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fburnabyon The unemployed will not be considered

Perhaps that unemployed are all just trying to create more HR positions in the company so they can apply to those, too!

fburnabyon The unemployed will not be considered

This is probably true. But then again, if you know that most of your resumes are thrown out at random, you know you need to send out a large population of them in order to have a just few of them end up being read.

fburnabyon The unemployed will not be considered

> Though "must already be in a relationship" would not be a very mainstream criteria for dating sites.

This seems to be a very popular idea in some circles, actually.

fburnabyon Our greatest shortcoming is our inability to understand the exponential function

The reason that the curve levels out for biological populations is that the rates at which members start starving to death or killing each-other increases to cancel out the birth-rate. That does seem to be of some concern.

fburnabyon Science fails to face the shortcomings of statistics

This is also only true if the distribution of each sample is the same. If you don't understand the system you're sampling from, or where the variability comes from (maybe its systematic), then all bets are off.

fburnabyon Science fails to face the shortcomings of statistics

I'm doing a master's degree in science right now. I've previously worked as a telecomm engineer. I agree that there is relatively little division of labour in science, compared to engineering; or at least the labour isn't divided in the same way. I'm not convinced that this is bad, and in fact it's probably necessary.

Most of the useful scientific results synthesize previous results from various fields. There are very few observations incoming that actually add to or question the prevailing theories of a given field. It seems to me from my short experience that most of the work is in reducing theories, and experimentally confirming the reductions. To be useful as a scientist, there's a good change that you'll need to be an expert in at least two things.

I don't think it should be surprising that generating novel knowledge requires substantially more overhead than does acquiring and exploiting it (eg. engineering, or any practical pursuit where division of labour works so well). This may not apply to the medical research that was mentioned in the article, (the system is too complex for theoretic reduction to be useful) but I doubt that physical, ecological, mathematical, etc. sciences would progress as quickly without their practitioners having broad knowledge of their subjects.

fburnabyon Ask HN: How many of you founders are girls ?

Wouldn't it make more sense if your tagline was "hot masala applications?"

fburnabyon Why 3D pie charts are bad

Well there's an easy solution here. Make the red smell like strawberry pie and the blue like blueberry pie.

fburnabyon The Scary New Rich

I was thinking the same thing. That quote describes our society pretty well.

fburnabyon "Don't work too hard, or you'll screw up the economy"?

>It really is the broken window fallacy, but in reverse; that working harder could decrease aggregate employment implies that working less hard (or more counter-productively) could increase aggregate employment.

Not all system responses are reversible. I can start working really hard, making it feasible for my company to lay someone else off. I could later stop working so hard, but there's no reason to expect that job to come back.

> This is even more hare-brained than the suggestion that we should all work less

Did the article make a suggestion? I think it was more of a scientific statement that this would happen. Of course in a global competitive market it's irrational for any single individual to start working less. That in no way refutes the claim being made. Depoliticize for a second and consider the claims being made. Your stance is right, but you have no need to defend it here.

fburnabyon High Academic Results Make Better Programmers

>Calculus, literature, CS 101: C. Topology, Operating Systems, Quantum Mechanics: A.

But why isn't it preferable to have the person who goes with: Calculus, literature, CS 101: A. Topology, Operating Systems, Quantum Mechanics: A. ?

Perhaps the C/A person was spending their time better elsewhere when they could get away with it. But even so, this doesn't really excuse them because either the C/A student:

(1) "gets it" -- in which case doing well in those easy classes would be trivial. Given that all the students know what the game is (get high grades), why would an employer trust them to take a job seriously when they refuse to perform any trivial tasks despite the high return on low investment?

(2) "didn't bother learning the easy stuff" -- in which case they probably don't actually have any deep understanding of these more advanced topics. This would suggest to me that they simply started figuring out the teachers password for those courses.

I don't see any way to interpret the C/A student as being better than the A/A student without knowing more about either the student (certainly some interaction can reveal a drone) or the classes (there are tough classes out there, which actually require understanding for high performance).

Edit: Self-awareness check -- I made the transition from "C/A" in high school to "A/A" in university. This was based on an attitude adjustment, and the realization that I'm playing a partly silly, but also partly valuable game and I might as well try to win both. I suppose this opens up a third possibility in which the C/A transition comes from a change in the student. But that should still at best put me on par with an A/A student, given no more information.

fburnabyon Sarcastic Font

I think someone above more correctly identified this as a deadpan delivery of some sarcastic statement. This is probably more effective and funny. But sometimes people like to be very blatant about the fact that they're being sarcastic. Especially when talking with someone they don't know well. Like strangers on the internet.

fburnabyon Stuff

I once felt the same way about a toque (yes, I'm Canadian).

fburnabyon Stuff

Geoffry Miller, nice! If I owed a house, it would be on both lists. Other than that, my computer, education and guitar are shared on both lists. Below those, my most expensive purchases have been necessities (think bed mattress, rent, etc). Honestly, it feels wrong to regret spending money on these. I may not love them, but they're part of the cost of living.

