zug_zug

I often wonder what percent of the people who write these types of things have any actual talent for management objectively. It'd be interesting if there was some abstract study or game to actually measure it, just as a big social experiment.

Imagine having 20 managers drafting a team of 6 from a pool of 1000 engineers. Then they all get asked to build the same thing and see who does it fastest, best, fewest bugs.

Fascinating article.

Slightly-off-topic:

This article presents the hard science as exceedingly difficult. I kinda suspect part of that is scientists have this attitude of acting completely blind to the hundreds of millions of years of evolution that made us what we are.

For example, if we suppose that microbiome is important to health, and suppose that all human behaviors (e.g. hand-shaking, kissing) I think it gets us pretty quickly toward some great avenues to test. I almost wonder if the imperfect sanitation conditions we evolved in might have conferred some ability to exchange fecal microbes.

Now obviously this doesn't really solve the fact that sequencing a microbiome is incredibly hard. But even without sequencing a microbiome you could probably do a blind test of saliva-swapping vs water and see to what degree this affects self-reported measures. Or if that's too hard to get past IRB, have one towel that's been touched by 50 people and one towel that's completely clean, and see if touching that has any subjective effects.

It feels like the kind of things you could test on 1,000 students in a weekend for free.

>> The lady's claim was (allegedly) that she has a perfect ability to distinguish between the tea-milk orders

I believe you added the word "perfect" which makes a substantive difference. I think this highlights the complications that get involved when trying to turn a simple proposition into an meaningful claim:

- Can we prove that person X can observe taste of tea with > 50% reliability with 95% confidence (what Fischer did)

- Can we prove that person X can observe taste of tea with 100% reliability with 95% confidence (not statistically possible)

- Can we prove that person X cannot observe taste of tea with > 50% reliability with 95% confidence (only possible if this person guesses wrong more often than randomly)

- Can we prove that person X cannot observe taste of tea with 100% reliability with 95% confidence (just need one example)

Maybe they are, I don't know what's taught in a CS major, but a shocking number of my coworkers don't seem to understand the basics of statistical sampling which makes me wonder if they even had 2 courses on it.

> apprently it’s nearly 5 meters long, ???

3 inches longer than a Camry

Anecdotally I'm having trouble finding certain small cars in stock (e.g. crown platinum) and suspect there is some self-interest in the dealership to explains this.

I think car-buyers are often under an illusion that an suv is "more car" when actually it's exact same components and just a larger frame. They'd much prefer to sell you the high-margin product and pocket the difference.

To me when I first came across this in college it was fascinating. I think any stem field should be taught about these statistical methods.

The power of being able to put an objective answer on any personal claim (e.g. mint gives me a headache) with statistics & a blind design is a very powerful tool to approach fields where our science just isn't good yet (psychology, health, etc).

> Thus, if and only if the lady properly categorized all 8 cups was Fisher willing to reject the null hypothesis – effectively acknowledging the lady's ability at a 1.4% significance level (but without quantifying her ability).

Important to realize though, that failure to categorize all 8 doesn't prove anything either. It just means this one experiment isn't conclusive in itself (at 95% confidence).

It's good to be aware of how easy it can be to get a false result by chance, but it's imo a worse statistical sin to propose that not proving something is proving the opposite (a mistake I see quite often).

I think the idea that managers are professional liars are something boards need tackle head-on if they want to see stock prices rise.

Throughout my career I've seen a lot of managers willfully focus more on crafting a narrative of "everything is fine" than fixing problems -- usually by hiding and mismeasuring known problem areas for example. At first I thought those were bad apples, but I came to realize those managers' managers are perfectly content with this type of dishonesty, because they get credit if it's not caught, and can wash their hands of it if they have plausible deniability.

So multiple times I see a founding team who's utterly sincere, and then a huge management chain that believes in nothing, couldn't care less about customers, and treats the whole job as a game/performance, and some very sincere engineers. And I just think to myself... "How does the C level not see this?"

Great, since the FDA won't do anything I can't for the day that whole foods to start selling non-PFA grade food.

If you want to expose kubernetes by a query language, why not expose an SQL interface?

I agree, at least the one FAANG company I worked at didn't hire like it want experienced, well-rounded people. Instead it hired a bunch of "brilliant in a vacuum" type people who proceeded to do brilliant-in-a-vacuum things create impressive projects that ultimately were far inferior to the industry norm because those projects never had a input from designers, customer support, the interoperability/standardization of the best-in-industry tools that were out there.

So ultimately I think it was largely to their detriment -- they reinvented everything and by and large I'd say most of what they built in-house was inferior to the industry-norm.

This is the guy from serial. I vividly remember listening to this whole podcast as an amateur reporter retold the whole story, only to be shocked and horrified that I had wasted my time because he was obviously involved and almost certainly guilty.

