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jongraehl

851 karma · joined March 26, 2009

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jongraehl··on Facing opposition, Amazon reconsiders NY headquarters site, two officials say
'You probably don't have a choice ...' is a reach. The rest is well-argued.

Anyway the most telling point is if OP gets his wish, then next time a bunch of people burn to death the public will clamor again for mandatory fire escapes, inevitably. We aren't the sort of people he wishes we were.

jongraehl··on Peter Thiel to serve as Trump delegate
"progress"

You think progress should be achieved by changing the interpretation of existing law? Odd view.

jongraehl··on Google says self-driving car hits municipal bus in minor crash
splitting the lane for a right turn is common in CA (assume legal too). but you'd best be sure you can make it without having to cut someone off. if a human did this the result might be the same. tough problem. there's a chance that if the google car went faster than 2mph it might have gotten some respect (or around the sandbags before getting hit, if there was room in front)
jongraehl··on Pull request acceptance of women versus men
For regular contributors, women appear* to accept a man's work (slightly) more than they will a woman's, and men appear to accept a woman's work more than they will a man's. Since there are more men than women, this means that on the whole women are privileged.

* appear: maybe men or women have a different internal bar for how polished they'll make a pull request (how afraid they are of rejection, etc). the study looks at profiles that are closeted vs out as a gender. If you reveal gender on purpose, this tells us something about you, presumably, but for convenience the difference between closeted and out is taken to signify "bias against [out] men/women". Much of this is not statistically significant, probably (study doesn't give enough info, and suspiciously did an "insider" vs "outsider" analysis rather than a pooled analysis, suggesting they didn't like what they found until they split into two pools).

For unsolicited outside contributions, closeted men seem to get rejected more than closeted women (men's bar is lower?). Out men get rejected more than closeted men or women. Out women get rejected more than closeted men or women. The key is: for this category, people appear to be less biased against out men than out women (but somehow people prefer contributions from hidden-gender folks?).

Anyway, this is interesting stuff but I'm not sure what to take from it. I do expect more low-quality outside-team submissions from men than women, and I might judge them unfairly if they were out men, but this is just a random hunch and I doubt it would affect me much (probably I wouldn't notice).

jongraehl··on GitHub is undergoing a full-blown overhaul as execs and employees depart
if we think some pattern should be called "censorship", then it is called that. if your interlocutor refuses to move beyond "argument about definition of words" and you still want to communicate, you then have to taboo the word, which slows your thinking+communication down a bit, but so be it.
jongraehl··on C or C++ for my game engine?
Every one of his complaints has a good solution, albeit some not widely known. Except compile time, single source file or otherwise - the compiler is using lots of smarts and lots of library headers on your behalf.

That said, author has done a good job explaining his thought process in taking the rewarding-at-every-step path, given he's not a C++-wrangling junkie.

jongraehl··on GCC 6 Will Warn You About Misleading Code Indentations
clang-format is better
jongraehl··on Is Sound Gradual Typing Dead? [pdf]
I prefer mandatory static types + type inference. It is a productivity boost if you're allowed to skip entering type names for local vars. If you ever want to change anything meaningful in a large system, you better have meaningful compile-time checks. The only downside is longer build times, but tools are improving. Outside of legacy projects (Linus loves C! and fantastic library ecosystems for scripting languages) I don't see any future for languages without static typing + inference.
jongraehl··on The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dominance of the Stubborn Minority [pdf]
Get tolerant or get wrecked sounds great until you look at the details (especially the asymmetric-nuclear-etc ones). Still, well said (not sure on "we need differences" - that's conveniently kumbaya; I'll settle for "eradicating all differences = monstrous bloodshed so don't do it").
jongraehl··on Cutting Back Sugar Improves Obese Children's Health in Just 10 Days
I like your line of thought, but this is no refutation of IIFYM or "eat less if you're fat" unless they performed this substitution isocalorically. Eating fast sugars instead of equivalent slow starches makes me crave more sooner, and eat more.
jongraehl··on Please Do Not Steal My Code, Mock My Analysis, and Present My Ideas as Your Own
Unsurprisingly, your version-2 story is as close as possible to version-1 and the demonstrated proof of version-1's lies. This is why it's nice to hold in reserve some additional evidence when you expose a liar - so you can catch them lying in version-2 and completely destroy their public credibility.

I hope this doesn't happen to you, but in my experience version-2 is usually only a partial confession.

Good luck recovering from this with a lesson learned: you don't look bad when you shared credit and honestly represent your contributions. People will already associate you with the good thing you brought to their attention, deployed and customized for them, etc.

jongraehl··on Please Do Not Steal My Code, Mock My Analysis, and Present My Ideas as Your Own
Public shaming is an appropriate reaction to demonstrable theft of credit, and works by like mechanisms as the original offense. The threat of being exposed for building a fake reputation can preserve the (relative) reliability of "judge me by my portfolio" by making the expected reputational gain from plagiarism neutral or negative.
jongraehl··on The Donut Hustle
Really clear writing. Sweet story.
jongraehl··on How Can We Achieve Age Diversity in Silicon Valley?
I'm not a fan of "protected category" hiring rules in any case. If good old people are underpaid, then let your company profit by hiring them. I suppose a tempting compromise is to not allow companies to solicit disclosure of age etc (so people can leave the year off their degree, show only most recent experience, etc), but honestly I think it might be better if those companies that really will only hire young would advertise the fact and save everyone some time.

