throwawayjava

But, it's best to be certain! To ensure my downvotes are truly deserved: my bet is on the temporarily embarrassed millionaires taking offense to the last sentence of my prior post ;-) (i.e., /s :) )

The argument is that the civil and criminal proceedings are considering largely similar statements of fact. The burden of proof is lower in the civil case, of course, but the facts under consideration are the same. Or course, slightly different exact statements are being considered but with a substantively similar underlying truth claim: theranos was a fraud. The real point is, it's hard to believe she would ever win the criminal proceedings and lose the civil proceedings.

To me, it would make sense for the courts to insist that the civil proceeding is resolved first when the criminal proceeding is considering largely the same statements of fact but with a higher burden of proof. Why? Because the people the criminal code is supposed to be protecting are largely the same people who are suing, and those folks would probably prefer getting some money back.

The problem is that this would probably violate the sixth amendment (as is mentioned in my initial post). So, again, constitutionally, I understand why. This just seems like a bug rather than a feature.

So, this isn't about "innocent until proven guilty". This is about "speedy trial". I think one possibility, moving forward, is the following workflow:

1. Federal prosecutors communicate intent to prosecute, and provide a list of victims purportedly effected

2. Any effected victims may file civil suits

2a. Judges/congress/state legislative bodies exempt commitments to defense funds for future possible criminal cases from bankruptcy

3. civil cases resolved

4. criminal charges filed and proceedings begin

We test the limits of every amendment that applies to non-corporate-executives, so why not the sixth in fraud proceedings against C suites as well?

I assume I got in a flamewar with the wrong person some years back or something.

Don't really care about internet points on VC-sponsored forums, but it'd be nice to get an answer to this question from someone who knows something about law, though, so thanks :)

I understand it would be probably unconstitutional to delay criminal proceedings until after the civil proceedings. But can't the judge in the civil proceedings do something to prevent all the money from being spent on her criminal defense?

It seems morally wrong that someone can commit fraud and then spend the money obtained via that fraud defending themselves against the state before having to settle up with the people who they defrauded.

It depends.

In the Holmes case, the plaintiff, if they win, will probably argue that at least part of the settlement should be nondischargeable because Holmes committed fraud.

> Why wouldn't everyone file and wipe out their civil case debt then?

Because either:

1) the courts explicitly disallow it in the particular case; or,

2) the combination of non-exempt assets and continued access to credit is more valuable than the settlement amount (in this case, you would end up paying the entire amount during bankruptcy proceedings in any case anyways, and then have a black mark on your credit for no good reason).

The distinction is that pop-sci articles are just journalism. Most academics take pop-sci journalism in their field with a grain of salt at most, and usually a hard eye-roll.

Real scientific journal/conference articles are held to real standards. Exaggerating or misreporting results in a scientific article is basically malpractice. It's by far the worst (scientific) thing that a scientist can do.

It's amazing how many people will agree with that statement (because... duh) and then freak out when someone points out it's impossible to talk about the DSM without talking about dominant beliefs regarding "what society should be like". I.e., without talking about politics and labor economics.

There are many topics covered by the DSM that are maladaptations to this society but a) would not have been maladaptations in previous soecieties, and b) might not be maladaptations in future societies.

Is it even possible to talk about something like whether some particular aspect of human sexuality is a disorder using only "real science", and on a related note, what does "real science" mean here? E.g., there have certainly existed human societies with no strong taboo around human nakedness, and in those societies Exhibitionistic Disorder wouldn't even make any sense to talk about.

Similarly, it'd hard to imagine ADD being anything other than a perfectly normal non-maladaptive variation in personality prior to industrialization.

As a practicing scientist, I'm honestly not sure how "real science" is supposed to given an answer a question like 'is being transexual maladaptive?" It's just not a scientific question. There are lots of related scientific questions about human biology. But ultimately, it's a question about how those biological facts interact with social constructions.

Can you tell me, concretely, what you mean by "real science" here?

What you are asking for already exists [1]. In fact, the article we're commenting on is about the guy who co-hosted it [2]. Up until a few years ago, the program was even called the "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" [3].

