dspeyer

The NSA gives a lot of advice to civilian cryptographers. It used to be tinfoil to assume the advice was deliberately bad. Now we know (some of) it is.

The NSA also has been found to give good advice sometimes, so just doing the opposite of what they say doesn't work either.

I've often had "break for pizza and similar from 4-5 on fridays and then go back to work" as a pattern (I tend to get in at 11, so I'm not leaving at 5 anyway). Some chaotic interaction with co-workers tends to be a good thing.

If you're looking for a replicated controlled study, there's been something close:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.html

The best avoid tangled, excessively-layered code, but often are inclined to use reflection, multi-indirection, or other tools that mediocre programmers may not understand.

The problem with the 3x approximation is that other expenses don't really scale with rent. If you spend $1000/month on food and $2000/month on rent, and then move to a $3000/month apartment, your food cost isn't going to change to $1500. Sure, the local grocery stores and restaurants might be a little more expensive, but not much.

And $1000/m for food is actually really high. That's if you eat lunch and dinner at restaurants every day and don't worry about the price. Figure $500 for food, $500 for health insurance, $150 for transit... it's not adding up to twice rent.

It's rare that anyone tries to replace 10 ordinary engineers with one 10xer. It's common, however, to try to replace one 10xer with 10 ordinary engineers, and find that they can't cope with the challenges.

As usual, "afford" means "make roughly three times the rent".

Take a look at Outer Mission, which has a monthly rent of $2150 and an affordability of 4.0.

   10.24 $/hour * 8 h/workday * 21 wd/month = 1720 $/m
   4.0 * 1720 $/month = 6881 $/month
   6881 \approx 3 * 2150

So while having 4 incomes is recommended for living there, it isn't actually needed. You could live there on a smaller income by being careful about your smaller expenses.

It seems paint will fall into disuse in the future, and the color green will be forgotten entirely.

But testing doesn't eliminate 2 and 3. Testing only checks for bugs you've thought of. You still need to do manual tests of new features to catch bugs you didn't think of.

IIRC, 1 & 3 are usually the same, and 2 is usually still way too optimistic. And that's from research, not anecdote.

It still might be useful. Use 1 to anchor 3 to anchor 2 and then triple it.

See also: http://lesswrong.com/lw/jg/planning_fallacy/

When I saw the headline I tried to think of one and failed. Then I saw the list in the article and recognized most of the names, and could even say a few things about them. And with those as priming, could name a few more.

Brains are weird.

So what can we do?

As a native English speaker, I freely admit that our spelling is horrible and our grammar has some sharp edges. Furthermore I freely admit that it's unfair that the burden of making communication work lies so heavily on others and so lightly on people like me.

I could try to learn Italian, but even if a third of English-speakers did, it wouldn't really change Antirez's situation, much less that of his Chinese analogues.

I could try to write more phonetically, but at a cost of ease-of-reading for existing English speakers. And an uncoordinated effort would only produce chaos. Perhaps PG would care to serve as a schelling point?

I could try to learn to understand thick accents better. I don't know where to start. Likewise I could try to learn to read foreign-grammared English better. I actually think I'm pretty good at that.

Are you saying the world doesn't need a common language? Or that there's a better choice than English?

Yes it sucks a lot for some people, and no it isn't fair, but that doesn't change it.

What would you have us do?

So Undertown does exist?

> Number of people who died

Zero

> Number of children who get thyroid cancer

Forty so far.

These are just what I could find quickly. Couldn't quickly find anything on Deepwater Horizon.

Last I saw, the Fukushima radiation had already dispersed to below the noise level.

The more potent chemical toxins pouring into the gulf will likely be killing people for a while, though.

Airtight handwavium that meets the other specs may be hard to come by. I can't think of a precedent. And the original design called for all the space at the ends to avoid needing that (which doesn't work).

Let's wait to see if the whole system crashes now before we conclude that.

Not that we'll ever know.

Do you buy food from a supermarket? Do you test it for salmonella and ecoli using your own bio-lab?

Do you fly on commercial (or governmental) airlines? Do you personally preflight the plane?

Even if you trust every member of these organizations, that isn't enough. It's them acting as organizations that allows them to achieve safety. If you don't trust organizations, you basically can't function in society.

Bruce Schneier may be the wrong blogger for you to follow, then. He talks about trust all the time. To quote his recent book:

> [T]oday, I passed several strangers on the street without any of them attacking me. I bought food from a grocery store, not at all concerned that it might be unfit for human consumption. I locked my front door, but didn't spare a moment's worry at how easy it would be for someone to smash my window in. Even people driving cars, large murderous instruments that could crush me like a bug, didn't scare me.

>Most amazingly, this worked without much overt security. I don't carry a gun for self-defense, nor do I wear body armor. I don't use a home burglar alarm. I don't test my food for poison. I don't even engage in conspicuous displays of physical prowess to intimidate other people I encounter.

>It's what we call “trust.” Actually, it's what we call “civilization.”

His point is that we need trust. You can't actually watch for every possible betrayal. Trust in fear of retribution will suffice, but there needs to be some trust, or there can be no complex civilization.

I'd be very interested to see the mechanism. I can't imagine any company had a "pay women less" policy that got revoked. So what happened? Are women being brought into management more? It seems possible that a single promotion by the CEO could have major follow-on effects there. Had there been a subconscious tendency to shut down ideas that had women's names on them? Did the company culture move away from 60 hour weeks now that the CEO wants to get home early, allowing women (who are generally less willing to do 60 hours) to thrive?

I'm assuming the study conductors were competent statisticians, so there's a real effect and it pretty-much has to be causality as indicated.

From the article:

> The researchers also found that these effects were strongest at firms with 50 or fewer employees, which they attribute to the fact that CEOs at smaller firms are typically more directly involved in making decisions that affect the pay of individual workers than CEOs at much larger firms.

No libraries. Ordinary web browsers for the client side.

A minimal HTTP server that recognizes GET requests, finds the url, throws away everything else, runs the relevant code and returns an HTML document of the results is actually really easy to write. And easy to integrate into an existing event loop.

A custom binary protocol? Then I would have to write a client! And install it everywhere. And keep it updated. And design my gui in wingdi instead of html.

That is not a viable option.

A while back, I wrote a daemon that checked a bunch of network stuff in a loop. I needed a UI for it, so I made it speak http. No library, just raw GET support. It worked. Didn't take long to write, either. I would never have tried that with a binary protocol.

Google's corporate charter was specifically written to avoid that. And shareholders have no meaningful voting rights, so they can't override it there either.

There seem to be ways around this. Portal 2 had a completely rigid plotline, but the gameplay didn't suffer much from it. Maybe a few moments.

I'm using Firefox.

I do have some ambient light. Maybe if I replaced the curtains in my window with true blackout curtains this would look ok.

    color: rgb(102,102,102)

Seriously?

Why do so many publishers make their content so hard to read?

(Once I fixed that with inspectElement, the article was good.)

There don't seem to be any direct competitors to kickstarter, so when kickstarter chooses to ban something from their site, they ban it from getting kickstarted. Just because they don't use violence doesn't mean they don't have power, or that their power doesn't come with responsibility.