oneloop

Yes, and I'm calling bullshit on that. The issue isn't confusing + with -, it's everything else. Credit limits, setting up campaigns "by accident" etc etc. The story is bullshit. Either didn't happen, or wasn't an accident.

Hahaha neither! I actually thought you were looking to understand what I meant. If I came across as condescending I guess you already knew all this, in which case I'm not sure why you said the other guy made a guy point. So now I'll have to assume you're just trolling. Well played :P But now I've lost interest :P

> What was the substance? You said you were throwing a wrench into the cogs of a brain that only mindlessly repeated things. OP wasn't mindlessly repeating, but bringing up a valid point, albeit not going into as much detail as I'd like.

Ah fair enough. So there's often repeated phrase that "correlation doesn't imply causality". That's because often times people make the fallacy of going "A and B always happen together, therefore A must imply B!" (or the other way around). This is obviously wrong. So some people have learned that whenever someone says "A and B always happen together, so maybe one implies the other...?", they can shout CORRELATION DOESN'T IMPLY CAUSALITY and shut down the conversation.

But the truth is that these people for the most part don't understand that phrase very well, right? Because you take conclusions in your life, right? Science has learned many things about the universe, right? So SOMETHING must imply causality. _If it isn't correlation, what is it?_ Think about it, everything in life is correlation. If you open your hand and the stone drops, did the stone drop _because_ you opened your hand? How can you ever know? All you know is that two events "opening hand" and "stone dropping" are correlated, how can we know if one implies the other? But of course we know, don't we? ;-) I think this is a substantive observation :P

> You accused someone of not knowing what they were talking about and using phrases they didn't fully understand, and I didn't see any evidence that that was the case.

Well, he didn't know the answer to the question I posed before. His answer was "I am very very educated, you go read some books." To me that's plenty of evidence he doesn't know the answer. In fact, I would say telling someone "correlation doesn't imply causality" is strong circumstancial evidence to that effect :P

EDIT: If you say that saying "correlation doesn't imply causality" is bringing up a valid point, it must be the first time you see that phrase, am I right? Go on reddit and in every single conversation you'll see someone throwing that around as an excuse to not having to dig further.

I didn't say they weren't facts, I was just pointing out that if you have a quote and want to know it's correct, you just google it. Don't you agree with that?

I know, I know :-/

What can I tell you, I think trying to use things you don't understand to show how much smarter you are, is the ultimate intellectual dishonesty. I think the world would be a better place (or at least more humble) if people were called out for such behaviours. You don't agree?

EDIT: Just to clarify, I agree with my comment not being respectful or make me look great, but I think it was substantial. If you want to be rigorous in science, you should know the answer to that question.

> You seem to have some sort of disdain for "abstract computer science material".

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12654399

Morgawr I suggest you go around this thread and read that guy's comments. You'll notice that they're all in the direction of "other people merits aren't such a big deal". His implication that passing an interview at google is just memorizing trivia

> I don't have months to study fulltime to cram for the CS trivia challenge

His implication that the reason why he didn't get into google isn't because he's not smart or knowledgeable enough, but because he didn't go to a prestigious school

> No, I don't work there. I didn't study CS in school (much less attend the elite CS schools they are selecting for)

The implication that maths is somehow less important than nebulous concepts like "shipping code within budget"

> "CS trivia" interviews select for people who know the mathematics of computer science, not for people who know how to ship robust software systems on time and within budget.

That interviews are processes which dumb people pass, unlike him

> Their interview doesn't select for "ability to figure things out" at all. It selects for "ability to memorize and regurgitate academic CS curriculum on demand."

And then the comments through which I came to know this guy: when someone makes a good point, he replies that "correlation doesn't imply causation", and then when asked a simple question, instead of answering the question his answer is "I have X credentials, therefore I know the answer very well":

> I have a philosophy degree, and I can say with some confidence that I understand that particular catchphrase pretty profoundly. Not everyone who happens to disagree with you is merely an ignorant barbarian in need of enlightenment. See Karl Popper's theory of critical rationalism to answer your questions about causation.

You see, checking boxes (like getting credentials and academic knowledge) is very important, but only the boxes he's checked.

I'm haven't enjoyed a thread this much in a very long time.

I noticed the same thing. I couldn't help but read his response in Trump's voice. "I'm very very smart, believe me. I went to a tremendous school and learned yuge words. No one knows causation better than me let me tell you."

Wow, no other answer could've made me this happy. Next time someone asks me why I think philosophy degrees are useless, I have something specific to point them to.

Google has an impeccable track record when it comes to security, at least as far as I'm aware.

What happened to you exactly? You got tricked by linkedin to giving it access to your contacts (which is understandable, linkedin is known for its dark patterns)? Or it happened to you that linkedin magically accessed your contacts even though you never gave it oauth access to your contacts?

