gametheoretic

(I'm more on your side than not.)

What does it even mean for 'society' to 'have a bias'? That individuals in group G fare worse in situation S, all other things being equal, than individuals in other groups? If you have a better reading, please let me know. If not, we have disembarked too far from the cognitive for bias, an inherently cognitive thing, as our explanation.

Look at my name and call me a hammer-nail guy, but here's what I think: it comes down to options - yours, others', your expectation of others', theirs of yours, and most especially the resulting interplay of all of the above. Human beings are the situation you put them in.

You and I (and Max Temkin and Julian Assange) have a grounded reason for a general fear of false rape accusation: that option is available to any woman we've ever spent an hour with. Is any individual, no matter her motivations, terribly likely to exercise that option? No, but that's not the disturbing part. The disturbing part is, there's no recourse once they do - no options.

But why! Why are there no options? Because rape is the exact thing that it is: a grievous crime whose lasting scars are emotional more often than physical. Anything else, it's different: show me the dead body, show me the stolen thing, what have you. If you're a woman, and some dude rapes you but somehow there's no physical scarring and no dna and no webcam recording and no witnesses-- an altogether plausible scenario, we can all agree-- then fuck you, says the legal system. No options. Not that the legal system has an option in the matter either; you can't have a system that sends people to jail for decades on testimony without evidence. No options here, no options there, no options everywhere, for everyone.

We, by which I mean the public, tend to believe the accuser, in my personal opinion, a) because some fraction of the public is women who have been exactly there, with no options, and see themselves in the accuser (regardless of whatever the real truth of the matter may be), and b) because they don't believe their voice matters anyway. Perhaps secretly, but all the same. Your girlfriend's opinion on Ben Roethlisberger's guilt of rape will, she is well aware, have zero legal effect. But it's your potential no-option situation, not hers, on your mind when you challenge her living room accusations for lack of evidence. A challenge which she can't answer because rape is the thing that it is.

Black females don't have the time in the day to get arrested. White women live in a consequence-free environment until they don't. A dozen other things. It depends how frank we all want to be.

>Black males are disproportionately represented among those in poverty or with low income compared to white males.

Who on earth is the intended audience here--

NFLX would prefer we not measure their offerings against AMZN's. That's what I think, anyway. Amazon has more headliners than they know what to do with - they rotate them on and off Prime's frontpage regularly enough to give the impression you'll never watch all of it. Netflix, on the other hand... Netflix and I fought an 18-month staring contest over whether I was going to watch The Lincoln Lawyer.

Amen & Ahoy

Good. Drive them into the ground, Jeff.

What was it, 2003-04 when Blockbuster's engineering team sent Netflix that concession letter? 10 years go by and guess who's stuffing their bra for lack of content.

Really, really great. Very ambitious. I see no viable solution to the issues people are griping about without forking over buttloads of money every month. Maybe someone on HN does, though - we can only hope you'll detect that helpful comment in this storm of pedestrian shittiness.

Are you on postgres? One thing you could do-- and I only suggest this cumbersome idea because you might just be crazy enough to try it-- would be to use the pg_trgm (trigram) extension with the following in mind: a) Theory being, when someone greps /[a-z]{4,8}/, they're either interested in {anthem, aardvark, ambition, ...} or {nltk, xkcd, json, zzxx, xxzz, ...}, likely not both. b) Neither (nor any third set you might come up with) is so inherently superior that it deserves default status over the other. c) Even with limiting results, half are bound to be totally uninteresting to the user. So what does that even accomplish?

So my pg_trgm suggestion is to take that same /[a-z]{4,8}/ result set and offer the user a relative sliding-scale by which they can push their visible 1,000 closer to/further away from a predefined set of dictionary words.

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/static/pgtrgm.html

You may also consider tech acronyms - maybe steal those from StackOverflow tags. Human names would be too big a hassle, IMO.

Again, I love the ambition of the damn thing. Kicks ass.

Yes, they keep asking me to import my Gmail contacts.

Groan.

Owen,

I would submit to you that an analysis of Twitter's, for lack of a better word, design decisions can't be made without putting more thought in re: who they are as a company and what their tendencies are.

