Maybe the common thread behind the similarity is the method of reducing the problem so as to run efficiently on your favorite big iron.

I don't trust their portrayal of what they've discovered as far as I can spit. The details given are far below the threshold of critical thinking. Properly, a claim like this needs a triple helping of sharp knives.

It should be illegal, because the harm it does to society beats all terrorists there can ever be.

You added that to get your post through the AC filter, didn't you? Your starkly worded post was veering into the territory of a sane and deeply held perspective on life. But it turns out you were man enough to rebalance the force, with your cross-category rampage. FYI you're deep into Chapter 8, "How Judgments Happen" from Thinking Fast and Slow.

An underlying scale of intensity allows matching across diverse dimensions. If crimes were colors, murder would be a deeper shade of red than theft.

Intensity matching is used to answer profound questions such as this:

• Julie read fluently when she was four years old.
• How tall is a man who is as tall as Julie was precocious?

Kahneman adds "Not very hard, was it?" and "We will also see why this mode of prediction matching is statistically wrong ..."

bad_math_education worse than UniversalQuantifier(toxic_misapplication_of_force)

There's a pattern here your math seems not to detect.

We've heard this one before, over and over again: pirates are the biggest spenders.

Time to break out The Half-Life of Facts. I love the implied syllogism behind this kind of statement.

contingent_fact => radical_change

Of course, radical_change has no impact on contingent_fact. Just not going to happen.

Let me summarize my previous post with a question.

Has there ever been a society where the lazy melted away where women didn't die in childbirth--no matter how young or how beautiful--over random weaknesses of constitution?

When your wife is dying in childbirth, that must be about the most helpless feeling a man can experience. I suspect it's bad enough to make a man re-invent civilization all over again, when we've only barely rid ourselves of the beast.

I have had no more success trying to convince them that conducting an economy based on precious metals after the collapse of American society will be difficult than I have had convincing them that the collapse of society -- for which they have also been stockpiling assault rifles, BTW -- is unlikely to occur in their lifetimes.

These behaviours have very little to do with rational belief systems. These are wish fulfillment attitudes. Some people get a boner over survival of the fittest. Or they feel crowded by the success of the human race. Part of this is valuing relative advantage over absolute advantage. But hey, won't that assault rifle look tremendously less cool when their wife dies in childbirth.

I don't have any great bias against the delusions of others ... until it interferes with making a positive contribution to avoiding the worst. But why worry? Of course, with the big assault rifle you can kidnap a doctor. "What do you mean, you've never delivered a baby? You're a doctor, aren't you?" Many people with assault rifles have shit for brains. This contributes to making a single-use tool so appealing.

I suspect this movie doesn't stray too far from actual events. To Live:

Since all doctors have been sent to do hard labor for being "reactionary academic authorities", the students are left as the only ones in charge, despite being so young.

They doubt that this is a good state of affairs, so they find a real doctor (starving), feed him some steamed buns so that he can function. Problem solved. Almost.

However, Fengxia begins to hemorrhage, and the nurses panic, admitting that they do not know what to do. The family and nurses seek the advice of the doctor, but find that he has overeaten and is semiconscious.

Welcome to your future life.

I was in the mood to buy a DRM-free ebook or two at the discount price, but after five minutes at O'Reilly I gave up the hunt. There's no category in the subject index for big data / machine learning. And neither did I quickly identify a filter on level of presentation. No, I don't need a quick review of the data structures in R.

I found a free download entitled "Big Data Now: 2012 Edition". There are some tidbits of interest in here, but over all it's a little too button-down for my tastes. It mentioned Apache Mahoot for machine learning. Hey, I'd buy an intermediate to advanced book on that at half price--if such a book existed.

One of the problems with buying on price opportunity is that you frame the problem of "given this pile, what's best for me" instead of "given what's best for me, is there anything of note in this pile at all". I'm reading Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow and presently basking in the availability glow of just how stupid humans are, most of the time. We're idiots for framing and anchoring effects.

I mean, I nearly rolled off the bed in hysterics last night when I read that most people find it easy enough to list six occasions where they have behaved assertively (and this activity causes them to report having an assertive personality) but asking people to list twelve occasions where they've been assertive is hard work and causes people to doubt that they are really so assertive after all. Twelve considered difficult? I don't need no book on big data, I can type it in by hand in JSON notation wherever the need arises. I'm assertive pretty much whenever I sit at a keyboard or open my mouth or pull up to a four-way traffic control. You know, in a group setting you don't need to control the outcome. One can accomplish a lot by quietly (yet assertively) trimming away the worst stupidities. Well-timed application of the pruning shears to group psychology seems assertive enough to me.

