swatow

I'll save my pity for the tech forums still trapped in Orientalism.

To me it's strange that I see so many comments on HN about how technical skill isn't the most important thing: business sense, life experience, communications skills, etc. count for more.

But when someone with no technical skill creates a product by outsourcing the technical side, suddenly the comments are all negative.

Most Australians and Italians would object to this. Unfortunately most White Christians are irreparably racist. I would suggest a tolerant liberal nation like Israel as the destination.

This is really impressive. The problem is highly constrained. Because a house is a sturdy structure, large amounts of physical material are involved. Furthermore, there are quality/safety requirements.

It's great to see Ikea applying their deep expertise in producing sturdy structures that can be shipped cheaply, to this area.

The problem with bubble prediction is the perverse incentives. If you say there is no bubble, you look like an ignorant groupie. If you say there is a bubble, even if nothing happens, you can just say "you guys got real lucky this time".

I agree it's bad habit, but I don't see it in the article.

The article goes to great length to argue why Java should use the same terminology as other languages. I would not say that the statements:

Sun wanted to push Java as a secure language, and one of Java's advantages was that it does not allow pointer arithmetic as C++ does.

They went so far as to try a different name for the concept, formally calling them "references". A big mistake and it's caused even more confusion in the process.

can be called "actively trying to misunderstand people". In fact it shows an understanding with the position he's arguing against.

Maybe they should. Studies have found that ratings of a surgeon skill based on a video recordings of surgery, are predictive of patient outcomes[0]. The problem with associating prestige and respect with not stooping to being tested, is that testing can be useful and necessary.

http://psnet.ahrq.gov/resource.aspx?resourceID=26950

No, if you read the article, you'll see it is absolutely nothing to do with maternity leave.

The article describes a market where companies pay women for breast milk that is left over after they have fed their own babies, and use it to produce a pharmaceutical product for premature babies. The controversy is between non-profits and for profit companies both doing this (but the non-profit doesn't pay the women).

in the English speaking world outside the US, the "toilet" refers to the entire bathroom, not the piece of porcelain. This also explains why "use the toilet" is considered crude in the US but not outside. In the US it refers to the physical act of defacating, but elsewhere it is equivalent to "go to the bathroom"

I personally consider myself part of the alternative right, but my views are overall fairly mainstream. I fall into #3 not because I'm part of some "dark side" but because I think both big government and big tech largely do what they claim to, and the negative side effects are exaggerated.

I am very wary of "X always ends up as Y" arguments. If you don't like big companies abusing power, then close the loopholes or break them up (though I much prefer the former). If you don't like big government abusing citizens, then change the laws to limit government.

I like big government because they really do tend to work towards the public good. Look at healthcare or welfare in Australia for an example. I like big tech because they really do increase economic efficiency, and drive technology forwards.

I think as poorly of the conspiratorial thinking of #4's as they do of the "dark side".

Regarding the lead masks case, how about: Two guys were interested in taking some weird drugs (equivalent of "shrooms" today). They met someone who agreed to give them the drugs, and as part of the ritual gave them the instructions "Be at the place arranged at 16.30. Take capsules at 18.30. After feeling the effects, protect half the face with lead masks. Await the agreed signal"[0]. They took the drugs, OD'd and died.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_Masks_Case

This is a discussion on probability and statistics, so I was using the technical terms. In statistics if A and B are correlated, then A predicts B. But you're just a liberal who assumes everyone who isn't is dumb. Fuck you.

I think that, in spite of some pro-aging/death views, society acts to prevent aging and death by treating disease.

You seem to want a radical solution, but I think the main reason that there are few people trying to directly prevent aging/death, is because the medical profession doesn't consider this possible at this time.

I'm not very familiar with this style of programming puzzle, but I wonder how this is less arbitrary than whiteboard coding topcoder or kaggle. I know people who were hired based on all of these, but the latter two are different from Starfighter in that they exist for their own reasons (competition for its own sake, and getting answers to data science questions) with providing a signal to employers being a side effect. I wonder if the selection bias in a system set up for the purpose of employment will be better or worse.

I think that the comment was confusing not because of a positive/normative distinction, but because many economists would use the word rent only to refer to inefficiency. While patents are ex post inefficient since they grant a monopoly, they are ex ante efficient (in theory) because they provide incentives to discover new things.

It seems like a real stretch to call a drug company that researches a completely new drug and patents it "rent seeking", even if they can be said to enjoy "monopoly rents" ex post.

The standard arguments for free trade apply as much to individual states as to countries. Just as the US enjoys a net benefit from buying goods from China instead of making them, so does New Jersey enjoy a net gain from its residents buying California cars without any New Jersey middleman.

I think it follows pretty directly that if poor people are using jewelry as a store of value, then it's going to being making their financial situation even worse, and therefore can be considered one of the reasons the poor stay poor.

You also are committing a fallacy of "if X is true, then I must hold an immoral position Y, so X cannot be true". But logically either Y does not follow from X, or Y is not really immoral. (X = "poor people make bad decisions", Y = "the poor deserve their poverty") This logical fallacy has got you rationalizing everything that poor people do.

