AndrewThrowaway

"So how does an airplane fly upside down?" An the theory goes out the window.

Relevent XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1145/ "So why the sky is not violet?"

Actually things like that is what got me interested in physics. My physics teacher asked "so does lightning strike from the sky, downwards". Everybody in class agreed. We all "know" this. We all "seen" it in cartoons. We were learning about electricity (electrons) at this time. "But if electricity is electrons moving, ground obviously has more electrons that the sky, lightning must go from ground to the sky". I was so fascinated about actually "learning" something new. Remember running home to tell my father how clever I was now.

Lightning is much more complicated that this obviously: https://youtu.be/RLWIBrweSU8?t=77

Yes, there is no doubt that "there are always more things to do on a game project than you have people and time to do". However how there is time to firstly make "main thread on single core" monster and then redo it according to game development 101 - make use of GPU.

It is no joke - GPU was barely loaded, while CPU choking. On a modern game released by top software company proudly presenting their branding in the very title.

Then again isn't it like 101 of game development?

Imagine releasing a game that looks stunning, industry agrees that it pushes the limits of modern gaming PC (hence runs poorly on old machines). Fast forward some time - "oh BTW we did it incorrectly (we had our motives), now you can run it on old machine just fine, no need of buying i9 or anything".

You just begin to wonder how these things happen. You would think top programmers work at these companies. Why would they not start with the good concept, loading GPU first etc. Why did it take them so much time to finally do it correctly. Why waste time not doing it at the beginning.

Because it is hard to prove to others, and especially to yourself, that your life is quite good. You can buy expensive clothes (with huge logos that can be seen from a mile) but how expensive can they get, they can be fakes; you can have expensive house (but not much people can see you comong in/out), etc.

So car becomes a perfect proof. "Everybody sees how big and how new and how powerful and loud it is". You have succeeded. Look at drivers sometimes. They are even acting like driving in a movie of some sort. Doing faces when accelerating and etc.

It is the same with plastic surgery - you don't want it to be subtle anymore. You want it to be visible. So anybody can know that you can afford it.

It looks like report is based on responses of experts, kids 0 - 7.

However I guess I was referring to all healthcare system in the US. I believe all over the Europe kid would be tested for free, every year, mandatorily. If eye correction is needed one would be supplied. So study like this wouldn't even be possible. Of course maybe some minimum payment would be needed, parents involved, etc. etc. But these are only details.

However the problem itself is not a problem of neglectful parents. It is a problem of healthcare system/educational system and society as whole.

Study shouldn't be surprising at all - pupils who struggle to see, struggle to learn. Giving them eyeglasses helps a lot.

I would imagine a study like this would be a thing in some third world country. Reading the title you would imagine some poorly lit classroom, wooden walls and clay floor and etc.

But it is Baltimore?

I grew up in Soviet and then Post-Soviet country. We all had eyesight tests every year, maybe even twice a year. If anything - you got eyeglasses. Yeah, maybe you were bullied for a week by pupils but that's it.

To be fair I am a bit shocked with US...

I see this thinking as a main problem. Cities are being built around cars, workplaces are being built around cars and etc. Banning ICE vehicles could be a step into transforming cities to be more people friendly, more kid friendly, more community friendly.

There are places in the world were cities were not built around cars. You take a train (or any other kind of public transport) to go to work, or you take a bike. Or you walk.

https://xkcd.com/538/

Technology people always want to imagine that technology will save/deceive them.

Imagine a situation where some "enemy of the state" is using some "secure" service like "securomail" or similar.

Is it hard to imagine Police/Interpol/KGB coming to the offices of "securomail" and demanding providing IP addresses, no longer encrypting, installing malware for this particular user, etc? Or else all the C-level of "securomail" are "helping the enemy of the state" with all the consequences.

There is always this "5$ wrench human layer" which no technology will protect from.

On the other hand a person lacking ability to tell green from red can still paint quite good landscapes?

On the other hand reproducing the tone requires practice, and mostly practice with your vocal instrument.

I would imagine that kids who grow up in families where e.g. mother sings while cooking, don't even notice how they practice at the age of 2 or so. But what is important, they train their voice, not only hearing.

It is like with colors. A person can see colors perfectly, but if you asked to mix acrylic paint to get chartreuse? Most of the population would struggle I would believe. We wouldn't call these people color-blind.

However with music I feel we somehow mix tone-deafness and ability to sing/reproduce tone.

For me this was kind of an eye opening article.

Let's say I liked some historical novel by that one author. I searched for some similar books. Maybe I read some detective story on similar theme with some deeper meaning that uncovers human nature. Did I try to find books that oppose these ideas? Or did I try to search for a third book with similar message?

Let's say suddenly I am leaning far right. I read so many books on that topic and I know that this is actually a human nature and world is like that and so on.

But is it? Or I just saw what authors wanted me to see? Did I become more intelligent or brainwashed?

I remember how I was blown away by this video a few years ago:

https://youtu.be/3rWycBEHn3s?t=171

Tech lead: Can we just leave it on or pre-start it somehow?

Developer: But...

Tech lead: I will think of something.

