swatow

21 ms·

1.
by swatow 11y ago
I'll save my pity for the tech forums still trapped in Orientalism.
2.
by swatow 11y ago
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 c
3.
by swatow 11y ago
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.
4.
by swatow 11y ago
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 ap
5.
by swatow 11y ago
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
6.
by swatow 12y ago
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
7.
by swatow 12y ago
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 t
8.
by swatow 12y ago
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
9.
by swatow 12y ago
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
10.
by swatow 12y ago
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
11.
by swatow 12y ago
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 instructio
12.
by swatow 12y ago
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.
13.
by swatow 12y ago
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
14.
by swatow 12y ago
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
15.
by swatow 12y ago
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 monopo
16.
by swatow 12y ago
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 buyin
17.
by swatow 12y ago
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.
18.
by swatow 12y ago
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,
19.
by swatow 12y ago
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
20.
by swatow 12y ago
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. I
21.
by swatow 12y ago
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
22.
by swatow 12y ago
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 grou
23.
by swatow 12y ago
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?
24.
by swatow 12y ago
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.
25.
by swatow 12y ago
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
26.
by swatow 12y ago
I think people go to San Francisco for the 20-30 year old girls, not the aging population or drug addicts.
27.
by swatow 12y ago
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,
28.
by swatow 12y ago
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
29.
by swatow 12y ago
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 in
30.
by swatow 12y ago
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 th

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