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Israel’s incoming prime minister Benny Gantz unveiled an emergency government, to take power following an upcoming confidence vote in the Knesset. The last two MKs required to give Gantz a 61-59 majority, two members of Gantz’s own Blue and White Party who were previously resolute not to go into coalition supported by the mostly Arab […] Disclaimer: I’m going to say this once. Obviously, I am not happy about the coronavirus’s threat to public health or the economic toll it’s taking. I do not think the existence of this pandemic is good. Just so happens that social distancing and remote work suits me. I am truly an introvert, and this whole […] When you get married, you are creating a family. One way to reinforce that is to have the same name. But whose name do you pick? Do you hyphenate? Do you not hyphenate, and never have a simple time filling out a form again (like my friends the Rabideau Childerses)? Do you make a new […] In public transportation as in many other aspects, an important fact of improvement is being able to mix-and-match things that work from different sources. It’s rare to have a situation in which exact importation of one way of doing things is the best in every circumstance (and the Covid-19 crisis appears to be one of […] One frustrating thing coming from telling Americans to be more like democratic Asia, or even more like Europe, is that it is a) a political claim, that b) doesn’t neatly map onto partisanship or even intra-partisan political factions. Demographically, it appeals to more educated people, and to people who identify with more educated political movements […] The US Census Bureau has just released 2019 population estimates by county. Metro New York, after slowly rising for decades more than making up the 1970s losses, went down by 60,000 people, or 0.3% of the population. The city is down 53,000 people. Why? The city chooses stagnation and ignorance. In the 1970s, the city […] Entrenched hierarchies do not like outside criticism, especially when it’s right. They fight off knowledge that they don’t have or can’t control. In a business setting, the main way out is to found a competing company and drive the one that won’t change out of business. But when it’s not possible, the way out involves […] We’ve been running 30x fewer tests than other states, and have been extremely tardy in responding to the Biogen outbreak.
As a "fully remote work" company, we had to make some choices about the
technologies we use to work together and stay in touch.
We decided early on - about the time we realized all three cofounders
live in different cities - that we were going to go all-in on remote work,
at least for engineering, which for now is almost all our work. As several
people have pointed out before, fully remote is generally more stable than
partly remote. In a partially remote team, the remote workers seem to …
I've been comparing notes with people who run corporate engineering blogs and one thing that I think is curious is that it's pretty common for my personal blog to get more traffic than the entire corp eng blog for a company with a nine to ten figure valuation and it's not uncommon for my blog to get an order of magnitude more traffic.
I think this is odd because tech companies in that class often have hundreds to thousands of employees. They're overwhelmingly likely to be better … TL;DR: The limited public evidence suggests Boston has likely failed at containing the coronavirus. State officials should start communicating more transparently about the current status of the outbreak, and the city should cancel large events, in particular the St. Patrick’s Day parade. If you agree, call your elected officials to ask for better communication and aggressive mitigation measures.
(Epistemic status: I’m not an epidemiologist, I just like extrapolating exponential growth.)
My hobby: opening up McIlroy’s UNIX philosophy on one monitor while reading manpages on the other.
The first of McIlroy's dicta is often paraphrased as "do one thing and do it well", which is shortened from "Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new 'features.'"
McIlroy's example of this dictum is:
Surprising to outsiders is the fact that UNIX compilers produce no listings: printing can be do… Being smart is rad. As a tool, it mostly lives up to the hype. But it can never define the real you. Or fill the hole in your heart... The more I've given to being smart the emptier it feels. I thought being smart would allow me to be secure in myself, finally sure that I wasn't making a mistake by loving myself. For some reason, a lot of smart college students end up with the idea that “solving hard technical problems” is the best thing they can do with their life. Why does this happen? Probably because that’s the only thing they’ve been rewarded for over the past 15 years. You can’t micromanage flow. It’s when your thoughts, feelings, and insights are flowing. If you try to slow down a river and tell every water molecule exactly where it goes, what you’ll have is a block of ice.