What sticks out about Twitter is how deliberate and disciplined their decision-making tends to be. (To me, at least. FWIW, I've worked with a major telecom on their buyflow in both a business and technical capacity. I'm proud to say I'm the reason email/password is the fallback auth and address/pin-number (half of which was already taken care of in the previous step: determining service availability via address) is the default, rather than the other way around as per the original design. Given that the app is in Best Buy kiosks and whatnot, that was a pretty big one.) E.g., these guys track time-to-first-tweet. They're not not looking at what you're looking at. Hell, they're looking at it with a microscope. If they and I arrive at different conclusions, I ask what I'm missing, not what they're missing -- and I don't say that in a platitudinal sense; I'm an arrogant bastard who thinks everyone is wrong about everything. In case you hadn't noticed.

But think about how long, how many years TC, et al. chirped chirped chirped about Twitter's "inability" to monetize. Now those people-- if anyone would bother to look-- look like idiots. Twitter silently told everyone to go fuck themselves, we're going to spend like 4 years throwing away ideas, developing a very strong opinion on this, because a wrong decision could kill our company - not now, but 10 years from now. Compare and contrast: Fb ads, which have been (thoughtfully! and with data!) likened to Ponzi schemes.

11 minutes of panic. With torn ligaments. Empathize with an 'e'?

The feminists say to flip the genders.

Yes, the audience's ability to relate to the protagonist matters.

Intend? In the trivial sense, you can guess; in the broad, unknowable.

Agreed; nowadays anywhere you go, there's some snarky dude saying 'hardly'.

A strict consequentialist wouldn't waste time with politics; he knows the input/output ratio is a billion to one.

Either that and/or people on the internet are more extreme. Specifically the ones who write the things on the links you choose to click.

You must not frequent any niche subreddits. In the sports subs, everybody knows everybody.

The risk of potentially ending your company? Not unless you view those unique capabilities as being a 10x force multiplier.

Your point was not lost on anyone over the age of 12.

No, because I read 1000x times more of the one than of the other, and I personally see and experience one and not the other. That you'd even bring up the comparison makes me think you're not taking this seriously, as a reality to deal with and not an internet crusade.

Read the statement again. I'm not laying blame on any party. I am only taking the position that whatever the cause is, I don't know any better than anyone else how to avoid it.

That's nice. I don't feel like you're talking to me; I feel like you're talking to a person in your head.

Those two also actively recruit Mormons for their very-above-average patriotism. Which is neither here nor there, but hey. As good a thread as any to go OT.

I'll be more than tempted. To be 100% honest, I have that thought every single time I read any article or blog post about sexism in tech. If programmers with a Y-chromosome are exponentially less likely to either sue us or get us labelled sexist jerks in the press, then that's who we're hiring.

If the history of Preferred Medical Term(s) for Mentally/Physically-Challenged Individuals is any indicator, that theory is lame.

Sound and fury.

Fair; I was under the impression most of that talk stayed in-house, so to speak. Are you referring to portrayals just by Americans which reach British shores, or portrayals by Britons as well?

Honest question. Seriously. For Britons only--

What's with the Guardian and "From my perspective, America's not so great!" articles? Not, like, "how could anyone think that?" but why does it seem to be such a regular feature? I admit upfront my being American may cause me to imagine/over-remember this phenomenon.

Not a direct article comment:

I'm asking this to anyone who supports the activist approach to the women in tech problem. a) If you had to put a number on it, what would you deem the percentage chance that this school of thought is actually wrong, and b) what are the consequences if it is?

Are you... asking if there is such a thing as a money tree?

Plenty (>90% ?) of people will tell you otherwise, but there's a case to be made that "investment" in public stock is essentially a game of reverse-routlette (i.e., not lose-lose-lose-lose-WIN but the other way around). What does the "anti-DOW" (most horrific deaths rather than strongest surviving) look like?

Or dogfood.

http://iknowthestory.shutup

>One thing I've noticed is that I'm really looking forward to springtime, so I can be outdoors more. I love weekend days when you're just ambling around all day, but it's not so pleasant when it's cold and wet...

A few years back, I'd have thought that an idle comment. I know I would have. I'm not sure what I'm trying to say here (which, if grant the rest of this poor sentence a charitable interpretation, you might find to be the point), but... it's almost like, in "returning to human form," (I suspect many fellow techies use similar phrases in their heads but not in public for fear of being labelled a Luddite) the withdrawal experience "is" re-learning how to do that human thing, only this time, fuck you, you have to do it "algebraically," like you gave yourself Aspergers but for everything. E.g., slightly younger me was too cool for smalltalk about nice weather; current me appreciates a quick, light conversation, appreciates the smiles, appreciates the sun in his face.