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If I understand correctly, the issue is when you track the effect as a rolling value and stop the test as soon as it dips above the significance level.

So for instance, let's say your test is to roll a dice 6 times. You say "if I get 6 100% of the time, then I'll consider that significant". You do the first roll and get a 6. Well that's 100% of the time, so you end the test and claim you had a significant result.

I'm not sure what you're asking. I just believe in economics.

For me it's built in as a senior software dev, no extra compensation. But, it's 3 or 4 one-week shifts a year because everyone is in the rotation. Usually nothing happens. We are a small company (< 150) and we run a public marketplace website, so someone has to do it.

If either I was in a more junior position, or the on call issues were very frequent, then I might feel differently.

I don't know your situation, but I would ask: what has changed? Is the product turning out to be less reliable than expected, or has the previous arrangement for support failed somehow, funding cut etc.?

In a previous job we built projects with 18 month dev cycles, and then went into a 6 month session of intensive support, basically being on call every day. But we always knew that going in.

This. I strongly suspect that the biggest problem in school for children from good families isn't the schooling but rather the presence of children from bad families.

My sister is a primary teacher and the things I've heard make it clear that the system tries to make up for bad parenting but it's and uphill struggle.

Interesting situation. Musk must have known that losing would mean inheriting the legal bill for the case against him. But conversely they must have known that they would need to be paid before he took over.

Clearly the outgoing execs sided with the law firm and made sure they got paid before the deal took effect. But the law firm took a big risk trusting them with that kind of money!

Thanks but what I'm asking is how they can tell from their names? Is there a naming convention here?

>>> About a fifth of the women’s names in the brothel indicate they were free.

Can anyone explain this?

He has a point. The comparison with money is an interesting one. Most people understand the danger of counterfeit money. But people are in a sense the currency of democracy. Creating fake people is to democracy what fake money is to the economy.

I don't know if prison is the answer but it's definitely an important question.

Tesla is probably the biggest example that springs to mind. I'm not sure they were any different from the myriad of other car startups that come and go all the time.

I think Github and Linkedin (both acquired by MS) are both more popular now but I presume they would have continued to grow in popularity anyway, so I don't know if it had anything to do with the takeover.

Instagram is another one that has done well, but again it might have done well anyway.

I might have misunderstood but I didn't see anything here about not being allowed to sell it.

The complaint was that Tesla didn't value it.

When you buy software you buy the right to use it. If the terms of the sale allow, you can transfer that right to a 3rd party. But you obviously cannot transfer it back to the manufacturer because they already own an unlimited right to do what they like with it. Your license to use the software has no value for them. What are they getting that they didn't already have?

Are people actually complaining that you can't trade in software?

>>> Which is not necessarily productivity

True. But, while I can't access the article, I suspect this might be an "all other things equal" estimate. People are always saying how they used to have so many interruptions in the office, and now they don't. But that's probably taken into account here. So maybe an 8 hour day is 6.5 hours of work in the office, but 4 hours at home.

Even if it's not really 2.5 hours, I think it's inevitable that most people work less if they can get away with it. People who are highly motivated and love their work might not have that problem, but they're the minority especially in big companies.

>>> If results are the same or better who cares how many 'hours' of work are recorded?

Good question. Who indeed! Doesn't that make you think about the whole situation? If the results are the same or better, why are CEOs complaining?

I think it's clear that we're hearing about this because the results are not the same or better, they're often worse.

I work remotely, and the company is 100% remote. But, we are small (< 150) and only hire very senior people. Everyone knows exactly what they're supposed to be doing and is accountable for their work.

It's just not like that in many organizations. Huge numbers of people really will do as little as they can get away with - and that turns out to be very little when they're unsupervised.

From the places I've worked, CEOs are often the busiest and have the most interruptions. They ought to value remote work more, what with the time they save from not having to commute. Then there's the cost of office space. It takes a lot to turn them against it.

There's a good reason why this backlash is happening.

Didn't read the whole thing but whatI did read is good.

It's very true that the Sopranos came out of nowhere and has never been surpassed.

But, its not the best show in every respect. It has the best dialogue, the most complex characters and the best acting. But it doesn't have the best character development or the best plot imo. There's more than one way for a show to be great. But while other shows are great, they are great in lesser ways. The Sopranos is the best.

I don't think its necessarily a narrative that's being pushed. It is actually happening. I only skimmed the first of the 2 articles linked but their claims are not that strong. They say that retailers are suffering from "shrink" and no one knows what's causing it. So if no one knows the cause, then that doesn't work as evidence that it's not shoplifting. It is very obvious that brazen shoplifting is happening of a kind that hasn't been seen before.

They also claim that theft as a percentage of sales has gone down. The only reason they would phrase it this way is because as an actual quantity of money, it has gone up.

It might seem reasonable to expect that losses due to shoplifting are roughly proportional to sales. But it's not clear that it should be that way. I would say that we should expect the amount of shoplifting to be capped by whatever amount can be stolen stealthily. It's natural and very reasonable imo to object to people waltzing around the shop taking whatever they want and brazenly walking out the door with a smile and a wave. We are not bound to accept that just because sales have increased.

The article hints that the real problem is that traditional retails are losing out to Amazon. But if that were true then sales would be down and shoplifting as a proportion of sales would surely be up, since no one can shoplift from Amazon.

Yes that's normal. Every year the entry period is in October, and closes in early November. At the same time it opens, they start processing the winners from the previous batch.

If you enter in Oct, your result is announced in May or June of the following year. If you are picked, then processing for your batch begins that October - 12 months after you entered.