If you read any personal finance forums late last year, there's a decent chance you ran across a question from someone who was desperately trying to lose money before the end of the year. There are a number of ways someone could do this; one commonly suggested scheme was to buy put options that were expected to expire worthless, allowing the buyer to (probably) take a loss.
One reason people were looking for ways to lose money was that, in the U.S., there's a hard income cutoff for a hea… My old approach to depression and anxiety was to take a wilted plant (me) and try to engineer exactly how to force it to stand up straight again. “Reinforce the stem!” “Correct droop 30 degrees!” “Leaves, uncrinkle!” And then I went about implementing those changes, essentially by rigging up a traction apparatus to hold the […]
Reaching 95%-ile isn't very impressive because it's not that hard to do. I think this is one of my most ridiculable ideas. It doesn't help that, when stated nakedly, that sounds elitist. But I think it's just the opposite: most people can become (relatively) good at most things.
Note that when I say 95%-ile, I mean 95%-ile among people who participate, not all people (for many activities, just doing it at all makes you 99%-ile or above across all people). I'm also not referri… Before we had kids, Jeff and I fostered a couple of cats. One had feline AIDS and was very skinny. Despite our frugal grocery budget of the time, I put olive oil on her food, determined to get her healthier. I knew that stray cats were not a top global priority, and that this wasn’t even the best way of helping stray cats, but it was what I wanted to do.. . . . .The bike path near where I live has a lot of broken glass on the ground nearby. My family likes to go barefoot in the summer, and a lo… Creating really good outcomes for humanity seems hard. We get bored. If we don’t get bored, we still don’t like the idea of joy without variety. And joyful experiences only seems good if they are real and meaningful (in some sense we can’t easily pin down). And so on. On the flip side, creating really … More Hedonic asymmetries Suppose that a kingdom contains a million peasants and a thousand nobles, and: Each noble makes as much as 10,000 peasants put together, such that collectively the nobles get 90% of the income. Each noble cares about as much about themselves as they do about all peasants put together. Each person’s welfare is logarithmic in … More Moral public goods
When I ask people at trendy big tech companies why algorithms quizzes are mandatory, the most common answer I get is something like "we have so much scale, we can't afford to have someone accidentally write an O(n^2) algorithm and bring the site down"1. One thing I find funny about this is, even though a decent fraction of the value I've provided for companies has been solving phone-screen level algorithms problems on the job, I can't pass algorithms interviews! When I say … When I started dating my partner, I quickly noticed that grad school was making her very sad.
This was shortly after I’d started leading an engineering team at Wave, and so the “obvious” hypothesis to me was that the management (okay, “management”) one gets in graduate school is totally ineffective.
Most graduate students, including Eve, start school right after college, i.e., without much clue about how to effectively do self-directed work. (The way you can *really* tell something is horribly wrong is that grad students find PhD Comics darkly funny, not just dark.)
Long ago, I wrote git-subtree
to work around some of my annoyances with git submodules. I've learned a lot
since then, and the development ecosystem has improved a lot (shell scripts
are no longer the best way to manipulate git repos? Whoa!).
Thus, I bring you: git-subtrac.