I have a recommendation shelf at Goodreads for the narrow category "Computer Science". This presently includes many O'Reilly book: Regular Expressions, Haskell, JavaScript, TCP/IP. Someday, if Goodreads exploits big data in some useful way, this might actually feature the books from O'Reilly where there was any chance in hell of me making a purchase.

First suggestion: refine the "not interested" button to include "been there, done that". Regular expressions are way cool for the first decade of one's programming career.

Cheap labour is the way of the future and has been for the past 3000 years. It's also referred to as trade, growth, and prosperity.

This is not to say that America hasn't made some blunders. American manufacturing was in the catbird seat until Detroit happened. Want a small, fuel-efficient car that doesn't fall to pieces the minute your service contract expires? The Japanese will make one (eventually). Detroit could have matched the Honda Civic while the Civic still sucked, but they had their heads up their ass-hats. It would have cut into selling overpriced and oversized cars you really didn't need. Why sell utility when you can sell dreams.

Knock, knock.
Who's there?
Jap-Crap. Jap-Crap with a plan. Jap-Crap planning to kick your ass.
Oh, yeah? You and who else?

It takes a real genius to spin the globe and miss China. Well done, Detroit, well done.

If it weren't for Asia, America would still be making oversized shit that breaks like clock-work. Outside of high tech, that's mainly what America was good at. We don't bring out our A game until we have a trillion dollar sustainment program on the boondoggle warpath.

The golden era of high domestic wages and low productivity was paved by the global petroleum monopoly. Did the Arabs really want to sell us all those barrels for half the net proceeds accruing to what we could manufacture by its consumption? Hint: they didn't have many great choices.

Knock, knock.
Who's there.
F18.
Oh, yeah?
Yeah.
OK, let's talk business. Name your price.

But go ahead and spin your weird little protectionist narratives.

With the F35 we're now balanced on the knife edge at the post-knock knock end of history.

Until it has ass recognition, it will remain blind to Freemasons everywhere.

The whole skin colour / gender thing is a red herring. The difference between living in America and Africa is not. If fifteen elite athletes from North America and Europe cross the finish line in a clump on their titantium carbon-fiber wonderbikes and then some Congolese kid crosses the line a few seconds later on a second-hand paper bike how do you score the merit function? The African boy has nothing but guts and determination. No world-class coaching, no decent bike. Useless.

One has to step back from merit to at least look at what a person a accomplished on the foundation of what they've been given.

I count an Ethiopian Ruby developer who writes a small Ruby application to manage the coffee trade as worthwhile diversity, even if far less competent as a Ruby specialist than other available speakers. I really don't give a damn if he or she is black or any other pigment.

The main difference between men and women has nothing to do with aptitude. It has to do with the higher willingness of men to immerse themselves in their expertise at the expense of everything else in their lives. He who sacrifices accomplishes more. And this derives directly from reproductive variance. Low status males face the worst reproductive odds. It's just not possible for a woman to squeeze other women out of the gene pool the way Ghengis Khan squeezed out a quarter of the men in all of Eurasia.

Merit-based promotion doesn't encourage balanced lifestyles. It tends to mainly reward fanatics. Women complain about this, and well they should, but it's no trivial matter to decide which man who sacrificed more should be excluded to the benefit of a women who sacrificed less, but did so within a rich and balanced lifestyle (raising children, being active in the community, etc.)

I also think that if you don't invite people from around the fringes to participate, the fringes tend to stagnate.

There are other risks run by the whip-snappers of inclusion. Statistically, small conferences run more risk than large conferences of getting busted by the diversity police.

Luck and Skill Untangled: The Science of Success

So they did something seemingly very logical â" they looked at which schools have the highest test scores. They found that the schools with the highest scores were small, which makes some intuitive sense because of smaller class sizes, etc. But this falls into a sampling trap. The next question to ask is: which schools have the lowest test scores? The answer: small schools. This is exactly what you would expect from a statistical viewpoint since small samples have large variances. ... This is more than a case for a statistics class. Education reformers proceeded to spend billions of dollars reducing the sizes of schools.

If the book is anywhere near as good as his interview, everyone rush out to buy a copy. (I'm no shill. Try to find an imperatively worded endorsement in my previous 1000 posts here. There might be one, but I can't think of such an occassion.)

Far too often social thinking is bad thinking.

There's something not quite right about these benchmarks. A huge margin in FFTE is completely reversed on Apache. Often you can normalize this a bit by knowing which chip has how many cores and whether the floating point unit sucks or doesn't suck.

This discrepancy is more extreme than normal. Usually you find out that one chip or the other was hobbled by software indigestion, then the discrepancy dissipates in subsequent rounds.

