masterzora

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.

Where am I going wrong?

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.

In the case where you're using a fingerprint unlock for your own phone, you are both Henchman #752 and the boss.

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.

[1] http://www.timeanddate.com/time/zone/singapore/singapore?sye...

I do. I don't like small coins.

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.

I'm not sure what you mean by "shenanigans". Erdős was legitimately a collaborator. Going by the article, Graham and Erdős worked together to try to tackle a similar problem but never managed to make it work. Then Graham and Butler built on that to arrive at this. It doesn't seem relevant that Erdős' contribution happened decades ago.

You likely mean something in the vein of The Theory of Everything or The Imitation Game rather than a straight documentary but just in case documentaries count: it's called N is a Number.

Incidentally, through his appearance in N is a Number, Erdös has a Bacon number of 3.

"In the best case the programmer and the company will both think they are getting a good deal" is not the same as "if both the programmer and the company both think they are getting a good deal it is the best case." TFA says the former but your post is really about the latter.

Just because someone is offended doesn't mean they're right. I learned the last one the hard way after being a victim of emotional abuse for over a year, when the other party got outraged or sad at random things to make me do whatever their wanted

I actually spent a couple years in a similar-sounding situation (and have similarly moved past the anger) so I unfortunately have a pretty good idea where you're coming from here. It's also a pretty different situation from what I think the discussion has mostly been centered around. I'm not sure how you handled the experience or what the general case is but I remember for me, for a while I was genuinely sorry for hurting them every time and then it eventually switched over to me just wanting to say whatever it took to stop the episode. It's actually a fair bit more complicated than that but basically the point of the apology wasn't really about remorse or making amends; for the other person it was about control and for me it was just a survival technique. I think it's a fair bit different from the general case, especially when public apologies are involved.

Just because someone is offended doesn't mean they're right.

I don't think "right" is the way to put it at all. Even if we can say someone is or isn't right to be offended, I don't think it really matters. If you truly feel bad about somebody being offended, does whether or not you think they're "right" to be so really affect whether you feel bad about being a partial cause for that state? Or is it more that whether or not you deem them "right" really affects whether you feel bad about them being offended in the first place? That's not rhetorical; I'm genuinely curious but my expectation is that it's the latter. And note that for this I'm trying to differentiate between "feel bad about how they feel" and the sort of "feel bad about having to deal with this situation of them acting offended" I alluded to above.

I'm usually pretty good at empathy and understanding others' viewpoints but maybe some people are different enough from me in a way I'm having difficulty comprehending because I cannot imagine a situation where an action I take causes somebody to feel bad and where I genuinely feel bad about their feelings but I don't regret my role in causing that state. And I'm all too familiar with cases where somebody might have to apologise when they don't mean it but very, very few where they wouldn't benefit from trying to act sincere about it.

There's a lot going on here and it's hard to properly talk about it all at once so I'm going to try to discuss some pieces and hope I don't lose an aggregate meaning in the process.

I see a few key points in what you said that I want to respond to in particular.

I am sorry for how they feel. I am not sorry for what I said.

You don't have to be sorry for what you said to be sorry for offending or hurting the person. You can stand by what you said entirely while still being sorry that what you said hurt them. Saying "I'm sorry I said something that offended you" doesn't mean you're retracting your words but it does mean that you are saddened for having caused the other party pain, even if you don't think their pain is rational.

but that doesn't change the fact that your outrage is [...] totally your fault

If you're concerned about "fault" in this case, I'm not really convinced you do feel bad. "I'm sorry I said something that offended you" isn't "I'm a terrible person who is totally in the wrong"; it's "I regret that I did something that resulted in you being hurt." If you stand entirely by what you said it might even mean something like "I wish it were possible to go back and time and restate that in a way that would achieve what I intended without hurting you."

"I'm sorry" means I feel bad about something and I don't want to do it again

Ultimately, I think this is what it's all about. "I'm sorry you were offended" is (at its absolute best) "I feel bad about you being offended"; "I'm sorry I offended you" is "I feel bad about you being offended and I don't want to do it again."

It doesn't sound like you're actually sorry that they were offended in these circumstances, either, so "I'm sorry if you were offended" is still apologising for something you're not really sorry about, and poorly at that. Leaving aside the question of whether you should be sorry since that's too situational to discuss in generalities, if you're going to pretend you might as well pretend well, I'd say.

I'm sorry if I was unclear but I did understand that and was responding to that particular notion. I was attempting to demonstrate that the "and" does not imply the question is now two (or more) questions. Perhaps I can be clearer:

My primary point is that there is a difference between asking both the question "A" and the question "B" vs. asking the question "A and B". It is true that I can waste two questions asking both "A" and "B" to obtain the answer to "A and B" so in that sense I can see why one might feel "A and B" is two questions rather than one.

But really, the answer to "A and B" isn't really about the answers to "A" and "B" as much as it is about the relationship between them. If you ask "A and B", an answer of "yes" will tell you they are both true but an answer of "no" will not distinguish between whether A is false or B is false or both.

Alternatively, consider questions "A" and "B" again. A is either true or false. B is also either true or false. You don't know the truth value of either. How many questions does it take to determine the truth value of both questions, assuming A and B are independent and the value of one doesn't influence the value of the other? Well, you could ask "A and B" and if you get "yes" you're done but that rides on you being lucky. In fact, there is no way that you can differentiate all four possibilities with a single yes/no response; you need at least two. This isn't really a proof that "A and B" is a single question, of course, but intuitively if "A and B" were, as you say, "really two different questions" one would expect to be able to construct an "A and B" that does differentiate four different possibilities.

Or, from another angle, per your prior post would you say "are you and the god to your left both not Random?" is actually two different questions? How about (ignoring for the moment that this is an entirely useless question in this puzzle) "are you not Random and the god to your left not Random and the god to your right not Random?" Or "Are none of the three of you Random?" I can see no cause to say "Are none of the three of you Random?" (or, say, "does it rain here every day?") is any more than one question nor any way to differentiate this construct from the version using "and". I also see no reason why asking "are you not Random and is the god to your left not Random?" would be any more or fewer questions than "are you not Random and does 'da' mean 'yes'" or why that would be any different from an "if and only if".

Of course, there is the final, if somewhat less satisfying, point to make: the framing as a "question" is more for convenience and wider understanding but the common intention for puzzles like this (especially with Smullyan credited for the puzzle) is generally for you to choose a predicate and ask a god to evaluate it for you, with the god possibly running the output through a not gate before it gets to you.

Well, the part where it directly mentions excluded middle is the part where it cites Boolos commenting on just that.

While you can construct the answer to "Does 'da' mean 'yes' if and only if you are True?" from "Does 'da' mean 'yes' if you are True" and "Does 'da' mean 'yes' only if you are True", you cannot construct the answers to "Does 'da' mean 'yes' if you are True" and "Does 'da' mean 'yes' only if you are True" from "Does 'da' mean 'yes' if and only if you are True?" alone.

Note, in particular, that at the end of the three questions in the solution you still have no way of discerning whether 'da' does, in fact, mean 'yes'.

I had to call to cancel my AT&T account recently. The conversation was pretty short: I just told the rep that I was moving in with a roommate that already had service set up so I didn't need to transfer my own service (only about ~20% a lie).

The frustrating and insulting part was that I spent a really long time on hold before I was connected with the rep and every few minutes while I was on hold an automated message played saying something along the lines of "You can pay your bill, start new service, or basically anything except cancel way faster by going online!" It was bad enough without the constant reminders that I was only sitting there on hold because I wanted the one thing AT&T won't let you do online.