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voronoffon Let's stop laughing at Groupon

Groupon itself was the one pushing poor metrics for valuation and hiring a bunch of salespeople they never intended to keep more than a year past IPO. They artificially pumped their price, and should be derided for that even if they made money doing so.

voronoffon Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles

Wikipedia is notoriously poor on science, particularly cutting edge. That's the wrong model.

voronoffon Why Warren Buffett Just Bought Duracell

The car won't start because you are wearing a personal EMP that is disabling the electronics. While older cars work fine, and some newer ones can fall back to just using analog mechanics, more and more require the electronics to work.

voronoffon A Call for a Low-Carb Diet

I'm wondering how much of the difference is due to what you're drinking, rather than eating. Cmd-f in the journal article found no "drink", "juice", "soda", or "beer", so it seems likely they didn't consider it.

voronoffon What's the Real U.S. Unemployment Rate? We Have No Idea

Do note that this measure is of people aged 16+, so it decreases with both longer education on average and an aging population (where a greater % of people are retired.)

voronoffon Some Dark Patterns Now Illegal in UK

Do you have any links to writings on this (Anarcho-collectivism from a complexity perspective or vice-versa)? Did both a quick journal search and a Google search and didn't find much.

voronoffon On the foolishness of “natural language programming”

Having actually done research in this field, I feel confident in saying that you are wrong about the state of consensus. Here's a decent overview of the ongoing debate (assuming you are aware of what Skinner and Chomsky's theories involve): http://www.simplypsychology.org/language.html

voronoffon Reading Literature on Screen: A Price for Convenience?

While the XKCD comic has a lot of truth to it, it's mainly about many different individual experiments (as well as some poorly done ones.) When running large sets of correlations, standard operating procedure is to use one of several techniques to counteract this effect.

voronoffon Reading Literature on Screen: A Price for Convenience?

Criticizing the stats of an article that hasn't been published b/c of science news reporting on it is an exercise in madness.

Criticize the science news instead.

voronoffon An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented (2012)

To be glib, it has been done. We call it language.

Seriously, though, take a look at the link I posted in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8180924

One of the techniques used is to computationally create a space of possible ways to partition semantic domains on a plane whose dimensions are simplicity and informativeness, in order to look at where in the possible space it is that real languages lie. While it's not been done (to my knowledge) for a whole language, it's potential direction to go.

voronoffon An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented (2012)

For anyone who is interested in what an ideal language would look like, particularly in respect to brevity vs. informativeness I'd highly suggest looking into Terry Regier's work: http://lclab.berkeley.edu/

I worked in his lab on one of many projects showing that most human languages use a near optimal trade-off in various semantic domains (so far - color, kinship, containers, and spatial relations). His work also includes some of the best evidence for some language dependent forces in cognition interacting with some universal ones.

voronoffon Stellar

Anyone else concerned that there seems to be a permanent confirmation code for resetting pw sent in plain text over email?

"Keep this code SAFE. Anyone with this code and your username can gain access to your account"

Where I'm from, that is a password.

voronoffon My iOS Indie-Game Numbers

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tournament_theory

is an economic theory for explaining that.

voronoffon Polygon sat down with one of the creators of Dwarf Fortress

We're getting there. mifki's working on getting multilevel rendering for basic tilesets (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=138754.105) and then that will be exploring 3d. Stonesense itself is headed in that direction, see the most recent forum page: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=106497.1035

voronoffon Polygon sat down with one of the creators of Dwarf Fortress

You can play in Stonesense, though it's still early days yet and only works on the last patch.

http://www.wired.com/2014/07/dwarf-fortress-3d/

voronoffon Data.sparkfun.com: A place to push your data

This is cool, but it really needs a better metadata section than just tags. Weather station data becomes a lot more interesting with it's location.

voronoffon A Billionaire Mathematician’s Life of Ferocious Curiosity

I'm not talking about the subjectivity of value at all, though I can see how that might be unclear. I'm talking about the assumption of perfect information that is inherent in your statement.

voronoffon A Billionaire Mathematician’s Life of Ferocious Curiosity

"when people trade freely, they are both better off (otherwise they wouldn't trade!)" isn't true. Instead, it's that both people think that they are better off when they make the trade. A subtle distinction but also the most important criticism of a purely free market.

voronoffon Dropping Loot

You do realize this is a loot system for a roguelike, right? Not a story driven CRPG.

voronoffon Facebook experiments had few limits

Changes to Gmail's spam filtering algorithms, however, do happen without your consent or knowledge. Similar to how changes to the algorithm governing FB's News Feed happen without your consent or knowledge, but you know that it exists. Like your spam folder, you can tab to "Most Recent" to see what you are missing.

voronoffon Facebook experiments had few limits

What exactly is it that you think chemicals do when consumed by humans?

voronoffon Facebook experiments had few limits

1) That is where a significant portion of their revenue comes from.

2) News feed has been around for a long time in a form beyond what's newest. This has been well publicized.

3) Every company with durative engagement tests on users. If they don't, they don't have the interaction with users they desire.

4) Much like how the music in stores example is reminiscent of the CIA used music torture in Guantanamo. Or maybe, just maybe, there is some nuance to discuss?

5) This is the most valid of your points, but it's not uncommon for legal documents to be updated for more general coverage and doesn't necessarily imply the activity is unethical.

6) Gmail does. It's called spam filtering.

voronoffon The Highest-Paid CEOs Are The Worst Performers, New Study Says

Stock markets also consider risk, so when a new CEO pushes for a new direction, that's penalized initially even if it's the correct long term approach because more is unknown.

voronoffon The Pivot

This is reminding very much of the debate around the Efficient Market Hypothesis, as to whether traders can be systematically good vs. just repeatedly lucky. There is a lot of lit on this issue.

voronoffon Architecting a Machine Learning System for Risk

Care to do a write up of what you're doing as far as fraud prevention goes? However you feel about Airbnb, this was an interesting post. It's not ground breaking or earth shattering, but it shows the tech stack that a large company is using to solve a real problem, and that's useful. They even did a fairly good job of explaining the why.

voronoffon Airbnb closes $500M round of funding at a $10B valuation, led By TPG

This is right, but isamuel is also right in that there is the separate effect of the price of control, such that in reality it's harder to say what would happen in the AirBnB case because of the interaction effects.

It would be interesting to probe into further, but the most directly applicable data is probably fairly hard to get ahold of, given that it's investment/acquisition offers not taken in lieu of the other.

voronoffon A CNN Viewer Has Questions for Mike Rowe

There is a difference between doing hard work and working hard. Hard work (of various sorts) for an extended period of time often has a long term negative impact on one's health. The people who do it should be respected, definitely, but glorified? Seems like a bad idea especially considering the lack of transference to other fields and growing automation.

voronoffon "Put down the crack pipes" doesn't go so well

In my experience, all a man needs to do in order for someone to ask if they are, in fact, an engineer, is to dress well. Nice leather shoes and a well fitting suit worn casually will instantly create doubt about engineering interest and capability.

That being said, it's pretty common for the female engineers I know to not be taken seriously, especially at the start of their careers.

voronoffon Mining a 1993 game design for innovative game mechanics

You're missing the point of his post - he was saying that while path recalculation exists, it's hard to make an AI that makes proper choices when it comes to following the current path and creating a new path - especially when it's opponent can also modify the available paths in the future.

voronoffon Mining a 1993 game design for innovative game mechanics

If you want to talk simultaneous execution games, the original computerized version is probably RoboSport, a 1991 Maxis game.

The mechanic is deep enough that it can still be fun to play a few rounds with a friend, despite the utter simplicity of the game.