Hacker News: starbeast

New comment by starbeast in "Larry Ellison now on Tesla's board of directors"

starbeast — Fri, 28 Dec 2018 16:11:00 +0000

Her appointment should also be discussed, given how much of Tesla's bad press has been HR related over the past year. She may prove to be the more important addition.

New comment by starbeast in "Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors"

starbeast — Fri, 28 Dec 2018 16:06:26 +0000

Given Tesla's current issues with how they have been reported to treat their workforce, while Larry might be useful in terms of finance and contacts, I'm more interested in discovering what Kathleen is bringing to the table and what her attitudes to things like unions and employee rights in general might be. I suspect that could be at least as make or break as anything Larry might do here.

New comment by starbeast in "Larry Ellison now on Tesla's board of directors"

starbeast — Fri, 28 Dec 2018 15:37:52 +0000

Given the title includes her, I'd like to know what the thought was behind removing her name. I'd be very surprised if it was; 'Larry is bad, so lets not harm people by association'.

New comment by starbeast in "911 call centers down in Washington state"

starbeast — Fri, 28 Dec 2018 14:37:01 +0000

Not only can you not always distinguish them from each other, but they are very far from being mutually exclusive. Which is somewhere else that Hanlon's razor falls down. It sets them up as being options to choose between, which is obviously a very bad model.

To be honest, when I first heard Hanlon's razor, I immediately wondered what nefarious stuff Hanlon had been up to that he wanted to deflect attention away from.

Is a bit like the old aphorism 'You can't cheat an honest man', which is of most use to con artists trying to put honest people at ease before then cheating them.

edit - also you are misrepresenting Hanlon's razor. It is not an argument that says that stupidity is merely more likely, rather it says - "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity".

New comment by starbeast in "Please do not attempt to simplify this code"

starbeast — Fri, 28 Dec 2018 14:28:58 +0000

>If "conservation of complexity" were universally true then ANY compression would be impossible.

No it wouldn't. The complexity of a pattern can usually be conserved while reducing its length, but for each pattern there is a limit. This is the entire concept behind the Kolmogorov complexity of a system and any patterns that cannot be reduced any further without removing complexity are at their limit already.

This is also related to the idea that you cannot have a universal compression algorithm.

New comment by starbeast in "How the Netherlands Feeds the World (2017)"

starbeast — Fri, 28 Dec 2018 13:08:51 +0000

Tomatoes flavour often gets killed by chilling them too far - https://www.newscientist.com/article/2109336-heres-why-putti...

There are probably other things going on as well, but this seems to be one of the major factors at play.

New comment by starbeast in "911 call centers down in Washington state"

starbeast — Fri, 28 Dec 2018 12:01:41 +0000

I have said this before, but Hanlon's razor is good for politeness, but not very good for assessing what people are actually up to, as people regularly disguise maliciousness as incompetence and find it fun to do so, especially in politics and other power games.

One of the many tricks to power is pleading powerlessness on the things you actually planned ahead of time while claiming full responsibility for things that are accidental.

New comment by starbeast in "Please do not attempt to simplify this code"

starbeast — Fri, 28 Dec 2018 10:40:17 +0000

If it was objectively not true, then you could have infinite compression and any program could be reduced to a single bit.

New comment by starbeast in "I Got Banned from Photographing Arch Enemy"

starbeast — Thu, 27 Dec 2018 18:40:50 +0000

Isn't pseudo though as he is also a lawyer. He may be far too used to writing like that.

New comment by starbeast in "Fridge 0.2"

starbeast — Thu, 27 Dec 2018 16:20:50 +0000

One thought, if this is combined with a freezer and there is a pumped heat exchanger between that and the fridge, you can effectively use the freezer as the battery.

New comment by starbeast in "The OPM hack explained: Bad security practices meet China's Captain America"

starbeast — Thu, 27 Dec 2018 15:21:47 +0000

On the other hand, if you know something is bad for false positives then unless it is so bad as to be unusable, you would expect that, on average, getting a few results is dubious, but lighting up like a christmas tree probably means something is actually there.

New comment by starbeast in "The Teddy Bear Effect"

starbeast — Thu, 27 Dec 2018 15:17:31 +0000

>The problem with this definition is that it is close to making every promotion decision meritocratic by definition.

This is pretty close to what Michael Young was warning about when he coined the term in his 1958 satire, 'The Rise of the Meritocracy'. Here's an article by him on the subject - https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment

New comment by starbeast in "The Teddy Bear Effect"

starbeast — Thu, 27 Dec 2018 14:36:36 +0000

Thanks for the advice. I think also some of it might just be that I have mainly had jobs for smaller companies which have a relatively small percentage of management positions available compared to larger organisations. So as they tend to only have a handful of people in the middle between the executives and everybody else, there are just less management positions there to start with and they tend to either go to the existing friends of the executives or professional managers hired from outside.

New comment by starbeast in "The Teddy Bear Effect"

starbeast — Thu, 27 Dec 2018 14:29:28 +0000

Thanks for this. I guess there is a fine line to tread between being aggressive and assertive. I often see them used interchangeably though.

New comment by starbeast in "Researchers are keeping pig brains alive outside the body"

starbeast — Thu, 27 Dec 2018 07:37:27 +0000

Not yet you aren't.

New comment by starbeast in "Researchers are keeping pig brains alive outside the body"

starbeast — Thu, 27 Dec 2018 07:36:29 +0000

My mind went straight to Cold Lazarus, the sequel to Karaoke, by Dennis Potter. Reality Or Nothing! Poor fucking pig. I hope it stayed comatose and didn't dream. You can still feel pain from injuries in your dreams sometimes.

New comment by starbeast in "One Giant Step for a Chess-Playing Machine"

starbeast — Thu, 27 Dec 2018 05:00:46 +0000

Maybe. Is very good at designing intelligence however.

New comment by starbeast in "The Teddy Bear Effect"

starbeast — Thu, 27 Dec 2018 03:23:24 +0000

I am light skinned and look much younger than my age. I have noticed over the years that I seem to not be allowed anywhere near any kind of management role. Although I will be trusted with great responsibility to actually research, develop, build and deliver, I have not generally been allowed to define projects or suggest strategy. I am either at the sharp end or nowhere, it seems. I suspect that my only way to be anywhere near being in an executive position is if I start my own business.

edit - of course it might be nothing to do with appearance, I definitely have some negative character traits. Though if it is character traits, very similar traits don't seem to hurt the men with stubble and prominent chin clefts in their careers.

New comment by starbeast in "The Teddy Bear Effect"

starbeast — Thu, 27 Dec 2018 01:23:55 +0000

>how did he come to the conclusion that these effects and psychological biases are undesirable and we should find mechanisms to avoid them

Given your desire that others provide you with strong evidence for visual biases in hiring being at all damaging, otherwise you will dismiss them as pushing a political agenda, perhaps you might be a perfect volunteer for the following proposal.

In this spirit of hard nosed logical inquiry, are you at all interested in helping the British Medical Journal with their double blind parachute study? https://www.bmj.com/content/327/7429/1459

New comment by starbeast in "The OPM hack explained: Bad security practices meet China's Captain America"

starbeast — Thu, 27 Dec 2018 00:23:46 +0000

Given this bit -

>"Since this was a task more suited to Cylance Protect, they rolled out that tool in a free trial mode, and it "lit up like a Christmas tree." At this point, OPM began using Protect extensively in its diagnostic process, despite not committing to license it from Cylance; they eventually agreed to do so on June 30th, a day before the trial period was set to elapse. Cylance did not actually receive payment for months."

- it seems that the takeaway is even more devastating. Don't start work unless they have already paid.