drc500free

It makes solely due impost.

Israel / Palestine is a collision between two internally valid and mutually exclusive worldviews. It's kind of a given that there will be two camps who consider the other non-reputable.

FWIW, the /r/AskHistorians booklist is pretty helpful.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/books/middleeast...

I don’t think agreeing with a neo-nazi about the foundational tenets of nazism is a good use of that idiom. It’s supposed to be for things like “pickles on pizza are actually pretty good” not “we are all slaves to the Jews who control society.”

That’s not “unknown”, that’s an antisemitic quote from neo-nazi Kevin Alfred Strom.

The wrong statement is saying P(no real effect) < 5%

The correct statement is saying P(saw these results | no real effect) < 5%

Consider two extremes, for the same 5% threshold:

1) All of their ideas for experiments are idiotic. Every single experiment is for something that simply would never work in real life. 5% of those experiments pass the threshold and 0% of them are valid ideas.

2) All of their ideas are brilliant. Every single experiment is for something that is a perfect way to capture user needs and get them to pay more money. 100% of those experiments pass the threshold and 100% of them are valid ideas.

(P scores don't actually tell you how many VALID experiments will fail, so let's just say they all pass).

This is so incredibly common in forensics that it's called the "prosecutor's fallacy."

I had him as a lecturer in undergrad, and I still remember the weightlessness of his intellect. It was one thing to realize that we were the same age, but his ability to flit around different concepts was remarkable.

There were a lot of people around who felt like high performance athletes of the mind, while he was just this sort of effortless butterfly going from flower to flower.

Is there a difference between a clone and an identical twin (other than sharing a womb)?

Is this because we can essentially treat each dimension like a binary digit, so we get 2^n directions we can encode? Or am I barking up totally the wrong tree?

Agile was supposed to empower teams, but in many orgs it's done the opposite. Execs take over product, so PMs make system design calls. Engineers are left coordinating tickets they no longer own.

This piece explores how “senior” roles in engineering have been hollowed out, and why AI might accelerate the collapse of this broken hierarchy.

Thanks for the feedback - I've cleaned up the ending a lot to hopefully not read like buzzword bingo.

The history is right, my predictions are probably garbage.

Kind of similar to Marx himself, I guess.

I'm trying to understand this comment. Are you saying that Dahl's antisemitism is ameliorated by the fact that Israel attacked the PLO in Lebanon? And are you claiming that journalists have written more about Roald Dahl's antisemitism than about Israel's treatment of the Palestinians?

I'd like to read what you're saying in the most graceful way possible, but it really sounds like standard antisemitic beliefs about how it's really the Jews' fault that people are antisemitic, and that they control the media anyway.

Absolutely, and in practice it's not a well analyzed spreadsheet problem with a smooth transition. The change in interest rates moved necessary payoffs from the "later" bucket to the "soon" bucket.

A whole segment of product stories only worked when investors wanted to believe in them so that they could park their money there. With everything oversubscribed, products would get investment as long as success wasn't provably impossible - so CEOs and PMs optimized for inscrutability and constant pivots. More thoughts here:

https://coldwaters.substack.com/p/the-mystery-box-is-out-of-...

I'm not sure how one would get "AI-Enhanced Professional Writing" without feeding it into an LLM. This isn't underhanded, it's literally the product being offered.

Unfortunately, I've found a negative correlation between CV creativity and candidate quality.

I've got various theories as to why, but in my experience most people with non-standard resumes have turned out to be weaker candidates than people who just type their stuff into a standard template with something approaching the STAR format.

TBH, it doesn't look like it's spurring much discussion about the engineering ethics angle.

I'm certainly disappointed that none of the discussion is touching on the culpability of technical teams in building these systems.

I'm still struggling with my desire to surprise people with the conclusion instead of including it at the front of the piece. Which tends to lead to people discussing the setup rather than the punchline.

