velis_vel

> Regression analysis was used to estimate wage differences, after controlling for the following choices and characteristics: graduates’ occupation, economic sector, hours worked, employment status (having multiple jobs as opposed to one full-time job), months unemployed since graduation, grade point average, undergraduate major, kind of institution attended, age, geographical region, and marital status.

The problem with controlling for all those things is that you leave out other factors; for example, if men were preferentially hired over women, that wouldn't show up in this data.

> Something like "Appendable" might be more appropriate for C++.

So I can append False to True to get False (Boolean monoid under &&) or append 8 to 9 to get 72 (integer monoid under multiplication)? There's also a monoid instances for any single-argument function into a monoidal type, where (f <> g) x = f x <> g x; I don't know what to call that but it's definitely not appending.

Append is a name that works in a few cases but horribly breaks down in the general case.

I want an "Ask me about Roko's basilisk!" button.

Under your Google scenario, presumably the person using Google Maps on Android wasn't operating as a driver working for Google. Uber hired him to drive cars, so they're liable for what he does while he drives them.

Apparently in American English it can either be pronounced 'key', 'kay' or 'kway'.

> The one place where we only care what is inside peoples heads and not their feelings?

Are you saying feelings aren't inside people's heads?

Well, 'beautiful' is to a certain extent a subjective quality. 'What makes a Mac Pro beautiful is X' can be interpreted as 'What makes a Mac Pro beautiful to me is X', and that's not really a statement that you can argue against.

But even so, the fallacies are either stretched or completely inapplicable. Both the 'no true scotsman' and 'special pleading' fallacies involve constantly shifting goalposts, but we've only ever seen Jormundir say that internal design is part of what makes the new Mac Pro beautiful. Where are the shifting goalposts?

Like, I don't think that the fact that it's not beautiful on the inside is relevant to the fact that it's a cool as hell mod; I think it's completely irrelevant. But throwing fallacies at the statement is just weird. I don't get how they apply at all.

> However, Github holds people accountable for actually having to program - funny how meritocracy came up as a bad word to these people!

Uh, no it doesn't? There are plenty of reasons someone might be a programmer that doesn't have work on github. Maybe their employer has a really restrictive invention assignment agreement and they don't feel like giving them free code. Maybe it's their day job and they do other things with their free time, like paint. Maybe they don't have any free time because they're a single parent or whatever.

What's the joke?

> I made it through multivariable calculus and grads and so forth, but the computer scientist in me gets upset when I run into undefined or poorly specified notation.

Well, at the top of the 'Summation' heading it does mention Bernoulli numbers.

> Opposition to speed-limit cameras exposes the absurdity of most speed-limit laws: it's a law so bad many (most?) people are opposed to having it strictly enforced. If that's not a bad law, then I don't know what is.

Not all laws that are heavily disliked are bad laws, and not all laws that most people like are good ones.

> Sure, they have their bad moments (pun intended), being caught uploading users' address books, spamming user's friends with invites and perhaps paying for downloads. No one's perfect and some of us sometimes do try to stretch things a little to see how far we can go. Don't we?

Are you being sarcastic here? I can't tell. Uploading your users' address books to your servers without permission isn't just 'stretching things a little', it's a textbook privacy violation.

What's this weird fake AAVE lorem ipsum thing that this page links as a demo? Is the joke 'haha black people talk funny'?

Conversely: with an ebook reader, you can bring your entire collection with you wherever you go, and you can add to it from the device without having to wait 2 days, pay shipping, figure out where you're going to put the book, settle on an organization system so you don't lose it...

There are some good points here, such as the fact that in most (all?) major ebook ecosystems the distributor can take away your ability to read a book, but some of his points (like "Attention Profit vs. Attention Deficit") are because he was reading from iBooks on an iPad.

The attribution of things to 'ancient Native American proverbs' is reminiscent of the whole 'noble savage' trope.

The problem is that you can have backwards flow, not just backwards pressure, because water has to be conserved.

> Three quarters work, and one quarter do not. What's the unemployment rate in the USA now? If you include those who've 'given up' looking for work or whatever, I think it's around 12%. Yeah, let's fork out a couple of trillion dollars a year and double that.

Not everybody is on the Brazilian system, only people below a certain income level. According to http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2011.pdf the employment level among those in poverty is something like 10%. Obviously you can't directly compare that to the Brazilian system without knowing more about how the US vs. Brazil define poverty, but it's obviously wrong to assume that all income levels are employed at the same rate.

