World-writable memory on Samsung Android phones [LWN.net]

World-writable memory on Samsung Android phones

Posted Dec 21, 2012 4:07 UTC (Fri) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
In reply to: World-writable memory on Samsung Android phones by ekj
Parent article: World-writable memory on Samsung Android phones

> Sure. Nobody contests that there's a lot of lemons. My issue was with the person who said "rejecting *non-lemons* is no big deal", and even asked why you'd want to keep them.

Looking at the quote again:

>> I assumed that it was bleeding obvious that I wanted to keep as many non-lemons as possible.
> Why would I want to do this?

It's not that "rejecting non-lemons is no big deal". It's that getting a 100% lemon detection with some false positives is more important than doing 95% lemon detection to push the false positives down to zero. The lemons can be such a drag on the process that it's worth losing a few potential candidates than wasting any more time than necessary on lemons.

> Depending on your circumstances it very well may be a fairly big deal.

Of course[1]. If you're looking for 10 people and there are only 10 good people, be prepared to carefully filter out dozens of lemons. If you're looking for 2, setting the bar so that only 5 pass is better than setting it too low and getting all 10 good people and one or two lemons thrown into the mix.

[1]If you have a case where context doesn't truly matter, you should start looking for some asphyxiated spherical cows.

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World-writable memory on Samsung Android phones

Posted Dec 21, 2012 16:38 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

If you're looking for 10 people and there are only 10 good people, be prepared to carefully filter out dozens of lemons.

This an example of "asphyxiated spherical cow". Such situation just never happens. Never. It's either "you are looking for 10 people and there are just one or two good candidates in the whole world" or "you are looking for 10 people and there are dozens of good candidates". In first case you need to rethink your strategy (why exactly do you need these candidates? perhaps it's time to change your plans and look for candidates with somewhat different qualifications?) and the second case it's not a big deal if you lose 50% of non-lemons.

Even if you somehow in the situation where you need 10 people and there are exactly 10 good candidates in the whole world it's extremely bad idea to organize contest to find them all. What if half of them will be snatched by a competitor? What if your company will grow and will need 20 of them? What if, god forbid, one of them will die? You'll be screwed, that's what!