zootar

Do SAT scores correlate highly with parental income after controlling for parental SAT scores?

1) Civil engineers and architects can design any bridge they want (though not build it). True, SEs can actually "build" any software they want, but without users it can be hard to tell how good it is.

2) What's the medical / engineering / legal equivalent of a hackathon that those professions aren't doing? Doctors and lawyers can always choose an interesting or deserving client (possibly pro bono), or do a research project.

3) If it's hard to explain, is it possible software isn't changing the world all that much?

4) Imagine Google sharing its Search code. It won't, but as lawyers get to learn from the best lawyers in any area of the law by reading their briefs and watching their trials (all public).

If you're a programmer who can pass algorithm interviews, you have a great chance of scoring near the 90th percentile the first time you attempt the LSAT, and the 96th percentile with practice. Scoring much below the 80th percentile on the LSAT is very poor. In Canada, few students are admitted to any law school with scores that low.

Say you spend $300k on law school. Over a 30 year career, you only have to make an average of $10k extra per year to break even.

The "Jobs Data" tab offers more details: "79.2% of graduates were known to be employed in long-term, full-time legal jobs", "93% graduates were employed in long-term jobs", etc.

The number of software jobs are expected to grow, but is the growth going to be in jobs you really want, or will they all be for 23-year-old coding bootcamp grads?

Again, who cares about the nationwide averages? The 50th percentile Northwestern law grad makes $160k right out of school, and is on track make several times that as a law firm partner, or somewhat less as in-house counsel. My impression is that most programmers struggle to hit $160k any time in their careers, at least outside of SFBA.

When someone describes the downsides of their job, I take it with a grain of salt. Often, it's a case of "the grass is always greener". Sometimes, members of high-status professions want to downplay their success. In any case, most of the lawyers I've talked to say they enjoy their work (though they do work much longer and less predictable hours than programmers).

The "more new lawyers graduating each year than there are law jobs" factoid is both stale and irrelevant. Most of those new lawyers had admissions scores well below the 50th percentile and are graduating from third and fourth tier law schools. Who cares about them? I doubt many would have had bright futures in programming, either.

Relatively modest undergraduate performance can get you into a law school like Northwestern's, where 87% of the class of 2013 "found work and reported a salary", and at least 43% of the class had a starting salary of over $160k, a very respectable ending salary for a programmer, especially outside of SFBA (http://www.lstscorereports.com/schools/northwestern/sals/201...).

If you're saying some jobs that today require "Excel" will require "Excel with VBA", sure. But I'm skeptical that programming will become some sort of new literacy. It seems to me that programming has narrower applicability than, say, high school math. Still, most non-programmers seem to forget their high school math, and they get by just fine in careers where numeracy would be useful from time to time, but is just not essential. No one considers them illiterate.

The world is increasingly dependent on lawyers, the demand for which increases with the size and complexity of the economy. More economic activity means more agreements to be negotiated, disputes to be resolved, and regulations to be enforced. Moreover, this is high-end legal work, and many new lawyers will enjoy long, lucrative careers. It's not clear to me that I should advise my children to embark on a short, low-pay, low-status career in legacy software maintenance.

Null means "without value, effect, consequence, or significance; being or amounting to nothing".

Google "reproducibility crisis", "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" by Ionnadis, "The Garden of Forking Paths" by Gelman.

Most of them are negative results, though usually not overtly presented as such. In my experience, it's extremely rare for a researcher to throw away months of hard work because the result is null. They almost always find a way to augment it or spin it, write up the paper with the phrase "more research is needed" in the conclusion, and submit to a mediocre venue.

You're not in academia, are you? There're hundreds of obscure journals and conferences with very low standards. As long as you choose venues that are within your league, you can publish anything that remotely resembles research, and it will show up on Google Scholar. A new academic paper is published every 15 seconds, and most of them are "negative results, meh results, and flawed research".

Is your wife a tenured professor? What is she thinking of doing instead?

"By welcoming migrant workers, the UAE and its neighbor Qatar do more than any other rich country to reduce global inequality." http://www.newrepublic.com/article/120179/how-reduce-global-...

your best guess why they are underrepresented?

Christina Hoff Sommers' guesses: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-6usiN4uoA, http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/03/what-lean-i...

The connection between lead and crime is tenuous. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6092990.