[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Lehrer

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PBS_NewsHour#The_MacNeil/Lehre...

> People making $180k a year lack funds to buy stocks? Yeah, that’s a no from me.

An individual person making $180K a year is in the 92nd percentile. Parent is talking about the other roughly 300 million people.

What a great idea!

Perhaps the public broadcasting service could have a nightly program that dedicates an entire hour of primetime to this type of reporting. And we could even name it in Lehrer's name! Of course in that case we should also give MacNeil credit as well. So perhaps the show could be called something like the "MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour"!

;-)

First, you're projecting.

Second, it's not at all surprising that you're young enough to have first read Manufacturing Consent when you were "young".

Third, books like Manufacturing Consent and Discipline and Punishment are primarily sociological. They do have some normative content, of course, but their primary goal is to explain how the world works.

> It's called 'PR', it's used all day, every day by most companies and political organizations, social movements and even the government.

This is an over-simplification. Of course that's true. Manufacturing Consent is not merely pointing out the existence of politics or merely making the observation that political operatives attempt to use media to shift opinion. It's a book about ___how___ that process works in the age of mass media and in a democratic capitalist society.

The way in which cable news is used to warp people's perception of reality seems pretty obvious in 2020, with hindsight.

And so Manufacturing Consent might seem trite and obvious today. But the book wasn't written in 2019. Or 2018. Or 2008. Or even 1998. It was published in 1988.

Just to put that in context: it was written prior to 9/11. It was written almost a decade before Fox News was founded. It was written only shortly after cable television was even invented. In 1988, "Cable News" as we know it today didn't exist. CNN barely existed, and looked more like a combination of NBC Nightly News and CSPAN. And most importantly, manufacturing Consent was published at a time when most Americans really did believe that the nightly news was a mostly unbiased source of information.

You might read it today and think "yeah, that's obviously how mass media is used to influence how people think about the world". But that's very much not the reaction most people -- even, perhaps especially, hard-nosed realists -- had when reading it in 1988.

If for some reason a lot of customers want to pay extra for milk that's hand-milked by a milk maid standing on her head, we can of course talk about how funny those "head-standing milk is better" folks are. But that doesn't make it okay to lie and defraud them.

Jesus fucking christ. He fucking ran MD5 on some shit he pulled down from a web crawler.

Over-training a model on the validation set would be a lot more "brilliant", and even that is a dumb script kiddie level hack. Maybe finding an algorithm that computes weights s.t. the preimage of the training algorithm on the training set matches the result of training with truly random weights using the validation set. That could be a "clever hack". And even then _brilliant_ would be.... a real fucking stretch.

https://www.akc.org/products-services/training-programs/cani...

It's a pretty low bar for any dog that doesn't have major behavioral issues; I'd expect any dog with a non-dumbass owner and a good home from birth to be able to pass. Even many hard-core rescues could probably pass after a few years in a stable home.

A variant of this test for airline travel would probably not be too hard to design.

One of the problems with making any particular test mandatory is that the test operator can price gouge and then genuine service dogs will become even more expensive. So, such a rule would have to be paired with price controls on the test.

This is true of academic contests in general, btw, even without cheating. They stop being interesting/fun/good signals as soon as people start treating them as an independent skill set. Comparing performance on chess games for the first N games between two new players might be a good signal for some general intellectual capabilities. Comparing experienced players against one another is mostly just testing who's spent more time learning about chess.

He has only been at h20 for a few months.

He was almost certainly hired at least in part because of his participation in the contest.

No, I don't expect perfection. However, I do expect very careful implementation of access management for very large databases containing lots of PII and other sensitive customer information. Things like huge databases being accessible without credentials shouldn't require perfection on the part of some human. That sort of stuff should be continuously audited in an automated fashion.

But the software industry is quite bad, as a whole, so even the relatively competent actors make surprising, high-impact mistakes.

Maybe it's because the stakes are relatively low (c.f., bridge collapsing vs. PII leak) and the competition relatively fierce? Maybe software engineering is still very young and moving quickly?

In any case, I think it's totally reasonable to hold the opinion that MSFT is doing things pretty well relative to the rest of the industry and also that the industry as a whole is doing a pretty poor job.

