dspeyer

Iirc albatrosses actually can't take off from the ground. They need to jump off a cliff with an updraft. So they're very careful about where they land.

Analogies, if constructed carefully, have a limited use in explaining concepts. The more closely the analogized items resemble each-other, the longer you can hold onto the analogy. To really understand something, you can't be using analogies.

This analogy can hold together for half a sentence at most. The concerns involved in hiring a programmer and selecting a customer to rent cars to have almost nothing in common.

And if you want to use an analogy in an argument, you first have to argue that the analogy is valid.

Articles like this contribute nothing to my understanding of hiring.

If I'm reading the linked page correctly, these metrics were verified by correlating them with individual student improvement on a variety of standardized tests and "more cognitively challenging assignments in math and english". This is better than pure circular logic, but until those metrics are validated, these are suspect. In particular, everything seems to test for shallow understanding.

You can already MITM if you compromise any CA's private key.

Is there any way for software, even in assembly, to make intelligent use of on-cpu ram caches? I thought they were completely abstracted by the hardware.

    int i;
    float f = *(float*)&i;

I'm not saying you should do this, but you can.

Or to use an example the author didn't regret:

    struct foo {
      int a;
      int b;
      int c;
    }__attribute__((packed));

    void print(foo* f) {
      int *p = f;
      int i;
      for (i=0; i<sizeof(foo)/sizeof(int); i++) {
        printf("%d,",p[i]);
      }
    }

We need a solution to this. It comes up every time a ca misbehaves.

How hard would it be to allow a website to have multiple certs? If Turktrust's important customers had redundancy, we could pull less painfully.

Or for less rollout, could browsers acknowledge turktrust only as a root for .tr hosts? That would contain the damage, but probably not hit many legitimate customers.

A distribution is the probability of various values before the random selection takes place. Uniformity is what we do or don't see afterward.

The results of a uniform distribution, applied randomly a large number of times are less uniform than intuition predicts.

I've seen that a lot. Part of the reason can be plant starvation -- I'm not going to do a big build if I can't power them, so Benelux helps. Also, it helps to select regions with high connectivity (low diameter). If the one player who wants step 2 can't reach the only open space, there's a stall.

I do wonder if the rules could be tweaked to give some reasonable reward to a step 2 starter.

> While Agricola and Dominion do a pretty darn good job of it, it's often a matter of individual opinion whether adding randomization is a 'fix' or not. I hate playing a game where I feel like I could lose by pure chance no matter what my level of skill is.

Le Havre (sort of the sequel to Agricola) improves on this. The ordering of the buildings is partly random, and can result in very different games, but it's symmetric to the players and all the information comes at the beginning.

The curriculum didn't occur in a vacuum, though. It's based on what the leaders thought the students could handle. No one wants a curriculum where a lot of students fail.

Part of that is heterogeneous grouping. The curriculum is based on what the bottom 10% can handle, and everyone else must go at their pace lest there be elitism.

There's probably other factors too, though. All students could probably move faster if culture as a whole were encouraging it.

That's true of all non-african countries.

IMO and Putnum are comparing the best of each nation. This article is comparing the median of each nation. I wouldn't expect a strong correlation there. Both matter.

Does he really think this sort of invisibility just happens?

A road goes over a bridge so smoothly that drivers don't notice the bridge. The result of the bridge-builder refraining from decoration? Mostly the result of the bridge-builder very, very carefully lining things up. With a level of planning-time rarely seen in the software world.

Non-craftedness is just a style, one that only the most skilled craftspeople can achieve.

Is there any actual evidence that supports this hypothesis?

Dare I ask what the legislation he wants actually does? Is it another "kill freedom in the name of security without actually securing anything" act?

You know what other day was preceded by newspapers not predicting a Japanese surprise attack on America? ALL OF THEM.

Nothing in this article gives reason to change my expectation of upcoming cyberattack.

Part of what makes Reddit so good at what it does is that it doesn't try to be more social. By assigning very few pixels to users and making signup easy, the focus stays on the content of the discussion.

The idea of subreddits applies more generally. One piece of software, one account, many communities with different foci and norms. A more social forum could do the same thing.

This project does sound kind of nifty, but I'm confused about the company. What is The Ladders. Do you have a core product?

Some squirrels do pick fights with bears. That's what Hamas has been doing for its entire existence. There are enough people who would rather die on their feet than live on their knees.

Israel has already demonstrated its strength. Now it needs to convince its enemies that compromise is preferable to death and to convince the first world that its in the right.

It's hard to judge speeds from this, and they're often more important than direction. It's beautiful, but it doesn't tell me if the next high tide will have an even higher surge.

Last I heard, 111 8th had 4 days of fuel and the generators were safely high up. It's possible I misunderstood.

At Google, at least, we try to make up new questions frequently and retire old ones.

How do I control my cache type?

I often put a wooden spoon across the top of a pot of boiling water just because that's a convenient place to put it. The pot sometimes boils over. I've seen no correlation with the spoon.

This works on big things. Not so much on little, cumulative ones.

Why did A make a tasteless joke about B's outfit? Because he was nervous and his dubious sense of humor got ahead of his judgment. But he didn't mean anything by it and said he's sorry B feels that way. Well everyone says stupid things sometimes. No actual harm done. B should lighten up, right?

That doesn't work.

http://therealkatie.net/blog/2012/mar/21/lighten-up/

Some things are problems only because they're part of a larger pattern. That's when we need to think outside of the individual domain.

90% of regulars here could have written the original article. Therefore, there was little to be gained by reading it.

The rebuttal may not have been of great importance, but we couldn't have written it. It's one person's experience (though there are probably a significant number like her) and it adds to our model of the situation. Also, it makes a significant meta-point: stereotyping is bad even when done by the self-proclaimed champions of the stereotyped group.

I think the non-blown cascade is exactly what makes fizzbuzz aggravating. With three noises, the linear solution clearly dominates. With two, the exponential is actually shorter -- but feels unclean.

He explicitly said "hex"

So we have two ways of dealing with overfullness. We can use linked-list buckets, which are expected O(n) or we grow and sometimes have to rehash the entire table as part of an add.