> You're a hacker when a hacker calls you a hacker. All that "being able to self-identify" is narcissism.

Hackers have called me a hacker, therefore I'm a hacker. I now declare that every human being is a hacker if they self-identify as one.

> It seems doubtful that the answer to social inequalities is to make special privileges for each group to match the special privileges already enjoyed by others, as opposed to working more towards an ideal of equal treatment for everyone.

If two people are running in a race, and one of them has been running the past 4 miles with a 50-pound weight on their back, taking the weight off isn't going to make the race fair. You've either got to give them some kind of help or put a weight on the other person's back.

The language doesn't support loops; in terms of flow control, you get if statements and that's it. So probably not much of interest.

> The humanities are still trying to recover from that one.

In much the same way that 'science' is still recovering from prestigious journals publishing results that mysteriously fail to replicate[1] and software engineering is still recovering from the fact that there are 85 randomly generated papers published by the IEEE[2], yes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6n_scandal

[2] http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/71/35/55/PDF/0-FakeD...

> For the record, the only other male dominated job category is janitors but I somehow doubt it faces similar outrage by the gender equality knight templars.

I'm really curious where you got this information because it doesn't agree with anything else I've read. Among other things, about 75% of US doctors are male[1].

[1] http://www.hschange.com/CONTENT/1078/

> How is what Rap Genius is doing any different than Amazon or iTunes paying you for affiliate links, or you paying a blog to advertise you, or buying a friend a beer to include a link to you?

I don't know about affiliate links, but paying a blog to advertise you will also land you on Google's shitlist (unless you mark the link nofollow, in which case they don't care.)

Edit: according to http://www.webpronews.com/heres-what-googles-matt-cutts-says... you are actually supposed to nofollow affiliate links but they can usually handle it automatically for big sites like Amazon or iTunes.

Right, but it seems inaccurate to me to say that Lisp code 'has no syntax'. What do you call the reason that 2927(foo"bar. isn't a valid Lisp program?

Alternately: If I augment Python by letting you surround a block of Python code with curly braces in order to get an object representing the corresponding AST, does that mean that I can write Python directly in parse trees? :P

I don't know much about Lisp, but the reason people say this about Haskell isn't just that it has a type system, but a powerful one.

For example, how would you type the cons function? In Haskell, it has type t -> [t] -> [t] (i.e., for all types t, given a value of type t and a value of type list of t it produces a value of type list of t). In Lisp, on the other hand, you can construct a cons cell out of any two objects.

Obviously you can certainly construct a type system in which you can handle Lisp cons cells reasonably; Hindley-Milner type systems aren't the only game in town. But I don't think it'd have the 'if it compiles it probably works' property any more.

Yes, and he's still wrong. You don't write 'directly in parse trees', you write in text that gets converted to parse trees. The conversion is very simple, to be sure, but it still exists.

If you want to take a constructivist viewpoint, it doesn't exist. You can define constructible analysis, where you only work with numbers that you can approximate arbitrarily well using a Turing machine (this is a subset of all numbers that you can define, since you can do tricks with the halting problem). But constructible numbers still don't have decidable equality, since the halting problem reduces to constructible equality: is the number whose 2^-ith place is 1 if and only if the Turing machine M halts on the ith step equal to 0? You can approximate it arbitrarily well by running M for more and more steps, but proving that it's 0 would require proving that M never halts. (You can, however, get decidable ordering if you know a priori two numbers are unequal, simply by approximating them close enough that you can distinguish them.)

Personally, I'm not a constructivist; I think that these undefinable real numbers exist just as well as the ones that we can define. But that's a philosophical argument and I was never any good at those.

> That's the thing though. As I understand it, or as it's said to be: points have zero extension. So, no amount of points, not even an infinity of them could ever have extension.

This isn't true for an uncountably infinite set of points, assuming by 'extension' you mean what is usually called 'meausre' in modern mathematics. Modern theory is perfectly fine with saying that a line of nonzero length contains an infinite number of points of zero length, and trying to draw on Euclidean notions definitions of 'point' and 'line' to find conclusions about real analysis is going to be unhelpful.

I'm not sure what that Peirce quote is trying to say.

The set of numbers that can be uniquely defined in the English language in a finite number of letters is a countable set, because the set of finite sequences of English letters is countable.