Guys, you're a technical crowd. How would this even be possible? I mean, if you haven't given access to your gmail contacts to linkedin through oauth, this shouldn't be possible. If you have... you should expect that the app you gave access to will use the access.

I'm calling bullshit.

There's this website where you type in things and it searches those things for you. The url is google.com, you should check it out.

http://edition.cnn.com/2003/US/01/10/wbr.smoking.gun/

Something is strange with this story. On adwords, to spend money and only be charged at the end of the month you have to be accepted into monthly billing. You have to apply for it. It's not something that you do by accident because you confused adwords with adsense.

No, who?

Are you suggesting that Holmes is distorting the truth???

Professor at a third-world country University, you wouldn't know him.

Another way to put it would be that "all physics is either perturbative or non-perturbative", although this one doesn't sound as catchy since it is transparently a tautology ;-)

Sorry, I must've gotten confused at some point.

> I get the feeling that most math-involving Wikipedia pages are simply compound regurgitations of various textbooks.

You are absolutely right, because writing quality original work takes effort, and writing quality original maths work takes 100x more effort.

> This is kind of a cop-out

Call it whatever you want, but the fact remains that some subjects are more complex than others. Complex matters take more effort to write about, and there's fewer people qualified to write about them. When these two factors come together, you see regurgitated stuff. If you think that everything is equally simple if you explain it the right way, you're sorely mistaken about the nature of reality.

All this reminds me that I shouldn't be spending my own effort on HN :D

Exactly. And furthermore, the more niche and complex a topic is, the smaller the pool of people qualified to massage a specialist topic into a generalist audience.

Physics is complex man, what did you expect. If you know nothing, you need to learn a lot in order to even understand their starting point.

And regarding wikipedia articles, there's two big design alternatives: for each article you either write into it all the necessary background, or instead link to the necessary background in different articles. I suspect that the modus operandi that wikipedia has chosen is that you should do the former for mainstream topics and the latter for niche topics.

I expect that article will see lots of improvement in the coming weeks/months.

I still remember my condensed matter professor saying "The Kosterlitz-Thouless transition is the most important discovery in physics in the second half of the 20th century". Surely partly motivated by professional bias, no doubt, but there's still merit to the claim. If you believe that "all physics is either harmonic oscillators or phase transitions", the Kosterlitz-Thouless is the first example (I believe) of a phase transition that does not contain a local order parameter. Because of that certain materials proved illusive to all mathematical models of the time.

Related: Onsager received the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics, also for 2D phase transitions. Trivia: Onsager was a Chemist! :D

EDIT: I believe this is the original paper: http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0022-3719/6/7/010/...

Well..... what do you mean by screw up? If the forces of capitalism are coming after your margin, did they screw up by losing Costco? Or did they screw up by not remaining competitive? Inside Amex, if you had given the Costco account to a manager that did a better job, he would at best buy Amex a few years before the inevitable happened. That's hardly a screw up.

I appreciated it.

I notice that in about 80% of your comments on your comment history you mention how old you are. Maybe you're just getting grumpy?

I don't think it's a non-story the fact that some market participants can short sell non-existent amounts of stocks. Is this common knowledge? Did everyone already know this but me?

> I would disagree with your second point though. If you take a look at the search query data you will see that over 80% of the searches come from where users have typed less than 2 words in length. Only a small number of impressions are coming from searches that are 5 words or more in length so even if you had 1 million 5+ word keywords you would never be able to get the same number of impressions as you would with 2 word keywords if that makes sense.

No, it doesn't make sense.

10k 2-word keywords: 1M impressions/day

10k 5-word keywords: 100k impressions/days

If I now increase the number of 5-word keywords to 100k, what do you expect will happen? I expect to get abobut 1M impressions/day

His results are very general. They depend only only on the fact that keywords with more words have lower search volume. For any industry for which this is true (i.e. any), you will find qualitatively similar results.

If you think about it, it's a trivial result. In any other industry if I tell you "I'm going to focus on increasing the ROI of 10% of our sales", you'd laugh. Why not focus on increasing the ROI of the other 90% of the sales?

However, it does depend on the account. On an account where you have the same number of 2 word keywords as 5 word keywords, of course the 5 word keywords will have a tiny tiny percentage of the impressions (say 1%). But obviously a marketer who goes for the long term strategy will tell you that you need 100x more 5 word keywords, in which case the 5 word keywords would have the same number of impressions as the 2 word keywords. But in comes the author's argument that you can do virtually nothing to manage that many keywords (we'd be talking millions here).

Thanks buddy. I will have to investigate their team and work first, but then I might apply. Crazy!