Hey folks. I know this one is a touchy subject. It is in no way intended to pile on those who are gleefully mocking a murder, and I should have probably included the subtitle ("Towards Ethical Data Science").

Rather, it's an encouragement for people who are paid to build software and data systems that shape people's lives to take a moment to reflect on that impact.

I've recently been working with a lot of service center productivity data. Staff productivity (customers/hour) is pretty close to a gaussian, with some skew towards many slight underperformers and few overperformers.

However, any single customer interaction is exponential or weibull distributed.

Internal Marketing is the primary role of the Product Manager at a lot of big companies.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians didn't get up one day and move fifteen miles down the road because they all felt like going on a picnic at the same time.

Interestingly, the term "ethnic cleansing" wasn't coined until the 1990s. The 20th century push for ethnic self determination came with an understanding that people would have to be moved to form concentrated and contiguous populations that could self determine. Millions of people were forced to move in the 1940s to establish India, Pakistan, and a more Slavic Soviet Union.

Sadly, it's becoming apparent that the only reason people believe in The Holocaust is the massive effort that went into documenting and preserving the direct evidence. The exodus of Jews from Arab and Muslim countries doesn't have museums and isn't part of school curricula, so it's easier to deny.

Hundreds of thousands of people, whether Palestinian, Jewish, Desi, or German, don't tend to move en masse without violence.

People who hold a mental model of Israel as a White European Colonizer seem to simply reject the idea that it absorbed more than a half million fleeing Black & Brown Jews in its first decades of existence. If they even accept that 90% of the Jews in Arab countries suddenly left without their property and money, they insist that it was a voluntary move due to inherent Jewish disloyalty to their broader societies.

I agree with a lot of this, but disagree with the final conclusion that Product shouldn't define what is going to be built. Everything listed in TFA is something a good PM and a product-minded engineer collaborate and iterate on. At the end of the day, I think the article is really concluding that "bad Product Managers shouldn't define what is built."

The actual issue with Scrum is that APMs and others who identify as "Product Owners" often aren't trained or equipped to be good at actual product management, because they are focused on a fake set of JIRA-focused responsibilities. A "Product Owner" is really a software development project manager who uses a ticketing system to micro-manage engineering work.

The result is that scrum POs are bad Product Managers. Their role has little to do with understanding user needs, establishing and communicating a vision of a product's philosophy, or assessing the success of a feature once it's out in customer hands.

Scrum ends up wrong on two fronts:

* It has no idea how work is prioritized (much of the actual work of product management), and

* It thinks that "priorities" are a well-ordered list of discrete development tasks rather than features, and assigns much of the engineer's role to the PO.

It's as if Scrum defined a new role called "chief financial owner" who is responsible for making sure the columns are aligned in the annual financial statements, and then the job market was flooded with thousands of people with two years of experience saying "I'm a CFO" and we got hundreds of think pieces about why all these companies were having trouble managing cash.

Almost 10 years ago, I ran a media sentiment analytics product that worked on hand coding. Everything automated that we tested - and that our competitors tried to launch - output garbage. The status quo for media analysis was either averaging a lot of garbage, or paying an insane amount for a very limited scope. We used automated tools to multiply the hand coders, but there was no plausible lights-out solution if accuracy really mattered.

That's completely changed in the last 18 months. All my colleagues in the industry have switched to LLMs. They're seeing accuracy as good as hand coding was getting (these were generally college educated coders), at scale.

Non-LLM sentiment tools were always a bit of a parlor trick that required cherry picking to survive the demo. In almost every case drilling to the actual statements revealed it was wrong on anything involving irony, humor, or even complex grammar. That's changed almost overnight.

I think the finding that hn is "neutral" about MBAs says all that's needed about accuracy here.

Absolutely. It's become almost trite at this point to note that "all models are wrong; some models are useful," but it's true and the MVP is one of the better ones. The difficulty is the same one Agile has - the model has become more useful as an excuse to avoid rigor than as a way to get better outcomes or understand the world.

