jongraehl

I won't bother to call "[citation needed]" on this since I'm sure there are biased analyses out there on both sides, but consider lifetime cost vs. working years remaining. Maybe we're economy-positive on an 18 year old unskilled laborer, even. But most pro-immigration policy changes involve a lot of older folk coming along with in the long run, and not everyone who comes and stays makes enough to be a net positive from a tax POV (not even considering the retirement/medicare time bomb).

Ranbaxy is an anomaly, right? http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/14/business/global/ranbaxy-in...

I want to agree with you (everything you say is good), except that there's no evidence that Ben is actually anti-silver-bullet. It seems like he focused efforts on improving the company's own product/tech in-house instead of looking for an alternative to doing that, because the alternative ideas were low-quality. Presumably lots of thinking was involved on all sides.

Yes. The U.S. could have plenty of high quality immigrants. We could have them buying spots directly. But instead we have some "huddled masses" feel-good/politics/ideology/lottery hybrid policy (Chechen refugees? great!) which is not at all optimized for any rationally measured end result.

I'm pretty sure that skilled immigration is a net positive for the economy (even below-median coder H1B, as opposed to the many awesome H1B working at top companies).

But it seems a tautology that increasing skilled immigration quotas will depress my salary. If quotas are decreased, then the spots will be filled with only the best immigrants.

That said, most of my favorite technical peers are foreigners. So my ideal, selfish scenario would be for my company to have the ability to easily bring in H1B or similar, while our competitors can't :)

Minimum wage immigrant labor, on the other hand, absolutely must not lead to full welfare-state benefits (if I've not been mislead about the lifetime cost of Medicare), or the U.S. will be impoverished in the long haul.

It's unfortunate that the lobby for increasing H1B spots (which is probably a net positive for the whole U.S., in spite of my selfish doubts listed above) is politically allied with increasing unskilled immigration.

If you broaden the original statement, it's wrong, but "no enduring [single] formula" is a near-tautology. Alex must mean that if you're not creative and sharp, you won't prevail in the marketplace, which of course is likely. But clever folks can benefit from formulas, checklists, and exercises.

One could manufacture prompts all day - imagine yourself displacing incumbents by doing something new (or just doing it in a new way) - how is that happening? How are they fighting back? Why can't they stop you?

It's intrinsically motivating to win, and though you can enjoy winning in ways that aren't proved by economic measure, everyone understands market success.

As long as people link to things that work on their browser, you are wrong.

Given the same amount of time spent on TC, you'd definitely have the expected correlation (with the usual IQ common cause if nothing else). But I agree that once someone gets reasonably competitive in an area (esp. one w/ game-like mechanics and public recognition), they're at risk for overspecialization.

So, don't accept an offer at Facebook unless you're confident you'll shine in the first months (even in unfair situations, with people working against you). I can see how it's great for the morale of those who pass the hazing, but it sounds like perhaps they need to work on their on-boarding process - that incumbent teams and engineers are guided by selfish incentives that have nothing to do with helping newbies succeed.

On the other hand, those rejected will always have hurt feelings, and at some point their failure will be sealed by the lack of confidence/patience/charity established engineers have for them.

Probably the incumbents are often failing to appreciate the body of domain (FB procedures + code) knowledge they've accumulated, and that a new initiate likely lacks. Engineers are often poor communicators in that sense.

Until there's a longer security+correctness track record (and maybe not even then), it's too soon to rely on this closed-source software - http://forum.bittorrent.com/topic/18434-source-code/

Cool, but not perfect:

at the end of void ArmDebugger::Stop(Instruction* instr) (rhs of http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~yw21/demos/simulator-mips-simulat... )

we have an alignment of ' 2 * Instruction::kInstrSize' to some random code at the end

Reversed stupidity is not intelligence.

You'll often find such mealy-mouthed conclusions in write-ups of studies where the evidence doesn't confirm the author's hypothesis, and especially in anticipation of controversy. (in this case, your quote doesn't come from a study author, I guess)

If there's no benefit on average, then there's no reason to recommend on average (disclaimer: I take a chewy multivitamin because I remember being convinced by evidence that manganese is a bad thing to supplement, and most multivitamins have 2mg of it).

