nico λ

The mistake is that...it’s not just a logical deduction, but, so to speak, a deduction that has turned into a feeling. Not all natures are the same; for many, a logical deduction sometimes turns into the strongest feeling, which takes over their whole being, and which it is very difficult to drive out or alter. To cure such a person, it’s necessary

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Software engineers never escape the skill-change vortex, even many years into their careers. Experienced engineers must learn and adopt technologies that didn't even exist when they started out. Developers must constantly retool themselves, even well after their formal education ends.

Frequentist inference begins by assuming a null hypothesis to be true before data are collected (eg, that there is no effect of a particular treatment on survival). Investigators then collect data, analyze them, and ask, “How surprising is my result if there is actually no effect of the treatment on survival?” The data would be surprising if there... See more

Don’t underestimate the value of digging into history to investigate some bugs

I’ve always been pretty good at debugging weird issues, with the usual toolkit of println and the debugger. So I never really looked at git much to figure out the history of a bug. But for some bugs it’s crucial.

I recently had an issue with my server where it was leaking... See more

At the end of the day, much of this really will come down to a choice: How important is winning to you versus feeling good about yourself and being congratulated by your peers at your ever-shrinking coalition’s annual conferences and galas? I strongly suspect that in the case of many anti-Trump stalwarts, I know the answer — and it’s depressing as... See more

Spending time sharpening the axe is almost always worth it

You’re going to be renaming things, going to type definitions, finding references, etc a lot ; you should be fast at this. You should know all the major shortcuts in your editor. You should be a confident and fast typist. You should know your OS well. You should be proficient in the shell.... See more

Consequently, in its idealized form the scientific method limits freedom of the will, while technology amplifies freedom of the will. Technology is by no means derived with certainty. It is the extremely particular result of someone’s will, based on rationalizing through the concrete and contingent circumstances of the world.

A SOCKS proxy operates at a lower level compared to a traditional HTTP/HTTPS proxy. Thus, a SOCKS proxy allows you to forward all types of web traffic—including HTTP, HTTPS, but also FTP, POP, IMAP, and other application-level protocols.