So right now they're processing DV2023 winners. They started doing that in Oct 2022, one year after DV2023 participants entered. In October they'll start processing DV2024 winners who just found out a couple of months ago that they won, having entered in Oct 2022.

Does it make sense now?

I think that's a more complicated issue because a bar is less independent. In the US I don't know if there's anywhere that you can sell alcohol without a license, and in any case there's a host of other rules that apply to brick and mortar businesses.

Imagine a town square with spaces for market stalls. There are limited spaces. Thus if you take one, you are preventing someone else from taking one. They are public property and thus the public has a right to set terms for the business you conduct there.

Now that analogy holds for other kinds of business too. Even if you "own" the building that your bar is in, you never really fully own real estate in most countries. There are limits on what you can use it for because it's connected (physically) to the rest of the world which belongs to other people.

In contrast, my expectation is that I do fully own my brain and my thoughts and my attention and my intellectual output, and it's extremely disturbing to me that anyone thinks they should be able to compel me to devote those things to their purposes.

I'm not attempting to frame it as "the only correct opinion to hold", just mine.

The reason it's disturbing to me is that the supreme court is the last resort. In order for a case to get there, someone very powerful needs to really insist that you can or can't or must do the thing, whatever that may be.

It's disturbing to me that we need the supreme court's opinion on whether or not a person can refuse work.

I lean towards the "we invented it" camp. I used to assume that most phenomena in the physical world were approximations of mathematical perfection, which I think is the Platonic view (but I'm not sure).

But then I had a different thought: what if it's the other way around? Take the famous Zeno's paradox about motion being impossible. The argument is basically that there's an infinite amount of space between any 2 points. So you can't travel from one point to another without traversing an infinite amount of space.

Most people now say that Zeno's reasoning was wrong logically. But I don't think so. I think his mistake was his assumption that continuous motion is the right model. After that, his reasoning is fine. In other words, if it is possible to move from one point to another, then this refutes continuous space. Motion is inconsistent with continuous space.

Platonic continuity is the illusion. The discrete is not an approximation for a true, continuous underlying reality: it's exactly the other way around. Continuity is the flawed, approximate model that our brains have come up with to model a discrete underlying reality. Why should our brains have developed this way? I can only guess that nature found this the most efficient thing that worked well enough.

I'm sure many smarter people before me have thought of this and figured out what it would mean for physics so I'm probably wrong. But it certainly helped me to see the other side of the argument and I've never been able to see the Platonic view as anything but naïve since this occurred to me.

I missed most of the original discussion. This is interesting because it separates the question of whether the scenario is a violation of the rule from the question of whether you would punish it.

Depending on other things which are left undefined, I might issue a ticket for the EMT and police vehicles. If they damage the park, then it has to be paid for, and this might be the most efficient way.

I struggle to see the connection with content moderation though. I think most people have a reasonably clear idea of the kind of place they want a park to be, and would apply rules that tend to make the park more like that idea. Where there is disagreement (should dogs be allowed without leashes, should model aircraft be allowed etc.) most people accept that parks vary in this respect and you might have to find a different one or else put up with some rules that are less than ideal for you.

Online communities that have moderation problems have them because there isn't a clear consensus on what kind of place they should be. HN is a good counterexample. There's a short list of guidelines that describe the kind of place it should be, and most people stick to that. Claims of arbitrary censorship are marginal and uncommon. But youtube, FB, twitter etc. - there's no social contract for these things. There's no vision shared in good faith by most of the users and the owners. In short, there's no definition of right or wrong. So moderation is going to continue to be difficult.

You can hardly characterize fastmail this way. They've been extremely stable in the years that I've been using them. In fact this is the first time I remember seeing a mention of fastmail on HN that wasn't praise.

I didn't know this. The comments are good too, e.g.

>>> From the first few seconds of the video, I know where this is going and the answer is: the exponential function is not injective over C, so you can't cancel it. exp(x) = exp(y) implies x-y is an integer multiple of pi, so not necessarily equal.

This is exactly what I have been wondering too. I see it as a big help when adding or modifying API endpoints is hard because the API is maintained by a different team, has a different release schedule, or is just hard to change for some other reason. Otherwise I don't see much value given the overhead.

Everywhere I have lived in the US.

In Europe the view is that bigger vehicle = bigger responsibility. In the US the attitude seems to be bigger vehicle = bigger right of way. The party who stands to lose the most is expected to yield the right of way.

>>> Norton said installing speeding and red light cameras can also be effective if they work properly. Adding bike lanes can also keep drivers more alert on the road.

You know what else works? Making learning how to drive a requirement for getting a drivers license. Other countries that have tried this have had good success.

>>> History has quite a few examples of proofs believed to be correct for years that turned out to be flawed.

>>> I've seen estimates as high as a third of papers have an error.

That is pretty much what I meant by "tend" to be right. If only a third of all the software out there had "an error" that would be a dramatic improvement.

>>> Doing programming forces you to think rigorously.

Would that it were so! But alas a lot of software is happy-path only because many programmers don't tend to think mathematically. In contrast mathematical proofs tend to be absolutely bullet proof.

I can only assume that the mathematician who wrote the quote in your footnote was talking about maths notation vs computer language syntax. In that narrow sense, yes programmers need to be more careful. But software doesn't need to be anywhere near logically correct to run, and he seems to agree that in fact it never is correct.

In contrast, logical errors in published mathematical proofs are relatively rare.

Classic post-rationalization imo. If someone had written "conditions are now optimal for Wagner to stage faux-coup stunt to get what he wants" on Wednesday or Thursday, I'd be impressed. But claiming afterwards that the idealness of the conditions is proof that he must have been planning it for a while...the author is just fooling himself. He should read Taleb's The Black Swan.