I for one will be sticking to breast milk.

1. this could be done offline, or cached

2. unconvinced that they can't do better w/ the right hash table (which will be thousands of lines fewer of code). but since they're using a library, i'll give them a pass. not even a benchmark vs. a quick hash table version makes all the claims about "judy arrays are better for our purpose" suspect.

"a lot has evolved" for "a lot has changed" - faux-smart business english?

A significant chunk of customer service and sales people tell what I'm sure they think are "white lies", all the time.

Imagine a hypothetical irate, unreasonable customer who will go away happy if you say the right thing.

As for this particular case, perhaps they sent this notification mail through a different process than the one that allows all the other mails to get through spam filters etc, but it's entirely reasonable to suspect this kind of "oops! don't be angry at us" lie.

I'd like what you say about fair use to be true, but why would the court volunteer its opinion if the technicalities are already sufficient permission for Aereo? Can they do that? An "... and even if ..." coda?

I dislike "Mindfulness in Plain English". I have not spent more than a few hours trying any specific technique it advocates, so it's really the writing and reasoning I recommend against.

I reviewed the author's claims in some depth a couple years ago:

http://jonathan.graehl.org/vipassana-meditation-part-1

http://jonathan.graehl.org/vipassana-meditation-part-2

http://jonathan.graehl.org/vipassana-meditation-part-3

I think, before adopting a regimen, we ought to ask ourselves: is there evidence that the advocates of it arrived at it by a reasonable process? Or, if they didn't, are the benefits (compared to alternatives) compelling enough to override the risk of your spending time making an assessment and making an error in the direction of credulity? (see http://lesswrong.com/lw/19m/privileging_the_hypothesis/ )

You smiled while you took the photo you planned to shame them with.

Enjoy your notoriety.

To recap, m_d wishes to see a comparison at the same protein+fat+carbs (normal non-junk food) vs. soylent.

gnaritas objects.

gwern supports m_d.

gnaritas has an opportunity to qualify his objection, but chooses not to.

(fwiw, I'm also extremely interested in all manner of "are there valuable yet-to-be-identified substances in real food" experiments.)

You can let someone go without letting go of them.

Both would be easy to notice in a debugger. Finding the cause, as you imply, would be tricky unless you remember to check the preprocessed output.

I don't remember when Microsoft started doing the triangular beam (to allow moving the mouse right slightly inaccurately) in Windows, but it was really annoying until they did. I think they had it in Windows 98.

better to ignore than respond if it's not a lawsuit

Excessive risk (loss) aversion saps some of the enjoyment of having probably (but not certainly) sufficient wealth. 1% problems, I guess.

If asveiku is a real name, then he's heard of at least one (linked reply to "last time").

> err on the side of caution

The risk avoided is ... that the FA feels annoyed while serving this guy who talked back?

It sounds like the captain also made no attempt to evaluate whether the passenger was actually crazy (making eye contact would be a start). Seems like captain is earning points w/ the FA - "you don't like the guy? I'll throw him off".

[Sapir-Whorf](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity) is what you're thinking of. The case is usually dramatically overstated.

Clearly he's written a coherent comment. Language plays a role whether he knows it or not :)

??? If I may risk the typical mind fallacy, most people don't think in words most of the time. Just like typing or writing can serve as structure or canvas, imagining words is for special circumstances. For planning to say or write (and sometimes suppressing). For remembering something you heard or read. For imagining interactions or temporarily believing in hypotheses. For prayer, if you're into that.

(I have known people who talk out loud often enough about whatever preoccupies them that I must assume that they're in-their-head doing the same thing much of the time, so these people do exist - I just question if they're most people).

I do find myself remembering things I've read, said, or heard, when they seem relevant. I have vast amounts of "knowledge" that's waiting to be connected to real life experience.

That said, I wouldn't put too much stock into anyone's description of what their whole brain is doing. Why would we know? I find it's sometimes best to just pause, stop trying to steer, and wait for my brain to come up with something, no pressure. Just whatever comes up in response to a question or puzzle in the next X seconds (pick a small amount of time and commit to not act at all until it passes seems best).