yetanotherphd

Even though I don't think abstinence-only sex education is a good idea, it's strange that the true statement "only abstinence is 100% effective" is mocked.

Or are liberals going to start teaching an honest version of their view: "A combination of condom use and abortion when condoms fail, is 100% effective"?

These two comments together make a lot of sense.

When your try block is a single lookup, you might as well use an if statement or get. However, when the 'absolute minimum' is nontrivial try/except is still a good option, e.g.

  try:
      name = employee['name']
      first_name = name['first_name']
      last_name = name['last_name']
  except KeyError:
      print "Bad employee data"
      return

Firing people is a natural part of doing business. Decision should be judged (morally) on the margin. If I fire 100 people, I haven't resulted in 100 people never being able to work again, I have simply shifted them to their next-best option.

yeah it's weird, we are one the one hand said to be an underclass of social rejects, and on the other hand said to be immensely privileged. And on top of that, somehow being losers makes us more privileged, since it keeps normal people who don't want to be losers out of the profession. Go figure.

homomorphic encryption is like an interpreter that can run encrypted code without decrypting it.*

this is like a compiler that generates obfuscated code (that is as hard to decompile as if it were encrypted).

*Technically homomorphic encryption refers to performing arithmetic (and other?) functions on encrypted data without decrypting the data. But these operations can then be used to construct an interpreter that treats the data as code.

So basically, evidence for declining mental ability with age + fancy unverifiable model => evidence for increasing mental ability with age.

This is the worst kind of PC science.

I think the only difference between these entrepreneurs and big businesses is that big businesses would say "talk to our lawyers" instead of "talk to our lawyers, lol".

That said, if they do get sued I'm not going to feel sorry for them.

Here is what two economists at the St Louis Federal Reserve have to say about patents (tl;dr they are bad)

http://research.stlouisfed.org/wp/2012/2012-035.pdf

They built two of them, and found that they agreed to within their nominal accuracy.

No, there is no way. The information contained in this news report will have been incorporated into the stock price of all the companies long ago.

There was honest debate, your side just happened to lose.

Supply-side economics is a misnomer. Classical economics would be a much more accurate term. It is true that American workers cannot compete with lower costs overseas (though I think the lower costs have more to do with the fact that the US has more alternative means of employment and therefore higher wages). However this is no issue. As a friend of mine always likes to say, trade is like technology: you can think of other countries like a machine where you put in one kind of good (exports) and get back another (imports). So why would you want to impose a special tax on this machine? Economic theory suggests that to do so would be inefficient.

The only valid reason for protectionism is strategic: e.g. having the ability to make things for yourself in case other countries cut off supply. The US is by far the world leader in military technology so I don't think this is an issue.

I have a lot of respect for someone who can earn that much money with honest work. And those were mostly good songs, well written and arranged, and very suited to the singer, except for 22 which sucks.

I've noticed that the tech industry accords Asian women more respect that they are generally shown in other industries.

I believe that other industries, especially law and political lobbying/activism, claim to value women, but actually they are just making up for one kind of bias (believing that women are incompetent) with another: wanting to have attractive women around, and therefore giving them disproportionate respect and reward. White women especially seem to fit the preferences of these employers in this regard.

I agree that statistical correlations of marriage with various outcomes are very weak evidence of a causal effect.

However, I hope that people will apply this logic to ideas that come from both the left and right, e.g. the NYC ad campaign against teen pregnancy.

The same applies to the general principal that the government should not promote particular lifestyle. If girls want to get pregnant at 18, how is that any more the government's business than if they want to not get married?

Why would it make any sense that you are allowed to set a salary based on anything except 1.? And, if I understood your top level post correctly, why would it make sense for you to be able to classify caring for your children as working for the business?

Allowing people to choose arrangements that minimize their taxes, is the opposite of how tax law is supposed to work. Taxes should be based on economic reality, not what you choose to write down on paper.

It seems you are conflating what is beneficial for you, with what should be legal.

There is a very significant pro-Western bias amongst educated people who have moved to the West.

If you just looked at educated Chinese immigrants during the last 50 years, you would never guess at the overwhelming support for the communist party.

I agree (see my other post in this thread). But I don't know much about Ukraine. It would be great if you would post a detailed analysis as a top level post.

A lot of what seems to be grassroots could be aided, and perhaps even orchestrated, by sophisticated groups with a political agenda, e.g. the CIA.

It would only take around 10-20 bloggers to create the illusion that the majority people in the country felt a certain way.

EDIT: and nowadays, they wouldn't just blog, they would post to Reddit, and maybe even HN.

who do you think is being manipulated? Statements like that are useless without some elaboration.

I don't follow the logic here. The claim is that he could have somehow avoided this situation by acting differently.

The fact that the actions of the police were later determined to be unlawful, isn't evidence for this claim.

The downvotes are for your assumption that (1) people don't care about addressing underlying causes of suicide, and (2) people only want to fix the problem because it is inconvenient to them, and not for the sake of the people killing themselves.

It seems that you have extrapolated both these things from the fact that someone has proposed a technical solution to suicide, which is completely illogical. There is strong evidence that removing popular, easy methods of suicide actually reduce suicide rates.

Inequality exacerbates this problem, but it is not the root cause. I have heard many stories of police abuse from middle class, White people.

It is only the ultra-rich (or ultra-connected) that the police are afraid of.

That seems like an interpretation of the situation that requires a lot of assumptions beyond the bare facts.

The police were acting well outside the law, and so I don't think knowing his rights would have helped this man.

While this sounds like very useful advice in general, I wonder if uttering this magic phrase would actually have resulted in this man from being released? The facts of the case suggest that these actions were not done under the guise of a voluntary search/interview, which is what these phrases are generally designed to deal with.

I have no doubt that professionalization is highly related to social and political savvy. The ability to form an "in-group" and commit to doing what is in the interests of this group (thus solving the free-rider problem) is an essential social skill.

However, when groups professionalize in the sense of restricting the supply of people to that job, they are benefiting their own in-group at the expense of society as a whole (customers, employees and shareholders, people excluded from the profession, and indirectly, everyone else). Tech workers intuitively recognize this, and professionalization is the antithesis of hacker culture. In fact, I would say that professionalization wouldn't actually help the nerdy people you are referring to. It would just bring in different people (of course the social justice movement is already working hard to eliminate hacker/nerd culture from the tech industry).

As this article shows, tech workers are fighting this issue through the legal system. Maybe a union will be needed just to deal with this issue. I suspect that the rivalry between Google and Facebook, and the fear of further lawsuits, will keep competition rigorous in the short term.

I agree. People here are acting as if our collective unwillingness to lobby for rent-seeking legislation, is a personality flaw.

I don't think that an expert is viral communications theory would have done any better.

Almost everything involving networks is a fad. Networks are an interesting mathematical structure, but on their own, they rarely enable one to build a compelling statistical model. E.g. people join Facebook for very complex social reasons, that go beyond local interactions between individuals. The image of Facebook has changed significantly since it started, and new products have entered the market, like snapchat and kik.

Very nice. I think the bigger issue is that there is a huge amount of academic research in which a fancy model (usually involving the latest academic fads) is considered a substitute for serious statistics.

I think Facebook's models with linear time trends are actually much more believable than the original paper.

Well another minority might view strip teases as an act of empowerment and self expression, and be made alienated and uncomfortable by your sex-negative viewpoint. How would you balance the interests of these two minorities?

In HN we reserve consideration and respect for people who can't afford the rent in San Francisco. An old woman dying of cancer deserves none. She was probably a homophobe too!