Starting from only a very small real disadvantage in ability, any externally distinctive group can quickly seem a 'market for lemons' - for example, maybe the oldsters you've seen so far across the interview table are unrepresentatively bad, because the good ones are working and not interviewing. So don't think because you've seen 4 weak candidates of 50+ years old that it's not worth looking at the next.

jongraehl··on How Can We Achieve Age Diversity in Silicon Valley?
In my company, it seems we are (slightly) biased toward female programmer/researcher candidates (that is, a female will get hired more eagerly, all else equal).
jongraehl··on U.S. Will Require Drones to Be Registered
Sure, new-tech drones should respond to a targeted ping w/ serial number or similar. Simple challenge/response crypto could avoid cloning/spoofing. Enforcement of registration: no response = police will follow the drone to its owner and ticket (else impound). Physical serial number for legacy drones.
jongraehl··on Apple infringed UWisconsin power-saving patent; damages up to $862M
https://www.google.com/patents/US5781752
jongraehl··on Apple infringed UWisconsin power-saving patent; damages up to $862M
($862M is a maximum to be decided in the next phase of the jury trial; in the final phase the damages will be tripled if the infringement is judged willful). Case is Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation v. Apple Inc; Apple claimed the patent was invalid but the jury disagreed. WARF claims they approached Apple to negotiate a license and were "ignored".
jongraehl··on The Little Printf
Nice characterizations but the conclusion was only empty "human face" platitudes for me. I'll take the reminder that we should believe in the end result we're accomplishing and not only obsess about making the tools we're working with or system we're working on better as an end in itself.
jongraehl··on Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department
My read: math teaching @Berkeley is in fact horrible and this offended him. He was happy to shame the incumbents and refuse to submit to mediocrity. Naturally he'd prefer to keep his job and reform by example, but his compensation for being fired is that he can righteously expose the corruption on evidence of his firing (and knowing he had this leverage is why he was so uncompromising in pursuing good teaching).
jongraehl··on Phone video clears man charged with assaulting cop, even after phone disappears
Police slapping phones/cameras out of someone's hands need to get control of their emotions and bear the "I will catch you slipping up" threat with confident professionalism.

That said, the criminal-record stereo-blaster was probably lying about 'his uncle' and I don't think you get to 'you have no warrant we're done here' and shut the door on the police responding to a neighbor noise complaint. If they want to give you a talking-to or a ticket (depending on local law), they can.

I do believe the guy about his phone being "lost", though (should be easy to corroborate if they have signatures/records of personal items), and we can expect real sanction for the phone-slapper if it's clear which cop did it.

jongraehl··on Gaps in Alumni Earnings Stand Out in Release of College Data
"Mrs. degree" assortative mating (+ field of study preferences) make the 'females in college X' implication muddier, but overall it's good to encourage people to look at expected outcomes before opting into $100k debt.

That is, a rational woman would look at expected earnings including child support + alimony, and insist on figures stratified by field of study (so she can choose where + what to study).

jongraehl··on Reproducible builds in Debian: preventing compiler backdoors
You also have to trust the source code of the 'untrusted' compiler (that is, read it and make sure it doesn't directly contain any back door).
jongraehl··on What I learned from losing my Facebook internship
"As a rising [University student / whatever]," - have people really started saying this? "Rising" as a self-descriptor sounds ridiculous. I feel like this is at least the second time I've seen that opener.
jongraehl··on Upstarts raid giants for talent in Silicon Valley
That problem has nothing to do with linear algebra. I like it! Presumably the submatrix size is limited, or there are negative numbers. Personally I'd precompute the submatrix sums S[r,c] for row 1...r and col 1...c in r*c steps, which will then allow you to give the sum for any submatrix in constant time.
jongraehl··on Miller is like sed, awk, cut, join, and sort for name-indexed data such as CSV
To build: install flex and ctags, and -Wno-error=unused-but-set-variable
jongraehl··on Google’s S2, geometry on the sphere, cells and Hilbert curve
Right. Article text says so too.
jongraehl··on The magic of the Kalman filter, in pictures
I like particle filtering because it's easy to understand and implement - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Carlo_localization - and it's correct even for non-gaussian uncertainty.

Is Kalman filtering computationally more efficient (obviously particle filtering is stochastic and so trades off accuracy for compute) or does it have some other advantage?

jongraehl··on How We Beat C++ STL Binary Search
for 64 bit size_t it's pretty academic, but no, not correct.

suppose low is M-3 and high is M-1 (where M is 2^[#bits]) then mid should be M-2. but (M-3 + M-1) is (modulo M) equal to M-4. and half that is M/2 - 2, which is a lot less than the correct M-2. (pretend it's 2 bit unsigned ints so M is 4)

the correct 'mid' computation is low + (high - low)/2.

jongraehl··on A faster way to compute edit distance does not exist
Don't know, but you still end up aligning common subsequences (advanced monotonically in both seqs) and you still have the same order-of-computing-cells allowed in the standard m*n dynamic program. Your restricted problem is basically asking for the standard unix line-diff.
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