure better than none regardless of teaching quality?

Seeing `sudo rm -rf /usr` makes me cringe.

A more harmless way to check: `sudo touch -a /usr`.

The engineering of flight is something that's achievable through simple understanding of physics laws and principles. Birds did not engineer flight, we did, and we were only able to engineer a crude version of it. The natural abilities of flight in birds are still superior in many ways to engineered flight. So, how can we assume from this that we'll be able to build a version of ourselves that's completely more intelligent?

Humans engineering functional variants of inferior species' physical capabilities is undeniably incomparable to humans engineering a better, more intelligent version of ourselves. Maybe, a beneficial albeit simpler version can be engineered, but one that makes us obsolete? It's hard for me to conclude that's not a huge leap in assumption.

In an FPS like Halo the relevance of skill sets is much harder to measure, but I think it's a delicate balance.

If I were forced to choose, I'd say motor skills and reaction time combined with spacial intelligence are the key drivers of success. I have yet to see an FPS professional that doesn't have tremendous shot accuracy and agility, relying only on their strategic skills. But I have seen some with great shots and spacial awareness make many questionable decisions. But my exposure is limited and my perception is biased.

I'd guess general intelligence shares relevance almost equally as it affects weapon utilization, detection avoidance, enemy action prediction, strategic positioning, verbal skills (team games), random trickery, etc.

A lot of the general ideas here seem helpful. I just have some slight issues with the section on rallying support.

>Maybe you tell them that you used to work with a competitor who was quite speedy

>I highly recommend this over a brute force method of escalating things to the person’s manager or throwing competition in their face.

Seems contradictory.

I'd also point out that questions and comments like:

>Can you help me understand why something would take so long?

>Hey we’re really betting heavily on this, and we really need you guys to deliver.

>Are we working as smartly as we can?

when directed at someone, can be vague and off-putting without some valid specificity behind them.

The difference being the robot wasn't telling a bunch of bad jokes which led to its deserved destruction.

Not sure how much it applies here as I haven't looked at the code, but the Golang blog has a good article that talks about how to "Simplify repetitive error handling"[1].

[1]https://blog.golang.org/error-handling-and-go

>People like the idea of innovation in the abstract, but when you present them with any specific innovation, they tend to reject it, because it doesn’t fit with what they already know.

This can be true, but I think often, people tend to reject an idea because it does fit with what they already know.

People look for usefulness, and will hastily disregard something that reminds them of a previous innovation that failed. I don't doubt they are sometimes wrong, and perseverance on a seemingly weak innovation can be turned into something wildly successful, I just wonder how many founders wasted much effort trying to succeed when their innovation never really had a chance to be very useful.

Assuming that smart autodidacts can't obtain sound statistics knowledge is selling many people short.

Wonder if they'll ever ad support for Firefox.

Constraints allow for only integers <= 9999999999999999 and >= -9999999999999999 which is interesting considering (-)10000000000000000 through (-)9223372036854775807 are also within the bounds of a 64 bit integer.

It's ironic that these facts are not mentioned considering the article is about confirmation bias.

Snowden was someone with access who acted on what he thought was in the best interest of Americans. Whether it was or wasn't is debatable. But to assume foreign spies exist in the NSA, and would risk treason for foreign interest because NSA screening missed Snowden, is a big leap in logic.

Of course no one can say foreign spies inside the NSA or access to their top secret files is impossible, I'm simply suggesting it's safer to assume this is not likely, and comparing the NSA to civilian corporations in this regard is unreasonable.

To suggest all foreign superpowers have access to the NSA goods because "security is hard", and "Snowden was able to wander through the NSA’s networks with impunity", is a weak conjecture at best.

The NSA is not a corporation. They put exponentially more care in vetting before trusting with top secret intelligence access.

Using keyboard shortcuts to quickly switch work spaces seems to be the best of both worlds. It allows you to keep distractions out of sight while requiring minimal effort to quickly access other screens/windows when needed.

It seems this criticism is of the interviewer making a poor decision based on missed/incorrect observations, not with the whiteboard interview itself.

Whiteboard interviews might miss eccentrics who can't express their clever thoughts verbally or visually, but it can depend on how tuned in the interviewer is to these eccentricities or how much value their team puts on expressive skills.

Algorithm/data structure interviews, whiteboard or not, also have the added benefit of being exceptionally good at eliminating candidates that:

1) Drastically misrepresent their skills

2) Give up easily at difficult tasks

3) Don't seek help from others

4) Frequently have a bad attitude

I think what Google tries to find are the engineers with creativity, skill and ability to work intelligently at a problem which they haven't seen before.

It's important to know how a person approaches a hard new problem and how easily or not they give up. I'd guess that a person who didn't solve a hard problem, but got close enough by displaying creativity, curiousness and a solid thought process might have an edge over a person that implemented a familiar algorithm with ease but got a little flustered, and didn't show much creativity or inquisitiveness, when challenged with something new.

It's hard for me to say that being overly upset about someone else's argument winning over yours is not as significant a character flaw as sounding like a know it all.

Should we be always singling out those born and developed with little empathy to appease those born and developed with high emotional sensitivity? It would serve both to put forth effort in improving their flaws.

Firefox has recently released a tracking protection feature[1] that uses Disconnect's blocklist[2].

[1]https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-protection-fir...

[2]https://disconnect.me/