IDK, for me the story has to be one of the following:

1. MSFT made a huge and inexcusable mistake, so maybe there's something systemically wrong with MSFT; or,

2. MSFT is very competent, and even very competent people are making very big mistakes, so maybe there's something systemically wrong with the entire industry.

> The only people paid at conferences are the registration people.

...if by paid you mean "free labor from local organizers and their students, plus some $1K-$3K travel awards for a PhD student in exchange for 20 hours of front desk registration, with maybe one association employee overseeing everything".

TBF, the travel awards are actually a pretty reasonable rate (avg $2K for 1/2 week of labor) if you close your eyes and ignore that:

1. CS PhD students are under-paid by a factor of 10x

2. CS PhD students are probably the only tech workers who are expected to raise funds on their own for work-related travel multiple times per year

3. these organizations double-dip. They are essentially paying a bit over market rate for labor required to run their conference registration desks while claiming that this relatively small amount of $$$ gives them some moral justification for price-gouging everything else (see: any ACM/IEEE statement about open access policy, which inevitably mentioned sponsoring student travel...)

4. ...and then still lean on conference organizers to find corporate sponsors to supplement those travel awards.

5. and those same students do a ton of other free labor in the form of writing and reviewing papers.

And so on.

Basically, any time I think "oh yeah, ACM/IEEE do that thing I didn't think about. Well, those people must be paid / must be receiving honest-to-goodness grants", it turns out: nope! All the work is done by volunteers, and any "grants" come with labor requirements.

TBF, none of that is totally unreasonable until you realize how much money these orgs are raking in. Where the hell does it all go!?

"It's fraud, but only in the sense that we don't have the profits yet. With some investment we'll surely be able to make that much profit and more."

Also, it's not just a landing page. They take PII. I'm honestly a bit surprised this is legal.

Doing something about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act seems way more important than fixing publishing...

That was also my take-away regarding this idea.

20% cut? For match-making on private music lessons? Fuck that. Our local music store charges less than that for renting an hour in a soundproof room! And the discoverability/match-making "platform" is a free bulletin board next to the restroom...

Also love how that email described the radical act of checking the local music store's bulletin board (or going and asking a friend/coworker/etc. for a recommendation) as "under-the-table neighborhood activity".

I went to a bad No-Name University for undergraduate and then Top Tier University for phd school, so I have an unusually representative view here.

I do agree that, for CS, the no-name university was... bad. Fortunately, I realized this early and did a lot of self-study. I probably learned more reading taocp and going through MIT open courseware courses in the library during the evenings than I learned in my actual undergraduate courses.

The mathematics courses, even at No Name, definitely provided me with a better education than I could have ever gotten on my own. I'm pretty bad at math, it was my worst subject in high school. So I double-majored in it during undergraduate. This dovetails with your advice to use university as a time to learn things you already tried and failed to learn on your own, or which you otherwise know will be difficult to learn on your own.

The CS education that undergraduates get at Top Tier University is far better than what I got, even though I worked through that Top Tier University's online courseware/lecture notes/exercises during undergraduate on my own.

My hot take: college is always worth it, but only if you intentionally invest in "leveling-up" past your previous potential.

That will happen almost by default at Top Tier unless you're a genius (...but you'll pay a lot for it). But not if you're going to university at No Name. So, in that case, students should definitely a) minor or even double-major in something they're not good at, and b) heavily supplement their CS courses during evenings/weekends.

Also, this is all highly specific to very self-motivated learners -- the sort for whom "self-taught" is a reasonable route. I'm one of those people. Over time, I've realized that we're a very small minority. Our perceptions of what others are capable of learning on their own, and prescriptions for how others should learn, are typically quite warped. Most people probably do need something like a 4 year college degree to become a competent programmer.

From his GH profile looks like he's a competitive applicant for ML engineering positions or perhaps a fellowship/residency/PhD program.

So, a junior researcher at the level of a decent second or third year PhD student. A researcher, maybe someone you'd trust to build a prototype or product, lots of potential, but probably not someone you'd trust to run a research program.