The last time I installed Windows over an open source operating system for my own purposes was to play the first version of Quake.

If I had a time machine, I would go back and tap myself on the shoulder. Look dude, Quake rocks, but the skills you could be learning in Linux or BSD will serve you forever. I also quite liked Age of Empires at the time.

Dual booting wasn't a viable option. Around that time I think I paid $600 for a 6GB SCSI disk drive, thinking it would pay for itself in time saved in my software development work. Maybe it did, but I suspect it didn't.

The other problem is that you could install Windows on some cheap ass disk drive, but the installation process was long and tedious, and you had to ask what value you placed on your immortal soul sitting there feeding borg cookies into the 3 1/2" borg infection port.

I seemed to recall NT never told you about the mistake in your LUN assignment until digesting _all_ the borg cookies. More cookies, please!

But even then I had a deal with myself that I would multitask cleaning the bathroom with every large Microsoft application installed (or re-installed). Dev Studio kept my pipes clean. DLL hell polished my chrome.

I'm older and wiser now. I can clean the bathroom just because it needs to be done.

There was a girl in my class in middle school who was first rate at figure skating, and never got picked on at all. There were kids who were good at art and other things ... no hassles. Precious athletes, for the most part, exempt from the social tax on excellence.

There was a girl hideously deformed in the jaw and neck who showed up one day. No one said a word for two months, then the dam burst. I'd been in a children's hospital down the hall from a burn unit. I wasn't having any of it. Most of the adults who came to visit were so green around the gills to step onto that ward you almost needed a bucket in the hallway.

Sam Harris says we grant religious beliefs too much automatic deference. I think this also extends to our little rotters. There's something terribly vicious in young children that we neither discuss nor study to the extent warranted by their appalling capacity for social cruelty.

Not my little angel! Well, I suspect your little angel has become adept at emulating attitudes learned at home.

The social violence of little angels should be news. Today and every day. Do people think it just goes away, or does it merely mutate into more mature forms? I'm not trying to stamp out scorn or derision. That's a fact of life, man. But I do think that the use of "gay" as a generic adjective of derision should get the little rotters shuffled onto a short bus for the social learning disabled.

High time "gay" went the way of DUI, where nearly everyone looks at you funny, like you're charting a life course for a wall-mounted chrome toilet with no lid.

Borrowing from the newest story, I'd have to add the 16 pixel image of MACS0647-JD to this discussion.

Back when DTMF dialing was a newly introduced technology, Bell Canada in Ontario, where I was a student, had three different rates for basic service: the incumbent rate for existing pulse dial phones with a dial, a higher rate for new-fangled DTMF phones with a keypad, and a higher rate still for hybrid pulse dial phones with a keypad.

It hadn't been all that long that the consumer could buy their own phone from the local discount mart. If your phone generated DTMF phones, it wouldn't work without paying Bell more money for the "advanced" service. But you could buy a phone with a small micro-controller where you dialed with a keypad, but it pulse dialed over the line to impersonate the old phone you used to have. Usually there was a small slide switch on the bottom to select the dial mode. Of course, DTMF completed the dialing a little faster than the pulse setting.

Bell had no way of knowing that you had a keypad phone generating pulse dialing on the line, but if you allowed their technician into the house and they caught you with such a phone, they would convert you to the highest basic service rate of all. It was like another $5/month, which for a student, was super annoying.

Bell PHB: this is new fangled so we have to charge more, but it saves us money to deliver the service by allowing us to retire the old and slow and decrepit line cards, so we need to promote moving people to the new technology as fast as our bean counters can waggle their abaci, while also simultaneously incentivizing the change-over with higher fees.

If I made 50 calls per month at 4 bytes per call, it worked out to something like $5 / 0.2 KB or $25,000 / MB.

Russ Roberts has been trying to sell me on the Hayekian virtues of the private sector for about 150 episodes now. But I remember Bell Canada, and I know the private sector will charge you more for the benefit of saving them money at the drop of a pin, if they can get away with it.

Oh, yes, the solution is to deregulate. I got the memo. That's why I'm presently so much in love with my cellphone service, and I bet you are too.

and we are left wondering, would proprietary companies that get broken into so forthcoming?

No, we are not left wondering (unless one thinks that FreeBSD has a patent on especially leaky SSH developer keys) so instead we pretend that we are left wondering to justify hanging around and scribbling on the bathroom wall.

If Apple can't keep their mitts on an iPhone prototype and Google can't keep their mitts on a Nexus prototype, do you really think these butter-finger organizations have any better control over their developer's SSH keys?