alien_at_work · HackerTrans

alien_at_work

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8년 전discuss

I view 'imply' as 'suggest' and 'prove' is 'this is a fact'. Correlation does in fact imply causation (which is why correlations are investigated). It just doesn't prove the causation. It may be that the two things you're looking at are both related to some other cause (e.g. ice cream sales and murders increase in summer, supposedly. This does not mean ice cream sales has a direct relation to murder but they probably both have a relation to outside tempature), it may even be pure coincidence. But if you see a correlation you see a place to begin your investigations.

8년 전discuss

Except that's not right. It may be. In fact persuing correlations is how we do science. At some point we gain enough confidence in the correlations that we call it causation.

8년 전discuss

>Today, if there's correlation, unless it's clearly spurious/etc, and unless somebody has a better idea, I tell the product/eng team to push hard on it and don't even mention correlation vs causation.

Because it's actually a stupid thing to say. Correlation does not conclusively prove causation would be better. It certainly gives a sensible place to look.

8년 전discuss

>never seek out advice from reliable resources.

What reliable resources would those be? Poorly defined, crap studies done by people who've never had children and the study was never independantly reproduced by anyone?

In the beginning, pain is the only means of communication (although we didn't actually spank, a little tug on the side burns did the trick). In my experience, once a child is old enough to understand time-based punishment (e.g. you don't get to watch TV tomorrow) a little and what it will mean, that becomes more effective.

8년 전discuss

Some of those are so bad as to be straight up dangerous (e.g. r/fitness).

8년 전discuss

Posts like this seem so dishonest. The entire point of shilling would be hiding the fact that your shilling (otherwise you'd buy an ad), so of course we don't have deep documentation of exactly who is shilling when, where, how much they're paid, etc.

What we do have is the knowledge of companies/groups dedicated to "influencing online opinion" (e.g. Correct the record, Share Blue, etc.). They don't advertise what they're doing but there somewhere doing influencing. Seems reasonable that they'd be on the biggest social sites doing their work.

What I've personally seen as very obvious shilling is GMO related topics on reddit (regardless of where you stand on the issue). You can be on the most obscure sub you can find, and if anyone says something critical about GMO products there will be a rebutal post within a short time always using the exact same arguments, exact same articles, terminology, etc. When new variations of the defense are developed they are instantly deployed site wide. This is for sure an organized group of people. Are they paid for it? I'm not sure, but for the effort they put in I hope they don't do it for free.

If I had infinite time, it would be intesting to do some deep data analysis on the posts on reddit and try to figure out how many are coordinated.

8년 전discuss

>let's say polite Elon Musk

Uh... where do you get this impression? My impression is that Musk easily fits in the same bucket as Ellison / Jobs / Bezos

8년 전discuss

Are you seriously trying to claim Snopes isn't biased? I would say that's the more outrageous claim here. If Snopes is absent of any bias, what is their methodology by which they achieve that? Here is someone [1] who tried to find out and could not.

And as far as bias, a quora post [2] seems to give the impression that Snopes was heavily favoring Hillary Clinton through the campaing.

So I'd like to turn this around: could those that believe Snopes is not biased give some kind of citation?

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2016/12/22/the-dai...

[2] https://www.quora.com/Is-Snopes-biased-Why-do-some-people-be...

8년 전discuss

They weren't voting between Trump and no one. The alternative was Hillary Clinton. For a conservative christian you'll have a hard time finding someone they'd be more scared of having as president.

8년 전discuss

Ugh. Is what happened so very difficult to understand? Chistians were faced with voting for someone they were generally not comfortable with vs. someone believed to be truly evil. Her husband votoed a bill to ban so named "partial birth abortion" and Hillary expressed support for late term abortions.

If you could get over your contempt for people who see things differently than you do and actually talk with some of them you might find that a lot of people were voting against Hillary instead of for Trump.

8년 전discuss

That's not fair. Everyone had the option of voting so nothing is forced on anyone. If you don't like what the people who actually voted picked, then try voting next time.

8년 전discuss

Funny enough, the creator of Perl's previously well known accomplishment was winning these contests pretty much any time he cared to join. Take that as you will.

8년 전discuss

>and then clarify the question title to reflect the problem they need help with.

How many times have you seen that happen? Further that only occurs in an XY situation where the question was wrong. I've been hit by cases where the answer was "don't do that because it's bad". Well, I know that and I know why it's bad but I also know that I have to do it anyway. What now? You couldn't change the question in that case because they asked what they meant, they were just told that they were wrong (and they were).

>I get really miffed when I see someone answering the literal question even when it is clear that the OP have a different problem

And I get just as miffed when they don't because of all the times I get burned by people behaving as you want and then I can't get that same answer answered and have to go through even more pain (it was painful enough to be forced into the situation) to figure it out for myself. I have basically no karma on SO because when I get some I use it to vote down such people.

>Answering both X and Y is fine of course, and probably the preferred.

Here we can agree.

8년 전discuss

Again, you're assuming the question is "wrong". But how likely is it that every single person who asks that question is wrong? With your line of thinking you help the OP and anyone who gets in the exact same situation as the OP but no one who actually needs the answer to the question that was asked.

If you're worried about it then just answer exactly what was ask and follow your strategy. But please don't simply do your strategy because it's a real pain for those of us who end up having to move off the beaten path from time to time.

8년 전discuss

> it is in my view completely useless if it doesn't solve the problem.

Well, this is exactly the problem I'm describing: you're trying to solve the problem for one user when the answer is for everyone who could ever ask something similar enough to come to the page from a search engine. So ignoring the question and solving the problem might help the OP but it doesn't help anyone else who actually needed to know how to replace a lamp. In fact it's hurt them because now "how to move a lamp" is considered solved by a lot of people but the actual page with the "solution" does not contain one.

8년 전discuss

>In such cases where the OP and the community agrees, reformatting the question would avoid making a useless landing page.

And if the question is 10 years old the day I need to reformat my linux hard drive? The OP might not even still be alive. Certainly there will be resistance to rezzing a 10 year old thread to make the question more general.

8년 전discuss

>since this is optimizing for a hypothetical future reader at the expense of the actual person having a problem

Which is fine because there are N potential future readers but only one OP.

8년 전discuss

It's highly presumptious to assume you know better than the person asking. You might, but you might not. The fact that SO serves as a collection of programming knowledge, you do not know better than everyone who will ever search for that question even if you do actually know better than the OP who actually asked the first time.

It would be fine to help with all these other possibilites but part of your answer should... actually answer the question that was asked, as it was asked and not doing so should result in a servere punishement.

8년 전discuss

No, this is unacceptable. Ideally you should first answer the question, then explain why it shouldn't be done. If you don't have enough time, then drop the second part.

And the reason is not about the OP, the OP is irrelevant in such a site. SO is a collection of programming knowledge. So the problem is that an experienced software engineer comes along years later, forced into doing something they already know is bad but have no choice for some reason (normally some silly job constrained that they simply cannot change), google search to see if anyone has done it and guess what comes up? The exact question on SO but with these useless answers. And since it has been "answered" no one else bothers any more. And I can't come in an clarify why I need it, it's not my question. If I ask again, my question will probably flagged as a duplicate.

If I could change only one thing on SO, it would be that anyone who answers "don't do that", in any form, without answering the question is banned from the site and their response removed.

8년 전discuss

Can you get an interest only loan on a home in the USA?