barik

It was posted by the author on Twitter, so it was absolutely for the world:

https://twitter.com/invtym/status/1227321408469909504

The important part is that if you really set your contributions to 65% then you will max out your annual retirement contribution limits early on (front loading). So the rest of the year you will receive your full paycheck (- ESPP, which you'll also get back every quarter).

So the situation is not as dire as it appears.

Yes, that's true. If you're wanting to buy a house that is a good reason to not put additional money in the Roth 401k. It still makes sense to do the Roth IRA, since you can withdraw your contributions early without penalty (subject to some rules).

It would be good to add something on mentoring. This isn't covered very well in new employee orientation. But it's hard to figure out what advice to give because it's so team and role specific. Maybe the advice should be to just find one.

It felt odd writing it. You are right, but when people do suddenly come into money (the initial cash signing bonus), they will sometimes do irrational things. Being able to step back from this emotional reaction will allow that money go much further.

Also forgot to mention open a Fidelity BrokerageLink account for your 401k.

I thought about adding it, but BrokerageLink requires a minimum balance transfer. By then, I figure that people will find out about invclub if they want to pursue more custom strategies.

I also added the note about the fresh Windows 10 Enterprise install. Ultimately, it's a wash. The group policy will apply one way or another.

How many more groups are left to join? There's no easy to way as far as I can tell to get a sense of completion. The extension goes in reverse alphabetical order, but also loops around again.

You can join as many groups as you want. For example: https://df58.host.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/yahoogroups/leaderboar...

It's hard to say if it was worth the price. I purchased a lifetime subscription a while back at a discounted rate. I'm not sure if this a product that I would pay for monthly perpetually though.

Brain.fm does "work" in that it definitely has helped me focus, but I think one could craft a Spotify playlist manually with some effort in order to achieve a similar effect.

What is a recommended VM size on Azure to use?

Keyboard-Video-Mouse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KVM_switch

Ignoring for the moment the active jamming, it's interesting to consider otherwise how perspectives on cell phones have changed over time. When I was in high school (circa 1998), the administration would suspend students caught in possession of cell phones, and their phones would be confiscated. This policy was explicitly in the official student handbook, if I recall correctly. The argument that students needed the cell phones for "emergency" purposes was also deemed by the administration not to be credible.

I agree. In 2000 or so when I first started blogging, pingbacks [1] (or its variation, trackbacks) seemed like it would take off as a popular mechanism for link notification. Unfortunately, for various reasons, it doesn't seem to have really taken off.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pingback

which is to motivate me to do something today which I will be able to talk about tomorrow.

I've actually wondered about this, ever since finding inconsistencies in the psychology literature about this subject, particularly those which echo my own experiences.

For example, Ordóñez and colleagues' 2009 paper, "Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic Side Effects of Overprescribing Goal Setting", identifies some of the negative effects: "narrow focus that neglects nongoal areas, distorted risk preferences, a rise in unethical behavior, inhibited learning, corrosion of organizational culture, and reduced intrinsic motivation."

Other work related (Sivers, McGonigal, etc.) to this effect has also argued that announcing your goals make you less motivated to accomplish them. There's yet other work, by Brown (in the book Daring Greatly) that shows that for certain personalities, these types of environments have a very opposite effect to enhancing motivation: instead, they generate anxiety, guilt, embarrassment, humiliation, and even shame.

I'm not doubting your experience, but my experience is more aligned with the items I've just mentioned. So it'd be interesting to try to tease out why some people experience the benefits you outlined, while others don't, even within the same scrum team. At one point, I conducted an informal study within our own team on scrum experiences and the results are completely bimodal. It's perplexing.

You actually indirectly highlighted one of the problems with these types of "brain teaser" questions.

Condition 1: If you are actually as brilliant as Donald Knuth, and independently derive the Floyd's cycle-detection algorithm, then obviously you must have cheated, because only Donald Knuth could have come up with that sort of thing in 20 minutes.

Condition 2: If, on the other hand, you aren't brilliant like Donald Knuth, you'll probably come with the naive solution using a visited data structure of some sort, in which case you're stupid because you can't come up with the optimal algorithm.

In either case, you bombed with that interviewer.

Condition 3: Cheat. Do the naive algorithm first, then have an "ah-ha" moment that magically gives you the optimal algorithm, because you actually knew it before hand. I suspect, but can't prove, that some hires get in this way. During my time as a PhD researcher studying deception under a related NSA grant, I routinely found that a) people are horrible at lie detection, and b) people greatly overestimate their ability to detect lies.* The perfect way to game the system!

