HN user

ColinCochrane

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yosefk.com 8y ago

Redundancy vs. dependencies: which is worse? (2008)

ColinCochrane
98pts29
vimeo.com 8y ago

Others Will Follow – SciFi Short

ColinCochrane
1pts0
money.cnn.com 8y ago

Martin Shkreli headed to jail after Hillary Clinton threats

ColinCochrane
15pts4
www.bbc.com 9y ago

LHC double heavy particle to shine light on strong force

ColinCochrane
1pts0
mentalfloss.com 9y ago

Man Buys Two Metric Tons of Lego Bricks; Sorts Them via Machine Learning

ColinCochrane
2pts0
www.nytimes.com 9y ago

At His Own Wake, Celebrating Life and the Gift of Death

ColinCochrane
1pts0
hbr.org 9y ago

Problems of Matrix Organizations (1978)

ColinCochrane
1pts0
www.theplayerstribune.com 9y ago

If You’re Going Through Hell

ColinCochrane
2pts0
ijr.com 9y ago

Edward Snowden Demonstrates How Easy It Is to Hack a Voting Machine

ColinCochrane
268pts200
en.wikipedia.org 9y ago

Starlite

ColinCochrane
1pts0
www.statnews.com 9y ago

'Essentially witchcraft': A former naturopath takes on her colleagues

ColinCochrane
2pts0
www.slate.com 9y ago

Changing Baby's Diaper Now Considered Child Molestation in Arizona

ColinCochrane
14pts0
backchannel.com 9y ago

Beware of the Robot Pharmacist

ColinCochrane
2pts0
www.filfre.net 9y ago

Sierra Gets Creative

ColinCochrane
139pts51
c2.com 10y ago

Soviet Shoe Factory Principle

ColinCochrane
4pts0
www.informationweek.com 10y ago

Build vs. Buy: A Dangerous Lie (2014)

ColinCochrane
1pts0
www.psmag.com 10y ago

Seattle is the Next Detroit

ColinCochrane
2pts0
www.popsci.com 10y ago

What Happens When the Space Industry Collides with a Tiny Town?

ColinCochrane
1pts0
www.washingtonpost.com 10y ago

D.C. church says a bike lane would infringe upon its constitutional rights

ColinCochrane
2pts0
en.wikipedia.org 10y ago

Spite House

ColinCochrane
2pts0
chronicle.com 10y ago

50 Years of Stupid Grammar (2009)

ColinCochrane
1pts0
www.bing.com 10y ago

What you get when you search for “Guitar Tuner” on Bing

ColinCochrane
11pts7
www.washingtonpost.com 10y ago

A new Stephen Hawking presentation about black holes

ColinCochrane
169pts95
www.popsci.com 10y ago

Why NASA Helped Ridley Scott Create ‘The Martian’ Film

ColinCochrane
14pts1
www.runningthefield.com 11y ago

Running the Field – The Story

ColinCochrane
2pts0
www.washingtonpost.com 11y ago

Don’t make bicyclists more visible. Make drivers stop hitting them

ColinCochrane
11pts2
www.hackster.io 11y ago

Smoke n' Mirrors

ColinCochrane
1pts0
www.bloomberg.com 11y ago

RadioShack's Bankruptcy Could Give Your Customer Data to the Highest Bidder

ColinCochrane
1pts0
pipeline.corante.com 11y ago

Nonstop Glamour and Prestige

ColinCochrane
6pts0
www.newyorker.com 11y ago

The Open-Office Trap

ColinCochrane
153pts183

"Considering" might be a bit strong. All that's really happening is the CRTC is opening a public consultation in response to a formal complaint. A cursory look at the CRTC's website shows quite a few public proceedings that are open to comment [0], including the one from the featured article.

I'm inclined to believe this is an example of the system working as intended. A complaint was filed and now the public has their opportunity to voice their opinions in response.

[0] https://applications.crtc.gc.ca/instances-proceedings/Defaul...