If you say you're "doing agile," you don't have to put the effort into writing rigorous requirements. If you say you're "doing an MVP," you don't have to put in the effort into building a rigorously-engineered product. Neither model is supposed to be about being lazy. They're supposed to be about making trade-offs between different kinds of rigor.

Agile is supposed to unlock the ability to truly re-plan after each sprint and make very different decisions about your product direction. It's only a positive tradeoff if you are being rigorous about looking at your results, generating alternative paths, and assessing them. Otherwise you just end up with no documentation and a shitty architecture.

MVPs are supposed to be prototypes that reveal the answer about a specific hypothesis that is critical to your strategy. It's only a positive tradeoff if you are rigorous about what knowledge you don't have about your customers and technology, and build exactly the thing that will answer the question. Otherwise you just end up with a half-baked and buggy product.

Together, they give you the information you need to head in the best direction and the means to do so. But only if you're taking all that time you were originally spending on system design, rigorous documentation, and product quality and putting it towards stuff that tech teams aren't usually as comfortable doing.

It can be a mixed bag, and I personally don't take stims anymore.

But avoidance of medication just makes me thinks of the deaf people who oppose treatment because they worry they wouldn't be culturally deaf anymore.

This is why the conversation is nearly impossible, even on hn. It's hard to find enough people who agree on which facts are objectively true in order to have the discussion.

Things end up stuck in endless loops of the loudest voices claiming that either "any criticism at all of Israel, no matter what it does, is antisemitic" or "no criticism of Israel is ever antisemitic unless it explicitly and directly refers to Judaism."

Ironically, I've observed many of the former have trouble understanding that racism can exist without using a racial slur, while many of the latter can easily write a 1000 word essay about dog whistles and implicit bias against groups other than Jews.

There is an interesting and delicate conversation about how a twenty-something engineer in the military ends up frequenting anti-military and anti-democracy subreddits. I think that fits in with hn.

There is another interesting and delicate conversation about what that person thought about Gaza and about Israeli Jews, and where those ideas came from. He posted on Reddit that Hamas's stated intent to destroy Israel - where 7 million Jews live - would not count as genocide. That is a higher percentage than the extermination of 6 million European Jews in the Holocaust, when there were more Jews alive than now.

He based this on the belief that Israel is a US and UK colony, which is hard to take seriously either literally (since it isn't) or figuratively (since none of the many non-middle-eastern waves of Jewish refugees came from the US or UK).

He also had a deeply held belief that the violence killing 1% of Palestinians in Gaza IS a genocide (and I think it's safe to assume that he fully accepted Hamas's claims that 30k people have died, and fully rejected IDF's claims that 12k of those were Hamas militants). So deeply held that he burned himself to death over it.

To me, the inconsistency of holding those two beliefs so strongly at the same time is a sign of antisemitism believed more deeply than I personally believe in anything. And that contradiction does not survive a moment's rational thought - to me at least. Which makes me assume that someone whose profession is built around thinking rationally was simply unable to think rationally about the Israel-Gaza conflict and see the inherent asymmetry of what he was saying.

So I think there is a discussion here. Not about whether he was right that the devastation in Gaza amounts to a genocide, or right about whether democracy is evil, or right about whether America is evil. But the limits of rationality compared to how engineers usually think about themselves, and whether we are more or less susceptible than anyone else when it comes to online echo chambers.

And it is incredibly hard to have that conversation without getting into flame wars. Or projecting our personal beliefs about the Israel/Palestine conflict to the point that it prevents useful discourse.

My understanding is that the real driver is in being able to decouple the design of the controls from the rest of the interior design. I read somewhere that being able to design those in parallel with fewer dependencies makes a significant different in getting the car into production on time.

I first learned about shutter angle when reading about its use in Saving Private Ryan; the narrow 45 and 90 degree shutters made the opening scenes much more visceral with so much flying through the air.

https://cinemashock.org/2012/07/30/45-degree-shutter-in-savi...