mrerrormessage (u/mrerrormessage)

mrerrormessage commented on The “spreadsheet mentality” sucks, and kills the efficacy of jobs tedbauer2003.medium.com/t... · Posted by u/hunglee2

throwaway787544 · 3 years ago

"If you can't measure it, you can't manage it" is a quote by W. E. Deming. But Deming was fully aware that there are things you can't measure and must manage. He also emphasized that data could be used to mislead and that you must... well, use your brain. Deming thought of data as merely something to be collected in order to decide on an action, but before you can decide, you predict. I think this "predictive" potential is a good mental model; just as predicting the future is foolish, you can also reliably predict that the Earth will go around the Sun tomorrow.

Deming was (among many things) a professor of statistics, and knew that statistics can lie. Much of his work emphasizes the need for analytical skills and critical thinking. An example is PDSA (not PDCA), which requires study and evaluation of an action and theory in order to learn from it. https://deming.org/explore/pdsa/

mrerrormessage · 3 years ago

Came here to reference Deming myself. One thing I've noticed in Deming's work (especially 14 points, sicknesses) is that by contextualizing and properly understanding the use of statistics he humanizes people in an organization. We must look at metrics/statistics correctly, in a way that humanizes and enriches people, not in a way that turns them into numbers in a spreadsheet.

mrerrormessage commented on Do transportation network companies decrease or increase congestion? advances.sciencemag.org/c... · Posted by u/bspn

bb88 · 6 years ago

The story for public transportation in most large cities in the US is not awesome.

    1.  Crime
    2.  Forces you to come in contact with people you would not choose to associate with normally
    3.  Public transportation vehicles are often dirty/unclean
    4.  Long waits during off peak times, often, which forces you to revolve your schedule around public transportation
    5.  Commutes are often longer
    6.  Can't get to your destination often without a long walk, or another vehicle
    7.  Usually still requires walking in the rain/hail/snow/sleet/wind/sub-zero temps
    8.  Initial build out and future expansion are very expensive.

Unless those are addressed in new buildouts, public transportation will continue to have the reputation of public housing and public schools in many places.

mrerrormessage · 6 years ago

I agree that many of your points present legitimate difficulties with the use of public transit in the US as it currently exists. However, I think that the first two points are just as true for ride share as they are for public transit. Ride share also has crime (see sexual assault scandals https://money.cnn.com/2018/04/30/technology/uber-driver-sexu...) and ride sharing (particularly pool-style) also "forces you too come into contact with people you would not normally choose to associate with"; some people (including myself) see this as a benefit of public/shared transit, not a drawback.

Part of the problem is that public transit scales differently from ride share. The more riders public transit has, the better it gets. The more riders ride share has (beyond a certain point) the worse it gets.

mrerrormessage commented on Airlines eye crueler ways of making passengers miserable latimes.com/business/laza... · Posted by u/ekovarski

mrerrormessage · 6 years ago

Am I the only one who thinks standing for shorter flights of < 3 hours would be healthier and more comfortable? I work regularly at a standing desk, sitting for too long makes me feel lethargic and often causes headaches for me (it's much easier to have good posture, neck and back alignment when standing). For longer flights, people need a seat, but for shorter flights I would gladly pay the same price to be able to stand instead.

mrerrormessage commented on Massachusetts to tax ride-hailing apps, give the money to taxis reuters.com/article/techn... · Posted by u/petethomas

mrerrormessage · 9 years ago

I haven't read all the comments in this thread, but I'm surprised at the outrage over a one-nickel tax. This seems like a fairly simple, straightforward rule. Is anyone going to decide not to Lyft/Uber over 5 cents? I don't think so.

Let's also not forget that these ride hailing services are MASSIVELY subsidizing the cost of rides in order to attract drivers/users. That hurts business for taxis. In my mind, this is a sort of protection that ensures taxis stay in business as another, publicly regulated option. What happens in other areas of Uber/Lyft kill all the taxis and then decide doing business isn't profitable and leave (or all their drivers leave I've subsidies end)? This might seem like a farfetched scenario, but remember that Uber is still sitting in a large cash reserves. What will change when they need to turn a profit every quarter? If they have established a monopoly (even locally), they can charge users as much as they want. If they've established a monopsony on drivers, they can lower wages. In my opinion, subsidizing a long-standing industry from a monopolistic competitor with gobs of money to throw at the market looks like a good move.

mrerrormessage commented on Lara Croft Has Company: More Female Heroes Appear in Big-Budget Games nytimes.com/2015/12/29/ar... · Posted by u/lmcnish14

dawnbreez · 10 years ago

I fail to see the significance of the main character's gender, unless it relates directly to the story in some way (i.e., being male/female affects their social standing). It strikes me as silly that so many people raise hell over a detail that should be meaningless.

mrerrormessage · 10 years ago

It's relevant for at least two reasons, in my opinion. The first is that video games, like novels, are stories told through the the protagonist/s. If this character is always male, you miss out on a whole class of stories which are women's stories. Just as literature rarely told women's stories upon a time, video games up to the present time rarely tell women's stories.

The second reason is that having a female protagonist changes the entire meaning of the story. Consider Pierre Menard, author of Quixote (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Menard,_Author_of_the...), which discusses how the particular context of the author effects the meaning of the work.

Wikipedia had an excellent article about gender representation in video games https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_representation_in_vid... . One part of the article notes:

> 60% of girls but only 39% of boys preferred to play a character of their own gender, and 28% of girls as opposed to 20% of boys said that they were more likely to play a game based on the character's gender.

So it may not matter to some people, but it matters greatly to others.

mrerrormessage commented on DLL Hijacking Just Won’t Die textslashplain.com/2015/1... · Posted by u/ingve

mrerrormessage · 10 years ago

The question that needs to be asked here is how to get all installers using MSI. MSI is a secure, declarative format which runs off MS code in known directory. Because it's declarative, it can also be queried and tracked. I recently packaged an installer using it and it worked really well. WiX has terrific documentation and it was straightforward.

mrerrormessage commented on Physicists believe they can create matter from colliding photons theguardian.com/science/2... · Posted by u/stonlyb

mrerrormessage · 10 years ago

If this can be made practical at any scale, I think the most exciting applications will be in long-range space drives. Although it sounds as though immense amounts of energy are needed, not needing to take along matter to eject in order to move is a game changer for space exploration.

mrerrormessage commented on I turned off JavaScript for a whole week and it was glorious wired.com/2015/11/i-turne... · Posted by u/denzil_correa

mrerrormessage · 10 years ago

It's ironic that an article about the awfulness of js on the modern web is rendered unreadable by javascript and/or flash: http://imgur.com/8Iikyd7. The page literally crashed my browser on first view.

mrerrormessage commented on I Want to Run Stateful Containers, Too techcrunch.com/2015/11/21... · Posted by u/kevindeasis

mrerrormessage · 10 years ago

How much of this could be avoided if the application didn't use mongo? Needing to run a three-nice cluster out of the gate seems like a big part of the problem. Sure, you want backups and redundancy for any database, but there are situations where a MySQL or pg slave that can be switched on makes more sense financially, especially if load doesn't require a three-node cluster.

mrerrormessage commented on Obesity Paradox: Overweight patients with some chronic conditions fare better qz.com/550527/obesity-par... · Posted by u/Amorymeltzer

mrerrormessage · 10 years ago

I wonder if anyone has run the data using body fat percentage instead of BMI. BMI is a very coarse metric that will sometimes label short and/or muscular people as overweight/obese when they are quite healthy (think football players or weight lifters).