Viewing profile — swatow

I'll save my pity for the tech forums still trapped in Orientalism.

To me it's strange that I see so many comments on HN about how technical skill isn't the most important thing: business sense, life experience, communications skills, etc. count fo…

Most Australians and Italians would object to this. Unfortunately most White Christians are irreparably racist. I would suggest a tolerant liberal nation like Israel as the destina…

This is really impressive. The problem is highly constrained. Because a house is a sturdy structure, large amounts of physical material are involved. Furthermore, there are quality…

The problem with bubble prediction is the perverse incentives. If you say there is no bubble, you look like an ignorant groupie. If you say there is a bubble, even if nothing happe…

I agree it's bad habit, but I don't see it in the article. The article goes to great length to argue why Java should use the same terminology as other languages. I would not say th…

Maybe they should. Studies have found that ratings of a surgeon skill based on a video recordings of surgery, are predictive of patient outcomes[0]. The problem with associating pr…

No, if you read the article, you'll see it is absolutely nothing to do with maternity leave. The article describes a market where companies pay women for breast milk that is left o…

in the English speaking world outside the US, the "toilet" refers to the entire bathroom, not the piece of porcelain. This also explains why "use the toilet" is considered crude in…

I personally consider myself part of the alternative right, but my views are overall fairly mainstream. I fall into #3 not because I'm part of some "dark side" but because I think …

Regarding the lead masks case, how about: Two guys were interested in taking some weird drugs (equivalent of "shrooms" today). They met someone who agreed to give them the drugs, a…

This is a discussion on probability and statistics, so I was using the technical terms. In statistics if A and B are correlated, then A predicts B. But you're just a liberal who as…

I think that, in spite of some pro-aging/death views, society acts to prevent aging and death by treating disease. You seem to want a radical solution, but I think the main reason …

I'm not very familiar with this style of programming puzzle, but I wonder how this is less arbitrary than whiteboard coding topcoder or kaggle. I know people who were hired based o…

I think that the comment was confusing not because of a positive/normative distinction, but because many economists would use the word rent only to refer to inefficiency. While pat…

The standard arguments for free trade apply as much to individual states as to countries. Just as the US enjoys a net benefit from buying goods from China instead of making them, s…

I think it follows pretty directly that if poor people are using jewelry as a store of value, then it's going to being making their financial situation even worse, and therefore ca…

One way to describe it in words is that it's like a normal wind turbine, but instead of 3 blades, you have one wing that moves in a circle like a blade. And instead of the energy b…

You are giving the FSF point of view, but that is not the only point of view. The post is correct that the practical effect of the GPL is to require giving back to the community. F…

I don't mind if other people use the GPL, but I think it's inappropriate for certain kinds of work, including most work sponsored by the government and universities. Suppose the go…

We are talking about academic studies, not how I would personally act. You are asserting that the signal from race/gender is very noisy and the signal from the resume is very preci…

Many people, perhaps not you, are interested in distinguishing between discrimination based on Bayesian inference, and discrimination that isn't, and is instead, for example, based…

Isn't the exact opposite also possible? That there are all kinds of biases in the world, but studies are being selected for (a) showing a bias against women and (b) showing that wo…

In what way is affirmative action poorly understood? What you have described is simply the bar being lower for certain groups, which is exactly how affirmative action is understood…

I know these studies are common (probably because they are easy to conduct) but they don't measure the intrinsic bias of the interviewer. What they measure is a combination of the …