The list exercise might make more sense to non-students.

fburnabyon Stuff

I remember thinking the same thing about Ikea when I went through one of their catalogs last week. But I think it seems like a bad idea; it makes their products feel less enticing. I could look at their furniture and -- though the pictures still look very nice -- think to myself "how would I navigate around that with a cup of tea and a book in my hand?".

fburnabyon No One Knows What the F*** They're Doing (or "The 3 Types of Knowledge")

But what about the example with the egotist? The fact that so many people can be so blatantly oblivious to their "unknown unknowns" makes me think I must have some of them too. I can be cautious and look out for them, which should certainly help me reduce them, but these things are almost by definition the things that you don't notice.

fburnabyon How unique -- and trackable -- is your web browser?

Hey! You're exactly as unique as me!

fburnabyon When work doesn't pay for the middle class

>> and there will certainly be someone else trying for that

That deserves an award for understatement of the year. You could probably set up a five man brawl to the death for that job right now.

fburnabyon When work doesn't pay for the middle class

>> Try living on $20k/year and see how that works out for you.

Granted, I'm single and don't have kids, but even living on $20,000/yr right now isn't bad. I can't have a car, but other than that, I can make any small (<$500) purchase I want without any real worry. Tell me I only get $14,000 and I'll start to worry.

fburnabyon When work doesn't pay for the middle class

No bureaucrats are making any decisions in either of your hypothetical scenarios. In one case, there's an unchanging legislative environment incentivizing more work, while in the other case the legislative environment is incentivizing other potentially valuable things. No decisions made.

As long as the tax code isn't too complicated and it doesn't change constantly, then how is the government meddling? There are just free people making their own decisions; their decisions just have slightly altered outcomes depending on the environment they're made in.

fburnabyon Schools should not "teach the controversy". But why does Google get a pass?

What's wrong with the existence of misinformation? I don't think there's anything wrong with being able to find silly lies on google. There's something more ominous about children being forced to learn this misinformation, as would be the case in a school.

fburnabyon Vitamin D deficiency increasingly common

Atlantic wild caught salmon

How did you obtain wild Atlantic salmon? It's an endangered species, and fishing is not allowed! If this is really what you have, how did you get it? If it's legal, let me know, I want some too! If not, you should probably stop...

fburnabyon Why do so many terrorists have engineering degrees?

because its "awesome", whereas many of the science students I know like science because they think it is important and interesting.

I think you're right on the money. I just finished an engineering degree and am now doing a MSc. I think my engineering classmates like science because they can learn things that are "true" and "know the answers". We would talk about projects, and standards and make bad puns using our newly-learned technical jargon. My science friends use words like "sexy" when describing theories, and they like to think about things in a far more epistomologically sophisticated way.

They mentioned the high religiosity and conservatism of engineers in the article. I wouldn't be at all surprised if these are the traits that distinguish engineers from scientists.

fburnabyon Sex and shopping - it's a guy thing

What if you hang around in a culture in which conspicuous consumption is generally frowned upon? You would have apparently conflicting goals; a presumably "hard-wired" desire for the car, yet a more learned knowledge that it won't actually help you implement the intentions of your genes.

In short, I'm proposing that it could be one of those examples of an out-of-evolutionary-context kind of behavior.

fburnabyon Students Ace Textbook Physics While Struggling With Basic Understanding (video)

If you're anything like me, you'd also have graduated at around 30.

fburnabyon E-books spark battle inside the publishing industry

>>Most authors don't know how to nor want to self-publish their books.

I'm cheaper than an existing publisher if the author is willing to go digital only. Hmmm, maybe there's an opportunity for small publishers to make a comeback...

fburnabyon Knuth: Computer Programming as an Art

I like to think of it as Hofstadter suggests; theorem proving is mechanical, but there is a very beautiful art in selection of the axioms.

fburnabyon While Contrarianism rarely pays, Contrarianism is the New Consensus

The general consensus on contrarianism is wrong.

He's being a contrarian about contrarianism! Must be a smart guy.

fburnabyon The Dumbest Interview Question

I hope you don't mind my running this by you all. If I'm asked this question, I will respond that my biggest weakness is that I'm coming from academia.

I believe that many hiring managers will consider this a problem, or at least a potential problem. I believe it may be a good answer anyways because 1) it doesn't actually tell them anything "bad" that they didn't already know, and 2) it signals that I am aware that working in their company won't be the same as academia and that my being aware of this makes me more likely to be able to adapt.

Any thoughts or criticisms?

fburnabyon The Dumbest Interview Question

This only applies if you're not hungry, or getting booted out of your apartment in a month.