Viewing profile — texthompson

Why does it matter where the bytes are stored at rest? Isn't everything you need for SHA-256 just the results of the SHA-256 algorithm on every 4096-byte block? I think you could j…

Why would you PUT an object, then download it again to a central server in the first place? If a service is accepting an upload of the bytes, it is already doing a pass over all th…

That's interesting. Would you want it to be something like a bucket setting, like "any time an object is uploaded, don't let an object write complete unless S3 verifies that a pre-…

> Someone probably told me that every cell in my body has the same DNA. But no one shook me by the shoulders, saying how crazy that was. This is only mostly right. Every cell in yo…

If you didn't know, that 80% number is probably the result of Little's Law. That's the result where if your demand is generated by a Poisson process, and your service has a queue, …

One of the funniest stories I've ever heard was about how a junior developer asked a more senior developer a creatively terrifying question: How do I install half of an RPM?

I think of myself as a very absent-minded person. I also can't imagine being in my car without knowing my daughter is in my car. After reading this, I'll probably check the back se…

People in Flint, Michigan still don't have clean water. Lots of other folks in the world also don't have clean water. Doesn't that seem like an easier thing to fix than trying out …

I hope that you feel better soon.

Daycare.

It turns out that the people who need the most help might have a hard time telling doctors the truth about their symptoms for a variety of reasons. I think you're right that this w…

I've never seen anecdata before. Thanks for sharing that word, love it. :)

Why is it not in anyone's interest to write an explicit rebuttal?

Being #3 in a growing market is not a bad place to be.

I think this is consistent with an institutional interest in going through the motions of diagnostic tests, but not caring about accuracy.

It looks like Professor Eisen's blog is down at the moment. Here's a link to the Google cache of that page: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

Michael Eisen is a professor at Berkeley, founder of the Public Library of Science and pioneered the use of microarrays for studying gene expression. This blog post is in response …

I think that evolutionary psychology might be worse, but perhaps that's because serious scientists actually care about nanotechnology and its related fields.

This article would be really interesting with more context and explanation, but I find a bit unreadable in its current state. That being said, I enjoyed the algorithm for generatin…

It's too bad that there's not a more robust discussion about the institutional incentives that drive scientists to fool themselves.

Coins can be biased, they just need to be bent so far out of shape that it's obvious. Here's a fun example: https://izbicki.me/blog/how-to-create-an-unfair-coin-and-pro...

I'm a big fan of two books: * The Elements of Statistical Learning, by Hastie, Tibshirani and Friedman ( https://web.stanford.edu/~hastie/local.ftp/Springer/OLD/ESLI... ). * Probab…

I don't think that the title or the content claimed that "presenting mathematics in an understandable way" is a hack. "Statistics for Hackers" sounds to me like hackers are the int…