That was a very entertaining read. Pulling no punches in the conclusion:

'In the modern-day vernacular, people often refer to a criminal case “being thrown out”. Obviously, this is little more than a figurative expression. Cases aren’t actually thrown out, in the literal or physical sense. Nevertheless, in the specific circumstances of this case, the Court is inclined to actually take the file and throw it out the window, which is the only way to adequately express my bewilderment with the fact that Mr. Epstein was subjected to an arrest and a fulsome criminal prosecution. Alas, the courtrooms of the Montreal courthouse do not have windows.'

I ran a performance audit from the Chrome dev tools:

  First meaningful paint: 8,820 ms
  First Interactive : 11,420 ms
Those are brutal numbers for just about anything, let alone a simple blog post.

Here’s an example: while interviewing a man for a comptroller position, he asked me if I was familiar with financial statements, like a balance sheet. This person knew I had been an entrepreneur for years. When I simply replied yes, because I found the question so mystifying, I was met with laughter and a five minute lecture on why balance sheets matter. A lecture that would have been more fitting for a high school level finance class than an interview with a CEO who carved out a precious 30 minute slot to speak with a candidate.

That is brutal. I don't understand how someone could be so tone-deaf, especially in a job interview.

This is true, but I think the point the parent comment was getting at is that an investigation tends to take a more holistic look at the incident rather than simply assigning blame directly to a single factor. Even pilot error, especially in the context of commercial aviation, is often found to be the result of training deficiencies or cultural issues on the part of the airline.

I'm not sure why the article refers to Chesterton's fence as a fallacy when it basically agrees with the principle that you shouldn't blindly push reforms without understanding the reasoning behind the existing state of things.

That's not to say I disagree with the content of the article. I think it presents a good approach to promoting improvements to processes, the key takeaways being:

1) Observe the process and try to understand all aspects of it (not just that which affects you).

2) If you still feel that it can be improved, come up with a plan to improve and implement the process in a limited scope over which you have control.

3) If successful, break down why it was successful, and evaluate whether it is suitable to be expanded to the general case.

4) Find the owner of the existing process to discuss it with them, and present your proposed improvements.

I think there's an argument to be made that you should talk to the owner of the process before you start coming up with improvements, which could save some time on understanding it. But I suppose that depends on the situation.

To be fair, the article is up front about that.

But that's the point of this whole post: If you can't justify being nice for the sake of others, at least be nice for the sake of yourself.

In 2013, the Wunderland donated one square meter to each of the six major political parties in Germany, asking them to envision what the nation would look like if their party were in power. Top politicians and their advisors visited the Wunderland to participate in this special “Utopia” exhibition. They fretted for weeks over the small details, which each took on the symbolic importance of a plank in a political platform. They had to decide what to include, what to emphasize, and which scenarios would convey their policies most precisely; essentially, what kind of world they wanted to imagine into existence.

I really like that idea. It's almost like an elevator pitch for each party's platform.

There likely is nothing to be done at the moment to prepare for these possibilities (the only body of writing on the subject available in an emergency is science fiction), because no one of consequence is going to take this rubbish seriously unless it happens. At that point, our policy will be determined in the traditional manner of grand panic.

An entertaining conclusion.

It's quite interesting to see how the new logo can be deconstructed to simple shapes.

That said, shouldn't the link be directly to the article instead of through a URL shortener?

There were a couple of useful points in there.

Instead, Nee says one trick could be to find something unexpected that doesn’t fit the usual script of a crime, breaking the burglar out of the automatic, below-conscious processing. “That’s likely to make them abandon the crime,” Nee suggests. Playing a recording of someone’s footsteps, or even something as simple as gentle white noise, might be distracting enough to perturb the burglar. Equally, you could lay out your house in a distinct way – anything that confuses their automatic mental maps. “The thing is, you have to be innovative over time because burglars will get used to whatever you do,” she says.

and

For the time being, there are some easy measures that we could all take. Besides the obvious (remembering to close windows and lock doors) Nee thinks one of the best strategies is to pretend that someone is always in the house; almost all the burglars she has interviewed report that they will do anything to avoid a face-to-face encounter