It's a bit like git-subtree, except it uses real git submodules. The
difference from plain submodules is that, like git-subtree, it encourages
you to put all the contents from all your submodules into your superproject
r… My friend used to have two ‘days’ each day, with a nap between—in the afternoon, he would get up and plan his day with optimism, whatever happened a few hours before washed away. Another friend recently suggested to me thinking … Continue reading → I suggested experimenting with different settings on personal characteristics that aren’t obviously good or bad. For instance, trying out being more or less perfectionistic for a day. A particular variety of this that interests me is experimentation with different ethical … Continue reading → I make use of a lot of analogies, for instance ‘like dancing’ and ‘the ice skating thing’ are particular phenomena I often think about, and I get value from thinking about meta-ethics as if it were romance, or saving the … Continue reading → Sometimes it seems consequentially correct to do things that would also be good for you, if you were selfish. For instance, to save your money instead of giving it away this year, or to get yourself a really nice house … Continue reading → Continuing the theme of wild animal suffering in children’s lit… Hans Christian Andersen’s stories involve a lot of suffering of both human and animal varieties. “The Ugly Duckling” takes a brief detour from describing the duckling’s repeated social humiliations to describe being a waterfowl in winter: The winter grew cold – so bitterly cold that […] Different people seem to have different strategies, which they use systematically across different parts of their lives, and that we recognize and talk about. For instance people vary on: Spontaneity Inclination toward explicit calculations Tendency to go meta Skepticism Optimism … Continue reading → Using real money in prediction markets is all-but-illegal, and dealing with payments is a pain. But using fake money in prediction markets seems tricky, because by default players have no skin in the game. Here’s a simple proposal that I think might work reasonably well without being too hard to try: Create a service that … More Prediction markets for internet points?
An executive with 8,000 indirect reports and 2000 hours of work
in a year can afford to spend, at most, 15 minutes per year per
person in their reporting hierarchy... even if they work on
nothing else. That job seems impossible. How can anyone make any
important decision in a company that large? They will always be
the least informed person in the room, no matter what the topic.
If you know me, you know I've been asking myself this question
for a long time.
Luckily, someone sent me a link to a … How should a state tax investment income if it wants to maximize its citizens’ welfare? This sounds like a simple question but I find it surprisingly hard to think about. Here are some of the positions I’ve moved through over the last few years: Taxing investment has distortionary effects, but we should have non-zero investment … More Taxing investment income is complicated From the perspective of an organism trying to propagate its genes, sex is like a trade: I’ll put half of your DNA in my offspring if you put half of my DNA in yours. I still pass one copy of my genes onto the next generation per unit of investment in children, so it’s a … More Reframing the evolutionary benefit of sex A preschool game that’s been particularly popular and versatile with my kids. Materials: Pennies Collection of counting bears or any other small objects One person is the storekeeper and sets out the bears in any way they want. The other people are customers and bring some pennies. The storekeeper sells the bears to the customers. […] I would say I’m alllmost recovered from the all-nighter I pulled this weekend calling the graveyard shift (4AM–7AM)—but heck, what a blast! Here’s the program I called (most of these walked through minimally or not at all):
50/50 — Bob Isaacs
Fiddler’s Fling — Cary Ravitz (Will Mentor var.)
Maliza’s Magical Mystery Motion — Cary Ravitz
Rollin’ to the Grey Eagle — Hank Morris
Read Between the Lines — Bob Isaacs
The Young Adult Rose — David Kaynor
Treasure of the Soda Bar — Maia McCormick
Cheat Lake Twir…
The Internet has gotten too big.
Growing up, I, like many computery people of my generation, was an idealist.
I believed that better, faster communication would be an unmitigated
improvement to society. "World peace through better communication," I said
to an older co-worker, once, as the millenium was coming to an end. "If
people could just understand each others' points of view, there would be no
reason for them to fight. Government propaganda will never work if citizens
of two w… At naptime Anna listens to recordings of novels recorded by Jeff’s grandmother. It is the main way she will know Winnie, as it is the main way I have ever known Winnie. Some of the recordings are missing parts, and Suzie often fills in the first few sentences, her cadence echoing the distinctive pattern of […] I walk past the neighbor’s garden and feel habitual comfort at the sight of bees clustering in the Russian sage. Bees are good. Bees are pollinators. Why is that good? Because I want my apple tree to bear fruit. Is it good to be a bee? What is it like? I have no idea. I […] (which we hope they will carry into adulthood) Consequences matter. If you were kicking your legs near your sister and you didn’t exactly mean to kick her but your foot did crash into her, you’re being reckless. You never need to give hugs or kisses if you don’t feel like it. No complaining or threatening […] Last weekend, I called my first techno contra (as part of a double dance at CDNY to celebrate the wedding of two of our lovely dancing humans 😍). It turns out, to no one’s surprise, that calling techno is a fair bit different from calling a regular evening dance. Here are my reflections on calling my first techno (including a bunch of great advice from folks on SharedWeight’s Callers’ Listserv).