Adnan knew exactly where the body was buried, but for hours this podcast investigated the tiniest of minuteua (who placed a call from outside a grocery store at what hour? How many times had the cellphone pinged at that location? Was his lawyer too old?) all while suggesting his friend "Jay" may have been involved [even though Adnan was adamant he wasn't].

To me it was a fascinating story about how somebody can fall for a conman/murderer's story despite really obvious evidence after an unreasonable amount of personal contact (I think she said she talked to Adnan every day for hours a day).

Not that justice is always served by our criminal court system; it certainly has many flaws and failures. But all the more reason to be ashamed about drawing our attention to one of the cases that's pretty open-and-shut.

In people with diabetes.

I looked into this a while back and think it's been pretty well established that most autoimmune conditions are increasing significantly in the developed world and no cause is established.

I'm referring to the significant percentage of the population who believed conspiracy theories around vaccines.

And then what I saw was media personalities intentionally fanning the flames (e.g. Rogan) because they understood creating cultural rift us-them war out of a nothingburger was a way to maximize engagement.

Ideally we'd all be so rational we would have no us-versus-them instincts at all, and could be completely objective and form independent opinions on every issue based on data. But it's very clear that culture has a bit of a mob-mentality, and it's an open question whether we'd be better off with more or less coordination/restriction on our communication.

Meh, I find this very hard to care about. I suppose to some degree there was some overreaction around covid, but I feel like some portion of the country being actively conspiratorial saps any faith I had that there's some inherent selection algorithm out there in our nature that will elevate rational, calm, evidence-based ideas to the top.

Feedback - This is awesome so far.

There are cases where people have doctored images in their research data, or completely fabricated data to meet a significance threshhold.

There may be ambigious cases but there are non-ambiguous cases too.

As it happens the place I had a really bad experience with it was stripe. I had pretty much aced every other question, but basically was setup with a problem where I didn't have a way to reliably get it running (and I wasn't even clear what the app was supposed to do, it was just some random project off of github).

Fortunately I already had an offer onhand from facebook.

I've only had one "find the bug" interview, and it was awful:

- Didn't set you up with a way to reliably run/test the code, nor a step-through-debugger which, jeez is it 1980? Like setting up a repo in a language you aren't familiar with (say getting your py-env exactly right) can take a whole hour if it's not your main language.

- Didn't have standardized questions, which is hugely problematic (some bugs are 2 orders of magnitude harder than others)

- It also just seems like there's a huge random element, like am I debugging code written by somebody who thinks at the same level of abstraction as me? Did they write comments I understand?

Yeah, I've certainly seen cases where something was overbuilt and 90% of the time was wasted.

But I've also worked at places where things were underbuilt (e.g 0 test environments whatsoever except prod). If there was a gun to my head, to finish something in 1 hour, I'd test in prod.

So I think advice that sometimes is useful, sometimes is damaging, isn't really helpful. Not unless there's an easy way to tell which situation is which.

When I see big blanket statements of advice, I usually try to "unit test" them to see if they have any value. So I think of wildly different scenarios, and imagine whether this advice is useful, neutral/depends, or negative.

This is one that I can see not going well in a number of those scenarios.

The article certainly paints it in that light.

I also agree that it isn't clear to me how stealing information from private citizens would be a justified response for ongoing tensions in the region.

Not sure why you're downvoted.

I'm not sure how it happened, but this tracks with my personal experience. 15 years ago the local stabucks had a fireplace, was meticulously clean, was busy but had seating, and generally was a place I associated with a really pleasant feeling.

Now my local one is more dirty than a McDonalds (perhaps people using up seats are seen as unprofitable), the drinks are even more expensive, and my stomache absolutely cannot handle their drinks (is it the acid, the sugar, or what?).

Technologically seems cool, and the first use that pops into mind is "wouldn't this be funny to prank my friend?"

But maybe no, it wouldn't. Maybe it'd be deeply disconcerting. We have very strong norms around honesty as a society, and maybe crossing them in video just for a joke is comparably crass to giving somebody a fake winning lottery ticket.

I've heard all of these lip-service justifications before, but I've yet to see anybody actually publish data showing how they saved any money. Would love to be proven wrong by some hard data, but something tells me I won't be.

PFAs should be illegal in all food applications by now. The danger of PFAs isn't really new at this point. I'm sure if we really try hard we'd find hundreds of viable alternatives (e.g. wax? noodle straws? bamboo?), they just wouldn't have the same margin.

Out of curiosity, where is that 150x number coming from? Is that just an off-the-cuff expression of frustration or is a real estimate from somewhere?

There's no such thing as an "everything bubble." All prices are relative.

An everything bubble would basically be inflation which wouldn't justify moving any assets. You only need to move between assets when one is inflated relative to another (e.g. stock vs real-estate)