dthunt

Please elaborate; I would like to know more about this incident.

I wonder if you could get subjects who travel a lot to record, before going to sleep each night, in a secret journal they do not share with each other, about whether or not they experience a hum in any given location. If those journals substantially agreed, you might be able to get a clearer picture of what, if anything, is going on.

If there is any sort of community built around a potentially hard to observe phenomenon, it's likely going to be a mess sorting out true stuff from false stuff.

Wow. Way to not actually respond to the request.

Comments > Votes.

Not necessarily.

A decent percentage of the time someone is experiencing a "heisenbug" it's because there are some stale object files sitting around, and the build state has gotten inconsistent (makefile bugs, bad tracking of dependencies, or what have you).

You go to build debug, everything works, you shrug, make clean, remake, and then you're golden again.

Obviously that's really not the way to go, though, because you risk mistaking an uncommon crash for "just had to rebuild, I guess" - but if you're comfortable reading assembly or what-have-you, you can usually confirm the "stale object files" thing easily -

and then fix your build ;)

I have upvoted this not because I agree, but because you have provided a basis for your statement about why you don't buy this line of reasoning.

I look toward the prospects of women in Japan for an indication as to what's wrong. These are people who have grown up with dreams that society seems unwilling to support. For how many women in Japan is 'Maybe it's time to have a kid in the next few years' tantamount to "I must give up any dreams of having a career"?

I would note that there is a particular fascination with Japan and sex, and that google is unlikely to give you an accurate depiction at the frequency of weird in Japan.

I suspect that weird exists in any population of sufficient size.

I have literally been propositioned on the street between Shibuya and Ikejiri. Places I would not have expected it.

I can't speak to signage, as I generally steer clear of areas that seem shady, and I wouldn't put a lot of trust into such things anyway.

Regarding the source of much of the information in this article, I have little to offer. If you were to weigh the hypothesis that the source was advertising services against the hypothesis that this came up in conversation with the article author and she found this worth noting, which do you think is more likely, given that this is interesting information that is unlikely to be left out of a sex-charged article?

In this case, being charitable about the parties involved in this article is probably correct.

I find the labeling of people very frustrating.

People often have very good reasons to pick the labels they do, but those reasons are often fairly nuanced. The only way to respect that nuance is to honor the label. And you don't even have to be Neil deGrasse Tyson to run into relabelling.

Whether that relabeling is done by a Pew poll that labels you as a religious person because you attended a single religious service one year because you were curious about an unknown slice of culture, or by a friend trying to soften your image by labeling you as something they think is less offensive, it's infuriating.

I can't imagine how frustrating this has to be for someone who actually has the burden of having a voice that people are interested in hearing; when someone reduces a careful and intimate response to a fairly personal question to not only a single word, but the wrong word.

It makes me sick.

I ran into my first experience with this sort of thing while looking into Mormon initiation rites on wikipedia. I certainly understand why Mormons may be interested in keeping initiation secrets off of wikipedia, but wikipedia has no interest in censoring that information. And yet, at least the last time I checked, I had a very hard time finding that in part because of the mess of articles I ran across and the reshuffling of articles.

Is there an easy way to search for deleted articles and read the discussion history for them?

I think the better lesson is not, 'how many hours of homework is fair' but, 'teachers, please assign the minimum effective dose of homework'. This is one of the reasons I think labs are effective in high school science classes, provided they don't spell everything out for you and require you to understand what is going on, why you are doing it, and what's the important points are of what is going on. Applying knowledge is far more effective at making knowledge stick than balancing chemical equations.

My advice, stop using the word faith, and carve the word up into something that means more precisely what you are trying to say.

I'm not sure that choosing to believe arbitrary things due to the consequences of believing those things can be rational. An active choice to believe something without evidence due to the consequences of belief has no effect on the odds that the proposition is true. It's the difference between "I have belief in Thor" and "I believe that belief in Thor is good." Very, very different things, and they are not remotely interchangeable.

A belief that can be demonstrated and tested, because it is inherently an objective phenomenon is better known as a hypothesis.

A belief which has your confidence because of subjective experience that cannot be shared (i.e. if you tried to, everyone would think you were crazy) can be rationally held, though it would be irrational to think you could successfully spread this belief.

A belief which you are terrified of testing against the crucible of reality by making excuses for why there is no evidence (e.g. epiphenomenal dualism, wherein the material plane is observed by the metaphysical plane, but the metaphysical plane never acts at all with the physical plane, and the metaphysical plane not existing would look exactly the same as the metaphysical plane existing) is by definition, fucking nuts. When you are making excuses for a belief about why it should be immune to testing, you are in a very, very deep error state.

I would be shocked if Appelbaum is still using a standard cell-phone at this point. There's just too much reason to worry about remote compromise of the device.

What I meant was that for h_1%, you're going to wind up with probabilities in the area of like, 1.2e-34, very quickly, if the coin is a fair one. The update process is adjusting via multiplication, and for a really bad hypothesis, that's going to bring its probability dramatically close to zero without that many trials. Even though the absolute difference between 1e-4 and 1-e34 hypothesis feels smallish when you look on a linear scale from 0-1, a 1-e34 is a lot 'stickier'.

Your explanation has the benefit of being a better explanation; my goal was just to explain where the inertia was hiding.

For argumentative purposes (if trying to reach a consensus with someone who claims to be 95% sure that the coin is 'fair' and accepts the '45-55% heads is fair' definition), you would concentrate most of your probability mass there, and find a mutually agreeable shape. The 'it's not shaped like a sphere' thing suggests that some people would take into account visual information about the object to inform their priors, and be prone to rejecting the fitness of the uniform.

