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MarkLowenstein

502 karma · joined October 17, 2014

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MarkLowenstein··on During Banned Books Week, Readers Explore What It Means to Challenge Texts
Pertinent:

https://www.ala.org/advocacy/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbook...

a list of the Top 10 Most Challenged Books in order to inform the public about censorship in libraries and schools. The lists are based on information from media stories and voluntary reports sent to OIF from communities across the U.S.

So it's (1) voluntarily submitted, like an Internet poll, (2) it is from libraries AND schools (not just school libraries), and (3) the library had to already carry the book, which means that if the library itself felt like the book was too inappropriate to shelve, it will not be represented here.

In other words, take the NPR article with a grain of salt, or skip altogether. Whatever you learn is unlikely to be accurate.

MarkLowenstein··on Fourier Series Visualisation with D3
Love how tau is defined as a constant in there. Word is spreading!
MarkLowenstein··on Samoa Scraps Daylight Saving Time
I would like to know your motivation. We shouldn't all change our clocks so that the sun is overhead at 1:00 unless there's a good reason. I suggest that if you like the sun to be up for more of your waking day, that the best solution is for you to wake up an hour earlier, and go to bed an hour earlier. It is exactly equivalent, except for the numbers that show up on your watch...which you could just set forward on your own if the numbers are the thing you're looking for.
MarkLowenstein··on Busting the 10x software engineer myth
Almost by definition, the 10x engineer is the one who is in a position to reuse and work within his own code, almost exclusively, rather than navigate the minefields laid by others.

The 1x engineer is a normal one who builds upon the work of other 1x people.

The 0.1x engineer is the one who builds upon the 10x engineer's work.

MarkLowenstein··on Process Intensity (1987)
I like to say that, just like matter can be regarded as frozen energy, data can be regarded as frozen actions. I would not be surprised if physicists eventually regarded both phenomena as isomorphic.
MarkLowenstein··on France Recalls Its Ambassadors to the U.S. and Australia over a Submarine Deal
Could it be an ennui about tech news, resulting from the Tower of Babel of great projects and great ideas, that haven't reliably improved our IT or development experiences?
MarkLowenstein··on Why doesn’t natural immunity count in the US?
I apologize for the delay. It took me awhile to locate my original source: page 18 of https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

Mea culpa, though: the chart I remember was of cases not spread/fan-out. I guess it is pretty hard to judge who is spreading it and who is not, in the public. Most articles tend to measure viral shedding or load as an indicator, which does support my stance, but that's science journalism which has been wrong a lot lately. I won't ask any HN reader to make a conclusion based on what I claimed.

MarkLowenstein··on Why doesn’t natural immunity count in the US?
Since vaccinated are spreading this around nearly as much as unvaccinated, the involuntary manslaughter argument is moot. Getting your own vaccine doesn't help other people not die...only you. Even high-vaccination regions are having waves of infection that dwarf previous ones. (Israel, Scotland, Hawaii)

That said, allowing civil suits to punish people that gave you a virus that killed you, would be effective to keep both vaxed and unvaxxed careful and staying at home while sick. Hard to prove where you got it, but just a few successful suits will keep people honest.

MarkLowenstein··on Why doesn’t natural immunity count in the US?
You are correct. This is the largest overreach I have ever seen: if you work for any company we can control by sniffing around government agencies to find a regulation we can leverage, we will make sure you can't even have a job unless you take a particular vaccine. When you overreach in this way, you would at least want to carve out every reasonable exception you could, to not unnecessarily hurt lives, right? For instance

- If you have a positive antibody test, you're exempt. - If you work from home, you're exempt. etc.

But they don't. I won't make your conclusions for you, but they are obvious.

MarkLowenstein··on The KDL Document Language
I've long made half-hearted stabs at creating what I call "NFML", a.k.a. "No Markup Language". My vision is incredibly similar to this, so I wish you luck! I believe the future resembles KDL.
MarkLowenstein··on Travel planning software: The most common bad startup idea (2012)
This is a great quote!

I only have a finite number of slots in my brain. If I don't remember it, I won't use it.

Why do I feel like computer industry people turn a blind eye toward this? It may be that successful tech people have practically infinite slots in their brains, so they aren't sympathetic to us regular people that do not. An example is the common question "Why didn't you use [X framework] to do this?" as if the possibility of answering "because I didn't know [X framework] existed" would be absurd.

