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Hussell
·4 months ago·discuss
Decisions are made by people in the group, not by a notional single being "the corporation". It's individual people making decisions about whether to go for short-term profit or long-term sustainability. Hold them accountable, don't shift the blame onto a nonexistent entity.
Hussell
·4 months ago·discuss
"We" here likely refers to Tim and his current coworkers who were present to see this, not every current and future employee of Microsoft / Github. Try not to think of any organization or institution as a person, but as lots of individual people, constantly joining and leaving the group.
Hussell
·8 months ago·discuss
The maximum IQ score anyone can get depends on the total number of people who have taken IQ tests so far. Even if every single person alive today took an IQ test (which is absurd in itself), the maximum IQ achievable would be between 190-197. In practice, I'd guess the maximum is somewhere between 170 and 185 (millions to tens of millions of IQ test results which were recorded).

Even then, you need special tests to distinguish between anyone with IQ higher than about 160 - all those people get the same (perfect) score on regular IQ tests.

So: claiming to have an IQ of 276? Bullshit. The guy whose parents claimed he scored 210 on an IQ test? Also bullshit. To get 210, there would have to have been ~500 billion IQ test results recorded.
Hussell
·last year·discuss
The statisticians have a bunch of tricks to transform the formulas into more-easily computable forms, e.g. calculate both the average and the standard deviation in a single pass through the data instead of one pass to calculate the average and a second to calculate the standard deviation. Converting the math in here to efficient code isn't very easy.
Hussell
·3 years ago·discuss
The two species share a lot of glue genes, and the properties of their silks differ due to other genes affecting things like the ratios of glue proteins in the silk. Those other genes evolved faster than the glue genes themselves.

The title is technically correct, though misleading.
Hussell
·3 years ago·discuss
Nowhere in the paper does it say that individual spiders are varying their silk composition in response to conditions. The selective expression of proteins is a difference between the two species studied, not between individuals within one species.

The title is technically correct: the two species share a lot of glue genes, and the properties of their silks differ due to other genes affecting things like the ratios of glue proteins in the silk, and those genes evolved faster than the glue genes themselves.
Hussell
·3 years ago·discuss
The spiders haven't even been shown to change their silk in response to conditions. It's just two species of spiders each with their own silk recipe.
Hussell
·3 years ago·discuss
Since I happen to know these species: the spider pictured at the top of the article is an Argiope bruennichi (Wasp Spider), a European species which closely resembles A. trifasciata (Banded Garden Spider, one of the two species in the study).
Hussell
·4 years ago·discuss
For those who haven't seen this before, the ones you should look at first are:

Falsehoods about Names https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

Falsehoods about Time https://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-program...

Falsehoods about Addresses https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a...
Hussell
·4 years ago·discuss
Is there an easy way to display a diff which shows all the new links since the last time this was on HN? (Sept. 8th, 2020)

Partial list:

Falsehoods about Airline Seat Maps https://duffel.com/blog/falsehoods-about-seat-maps

Falsehoods about Biometrics https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/falsehoods-programmers-beli...

Falsehoods about Plain Text https://jeremyhussell.blogspot.com/2017/11/falsehoods-progra...