No. Celebrities are, by definition, well known. To pull an example from the article, Ted Bundy certainly qualifies as a celebrity who would generally not be considered beloved.
Absolutely. Syntax highlighting for me is much more about what not to read than it is about what to read. It can be skipping over 'for' for the billionth time but often it's also reading only a couple key tokens to get the gist of what the line does and only going back to read it in full if non-obvious details matter.
I think comparing text and code actually makes perfect sense but you have to compare the right text.
Pick up any reference book. A dictionary, a textbook, a phone book, whatever. Leaf through it a bit. You'll find they all use text formatting to highlight things. The dictionaries I've used typically use bold for a word and its different forms, italics for parts of speech, and such. Phone books similarly use different weights and sizes for names, addresses, and phone numbers. Textbooks use bold and italics to highlight important terms and concepts and students will often mark up the books to further highlight certain things.
Code is usually not meant to be read like you would a novel; it's much more like a reference text. For me, at least, syntax highlighting is a tool that supports the ability to more easily find what I need and understand it in isolation. Maybe it would be slower for me to read a syntax-highlighted file token-by-token end-to-end than an un-highlighted one but that's not a use case I ever need.
I actually crawled through enough of those links to get an idea of what happened and I still don't see anywhere that YC/dang really went wrong. I'm sure it's in there somewhere but I've already put in more effort than I really wanted to.
That is a very different line of reasoning from that to which I was responding. IANAL so I'm not comfortable speculating too far but "it's entrapment if the government asks you to do it" is something I know to be a common misconception.
If I were to speculate further, though, I'd say that if someone justifiably believed it was legit because of the government sites, that somebody hadn't committed a crime in the first place and thus couldn't be entrapped.
The brokers reaching out to the students doesn't mean entrapment, even if we took the case where the brokers actually were government agents. To be entrapment, someone working on the government's behalf would have to do something that would even convince a lawful-minded person to commit the crime.
In short, infinities are complicated and intuition doesn't work well.
In slightly longer, you're talking about the difference of the rate of growth of two functions rather than actually about the cardinalities of the sets.
We define two sets as having the same cardinality when we can create a bijection between them. We can list the primes in order from smallest to largest and number them with the natural numbers. So we'll have 2 match up with 0, 3 with 1, 5 with 2, 7 with 3, etc. Every single prime number will correspond with a natural number AND every single natural number will correspond with a prime number, no exceptions. So they must be the same size. They are also the same size as the integers and the rational numbers but the set of real numbers is a bigger infinity.
> Would you design mathematical notations based on the opinion of 5th graders?
It's not their opinions. It's about how they naturally think.
And, yes, if I could change mathematical notation in a manner that made it easier to learn without introducing a more significant disadvantage, I would do it in a heartbeat.
Things are the way they are for a reason but that reason isn't necessarily that the way things are is the best.
It's not just about non-programmers being insufficiently precise. It's also about the different ways they express precision compared to how you have to do it for existing programming languages. For example, the paper talked about how the participants tended to talk about doing something to everything in a set in vectorised terms whereas scalar languages tend to be more common outside of scientific settings.
> The list of things they taught kids for the PacMan study also seemed very... well, technical.
What list? Perhaps I'm just missing it or there's another link I haven't seen but they don't seem to mention having taught the kids anything--especially anything technical--before the Pac-Man study.
I've heard a few before: "hypothesis contrary to fact", "what if" fallacy, and "counterfactual fallacy". None of the names are really great and none of them seem to be particularly common but I've never seen any better names for it or any used more commonly.
Where did I--or anyone--say it was different? Again, we're talking abstract, not current status quo.
That said, there are key differences between a dentist or plumber and a waiter or cashier. The obvious one is a private-practice dentist or self-employed plumber where they're setting their own fee and getting directly paid. In such cases there's no problem for tipping to solve. The other big one regardless of public or private is that there's a major power imbalance where the dentist or plumber is effectively acting as the agent of the patient or customer. Check-ups, routine cleanings, and such aren't an issue but when it comes to things that need fixing it's the dentist or plumber telling the customer "this is the service you require" and selling them that service. This is a principal-agent problem itself and tipping only exacerbates the issue rather than solving it.
