rachofsunshine

11 ms·

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by rachofsunshine 2y ago
"There exist exceptions to a trend" does not mean the trend is not a valid proxy (see [1]), and "refuses to do fizzbuzz" is different from " can't do fizzbuzz". I run a technical recruiting company, and w
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by rachofsunshine 2y ago
There's two different questions here: one is "is the way things are currently done stupid" (to which the answer is often "yes"). The other is "can a random outsider do better just by thinking about it" (to
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by rachofsunshine 2y ago
Even if polling had been exactly right, you wouldn't have been that confident in the outcome. In my unsophisticated toy model, plugging in the exact actual result as the polling average (but not telling it how the actual vote went) spi
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by rachofsunshine 2y ago
What they're good for is telling you that things are close. A tied poll or a 50-50 model can tell you that if your beliefs think it's 99% to go one way, you're probably overconfident, and should be more prepared for it to go
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by rachofsunshine 2y ago
Sometimes it helps to just remember that we're talking about people. Like most people, Himba men mostly adopt the norms of their culture, and structure the way they think about the world through that lens. For a Himba man, it is normal
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by rachofsunshine 2y ago
> In the modern world, I don't see how one can be obsessed about such a thing... The version of this I've seen most often has been certain Very Online groups who are convinced that if they have kids they'll turn out to sec
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by rachofsunshine 2y ago
I think it's fair to say that there is a subset of people for whom this kind of thing does border on obsession. By analogy, it's normal to care about your weight, but it's still possible for that normal concern to become an a
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by rachofsunshine 2y ago
There's this piece of product-management wisdom that I've been thinking about lately, which is that users almost always understand their problems better than you do. If the metrics say things are going well, and your users say eve
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by rachofsunshine 2y ago
Your resume link 404's for me.
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by rachofsunshine 2y ago
This is a good general tool for less-mathematically-deep folks to keep in their pocket: look for well-behaved objects that do something nice under the operation you're interested in. Typical "well-behaved" objects do things l
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by rachofsunshine 2y ago
I don't know how OP does it, but Elo ratings are a pretty good tool for this kind of thing. In each pairwise comparison, the selected option "wins", the other option "loses", and ratings are adjusted accordingly. Yo
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by rachofsunshine 2y ago
That was my first thought before I even clicked the link. Maybe "bracket" or something tournament-associated.
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by rachofsunshine 2y ago
> Delete the bottom 5 states from the data (red Bible belt places) and suddenly this is no longer so true. It's less true, but it's still mostly true. Even the highest life-expectancy state in the US (California, at 80.9 year
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by rachofsunshine 2y ago
I get that there's an argument for "if we make sure innovation can thrive and make sure people have a lot of resources to work with, we'll come up with lots of solutions to problems and people will be able to access them&quot
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by rachofsunshine 2y ago
> It seems inefficient and certainly demoralizing, but I would prefer that solutions to the problem were driven by market forces and innovation rather than regulation or employee backlash. I ask this as a person who takes market forces v
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by rachofsunshine 2y ago
The way I did it was by deliberately going against my normal impulses. The rule was "whatever you would normally do, do the opposite of that". If you would stay home, go out. If you would eat a steak, eat spaghetti instead. If you
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by rachofsunshine 2y ago
Especially with such a small number of rigid bodies to worry about. The literal only thing that has to collide with anything else is the pinball itself, unless we're talking about a pretty weird pinball machine.
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by rachofsunshine 2y ago
This puts water on Mars into the time range where life was known to exist here on Earth. The Martian water that carved these rocks was around until 3.7 billion years ago, which is around the age of the oldest known geographic evidence of li
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by rachofsunshine 2y ago
Yeah, it's very intentionally not a typical leetcode problem, precisely because leetcode is nearly worthless for screening people these days. I was replying to someone who seemed to be objecting to my opinion of some candidates' s
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by rachofsunshine 2y ago
We don't ask "make the longest palindrome". We ask "convert this English into code that does what it says". If you want to make the discussion more concrete, we have a public practice problem [1] that we send out wi
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by rachofsunshine 2y ago
The death of shitty interviews has been greatly exaggerated. AI might make e.g. your leetcode interview less predictive than it previously would have been. But was it predictive in the first place? I don't think most interviews are wri
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by rachofsunshine 2y ago
Former head of product there here: no, we didn't do this kind of identity verification. That would have prohibitively damaged people's willingness to actually do the interview. We did use various means to try to identify people si
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by rachofsunshine 2y ago
Any object that approaches the Solar System from interstellar space is necessarily moving at least (solar) escape velocity. It's "falling down" into the Solar System's gravity by a distance equal to how far it has to &qu
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by rachofsunshine 2y ago
Because it isn't big . It's massive . Those are not the same thing. Our everyday intuitions deal with solids with densities within a couple of orders of magnitude (from very light foamy solids at perhaps 0.1 g/cm^3 to very
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by rachofsunshine 2y ago
Black holes emit Hawking radiation regardless of ambient temperature. It's just that right now, the mass(-energy) of photons falling into the hole from the CMBR is outpacing the mass loss to Hawking radiation for large black holes,
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by rachofsunshine 2y ago
It's important not to blow off a few joules when you're speaking of radiation. The LD50 dose for a 75 kg human is only about 375 J (5 Sv) of gamma rays[1]. In this case, the 5 J delivered inside you (I didn't check your calcu
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by rachofsunshine 2y ago
This is one of the best things I've read in a long time. It's not exactly saying anything new - I'm sure this sentiment will be recognizable to almost everyone - but it's saying it quite eloquently. I'm a big beli
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by rachofsunshine 2y ago
I'd encourage you to read my reply to the sibling comment to yours. In brief: depression is a feedback loop, because it interferes with your ability to take the actions you need to take to be less depressed. If you've been depress
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by rachofsunshine 2y ago
Therapy, and even psychiatric treatment like antidepressants, are not the same thing as gaslighting yourself. When I tried an antidepressant for the first time, I thought the same thing you do. "I don't need medication! I'm s
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by rachofsunshine 2y ago
That might very well be true! But I didn't have hard numbers on that, and I did have hard numbers on crypto-industry-openness.

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