Alternatively:

Condition 4: Inform the interviewer that you're aware of the cycle detection algorithm, and get another brain teaser that reduces you to Condition 1 or Condition 2 (and if less than ethical, Condition 3). Oops.

Ideally, you want interview questions from which you can start at Condition 1, and without deus ex machina, eventually get to Condition 2, perhaps having the interviewer give some hints along the way. Better is to start with a problem that has a reasonable Condition 1 solution, and then slowly modify the problem specification for increasingly complexity ("Now pretend this is an arbitrary graph instead of a tree, what would you have to change?").

Finally, Google maintains a list of banned questions which have such brain teasers (technically, they have an entire question pool), but unfortunately, interviewers don't seem to check them frequently enough and so brain teasers continue to persist (even in 2015).

* If you're fascinated by lie detection, start with scholarly publications from Aldert Vrij, and work from there.

Just a couple of notes. The "Rizos et al. in JAMA 2012;308:1024-1033" refers to the article:

Rizos E. C., Ntzani E. E., Bika E., Kostapanos M. S., Elisaf M. S. (2012). Association between omega-3 fatty acid supplementation and risk of major cardiovascular disease events. JAMA 308, 1024–1033 10.1001/2012.jama.11374

The article can be read for free here: http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1357266

The reason for using .006 is stated in the article:

"Within each assessed outcome, we adopted a level of statistical significance adjusted for multiple comparisons testing by a factor of 8 equaling the number of overall and subgroup analyses performed using the 2 measures of effect (RR and RD); thus, statistical significance was assumed at a P value threshold of .0063."

P-value adjustments are fairly common [1], but I'm not smart enough to say if it was applicable in this case.

Also, in the interest of full disclosure, it might be worth mentioning that Bill Harris is the President of OmegaQuant
Analytics [2], whose stated purpose is to "advanc[e] the science and use of omega-3 fatty acids to improve health."

[1] http://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-patched/library/stats/html/p....

[2] http://www.omegaquant.com/. He also seems to have a pre-canned response, which he pastes as comments to various sites. The pre-canned response is here: http://www.omega-3centre.com/images/stories/pdfs/harris_jama...

Like many ggplot articles, they seem to consider the primary output being the Web, and not print publications.

One thing I haven't quite figured out with ggplot2 is how to keep the text size constant in publications across figures. If you look at professionally typeset books, you'll see that the figure text (say the labels in a chart) is the same as the text of the article itself. Even this article suffers from the problem (but obviously, that's because the text is in a PNG so it can't scale with the article text).

The only workaround I have is to manually set the width of the figure before exporting, but this is fairly inflexible. Perhaps tikz output is another option, but my understanding (possibly incorrect) is that it isn't maintained anymore.

Can anyone recommend a good workflow for charts in R and ggplot2 to handle this situation?

I think what's more frightening to me is how non-systematic this sort of thing is. There appears to be no rhyme or reason to who wins the "doxing lottery". I was looking at my own Facebook and Twitter feeds and realized that I (and maybe most of us, unless we live a pristine life) could just as easily have been Justine Sacco.

We could argue that people shouldn't make posts like these, but in doing so, we ignore our own humanity. We're not robots. Humor is an essential cognitive mechanism for building neural structures so that we can understand the world around us. It helps us to recognize and make sense of subjects that otherwise would be too emotionally difficult to face head-on. This is part of the reason I think that faux news shows like the Colbert Report have been so successful. By denying this sort of expression, we are essentially denying an important cognitive tool for understanding.

The article is a bit too fluffy for my taste, but in observing my own online behavior, I think that this part is key:

People are searching for products on Amazon, rather than using Google.

My own habits suggest that I have a "looking for something to buy mode" and "looking for information mode". When I want to buy something, I go straight to Amazon (and sometimes New Egg). When I want to look for information, I use Google. These two modes don't seem to intersect very frequently, if at all.

I think what's alarming to me is that these actions by private citizens are necessary in the first place.

If the problem is as widespread as the article seems to imply, then I think the industry should be more proactive and formally implement measures (such as allowing third-party but sanctioned "undercover" inspectors) to identify and address these abuses.

But the cynic in me already suspects why the industry would never go for something like this voluntarily.

Using a term like 'hn' isn't really a representative example, since it's unlikely that any advertising would be purchased for such a term or have any custom "knowledge panels". So, first, turn off AdBlock (if you hadn't already done so), then try a more representative query like "flowers":

http://i.imgur.com/jsx1feJ.png

It's a big difference, and these different experiences with Google could just be a matter of which keywords people tend to use (e.g., very general vs. very targeted searches) and what extensions they chose to install in their browser.

Sorry? Apple is an adjective?