MarkLowenstein··on California aims to ban recycling symbols on things that aren’t recyclable
I like the system at MOD Pizza. They give you your pizza in a paperboard box, but they also put a thin sheet of waxy paper on the bottom of the box before they put the pizza in. So you throw out a minimal amount of paper, but the box is ready to recycle.
MarkLowenstein··on Burning out and quitting
And as hard as it’s going to be to hire talent, it’s going to be even harder to retain talent.

This does not square with so many organizations falling all over themselves to issue vaccine mandates. I suspect it's not true.

MarkLowenstein··on Thought-Terminating Cliché
Whatever.
MarkLowenstein··on 286 vs. 386SX
On a 386, MS Word would make you sit around for 10-15 seconds looking at the splash screen. Then when you upgraded to a 486, you opened Word and it was like "bing!", you're up and running.

Now with magnitudes more speed and memory available, loading Word is...somewhere in between.

MarkLowenstein··on The thing standing between procrastination and daily progress is ritual
I have a checklist to do every morning. The first item is "make coffee". I've been doing my checklist now for years.

Imagine if I had put an "eat that frog" item there instead. That checklist would be ancient history.

MarkLowenstein··on Time to retire the CSV?
All I know is that when people give me a CSV I'm really happy and I get to work on their request right away.

When they give me literally anything else I get pissed off and push their task lower in my queue.

MarkLowenstein··on To remember everything you learn, surrender to this algorithm (2008)
Ulrich Neisser apparently. He's also quoted by this guy who apparently had the same idea as me: https://www.modacity.co/blog/using-repetition-achieve-effect...
MarkLowenstein··on To remember everything you learn, surrender to this algorithm (2008)
Well, the first principle is not about spaced repetition but is more about active learning (wrong term?) vs. passive learning. In other words, don't memorize by playing it a bunch and hoping repetition will beget recall. Instead, play from memory as far as you can (in sections as described below), filling in and approximating whatever you can't remember exactly, but trying to recall parts in that section, even if you can't piece them together in sequence.

The second principle is the spaced repetition. That works for learning the muscle memory as well as the memorization, but let's just address memorization.

First I divide a piece into arbitrary sections, often pages but in information-dense music you've got to go a couple lines at a time. I do not usually divide at a sensible musical stopping point, because we remember the starts and ends of what we do much better than the middles. Choosing weird places to start and end helps get some of those middles into our heads; plus it's really easy to mentally track what you've done if it's at a page or line boundary.

Then, with sections A through, say, D, I'll go in roughly this order, with "A" meaning I play all notes in section A in the proper sequence, even if I have to wait a few seconds sometimes to recall what happens next.

A A A; B B B A A; C C C B B A; D D D C C B A; D D C B; D C; D

...adjusting sometimes to accommodate the different information densities of the different sections. After this you'll need some mental downtime because it sucks a lot out of you to recall so much. Later you can do sections E through H, etc.

By the time you've done that, you're halfway to your goal. You can then start increasing the tempo toward performance quality by responsible metronome practice. I like to do

(1) the above routine out of tempo, waiting as long as necessary before notes

(2) the above routine at any tempo with metronome, doesn't matter how ridiculously slow

(3) increasing the tempo gradually from there, not deviating from the "note-perfect" requirement

MarkLowenstein··on To remember everything you learn, surrender to this algorithm (2008)
Since the early 90s I've used a piano-practice scheme that provides spaced repetition. It greatly reduces the time needed to either (1) learn or (2) memorize pieces. I always feel compelled to cite this poem:

You can get a great deal from rehearsal

If it just has the proper dispersal

You would just be an ass

To do it en masse

Your remembering would turn out much worsal.

MarkLowenstein··on YouTube suspends Rand Paul for seven days
Remember the concept of nerd-sniping? https://xkcd.com/356/ 99% of people, including the sharp and educated people at HN, zealously debate the merits of masks, or the proper priority of individual rights, etc.

But take a step above all of this for a second. Let's say your mask reduces the speed of the spread. Say you wear an N95, and you reduce your chances of getting it in any one day, to near 0. Well that will work...until you take it off. One day, you will have to take it off. And the virus will be right there waiting for you.