+ If you can, listen to the tracks in advance!
I worked with DJ Flourish (Mark Moore) from Philly—he’…
I made a little flow chart of mainstream programming languages and how
programmers seem to move from one to another.
There's a more common kind of chart, which shows how the
languages themselves evolved. I didn't want to show the point of view of
language inventors, but rather language users, and see what came out. It
looks similar, but not quite the same.
If you started out in language A, this shows which
language(s) you most likely jumped to next. According to me. Which is not
very scie… When people come to an effective altruism event for the first time, the conversation often turns to projects they’re pursuing or charities they donate to. They often have a sense of nervousness around this, a feeling that the harsh light of cost-effectiveness is about to be turned on everything they do. To be fair, this is a reasonable thing to be apprehensive about, because many youngish people in EA do in fact have this idea that everything in life should be governed by cost-effectiveness. I&… Hey experienced contradancers! Have you been looking for a new way to contribute to your dance community? Here’s one that I’ve been trying. It’s really small, and has the potential to make a really big impact on the quality of our dances, especially as more and more of us get on board with it. Ready? Here it is:
Be quiet when the caller starts talking, and don’t talk through the walkthrough.
That’s it. Really. If you want to go one step further, you can be the person who gently reminds people to … I’ve been contradancing for over eight years, and can jump into even the most complex and falling-apart of contras and still have some idea of what’s going on. But last summer at English-Scottish-Contra Week at Pinewoods, I tried Scottish Country Dance for the first time and I had an experience I haven’t had for quite a while: I was completely at sea in a set dance.
Scottish isn’t too different from contra and English, and I got along okay when I had a walkthrough. (Not great, mind you, but I ma… I’m late to the party, but I've been thinking about the documentary “The Life Equation” about how people use data to decide make life-and-death decisions. The central example is a woman named Crecencia, a mother of seven who lives in rural Guatemala and has cervical cancer. The doctor treating her knows that screening other women for cancer is more cost-effective than treating this woman, and that the community doesn’t have enough money to fully fund both. The filmmaker writes: “Crecencia’s… We’re often taught about the importance of “finding your purpose” as you set out into the world and choose your pathway forward. The words change–sometimes it’s ‘purpose’, but you might also find your ‘bliss’, your ‘passion’, your ‘voice’, your ‘career’, or your ‘calling’–but the narrative remains the same. Whatever it is, you’ve gotta find it. And … Continue reading On Finding Purpose →
The post On Finding Purpose appeared first on Hollis Easter .
Purpose I play music on stage, and that usually means using amplification (PA) systems. The bands I play with (Frost and Fire, The Turning Stile+, and others) typically have a bunch of musicians playing a host of instruments, each with their own microphones. Consequently, we need a lot of mic mute switches. The enemy of … Continue reading XLR Mic Mute Switch with LEDs – Proof of Concept →
The post XLR Mic Mute Switch with LEDs – Proof of Concept appeared first on Hollis Easter .
How to test thermostat and thermal fuse units on kitchen appliances (espresso machine, coffee maker, rice cooker, pressure cooker) with a multimeter.
The post How to Test Thermostat/Thermal Fuse in Kitchen Tools appeared first on Hollis Easter .
Delicious crispy caramelized zucchini with garlic, basil, mint, red wine vinegar, and olive oil. Easily scales up to use all the zucchini in the house, and it's quick! Googootz!
The post Use Up That Zucchini – Googoots / Cucuzza Recipe appeared first on Hollis Easter .
Jennifer Battle asked the National Association of Crisis Organization Directors’ mailing list for some uplifting hotline memes to use in training, since there didn’t seem to be that many available. Here are my first responses. (please feel free to use these if you like)
The post Hotline Memes appeared first on Hollis Easter .
