billswift

The commenters here seem to have missed what I thought was Cal's point: What you know matters more than what you do, because what you can do is limited by what you know. Learning new techniques is important because it expands the arena of what you can do.

There is a difference between "doing the right thing" because it is the right thing and doing it because the victim screamed loud enough. Some people will no doubt go back to using them, and more probably will if they are consistent about doing the right thing.

119 days is a year? What planet do you live on? In fact, I think the expiration is 6 months, though I'm not sure.

And that only considers accidentally taking them out of context. As the quote from Richelieu goes, "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."

His further reading list includes Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds, but his post doesn't look like he read it himself. Surowiecki has a long list of requirements for the "wisdom of crowds" to actually be helpful, for one example the individual judgments need to be independent, that the post ignores. Without the restrictions you get different failure modes, like bubbles, runs, and traffic jams.

I don't have a link handy, but there is a very clear scanned pdf of the second edition of Calculus Made Easy from 1914 available on archive.org

Failure is a better signal than success though. You can also succeed through luck and other mostly irrelevant circumstances; but if you are trying to succeed, then you only fail despite your efforts.

>particularly receptive to the meme of fiction

Actually, our minds and memories are particularly receptive to narrative. Which can also result in problems, both the narrative fallacy ("Our need to fit a story or pattern to a series of connected or disconnected facts" which leads us to overvalue "facts" embedded in a story format) and undervaluing of statistical and other numerical data.

>it is an empirically observable fact that most people, when presented with a book, will judge it by its cover.

Of course we do. At least for a first cut judgment - after all the cover has the book's title, author, and usually a blurb; that is usually enough information to either discard it or decide to take a closer look.

That is because he has been working mostly on infrastructure, http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4071 , http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4351 and http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4335 , for example.

>Lots of developers, when faced with a choice, make it configurable instead of thinking hard about it and making the choice.

It isn't an exclusive-or; if you want power users it needs to be configurable. What you need for beginners and casual users are really good defaults, which means doing the hard thinking to choose them. If you want both types of users, you need to do both types of work.

ADDED: It also helps to make the configuration choices discoverable, to provide a path for new users to become power users.

You might also note that they did not give any sort of false positive rate - they mentioned how often it correctly identified gunfire, but not how often other sounds were incorrectly labeled as gunfire. Since gunfire is uncommon, even with a fairly high accuracy rate, it is still likely to wrongly identify other sounds as gunfire more often than making accurate identifications.

12,000 kilos = 12 metric tons ; He probably referred to it one way one time and the other way another time and the poster conflated them.

It depends on what you want; I came at calculus mostly from a civil and mechanical engineering point of view, and I found the Dover reprint of Morris Kline's Calculus: An Intuitive and Physical Approach, originally published in 1968, very helpful.

A couple of additional points:

Reading other people's programs doesn't help much because, unless you can find some really small standalone programs, they are going to be too complex for a beginner to learn much from.

Explore variations on the small programs presented in tutorials, try changing things - then try them out to see whether they now work as you expected, if they don't, keep at it until they do. It is never to early to start learning debugging.

There should be a difference in sensation because of the difference in mass of the ring versus implant. An implant, simply because it is so much smaller, should have a stronger reaction, should move or vibrate more, for a given strength of field.

No, that's why honest people avoid enterprises. There are lots of smart people with slack morals working for big businesses and Wall Street. ADDED: There are also plenty of less smart and honest people working for big businesses on lower level jobs, I was just objecting to the claim that all smart people avoided them.

I think his word choice was right, "mediocracy" means rule by the mediocre which definitely fits his comment.

Of course, another factor is how ending copyright might redirect a lot more resources into open source. Without being able to benefit from rents that come from keeping proprietary code, how many companies would switch to using and improving open source alternatives?

More likely they are better at avoiding the authorities. That is what I usually try to do.

Pure brute force is a bad metric, every 12 character password is equally good or bad by that standard. The problem is in how accessible the password is to faster, less random searches. I would think that anyone writing a cracker program would check for single or double character repetitions pretty early in their search.

The real world still has clear causality. Just because the links of causes and effects (and the involved feedback processes) are often too complex for most people to follow does not mean that they are not there. You might as well say that because most people can't do calculus, calculus isn't really useful.

For an example of lousy peer review, I posted this yesterday on LessWrong:

A new science journal recently published a seriously crackpot paper, this has the abstract a link for the pdf. I first heard about it from Derek Lowe, who has also written two follow-up posts. The first has a couple of links discussing how news of the paper spread, while the second includes a link to the journal making excuses for why they published it.

<blockquote> Moreover, members of the Editorial Board have objected to these papers; some have resigned, and others have questioned the scientific validity of the contributions. In response I want to first state some basic facts regarding all publications in this journal. All papers are peer-reviewed, although it is often difficult to obtain expert reviewers for some of the interdisciplinary topics covered by this journal. I feel obliged to stress that although we will strive to guarantee the scientific standard of the papers published in this journal, all the responsibility for the ideas contained in the published articles rests entirely on their authors. </blockquote>

I included the links to all of Derek Lowe's posts because they have other interesting links, including in the comments.

The permalink is here http://lesswrong.com/lw/9p9/open_thread_february_114_2012/5t... , so you can check out the links I included.

The article mostly ranges from silliness to fear-mongering, but at least it ends on a rational note:

"Allow me to translate Ms Wilderman's words into plain English," wrote Robert Bruce Thompson, the author of Illustrated Guide To Home Chemistry Experiments. "'Mr Deeb hasn't actually violated any law or regulation that I can find, but I don't like what he's doing because I'm ignorant and irrationally afraid of chemicals, so I'll abuse my power to steal his property and shut him down.' There's a word for what just happened in Massachusetts. Tyranny."

"Robert Bruce Thompson, the author of Illustrated Guide To Home Chemistry Experiments", also the author of PC Hardware in a Nutshell and other O'Reilly books.

There is always a "parenting crisis" in the US. I remember hearing this sort of stuff when I was a kid, 40 years ago, and have seen books on "parenting" from as far back as the 1920s with the same sorts of stuff.

If there isn't much that you are worried about losing, you can just save a local copy from your browser. I only do that with a few per month, but it works fine with no extra fiddling.

Here is the follow-up he mentioned: Textmining: My years negotiating with Elsevier, http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2011/11/27/textmining-my-years...

"Once you pay the Danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane."

Rudyard Kipling

Way back when I was in Boy Scouts, I tested for my lifesaving merit badge in a mountain lake in October. In my opinion, anyone who has the self-discipline to do this regularly isn't going to have any problem lowering his weight whatever method he chooses.

Another good comment is by Paul Ohm on Freedom to Tinker

https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/paul/united-states-v-jone...