Masks may "work" in terms of slowing things, but they don't work in terms of increasing your lifespan more than a few minutes on average, or ending the pandemic. Vaccines do that, or lots of people surviving an infection.

Remember that for all that time in Nov-Jan last winter in the West, everybody and his dog was wearing a mask. Yet more people than ever got it anyway.

MarkLowenstein··on Actual impostors don't get impostor syndrome
A lot of tech interviews screen for the ability to quickly solve whiteboard problems.

But the problems you solve on the job rarely if ever resemble those problems.

Perhaps we have a lot of impostor syndrome because we have a lot of people who aren't the right fit for their job. (This has been my personal experience.)

MarkLowenstein··on American parents are sending their kids to 'Russian math' (2017)
It is hard to believe any American feels the need to supplement the existing in-school lessons with after-school paid programs like Russian math or Kumon.

In the last 10 years nearly every school has adopted the Common Core curriculum, which is the product of the latest findings in educational methodology research, developed by Ed.D. luminaries like Dr. Jill Biden, and promoted by successful industrialists like Bill Gates.

MarkLowenstein··on Surveys show Americans want more walkable cities
I've never run into a walkable city center where there was one super-obvious and convenient place to park--maybe a gigantic underground garage--and then you walk everywhere from there. Feels like that might work.

The attractive city centers have nice stuff, but too few people who live within walking distance to keep them in business and in good shape. They need a way to bring in suburbanites and visitors to supplement the native population.

MarkLowenstein··on Beware of 'shrinkflation,' inflation's devious cousin
This is the answer. Shrinkflation happens all the time, with bigger sizes being reintroduced at the top, and apparently it's executed well enough for people not to notice, since this is the first comment I've seen that acknowledges it.

There is a great analog in sound: the Shepard tone, a.k.a. the "sonic barber pole": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9VMfdG873E

To your ear, the pitch constantly descends, yet it can go on infinitely without ever actually getting "low".

MarkLowenstein··on Hospital exec says employees are walking off the job
(1) If "natural" immunity is the wrong term, I mean to say "acquired", i.e. had the disease.

(2) Yes, you're right that vaccinations also lower the amount of "dry wood" available. I try to add those into my estimates but it made too long a description so I left it out. But until 3 months ago it was only a small factor.

(3) More evidence that it's a hit job: the actual breakdown of current COVID cases is not red states vs. blue. It is urban vs. rural...as you'd expect on the upswing of a new conflagration. But the high-rates map is hugely correlated with urbanization, whereas "Trump country" is barely affected yet. That would be the real story, if there was one, which there is not. Have you seen stories on the crises in NYC and Long Island? Maybe I've missed them.

MarkLowenstein··on Hospital exec says employees are walking off the job
I meant to point out that if a region has kept COVID conflagrations from happening, via social distancing efforts, they will have accumulated less natural immunity, thus they are riper for conflagrations in the future. The way I predict "who's next" in the U.S. is to look at which states are at the bottom in terms of infections per capita. Those are the ripest. The technique has worked very well for me thus far.
MarkLowenstein··on Hospital exec says employees are walking off the job
You're both correct. What is being missed is that, partly because of less social-distancing, FL and the MO/AR/LA region are getting hit first, so you can point to the problems there this week. The media dishonesty is that they won't come back next week or in two weeks and give attention to the equivalent problems in VA, OR, WA, etc. The passive headline-reader, who throughout 2020 and 2021 has seen sob story after sob story about South Dakota, Texas, and Florida, must really scratch their heads when looking at the cumulative death rates and wonder how they ended up being so far from the top, when practically 100% of the reported problems were always in those states.
MarkLowenstein··on Hospital exec says employees are walking off the job
Did they walk off the job in December and January, when they had higher than the current numbers of infection for 2 months straight?

CNN is highlighting this non-unique situation to dump on a hated "red" state. Will they be there in a week, when "blue" Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii all have bigger numbers than they've ever seen? Those states all social-distanced themselves into ripe fruit, ready for picking by the more contagious Delta variant.

MarkLowenstein··on Lists, more lists, and the power of checkboxes (2019)
Mine:

    o task 1 [not started]

    / task 2 [started]

        x nested task A

        o nested task B

    + task 3 [blocked, e.g. on hearing back from somebody]

    x task 4 [done]
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