Tech lead to management: We made camera start 150% faster!

Management: Wow wow wow. It is so great to have such an experienced tech lead we pay so much for.

Tech lead drives into the sunset with his brand new Tesla.

I understand that things would not so simple of course.

My main message is that technology is only a tool, it is still people, society doing the act.

Yes, social scoring would be easy to implement. However for it to work you would need critical mass of people believing in it.

If you live in Minnesota and somebody in DC says that your score is low you can kinda just ignore it.

When you local milkman stops selling you milk because of it, then things get dark.

However your local milkman can already have "a score" for you which is even worse than that one from DC. E.g. not selling you milk because you are gay or have a green mohawk.

HN attracts specific technical audience who tends to see things from very technical (hard, logical) point of view. However what I want to stress here are "softer" things - how society works, how people interact, how they sell out, what they want to achieve with this etc. It is much harder to define and is much scarier TBH.

It might be a good idea to be nice to your neighbors, demonstrate only mild opinions, basically just "hide in a gray mass of people" before you start setting up your own email servers, degoogle yourself and etc if you are thinking about fascist government taking over.

For technology or corporations to betray you, you most probably be betrayed by society before that.

When Nazis came my grand father was a teenager. A lot of local chads believed in them and joined SS and did all the dirty work. Then when soviets came these chads were afraid that they will be prosecuted for murdering Jews so they did the only logical thing - joined soviet milicija. What basically made them untouchable.

My grand father's brother ran away to US. These local chads then could "prosecute" all the family for "joining partisan movement". It was not soviets from Moscow that were counting every head. It was local supporters who knew each other from the high school. If there was some brother missing in family, they could send all the family to gulags, take over the land, take over houses by accusing family joining partisans. So my grand father spent his teenage years hiding in neighboring villages.

It is not Google who will give you out. They will have upper hand if anything because they are big and etc.

It will be your employer who will comply. It will be your local mailman (what was all these packages you were receiving from China?). It will be your neighbor who likes to shoot guns and doesn't like you for one reason or another.

What people should understand that this "fascist government" will be sitting in DC. They will not be sending somebody from DC to Minnesota because "someguy at gmail dot com" wrote something against them. How inefficient that would be. It will be local people who will be supporting "the new great government". And they have much more compromising information about you than your emails.

When the doomsday comes you will not be hiding your baked beans in your bunker from zombies. It will be your neighbor whose three kids are starving. Or just your other neighbor who likes guns and to eat. And he is hungry, pretty hungry right now.

Let's take some projects of various complexity - some personal webpage, online calendar, social app, etc.

And lets do these in Vanilla CSS - just some clean proper style.css in the <HEAD> and exactly the same project with all the inline styles with some JSS etc.

And let's discuss then. At what point in project's complexity what makes more sense. Which code is more readable/maintainable/etc. Performance gains and etc.

If you would write mAP: 0.9 or mAP (%): 90 or similar my "professor" would be OK with that.

I guess general rule in science (or maybe engineering) is to define units. I have no doubt that e.g. when you are building rockets (or maybe model airplanes) you would know that e.g. velocity is in m/s. Until somebody thinks in some other way and things blow up.

I just wanted to make some fun comment about missing units and that is it. I have no doubt that anybody browsing that repo would not be confused about mAP being 95.6.

"So this is precision? 0 to 1? 1 being totally accurate? And you got 96.5? I assume it is percentage?"

Mxnet | 96.5 | 95.6 | 90.4

Ours | 95.6 | 94.6 | 88.5

My professors would be so mad if I submitted data like this. I already can hear "What are the units? Seconds? So yours are by one second better? Error margin? Percent? So yours is worse?"

I get that this is a very specific information for a specific audience. People who stumble on this repo should know what is that.

However we can all be better at presenting our data.

https://www.stateofdigital.com/facebook-browser-biggest-brow...

So human eye is more sensitive to the same wavelengths the Sun emits more! So it all evens out and the Sun only appears white! That's why we define white as white as this is "lit by the Sun / reflects all sunlight" - our only source of light for many years. So if e.g. dog's eye is sensitive to different wavelengths it should see the Sun in different color? But then again, a dog should call it "white" as this is what you would call "lit by sun" as opposed as e.g. "lit by fire".

Fascinating!

What was surprising that pro on lady's bike couldn't match layman journalist on proper road bike. Basically all the energy spent on women's bike goes to flexing (heating) the frame. City bike built like tank was better as at least it was sturdy.

However it also shows that good bike is so much more important as you would think pro would match you riding anything with two wheels.

Lets change the story to be about an artist being burnt out of art industry. Suddenly he has to deal with all the grant money, politics of the gallery etc. Feels like he doesn't want to do anything with art anymore.

And somebody in the thread suggests the artist just go to the nature and paint and don't think about any art styles and acceptance of peers and trends and etc. Just give yourself to painting and don't think about anything. Just paint with a coal on stones and loose yourself in it.

And you comment would be something like "There's a balance here though, you still need to paint on canvas with acrylic or something, otherwise you won't be able to validate your art in the future for you to progress etc."