zcarter

One weird trick: sit at the very front of your chair with your thighs pitched down, weight resting on your butt. That will angle your pelvis forward, closer to a standing position. You should find it easier to sit upright with your spine straight.

For a flavor of the content that is being reminisced, an old favorite: https://www.theawl.com/2011/11/a-conspiracy-of-hogs-the-mcri...

Prominently featured in a recent documentary on manufacturing in Shenzhen. Recommended: http://www.wired.co.uk/video/shenzhen-full-documentary

Per Neuroskeptic's due diligence, human effects don't look promising.

>>> This is a citation to one of their own papers, from 2012. There’s just one problem – as far as I can see that paper didn’t find the correlation that Zanos et al. say it did.

Also available as python/R packages-

pypi: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/brewer2mpl/1.4.1

cran: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/RColorBrewer/index.h...

I like to explain it with a wager: pick a star from the night's sky. If you pick the star I'm thinking of, I'll give you a dollar. After you've made your selection, I'll give you the opportunity to switch to one other star, guaranteeing that either your star or this one alternative will be the star I had in mind. Do you want to switch?

Tongue in cheek? Alternatively, you should know about: http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/generated/pandas...

If anyone is looking for a starting point to Gardner's vast works, I highly recommend "Aha! Insight."

MS backend dev here. Are you referring to the Mighty Spring position?

We are automagically matching new signups to our own open positions to both dogfood our product and give users a sense of how the job match process works when they don't have good organic matches.

Sorry if this was confusing.

Mighty Spring backend dev here. The short answer is yes, but there are not many remote-only jobs right now (beta and what-have-you). That will hopefully soon change.

Candidate affordances let you indicate a willingness to work remotely, and a requirement for remote work only. If your skill set and desires don't overlap, we won't recommend you a remote-only job just because it is remote.

I think a useful conversation to have is, "how quickly we can replace politicians with robots?" A political discourse addressing the topic would necessarily acknowledge the radical changes most technology enthousiasts expect to take place in our lifetimes.

The most common response to hearing that a machine can do your job is disbelief (http://kk.org/thetechnium/2011/09/the-7-stages-of/). Fertile ground for dismissing the imminently possible as science fiction.

Coming from an investment management background, it has been hilarious to see people espousing all manner of foolish nostrums about tech hiring, showcasing biases that have proper names in the investment community,

My favorites are of the "never hire Xs" variety, as a manifestation of the snake bite effect. Woah... what happened between you and someone with a dual CS/Art History major?

I would reframe the suggestion as two ideas. 1) "hire for your culture" and 2) conditioning on a cultural expectation of individuals putting up with lots of problems on their own, "make sure new hires can cope."

The latter is an important point, but the idea that all startups have this attitude towards employees and crisis management is not accurate.

How important is it for potential candidates to know if the culture at a startup they are considering working for has these values? I'm guessing a blog like this turns off a lot of people, but to the author's point, not anyone they would hire. Effective :D

FD: back end dev at Mighty Spring, we do startup hiring. (mightyspring.com)

If I'm going to be automating jobs away, they may as well be jobs that are generally loathed.

FD: MS engineer participant

Looks like someone there got a hold of Edward Tufte's "The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint"

http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/powerpoint

"the popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis."

Some relevant points for engineers addressed here: http://blog.mightyspring.com/post/74827679281/battling-outsi...

Know who (with)holds information

Avoid information asymmetry

An interesting thought experiment that should be informing more of the discussion is to take inevitability for granted.

If mass surveillance does exist, the concern becomes equality of access. Information asymmetry is now the problem. Fear of blackmail is moot when everyone already has access to the information. If we must have technology intruding on our privacy, I would personally prefer a world where everyone can intrude, instead of a select few.

Fully public, mass surveillance is logical extension and conclusion of if-you-have-nothing-to-hide rhetoric.

I find Terrence McKenna's argument that consciousness is demonstrably entangled in the material world at a quantum mechanical, atomic level convincing. To summarize, it is known that two similar chemical compounds, differing only in the placement of a single atom on the carbon ring structure of a molecule, when administered in doses at the order of micrograms will either be psychoactive and result in a massive disruption to the human subject's baseline consciousness or be inert beyond our ability to measure an effect.

Given the asymmetry in the difficulty market participants have with selling (and withdrawal in fiat, in a timely manner) or shorting bitcoin, as compared to the effort involved in buying bitcoin, any news is bullish news. This should hold generally and is not specific to publicity about the attack.

Assuming equal reach for would-be-sellers and would-be-buyers, more buyers are capable of expressing their opinion in the market than are sellers.

If you suppress prices, you reduce supply. Demand remains high, supply is now artificially low.

One unspoken benefit of this history of wage suppression is the dearth of engineering talent today. Rather than high prices signaling an opportunity to invest in an engineering education, labor market participants should have rationally chosen different skills and disciplines given the relatively low perceived market pay.

It stands to reason that engineers are getting paid more now than they otherwise would be thanks to temporal lags and education costs. If an unrigged market had been signaling prices that conformed to job market participant's real demands, the students of yesterday could have recognized better job opportunities today.

I always explain this problem with stars: I'm thinking of a star in the night's sky... guess which one.

Alright, good guess, but would you consider changing? You can either keep your original guess, or switch to this one other star I'm pointing to now.

Everyone switches.

Step one (always): Look at your data.

Only then should you choose the statistic(s) you 'care' about.

A story about the benefits of fiber optic cable over investment is often used to dismiss the harm caused by the late nineties internet bubble.

What do we have to show for our recent hosting bubble?

Right. I needed to define "problems." Problems at the level of society. If everyone has access to everyone else's behavior on the internet, society would change, yes, but I do not really believe the possibility of 'change' to be a problem itself.

Considering your former stripper example: - If they would be kicked out of the job, is the former stripper not defrauding the school and the parent in this example? Privacy in this case is helping the former stripper deceive the (possibly overprotective) parent. Is reducing the incidence of fraud a problem? - people having false beliefs and biases that are shattered by new information (possibly harmful by causing them emotional distress?) is not a reason to prevent the discovery of that new information. Generally, I don't think it is a problem if the reality of the world causes trauma in the form of preventing foolish ideas from continuing. I imagine Ted Haggard's outing was very emotionally traumatic for his parishioners. - Relative social morals would obviously change. Almost everyone has done something society deems weird on the internet. Social norms around pornography, for example, will change. The moment this happens, the parent would likely realize, everyone has done something possibly deemed objectionable in their past. Further, the parent would have better information about how the former stripper is currently behaving - the best way for them to make decisions about their child now.

Right, "Price Stability" is a different thing with real merits.

Most of the problems arise from the existence of asymmetric information. Consider how a blackmailer's power evaporates when the information they possess is made public. I think the simplest and most likely outcome is that all of the collected data will be made public.

While it would be nice to maintain the illusion of privacy, it is only that, an illusion.

The 'depreciating currency is a problem' argument is true for the existence of any asset having a higher yield than your widget factory. Why wouldn't you invest in that high yield asset instead of your widget factory? In this way, you can view _any_ appreciating asset as a reference unit of account. It is just as easy to see your egg and milk purchases as units of the high yield asset and delay your purchases for the same reason outlined in the article. So, it's a nonsense argument.

If you have a strong prior that stocks are going to be worth 100% more tomorrow than they are today, why would you buy milk and eggs with your spacebux today? You could invest your spacebux in stocks, sell them tomorrow, and buy milk and eggs tomorrow! Therefore, no one will buy milk and eggs today if stocks are expected to rise in price.