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User: K.+S.+Van+Horn

K.+S.+Van+Horn's activity in the archive.

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  1. Re:Jensen's Inequality Strikes Again on Mercury -- Not Venus -- is the Closest Planet To Earth on Average, New Research Finds (gizmodo.com) · · Score: 1

    That is completely and entirely irrelevant. All that matters is that there is unbiased measurement error.

  2. You're wrong, because we're looking at average distance between Earth and another planet, NOT the distance between the average positions of Earth and another planet. You need to learn about Jensen's Inequality:

    http://bayesium.com/its-all-ab...

  3. Jensen's Inequality Strikes Again on Mercury -- Not Venus -- is the Closest Planet To Earth on Average, New Research Finds (gizmodo.com) · · Score: 1

    It's the same phenomenon as the fact that GPS overestimates the distance you've traveled:

    It's All About Jensen's Inequality

  4. What about the specificity? on Scientists Develop 10-Minute Universal Cancer Test (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    They need to talk about the specificity, not the AUC for a sample that has more instances of cancer than not-cancer. If you use this to screen the general population, the vast majority of whom do not have cancer, the false positives will overwhelm the true positives unless the specificity is very high.

  5. Re:Men need not apply on Google Cloud Executive Who Sought Pentagon Contract Steps Down (nytimes.com) · · Score: 1

    He? Why are you assuming that Diane Green is male?

    As for your question, nobody says "I'm planning to help female founders", making sure to including the limiting adjective "female", if they plan to treat male and female founders equally.

  6. Re:Men need not apply on Google Cloud Executive Who Sought Pentagon Contract Steps Down (nytimes.com) · · Score: 1

    The point is that if Diane Green were Dale Green, and discriminating against women instead of against men, he would be denounced by one and all. The news article certainly would not have passed that over without comment. Massive double standard.

  7. Men need not apply on Google Cloud Executive Who Sought Pentagon Contract Steps Down (nytimes.com) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "[Green] planned to help female founders of companies by investing in and mentoring them."

    Since this is apparently OK, I take it that if a male executive wants to exclusively help male founders of companies by investing and mentoring them, rejecting female founders solely because they lack a Y chromosome, that's OK too, right? What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, after all.

  8. The Peter Principle on 'The Problem With Programming and How To Fix It' (alarmingdevelopment.org) · · Score: 1

    It is long past time to return to designing tools not just for rock stars at Google but the vast majority of programmers and laypeople with simple small-scale problems,

    Every time someone does that, their "simple" tools end up being used for problems far more large and complex than they were designed for, and we get a godawful mess. Think shell programming, Perl, PHP, Excel, etc. (Spreasheets have been used to produce the most opaque, incomprehensible modeling code I've ever encountered.) It's the Peter Principle for programming languages and tools.

  9. Laughable cluelessness on Big Tech Warns of 'Japan's Millennium Bug' Ahead of Akihito's Abdication (theguardian.com) · · Score: 2

    "...Unicode, the international standards organisation which most famously controls the introduction of new emojis to the world."

    This is a new level of cluelessness. "Most famously"? Like, internationalization and localization were just afterthoughts; it's the emojis that they really focus on.

    How is this guy a technology reporter for a major newspaper?

  10. Myopic view of history on Big Tech Warns of 'Japan's Millennium Bug' Ahead of Akihito's Abdication (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    "Akihito has been on the throne for almost the entirety of the information age"

    Umm, no. We were well into the information age by 1989. The use of computers in vital infrastructure (e.g. banking) dates back to the late 50's. I checked out the author of the article, and as expected, he appears to be under 30; this would explain his myopic view of history.

  11. Journalism by Press Release? on NSA Purges Hundreds of Millions of Call and Text Records (nytimes.com) · · Score: 1

    Lacking any third-party verification, that headline should be "Says They Have Purged" instead of "Purges". Simply stating as fact whatever claim the gov't makes, without any attempt at verification, is poor journalism.

  12. Re: All we need are healing hugs on One Of LLVM's Top Contributors Quits Development Over Code of Conduct, Outreach Program (phoronix.com) · · Score: 1

    Oh, right. I forgot that white men, and only white men, are the source of all evils in our society.

  13. "Add that comments around the CoC explicitely says that if racist speech would be punished, reverse-racist speech (ethnical minorities making racist comments against the majority) won't."

    Could you share a link for this? I can't find anyplace where it says that.

  14. Re:All we need are healing hugs on One Of LLVM's Top Contributors Quits Development Over Code of Conduct, Outreach Program (phoronix.com) · · Score: 1

    I can't find the "we will not act on complaint regarding..." text on the LLVM website. Has it been removed?