For purposes of a trademark, actually, yes. From Apple's own site [1], "Trademarks are adjectives, and should not be made into verbs or made plural or possessive." In addition, Apple specifies a list of suggested generic terms for each trademark. Under Guidelines for Using Apple Trademarks and Copyrights, some concrete examples are given [2]: "Correct: I bought two Macintosh computers." but "Not Correct: I bought two Macintoshes."

[1] https://www.apple.com/legal/intellectual-property/trademark/...

[2] https://www.apple.com/legal/intellectual-property/guidelines...

It's possible that both of you are actually right, depending on the package. For example, "plugins" (such as Flymake, or modern variants) can indeed cause the editor to slow to a crawl. Likewise, I had to turn off real-time spelling checking for LaTeX documents in Emacs for this very reason -- on dissertation-size documents it was simply unbearable, and every few sentences the editor would just spin for a bit [2].

[1] http://flymake.sourceforge.net/

[2] http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/emacs_spell_checker_problems.html

This is an off-topic answer, but I see no reason why this thread shouldn't be generalized to FizzBuzz equivalents in other careers (in fact, it might be interesting to do so). Our electrical engineering FizzBuzz is an introductory, Freshman-level voltage drop problem, found within the first chapter of any Circuit Analysis textbook:

         R1  (N)  R2
  [VDD]-^^^^--*--^^^^----|

This works surprisingly well as a negative hiring filter. It's not intended to be a trick question at all: it can be solved with Ohm's Law:

  I = VDD / (R1 + R2)
  Vn = VDD - R1 * I

  Vn = VDD * R2 / (R1 + R2).

In CS, conference papers act much like journal papers (though often quite a bit shorter). Unlike journal papers, a talk or poster (by one of the authors) is also required to be presented at the conference in order to have the paper published. Though there are exceptions, the majority of these conferences are published in either ACM or IEEE libraries.

The Best Paper Award is typically some combination of a decision by the Program Committee, aggregated votes by attendees of the conference, and input from the paper reviewers who originally peer-reviewed the work.

There isn't a single metric for the award, and it can be quite subjective: sometimes it is an innovate topic, sometimes it is simply an interesting perspective, sometimes it is a well-executed presentation (even if the research itself wasn't all that interesting), sometimes it is because the authors used a difficult-to-acquire or real-world data set (internal Google or Microsoft data, game data directly from Blizzard), sometimes it is because of a challenging participant base (for example, interviewing minorities in elementary schools or a longitudinal study tracking participants over a decade), and sometimes it is simply excellent experimental design and statistical analysis.

I'll give you a serious response, as explained to me in a recent interview I had for a research scientist position: branding. Some researchers in industry are given fairly wide latitude in the topics that they are allowed to study. In these cases, the company usually gets little direct benefit from the output of the "pet" research idea. For such researchers, their indirect value is the publications and resulting press that hopefully increases the brand of the corporation in a more general sense.

I think it's a fair trade off to have to make if you're considering industrial research. I'd also note that academia isn't much different -- most of those releases also start with something like "MIT researchers..."

I'm a customer of both DigitalOcean as well as Linode. I use DigitalOcean for random experiments and side projects and Linode for production sites.

I haven't directly observed any practical differences in ways that affect me in terms of VPS infrastructure itself, but I've found Linode's support to be significantly better and I'm willing to pay a premium for that on "sites that matter". I don't want to imply that DigitalOcean's support is bad -- it's not, but I feel they're average when compared with Linode responses.

On the other hand, my impressions may be biased since I rarely have to contact support in the first place. I'd be interested in whether or not others have had the same experience in terms of customer support.

I don't consider the sort example to be a quirk at all, though some of the other examples are reasonable. It's more a definition of what methods are supposed to do in the first place: a behavior that is applied on the instance of the object. Unless you're doing functional programming (or implementing certain specialized design patterns), you wouldn't expect dog.move() to return a new dog, so why should list.sort() return a new list?

With CalDAV being deprecated, the more pressing question for me is, "when are they going to kill the free IMAP protocol?" Individuals who use desktop applications like Thunderbird or even Outlook never see any Google ads. The most sophisticated targeting advertising techniques in the world can't help if a company can't get your eyeballs on the ad in the first place.

If the trend does continue, I can envision a future where everyone will have to use specific "Google connector"-style APIs [1, 2] to access the various Google services.

[1] https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gappssync

[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/provider-...

It's true that it has history in technological circles, but the politically correct wording appears to now be "primary" and "secondary". Interestingly, in 2003:

"Los Angeles officials have asked that manufacturers, suppliers and contractors stop using the terms "master" and "slave" on computer equipment, saying such terms are unacceptable and offensive." [1].

[1] http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/ptech/11/26/master.term.reut/