That may conflict with your sensibilities if you expect very strange coins, but if the priors aren't too crazily bad, if you have enough time for a few more coin flips, and the coin isn't particularly brittle, what's an order of magnitude between friends?

Edit: And for formal mathy purposes, ask someone else :)

In fact, it is accounted for. You'll notice the negative exponent on the unlikely hypotheses is getting pretty extreme after a handful of flips.

There are plenty of reasons to want to perform that kind of scan on the internet. Sometimes, if all you're looking for is a a sample of how many people are running version X of a product versus version Y, you really don't need to map the whole internet.　　You can just sweep for your port of interest across a few million random IPs and call it a day.

Sometimes, though, if you are building a directory, or if you just want a really fantastically beautiful map, you scan the whole shebang.

Doing it all in a few minutes is a little unncessary, though, even if it is neat how much better scanners have been getting lately. A scan that merely takes a few days is plenty fast.

Why are MAC's persistent?

They're totally insecure, so you can't make sensible security decisions off of them. Why aren't they randomly assigned on power-up?

I'm confused. Someone who makes an ACTUAL credible threat against someone typically just goes in a police file. Someone who makes a threat - not even to slander, but to investigate and expose - is committing a crime?

If I say, "Jim is a dirtbag, I'm going to expose him and his whole dirty family," what have I done? It sounds like I'm just an investigative journalist with delusions of being good at my job and who probably has a personal grievance with Jim.

I happen to not be a fan of the individual in this case, but it's important to be realistic about the whole business of threats against reputation.

Actually, if I recall correctly, he explicitly said that he was not making bodily threats, merely that he would do what he could to destroy the reputation of the agent that he had an issue with.

The video speaks for itself. Unless it doesn't (my memory is far from perfect）

This.

The same set of cognitive defects that are responsible for statements like this are responsible for belief in homeopathy and in the power of prayer to cure cancer (despite taking chemotherapy drugs).

People are remarkably bad at understanding the differential power of evidence with respect to their beliefs. That includes experts. Being right about what the evidence is doesn't mean we account for it correctly.

This quote, from the MS guy, is prompting me to work out the math on Bayesian updating in an incompletely hypothesized space, tonight, because I for one would like to know how/when I can rationally update my absolute and relative beliefs about hypotheses in response to weak evidence, and if this implies anything about how I should select for less mysterious hypotheses.

This seems like a really basic idea, but as a 31 year old, I am only now wrestling with the process of making less stupid decisions. I suspect the same is true for many of you.

And for that reason alone, I can't really hate on the Morgan Stanley guy, because in my heart of hearts, I think he's probably not the sharpest tool in the shed, and it should not surprise me that he develops confidence in other places that probably aren't warranted.

I can, however, hate on the world that allows people like this to be in a position to impact the world economy, just like I can be angry that there isn't a mandatory 'using evidence in making policy' training program for members of congress.

My reaction as well. Piss on that.

The polygraph is a stress interview tactic, full stop. It's the bad cop in the room.

That's why the very first part of the polygraph if where they are 'calibrating', and inevitably announce that the polygraph machine is working, but only sometimes offer to show you 'proof' that it works.

An skeptic would do well to announce as much, announce that she is a 23-ton hippopotamus named Wilfred, consumed a gallon of paint-thinner before coming to the interview, and ask to see the output after that extraordinary claim by the interviewer.

(just as an addendum to the above, compare: drug dogs, in theory, and in practice, in light of recent disclosures about the DEA's 'parallel reconstruction' program.

Supposedly the Patriot Missile was protecting Israel during the first Gulf War, but there are as far as I know zero confirmed hits (IIRC the Pentagon generously thinks that a few scuds were deflected, but Israel thinks otherwise).

The point is that just because a program is thought of as 'famously effective'　doesn't mean it actually is.

I call foul on behavioral detection.

I sincerely doubt there's a way to differentiate between someone who is ill and someone who is pale and has the jitters because they're about to do something bad. I moreover call foul on the notion that there are enough of the latter set to build an effective training program to create effective BDOs.

What's actually happening here is probably that BDOs are being used to justify retroactively special treatment given to people for invented reasons. It's sort of like a false alert from a drug dog - it's a claim that you can't really cross-examine, since the supposed microexpressions someone exhibits are too fast or too small to be picked up by a camera.

As I recall it, one of their partner newspapers deliberately misunderstood how encryption worked, leaked their special passcode to one of the document archives, and then pointed at Wikileaks for being shitty after themselves handing the keys to the unredacted documents to the world.

Correction. They PROVOKED the dog before shooting it.

Correct. I'm being completely serious, with the exception of the remark about exploding limbs (obviously).

Broad enumeration capabilities of this sort don't make sense. You don't need me to tell you why, because the moment you considered these features not existing, you immediately thought up alternatives that didn't involve running javascript, some of which require changes in the way people think about building web-pages, some of which may require changes in various specifications.

JS has more features than it deserves for learning about and (critically) sharing information about the host platform. Yes, you can still learn some things as a website operator by watching what browsers load/don't load, and what they put in their requests.

That does not mean that disabling javascript doesn't have value w/r to privacy concerns. Compare panopticlick.eff.org w/, w/o javascript enabled.

Edit: I should hasten to add that there are other concerns beyond privacy, like accessibility and the fact that a web page has no bloody business deciding that I'm likely running an iPad and therefor I shouldn't have access to X or Y. This is dumb, and contrary to the idea of the open internet. It's the same thing that's wrong with this EME nonsense.