3JPLW

Looks like it's possible to do radiocarbon dating on tooth enamel. It's easiest (and most accurate) if you rely upon the byproducts of the nuclear era, but I'd guess you could also do traditional radiometric dating prior to that pulse. This paper kinda sucks, but it's what I found in 30 seconds:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2957015/

He is winning his age brackets (often 60+ or so).

> Do you filter out the ones that don't?

Of course not, that's a straw man that only you are suggesting and often isn't even possible on most systems. People by-and-large will apply all pending updates at once.

Responsible disclosure pushes folks to update. Well, that and new emojis that they're feeling FOMO from. It's a carrot and stick sort of operation.

You're missing the key point: the patch is disclosure to the bad guys.

The P0 disclosure is the disclosure to the good guys and users.

You're assuming that the bad guys are learning about the problem from P0's disclosures, but without P0's disclosures, the bad guys would still learn about the old bugs from the patch itself.

So which is a better situation: a world in which only the bad guys get the information about broken old versions, or a world in which everyone gets the information?

Identity theft is an amazing PR term, not-so-subtly shifting blame onto the individual whose identity was fraudulently used.

* The PII wasn't stolen from me, it was negligently exposed by services I contract with (and pay!) and others that I have no formal relationship with (like Equifax).

* It wasn't defrauding me, it was defrauding services I contract with (and others) who failed to verify my identity.

And yet somehow I'm obligated to do the cleanup myself.

I'm super excited about this! For me the most exciting part is these four sentences:

> The model is portable and free from low-level details. You don’t need to explicitly start and stop threads, and you don’t even need to know how many processors or threads there are (though you can find out if you want).

> The model is nestable and composable: you can start parallel tasks that call library functions that themselves start parallel tasks, and everything works. Your CPUs will not be over-subscribed with threads.

It means that you can put threaded parallelism inside libraries without worrying. It means that Julia itself will start making its builtins threaded. It means that Julia itself is much more threadsafe by default. It means that packages can implement threaded algorithms — and you can use multiple threaded packages together at the same time without worrying. And it means that you can put threaded parallelism in your application code and all these things will work together beautifully.

Oh of course, thank you. I even knew that my camera has a 12 bit DAC, but somehow the way it was presented as 16 bit "literal" values made me forget that fact.

Really cool article. I'm left with just one question:

Why are the 16-bit RAW values so limited in their dynamic range? Wouldn't sensor manufacturers want to have their pixels able to return values that range the whole way from 0x0000 to 0xffff?

Interesting. I had no idea, and would love to find any sort of copy about it on their website. How long does support last? What exactly am I buying?

I must confess the interaction in TFA makes me much more reticent to do something outside the beaten path...

I'm guessing this user is like myself; someone who _purchased_ 1password back when it was $40-60.

Yes, I appreciate the fact that they're continuing to support things, and I am glad that they're finding a revenue model that supports their team, but I very much like my current setup and still haven't upgraded 1password on my Mac past version 3 because I like the old model. Skipping updates on iOS is much much harder.

I would probably pay a flat $40 again for an upgraded version with a standalone license if such a thing were still available.

Perhaps travel across borders? Delete all data, throw an SSH key into 1Password, then once across the border, SSH to your main server to restore all data?

... only if you have another pane with root logged in or with sudo authorized.

> produce well defined output.

Perhaps “produce consistent results” would be more appropriate.

Clearly this means they've broken public-key cryptography.

No the cluster size isn't fixed, nor is the event rate — the clusters are chosen purely based upon what an "unusually long" time between events would be. That's precisely how the rate ends up canceling itself out. Given this formulation, the expected cluster size is always e, regardless of how you define celebrity. That's what makes it fun.

Now the human psychology part that this doesn't cover is that typically when you have two or three A-listers die, well, then you start seeing all the B- C- and D-listers that also died in the same period that you would have otherwise ignored.

I agree, this is a bigger and really dense cluster, but remember that e is just the average (mean) cluster size. There will be clusters bigger than it.

My point is simply that our intuition of randomness biases us to see meaning in clusters when there is none in the first place. In other words, we need to intentionally shift our prior on how unlikely this event is. Yes, it's still unlikely, but it's not as unlikely as you would think.

You know the old adage that celebrities die in threes? It's actually mathematically supported... or, well, it's supported that they die in 2.718s. Same principle would apply to cloud service outages if all the services and their failures were actually independent. We'd expect them to happen in "clusters" of e:

http://ssp.impulsetrain.com/celebrities.html

I still love me a good conspiracy theory, but clustering of random (poisson) events is much more likely than you'd expect.