Steven Pinker on the lead theory:

There are reasons to be skeptical of any claim based on correlations between such widely separated variables as lead exposure (the cause) and crime (the effect). Consuming lead does not instantly turn someone into a criminal in the way that consuming vitamin C cures scurvy. It affects the child’s developing brain, which makes the child duller and more impulsive, which, in some children, and under the right circumstances, leads them to grow up to make short-sighted and risky choices, which, in some children and under the right circumstances, leads them to commit crimes, which, if enough young people act in the same way and at the same time, affects the crime rate. The lead hypothesis correlates the first and last link in this chain, but it would be more convincing if there were evidence about the intervening links. Such correlations should be far stronger than the one they report: presumably most kids with lead are more impulsive, whereas only a minority of impulsive young adults commit crimes. If they are right we should see very strong changes in IQ, school achievement, impulsiveness, childhood aggressiveness, lack of conscientiousness (one of the “Big Five” personality traits) that mirror the trends in lead exposure, with a suitable time delay. Those trends should be much stronger than the time-lagged correlation of lead with crime itself, which is only indirectly related to impulsiveness, an effect that is necessarily diluted by other causes such as policing and incarceration.

http://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/pinker_comments_o...

What fiction do you recommend? A comment of yours from a few years ago describes how I feel about fiction now: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=917882.

You seem to be mocking a claim that no one is making, namely, that it's reasonable to expect salary increases throughout one's career while relying exclusively on some limited initial training. The claim actually being made is that in any career, of the self-improvement necessary for advancement, some fraction can be realized during normal, paid work hours, and that the size of this fraction is trending downward.

No, it doesn't boil down to that. They agree on what information can be encoded genetically. They disagree on a detail of the mechanism of evolution: To what extent does selection occur at various "levels" (gene, individual, kin-group, species, etc)?

Are you claiming that Wilson would in fact say something like that about squirrels? If so, why? If not, then what scientist agrees with you if neither Dawkins nor his rival Wilson?

More to the point, that quote doesn't refer to the information content of genes at all. You'll certainly agree that it doesn't do so explicitly. Can you find a quote that explicitly says that someone disagrees with Dawkins about the information content of genes? Maybe in the Wikipedia articles for gene selection and kin selection?

Is it your understanding that Dawkins and Wilson (or any other reputable scientist) disagree about the information content of genes? If so, can you provide a source for that?

> Organisms do not exist in a vacuum, they interact with other organisms in their environment in myriad cooperative and competitive ways, and that affects which organisms survive and reproduce and which do not

What's your point? In what way would Dawkins disagree with this statement?

> they're much more like a complicated self-referential computer program for manipulating reality

What does "manipulating reality" mean? What reality is being manipulated, if not an organism's cells?

If anyone is reading this comment without having read the article, note that he didn't do this inadvertently: "If it was authority that got the paper published, there is poetic justice in deploying authority in reply."

They do show some businesses that failed. In these cases, the implication is that the sharks' decision not to invest is vindicated.

I just installed the iOS app. It's totally locked up on the "are you sure you want to invite without a quick video" dialog. None of the buttons do anything (including "Cancel").

Today's business environment does not exert any evolutionary pressure on the human species.

Why do you think selection favors "those who are able to work well with others of all races"?

Are there any known instances of a lecture recording being used against an instructor unfairly?

I doubt doing things that could be construed as "out of line, incorrect, inappropriate, whatever" really improve your lectures in a significant and sustainable way. In any case, there are better ways to be interesting and entertaining [1].

I think everyone understand that instructors aren't concerned about copyrights. They're concerned about having to improve the quality of their lectures, or have a permanent record of lectures they're not really proud of.

[1] Richard Buckland, UNSW: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bLCjMA0YlE

The comparison isn't necessarily between remote operation of a drone and flying a plane. As I recall from On Killing [1], air crews have lower rates of PTSD than infantry. I would expect killing someone through a drone's video feed and from a plane's cockpit would have similar psychological costs.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Killing-Psychological-Cost-Learning-So...

Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2165372

Even your present reply makes me glad that the Sonne article was submitted to HN. To you, the Sonne story is important. To me, it seems important, but I can't be sure what the article's biases might be. I suspect there are some, since I generally have faith in Ontario's justice system. I know of no better place on the internet than HN to have an article's flaws exposed. The absence of significant disagreement in the HN discussion increased the article's credibility for me. Your reply offers some further evidence that Sonne really is a good-standing member of the security profession, and being a friend of a friend of an apparently level-headed HN contributor is to his credit.

Your comment on yesterday's submission "Byron Sonne's G20 Focus Cost Him Dearly" indicates that your politics detector is over-sensitive. The article (and the HN discussion) isn't political in any meaningful way. It's about the law and the legal limits of freedom, subjects that seem (to me) to interest a significant fraction of programmers. The article's protagonist doesn't even claim a political motive. He was just performing an experiment to determine what the law is, while satisfying a programmer-like curiosity about a system's vulnerabilities.

The comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2574877