Here are three places Jeff and I are donating this year. The first two are similar to what we’ve been doing for years, and the third represents a change.Direct workJeff and I want to support work that directly makes the world a better place. (Some arguments against falling into a “meta trap” here.) As usual for us, this year we’ve given just over half our donations to direct work. We made these donations to the Against Malaria Foundation, one of GiveWell’s top picks, except for small amounts th… Last week the Boston Effective Altruism group had a discussion on self-care for altruists. I've written about the topic before, but I wanted to share some of the more practical advice people had. Think beyond day-to-day choicesSelf-care isn’t just short-term decisions like whether to make time for yoga tonight. It’s larger life decisions too, like what job to take, where to live, how to budget money, and how to make time for partners, friends, and family.For me, having children was self-car… My latest blog post helps to explain a few statistical/ML models by whether they learn an interaction in a toy example Since Github Pages is way nicer than Blogger, I'm writing over there at http://davidchudzicki.com now. To keep old posts alive, these pages at http://blog.davidchudzicki.com will remain as is. I was converting a PNG (which represented partials sums of the Weierstrass elliptic function) to a GIF and was confused about why the PNG looked fine at low resolution but the GIF looked bad. Then I learned that GIFs can only use 256 colors and we have to do something to map the many colors to the fewer colors. We could just use the closest available color in the new set of colors, but that results in sharp jumps and "color banding" where the colors change. So instead we use (and Image… On a visit to San Francisco's Exploratorium, I saw an oscilloscope they had making Lissijous curves. So I decided to make a version in d3: You can play with it (and see the code) here This post will describe a way I came up with of fitting a function that's constrained to be increasing, using Stan. If you want practical help, standard statistical approaches, or expert research, this isn't the place for you (look up “isotonic regression” or “Bayesian isotonic regression” or David Dunson, whose work Andrew Gelman pointed me to). This is the place for you if you want to read about how I thought about setting up a model, implemented the model in Stan, and created graphic…
Incoming Gantz-Led Government to Invest in Israel’s Infrastructure
Finding home in the time of coronavirus
Have it all: take your spouse’s name socially
Mixing and Matching
Europe and Asia are not Liberal or Conservative America
New York is Shrinking
This is not World War Two
Massachusetts should shut down immediately
Several grumpy opinions about remote work at Tailscale
How (some) good corporate engineering blogs are written
Boston should begin aggressive coronavirus mitigation
The growth of command line options, 1979-Present
Being smart
You don't need to work on hard problems
Let it flow
Suspicious discontinuities
Watering the plant
95%-ile isn't that good
It's ok to feed stray cats
Hedonic asymmetries
Moral public goods
Algorithms interviews: theory vs. practice
The unreasonable effectiveness of one-on-ones
Grad school is worse for public health than STDs
git-subtrac: all your git submodules in one place
Pieces of time
Ethical experimentation
For the metaphors
Self policing for self doubt
Wild animal welfare in Hans Christian Andersen
Personal quality experimentation
Prediction markets for internet points?
What do executives do, anyway?
Taxing investment income is complicated
Reframing the evolutionary benefit of sex
Bear store
Graveyard Shift at Dawn Dance
Absolute scale corrupts absolutely
Traces
Insect ethics for parents
Interpersonal rules for preschoolers
Reflections on My First Techno Contra
Programmer migration patterns
You have more than one goal, and that's fine
Improve Your Community With This One Weird Trick!
Words Don't Help Beginners
No one is a statistic
On Finding Purpose
XLR Mic Mute Switch with LEDs – Proof of Concept
How to Test Thermostat/Thermal Fuse in Kitchen Tools
Use Up That Zucchini – Googoots / Cucuzza Recipe
Hotline Memes
Two standard donations and one new one
Practical steps for self-care
An Interaction or Not? Understanding a Few ML Algorithms via an Example with No Evidence Either Way
dithering
Interactive Lissijous Curves in d3
A Bayesian Model for a Function Increasing by Chi-Squared Jumps (in Stan)