Like I said previously, the logic of where tipping could or could not make sense is based on what sort of incentives it reinforces, if any. And, also like I said previously, I am not arguing in favour of tipping, either, and I'm especially not arguing in favour of tipping making up an essential part of one's income.
To an extent, at least, it's not so ridiculous as your "logical conclusion", at least not based on current US tipping etiquette.
For one, 10% on $15786 is a little silly, sure. But current etiquette already recommends flat rates for certain types of services so this could logically be extended to certain other cases.
And secondly, even brought to the logical conclusion, extending tipping would only make sense where it could reinforce proper incentives and would be actively bad where it reinforces perverse incentives. A legal avenue for bribing cops is certainly problematic in a way that bribing waiters for better service isn't, for example.
That's not to say I'm arguing in favour of tipping but I don't think it's as clearly unreasonably as your example would suggest.
You're the first one to say "only waiters"; savanaly certainly didn't. Their statement was clearly in the abstract and not an endorsement of the current tipping status quo.
A few explanations you can add for more-falsehoods.rst:
> 15. Unix time is the number of seconds since Jan 1st 1970.
The section you quote from Wikipedia shows why this one is false: leap seconds. Similar to how the number of hours between 00:00 and 3:00 in most of the United States depends on whether the timezone remains constant, springs forward, or falls back, the number of seconds between two Unix timestamps depends on how many leap seconds were inserted or deleted in that time frame.
> 16. The day before Saturday is always Friday.
This one is true only within the assumption but I'm not sure if the falsehood is literally false. When Alaska did the calendar change it had two consecutive Fridays (October 6th & 18th, 1867). This gives us the day after Friday not being Saturday but technically not the day before Saturday not being Friday. The falsehood still holds in spirit (outside of the assumption), of course, and it's possible somewhere else had it be true in practice as well.
> 27. The weekend consists of Saturday and Sunday.
The weekend differs across the world. Friday and Saturday is another popular one but Brunei gets a special shout out for having a Friday and Sunday "weekend" with Saturday being a working day.
> 59. DST is always an advancement by 1 hour
As far as I know, this is currently true if you aren't dealing with historical datetimes but Singapore will mess you up with historical data. They had a really odd case[1] where they went on DST by advancing 20 minutes and then ended DST without changing the clock at all.
> It is disingenuous and/or ignorant to suggest that temporarily loading an email into memory for the purpose of displaying it on the users screen [...]
I may be wrong, but I think they were referring to things like spam detection, malware detection, possibly search indexing, and such rather than just "temporarily loading an into memory for the purpose of displaying it."
I believe you're looking at the wrong part of the equation. It's not about the relative rates of traffic violations among the poor vs everyone else; it's about the relative impact the same fine has.
If you have comfortable amounts of wealth and/or income and get hit with a $500 fine you might be annoyed but you can pay it and go on your way.
But for the poor it's not so simple. First, that $500 represents a much larger burden. Even if they do scrape together the money to actually pay the fine, it might mean other bills would have to go unpaid, for example. And if they don't or can't get the money to pay the fine, those outstanding fines can get additional fees tacked on like Vigilant's 25%.
So it's not about seeking out the poor disproportionately more than the rich; it's about how the same punishment is actually more punishing.
> Schneier is discussing an unpleasant fact; unbiased algorithms often discover that things we previously attributed to bias were actually unbiased predictors.
That's an interesting interpretation. To me it looks more like he's discussing that bias can (probably will) be baked into algorithms even unintentionally and often subtly. And that highlights a significant difficulty with the "unbiased predictors" thing you say: can you distinguish between an unbiased algorithm discovering that something that looks like bias isn't and bias being subtly baked into the algorithm? I think that's where the "we need to understand what we expect out of the algorithms and ensure the expectations are met" bit comes in, at least in part.