One way to describe it in words is that it's like a normal wind turbine, but instead of 3 blades, you have one wing that moves in a circle like a blade. And instead of the energy being extracted by a generator where the 3 blades meet, the energy is extracted at the wing itself, by many small turbines.

You are giving the FSF point of view, but that is not the only point of view. The post is correct that the practical effect of the GPL is to require giving back to the community.

Freedom is a loaded word, and I think most people don't share the FSF's definition of freedom. I would rephrase your statement as "the GPL is designed to globally maximise the ability to use, modify and distribute a piece of software. The only ability the GPL does not provide is the ability to take these abilities from future uses."

I personally think that this ability to modify software (and scrutinize its source code) is very important when it comes to the operating system. For javascript code sandboxed in the browser, it is much less important (sure, javascript can still do unexpected things, like tracking users, but this is still much much less than what could be done with full user level access, and these are things that can be fixed). So I support GPL for operating systems, encourage open source for other software, but don't object to closed source when the danger is low.

I don't mind if other people use the GPL, but I think it's inappropriate for certain kinds of work, including most work sponsored by the government and universities.

Suppose the government sponsors a numerical software library. If that library is GPL licensed, that means that proprietary software like Matlab, cannot use it. Is this a good thing? If we think that there should be strong encouragement for all software to become open source, maybe yes. But I believe there is no reason to want most software to be open source. So releasing things like this under the GPL just means that less people can use it than otherwise, and so the effort has been less efficient.

I would choose a permissive license for everything except operating systems (which I think should be open source, for security reasons), and end user products (like emacs), which need to have the community protected from proprietary forks. Libraries should mostly be licensed with permissive licenses, because that maximizes the number of people who can use it.

We are talking about academic studies, not how I would personally act.

You are asserting that the signal from race/gender is very noisy and the signal from the resume is very precise.

We can debate the precision of the signal from the resume, but race at least is highly predictive of many objective qualities, e.g. it is highly correlated with IQ. So what you call a vague, dubious, and unquantified signal is actually a highly informative signal.

Many people, perhaps not you, are interested in distinguishing between discrimination based on Bayesian inference, and discrimination that isn't, and is instead, for example, based on incorrect views or inherent dislike of certain groups. You might say that both are equally bad. I suspect that if you were given the opportunity to argue that a particular form of discrimination is not justified by Bayesian inference, you would do so. It's only because I'm suggesting that it's possible discrimination is justified by Bayesian inference, that you are (rudely) objecting to the distinction.

Isn't the exact opposite also possible? That there are all kinds of biases in the world, but studies are being selected for (a) showing a bias against women and (b) showing that women are objectively as good as or better than men?

In what way is affirmative action poorly understood? What you have described is simply the bar being lower for certain groups, which is exactly how affirmative action is understood by most people.

I know these studies are common (probably because they are easy to conduct) but they don't measure the intrinsic bias of the interviewer.

What they measure is a combination of the intrinsic bias of the interviewer, and the statistical inference that the interviewer does based on race/gender (statistical discrimination).

Because a resume is a noisy signal, it is still possible that race/gender contains extra information even after you have seen the resume. For example, suppose people tend to exaggerate, and this exaggeration introduces some randomness. Given the signal "lead some impressive project", there is some probability that the person didn't really lead the project. Now if the probability of exaggerating is the same, but a Black person or woman was less likely to have lead the project a priori, then even after observing the resume that claims to have lead the project, the a posteriori probability of having lead the project is lower for the Black person or woman.

I think people go to San Francisco for the 20-30 year old girls, not the aging population or drug addicts.

The best lies are the lies that can't be in principle disproven. I try to be reasonably honest most of the time, but if the question is something like "why did you leave" I'm going to give the "right" answer, not the honest one.

But in my view there is no battle of wills. If the question is an algorithms type question, then there is no ambiguity, and either the interviewee answers it or they don't.

Now if I had asked for a good way to construct a map, and the answer had been that hash maps are good on paper but have high overhead, then I would have to consider their answer carefully. But if I ask how an AVL tree works and the answer is "why do you want to know that" then they have just avoided the question, and I have to insist they answer it.

I don't see how that relates to my post. If anything, the post I replied to was describing an attempt to pass the interview by force of personality and slickness, in that they were describing how to avoid answering the question the interviewer wanted to ask.

I'm not looking for personality, self-confidence or slickness. I just want a person to directly answer the question.

nhaehnle's reply contains the fundamental error in your post, but there is another issue, which is that variance doesn't go away when you take the long run. Option 2 has more variance, and this doesn't get averaged out in the long run. Each year adds more variance to your wealth, which is a bad thing.

Sure, the variance on the yearly rate of return will shrink as the time horizon grows. But because the yearly rate is compounded, this doesn't prevent the total variance in returns from growing with time.

Long term investment doesn't cure the risk from volatile investments.