velis_vel's comments

> Regression analysis was used to estimate wage differences, after controlling for the following choices and characteristics: graduates’ occupation, economic sector, hours worked, employment status (having multiple jobs as opposed to one full-time job), months unemployed since graduation, grade point average, undergraduate major, kind of institution attended, age, geographical region, and marital status.

The problem with controlling for all those things is that you leave out other factors; for example, if men were preferentially hired over women, that wouldn't show up in this data.

> Something like "Appendable" might be more appropriate for C++.

So I can append False to True to get False (Boolean monoid under &&) or append 8 to 9 to get 72 (integer monoid under multiplication)? There's also a monoid instances for any single-argument function into a monoidal type, where (f <> g) x = f x <> g x; I don't know what to call that but it's definitely not appending.

Append is a name that works in a few cases but horribly breaks down in the general case.

I want an "Ask me about Roko's basilisk!" button.

Under your Google scenario, presumably the person using Google Maps on Android wasn't operating as a driver working for Google. Uber hired him to drive cars, so they're liable for what he does while he drives them.

Apparently in American English it can either be pronounced 'key', 'kay' or 'kway'.

> The one place where we only care what is inside peoples heads and not their feelings?

Are you saying feelings aren't inside people's heads?

Well, 'beautiful' is to a certain extent a subjective quality. 'What makes a Mac Pro beautiful is X' can be interpreted as 'What makes a Mac Pro beautiful to me is X', and that's not really a statement that you can argue against.

But even so, the fallacies are either stretched or completely inapplicable. Both the 'no true scotsman' and 'special pleading' fallacies involve constantly shifting goalposts, but we've only ever seen Jormundir say that internal design is part of what makes the new Mac Pro beautiful. Where are the shifting goalposts?

Like, I don't think that the fact that it's not beautiful on the inside is relevant to the fact that it's a cool as hell mod; I think it's completely irrelevant. But throwing fallacies at the statement is just weird. I don't get how they apply at all.

> However, Github holds people accountable for actually having to program - funny how meritocracy came up as a bad word to these people!

Uh, no it doesn't? There are plenty of reasons someone might be a programmer that doesn't have work on github. Maybe their employer has a really restrictive invention assignment agreement and they don't feel like giving them free code. Maybe it's their day job and they do other things with their free time, like paint. Maybe they don't have any free time because they're a single parent or whatever.

What's the joke?

> I made it through multivariable calculus and grads and so forth, but the computer scientist in me gets upset when I run into undefined or poorly specified notation.

Well, at the top of the 'Summation' heading it does mention Bernoulli numbers.

> Opposition to speed-limit cameras exposes the absurdity of most speed-limit laws: it's a law so bad many (most?) people are opposed to having it strictly enforced. If that's not a bad law, then I don't know what is.

Not all laws that are heavily disliked are bad laws, and not all laws that most people like are good ones.

> Sure, they have their bad moments (pun intended), being caught uploading users' address books, spamming user's friends with invites and perhaps paying for downloads. No one's perfect and some of us sometimes do try to stretch things a little to see how far we can go. Don't we?

Are you being sarcastic here? I can't tell. Uploading your users' address books to your servers without permission isn't just 'stretching things a little', it's a textbook privacy violation.

What's this weird fake AAVE lorem ipsum thing that this page links as a demo? Is the joke 'haha black people talk funny'?

Conversely: with an ebook reader, you can bring your entire collection with you wherever you go, and you can add to it from the device without having to wait 2 days, pay shipping, figure out where you're going to put the book, settle on an organization system so you don't lose it...

There are some good points here, such as the fact that in most (all?) major ebook ecosystems the distributor can take away your ability to read a book, but some of his points (like "Attention Profit vs. Attention Deficit") are because he was reading from iBooks on an iPad.

The attribution of things to 'ancient Native American proverbs' is reminiscent of the whole 'noble savage' trope.

The problem is that you can have backwards flow, not just backwards pressure, because water has to be conserved.

> Three quarters work, and one quarter do not. What's the unemployment rate in the USA now? If you include those who've 'given up' looking for work or whatever, I think it's around 12%. Yeah, let's fork out a couple of trillion dollars a year and double that.

Not everybody is on the Brazilian system, only people below a certain income level. According to http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2011.pdf the employment level among those in poverty is something like 10%. Obviously you can't directly compare that to the Brazilian system without knowing more about how the US vs. Brazil define poverty, but it's obviously wrong to assume that all income levels are employed at the same rate.

> You're a hacker when a hacker calls you a hacker. All that "being able to self-identify" is narcissism.

Hackers have called me a hacker, therefore I'm a hacker. I now declare that every human being is a hacker if they self-identify as one.

> It seems doubtful that the answer to social inequalities is to make special privileges for each group to match the special privileges already enjoyed by others, as opposed to working more towards an ideal of equal treatment for everyone.

If two people are running in a race, and one of them has been running the past 4 miles with a 50-pound weight on their back, taking the weight off isn't going to make the race fair. You've either got to give them some kind of help or put a weight on the other person's back.