It's not a big thing, and obviously it's a matter of taste, but I find it improves readability slightly. It's most notable if I'm doing work based on literature with standard notations (e.g., α₀ instead of alpha_0), but it can also be really nice to help keep track of different states of the same value, e.g., loc₀ vs. locᵢ and locₖ inside loop(s) or with staggered indexing computations.

It's just a simple tab completion in the REPL and usual editors, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20346931

Good grief man. I literally just grepped through my installed packages for '₁', looked for a relatively interesting line with lots of unicode, saw "haversine" and realized it was a simple formula others would understand and that I would be able to find an image of online, and then hit google images looking for it.

The point isn't the algorithm itself. The point is just how using unicode allows you to match the style of an arbitrary algorithm out of a textbook.

Folks who want to work with my program are going to know Julia. These tab completions aren't limited to editors/IDEs, they also work at the REPL. Just copy-paste the character you didn't know into Julia's help prompt:

    help?> α
    "α" can be typed by \alpha<tab>

Code is for reading much more than writing — especially for a new person. I maintain that matching the canonical form of the algorithm I'm implementing will help them gain their feet faster.

Good example:

https://github.com/JuliaStats/Distances.jl/blob/c21aab0fae30...

vs.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/haversine-geolocation#introduc... (note the mathematical formula on that page and the JS code compared to Julia's)

Now _scalars_ not being distinct from 1x1 matrices I do agree is highly problematic. Not having a real 1-tensor, though, works surprisingly well.

That's also not true. Julia itself defines the tab completions for all these characters — and they'll be very familiar to you if you've ever used latex. They're just a tab away in every editor worth its salt.

    α₁  \alpha<TAB>\_1<TAB>
    vₓ  v\_x<TAB>     
    H₀  H\_0<TAB>
    χ²  \chi<TAB>\^2<TAB>
    Aᵀ  A\^T<TAB>

When I went to do the python demo above, IPython also tab-completed the `\alpha` above... but to get the ₁ the quickest and easiest way for me to get it was in my Julia editor.

In and of itself, it's not wrong. Where it goes sideways is how Matlab chooses to allow matrix operations against these 1x1 matrices that should otherwise fail, how Matlab chooses to iterate (over columns, unless it's a "row-vector"), and how Matlab chooses to define length (the max dimension).

Amusingly this also leads to things like

    x = 1
    x(end+1) = 2
    x == [1 2]

Yes, absolutely "inline" as identifiers in your code. So many algorithms use subscript or superscript notations, and it's so nice to be able to use names like vₓ or H₀ or χ² or Aᵀ directly.

Subscripts and superscripts are probably some of my most-used unicode identifiers. Supported in Julia but not Python 3.

    In [1]: α₁ = 1
      File "<ipython-input-1-3c2973844bb9>", line 1
        α₁ = 1
         ^
    SyntaxError: invalid character in identifier

Hunh? You can view tweets just fine without twitter accounts.

I'm more sympathetic. I can imagine being in that situation — going down a dirt road — and laughing at the absurdity of it all and yet needing to get to the airport to catch a flight and not having any better options.

I'd wager it didn't get muddy immediately upon starting down that road. Once it did, though, it was probably too late with a line of cars behind you and nowhere to go but forward.

You're missing my point. She's simultaneously saying:

* Get your own coverage

* Insurance companies don't cover it. Full stop. It's not that it's unavailable "at a reasonable price." It's "woe is us, we would if we could, but those damn insurance partners won't let us."

I know her last point isn't accurate, but that's what she's saying and she's phrasing it that way intentionally to shift responsibility. It's abhorrent.

My recent encounter with this comes from healthcare. Healthcare companies love to brag that their "prenatal maternity care is 100% covered, no deductible, no copay."

Turns out "prenatal maternity care" is simply defined as the blood pressure, weight, and fundal measurements. That's all that bullet point means.

* Ultrasound? Well, that's different. It's a lab procedure. Yep, even the 20-week "standard" anatomy scan.

* Get a non-stress test done (literally just 10 minutes worth of heart-rate monitoring)? Then it becomes a "specialist visit." You'll pay for that.

* Get any bloodwork done? Even if it's for the mother's health and not trying to do some sort of pre-natal screening? It's a diagnostic lab procedure.

* Urine samples for pre-eclampsia? Diagnostic testing.

* Mandatory (state-required) STD panel? That's diagnostic testing, too.

Turns out the ACA requires "pre-natal care" to be covered, so bragging about it in the first place is just absurd.