  15. Chris Lattner's Orwellian Tweet on One Of LLVM's Top Contributors Quits Development Over Code of Conduct, Outreach Program (phoronix.com) · · Score: 1

    "it is critical to the long term health of the project that we preserve an inclusive community." -- Chris Lattner

    From the Outreachy Elegibility Rules: "You must meet one of the following criteria:
    You live any where in the world and you identify as a woman (cis or trans), trans man, or genderqueer person (including genderfluid or genderfree).
    You live in the United States or you are a U.S. national or permanent resident living aboard, AND you are a person of any gender who is Black/African American, Hispanic/Latin@, Native American/American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander"

    So white men, Asian men, and Middle-Eastern men are excluded. This is "inclusive" in the same sense that war is peace and slavery is freedom.

  16. Re:All we need are healing hugs on One Of LLVM's Top Contributors Quits Development Over Code of Conduct, Outreach Program (phoronix.com) · · Score: 1

    "Small amount of discrimination"? During my son's last two years of high school I counted at least FOUR special technology programs, promoted by the school, that ONLY accepted female students. And in my current workplace I see yet another special activity or program exclusively for women and/or minorities several times a month.

    You don't fight sexism with more sexism. You don't fight racism with more racism.

  17. Nobody complains about all-women companies on Chinese Tech Companies Post Men-Only Job Listings, Report Finds (theverge.com) · · Score: 5, Informative

    Case in point below. The founder eventually concluded that it was a bad idea from the standpoint of productivity, but it never seems to have occurred to her that her policy was deeply sexist.

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/fem...

  18. Root Cause of Problem Is Lack of Letter 's'... on Doctors Tried To Lower $148K Cancer Drug Cost; Makers Tripled Its Price (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    ... at the end of this phrase: "its manufacturer".

  19. Are Slashdot Editors Legitimate Nerds? on No One Knows How Long the US Coastline Is (discovermagazine.com) · · Score: 1

    Because if they were, they'd realize that none of this is news to their readers.

  20. Deliberately misleading terminology on Craigslist Personals, Some Subreddits Disappear After FOSTA Passage (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I've noticed that the term "prostitution" has been replaced by the term "sex trafficking" lately. This strikes me as deliberately misleading terminology, aimed at making people think that human trafficking -- that is, slavery -- is what is being targeted, when in reality it is certain voluntary transactions that are being targeted.

  21. Clearly unconstitutional on Craigslist Personals, Some Subreddits Disappear After FOSTA Passage (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 2

    "it would apply retroactively -- a seeming violation of the Constitution's ex post facto clause"

    Seeming? That's a clear, unambiguous violation of the Constitution's prohibition against ex post facto laws: "No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed." There's no wiggle room there.

  22. Re:Astrophisical jets ... on Can Electricity Travel Through Space on Astrophysical Jets? (mdpi.com) · · Score: 1

    Up until 35 years ago -- for a period of two centuries -- atoms themselves were hypothetical objects which had never been directly observed. Should we have put all of chemistry, materials science, condensed matter physics, etc. on hold until then?

  23. Because police lives... on Your Phone May Send You 'Blue Alerts' To Warn You When Local Police Are In Danger (androidpolice.com) · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...matter so much more than yours or mine.

  24. Inherently? on Google's Sentiment Analyzer Thinks Being Gay Is Bad (vice.com) · · Score: 1

    "the API labels sentences about religious and ethnic minorities as negative -- indicating it's inherently biased" Does this writer not understand the meaning of the word "inherently"? It would be inherently biased if the bias were built into the algorithm. From the description, it instead sounds like some statistical fluke in the data -- or possibly a reproducible statistical association -- misled the algorithm.

  25. Highly inaccurate article on We're Not Living in a Computer Simulation, New Research Shows (cosmosmagazine.com) · · Score: 1

    Several points:

    1. The journalist who wrote this article doesn't understand the difference between "impossible in principle" and "intractable." If you read carefully, you find that the researchers claim only that the simulation is intractable -- it would require storage exponential in the number of particles.

    2. To actually prove such a claim the researchers would have to solve some important open problems in computational complexity theory (e.g., the P != NP question). That's highly unlikely. At most they proved their claim assuming that one of these open questions has the answer everyone thinks it does.

    3. Even if they did all this, at most it would only show that our universe is not a polynomial-time classical computation -- it wouldn't rule out simulation on a quantum computer.

    Acknowledgment: 2 and 3 above are my rewording of some commentary I got from a computational complexity theorist; I'm not naming him because I didn't think to ask for permission to quote him.