aleyan

This article spent paragraphs describing a normal distribution where a couple of descriptive statistics would do (mean and standard deviation). Ok, I kid, that would be too technical. The old adage still stands though: a picture is worth a thousand words. Instead of showing us what this curve looks like, they wasted the one graphic of their column inches on a useless stethoscope Gordian knot illustration.

One a plus side, this article appears to be famous and from 2004. Somebody must have produced graphic of this bell curve of CF outcomes by hospitals. Anybody got a link?

> It is very tangible. You can effect the image with your hands. You can almost touch it. You can't touch any of this digital stuff, it is in the computer somewhere.

My first camera was digital and my first exposure to photo editing was with photoshop in high school. When I took a B&W photography class as a senior in college it was eye opening. We were in the darkroom dodging and burning photographs on the enlarger with our hands; it was exhilarating. I may not see eye to eye with Dave Sieg on digital, but I completely agree with him on physicality of creation. There is a qualitatively different feel when you are working with physical controls and within constraints of a non digital system.

> You plugin in things to make your animation. That is really where the term plugin came from.

Also this bit is also quite interesting. Is this etymology true?

> Dude is 64 years old, and was never seen using a computer.

Putin became acting president of Russian Federation on New Years Eve 1999. In months since, the only thing he brought into Yeltsin's former office was a computer[1]. He may not be a digital native, but to underestimate him is a mistake.

[1] https://youtu.be/EjU8Fg3NFmo?t=3m10s

> Even now, engineers are not held in anywhere near the same regard in China as they are in the West.

I have to respectfully disagree with the author on the esteem of engineers in China versus the West. I am not Chinese, nor an expert on their culture, but I do live in the West so I understand half of the equation.

Current President of China, Xi Jinping was educated as a chemical engineer[1]. His predecessor Hu Jintao was a hydroelectric engineer[2]. His predecessor Jiang Zemin was an electrical engineer[3].

Compare that with recent American presidents like Obama (JD), Bush(MBA), Clinton(JD), Bush Sr(BA in Econ), Reagan (BA in Econ). These are only a few points, but seems to me it is in China where engineers rise to the highest echelons of power. We have lawyers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi_Jinping#Early_life_and_educ...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hu_Jintao#Early_life

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiang_Zemin#Background_and_asc...

Coming to Django, if you want to do auth via email instead of username, you are out of batteries. I say this criticism as a fan of both Django and Rails.

I don't think "hustler" is interpreted as a compliment in the medical industry. Too long a history of snake oil salesmen peddling to the afflicted.

Readers may find the Master and Margarita website[1] to be very thorough in providing the background information, plot and character summaries, and other supplementary materials. It is the best resource I know on the subject

There is also an active Bulgakov facebook page [2] with things like fan art and informations about upcoming adaptations.

As a matter of disclosure, I created the facebook page in 2008, but it has been run for many years now by Jan Vanhellemont, the man who is also responsible for [1]. I consider him to be the foremost fan of Master and Margarita on the English language internet.

[1] http://www.masterandmargarita.eu/en/ [2] https://www.facebook.com/m.a.bulgakov/

This is not this essay's first time[1] making it to this front of hacker news. And I am glad for it, because Petrified Forrest essay is great, and Lapham's whole issue[2] on fear is fantastic.

Unfortunately two pieces I found most relevant for HN crowd from this issue so far aren't available on Lapham's Quarterly website. They are a moralistic Japanese 17th century account of an entrepreneur in "All the goodness gone from tea"[3] and Joseph Heller's bit on "Corporate Welfare" in "Something Happened"[4]. Hope you enjoy reading them as much as I have.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14589087

[2] http://laphamsquarterly.org/fear

[3] https://books.google.com/books?id=ux89AAAAIAAJ&lpg=PA93&ots=...

[4] https://books.google.com/books?id=b2AiWB98p5sC&lpg=PT14&ots=...

There are a couple of things wrong with this article.

The first problem, as pointed out by apl and em500, is the non-idiomatic pandas code. Pandas is fast not when you rewrite your algorithms using one for one with pandas functions, but when you use functions provided uniquely by pandas, then you start thinking with pandas. My rewrite[0] with groupby is 47 times faster than pure python; it would be 1848 times faster if I didn't convert the result to list of lists from DataFrame as in the other cases.

Secondly, if your analysis is taking too long on your MacBook Air, you should switch up to faster hardware before investing your time in time consuming optimizations. Presumably this is work done for an employer and for them the data scientists time is much more expensive than a powerful AWS instance. Of course if you made big Big O mistakes, no amount of hardware is going to fix that.

[0] https://github.com/aleyan/machinelearningexp/blob/master/Dat...

Perhaps we should take NYTimes advice a step further and stop letting them make us miserable either. There is nothing actionable in the news; next to no utility. News is simply a time sink that depress your spirit. Whenever I think of reading "legitimate" news like the NYTimes, I am reminded of this quote from a Soviet novel by Bulgakov. In it a doctor gives advice:

    If you care about your digestion, my advice is [sic]
    never read soviet newspapers before dinner.[1]

Over the past few years, motivated by the above quote and other reasoning, I taken a few experimental fasts from the news. During those weeks I found myself at no disadvantage that I could detect, but I did feel better and more productive.

[1] https://medium.com/@antonkovalyov/never-read-soviet-newspape...

Thanks for the reply. You have me convinced with amortizing the cost of js over multiple visits rather than a single thread.

Regarding the 4mb thing, I pulled it out of 1wd's comment. It would be best if 1wd came back and explained. That said, I believe the discrepancy is probably between the size of compressed javascript in the network and it's uncompressed size. Firefox dev tools show 3.1mb for meta.discourse.org. I don't know how to view the total size in Chrome's dev tools, but if you click the "use large request rows" in the Network tab you will see that application.js by itself takes up 1.5mb.

Are you really arguing that Discourse's superior linear complexity outweighs the huge constant cost in any meaningfull scenario? At 4mb/840kb * 970 comments, disregarding any additional JSON data that Discourse loads, a Discourse thread would need to have 4974 comments before its strategy is more efficient than Hackernews.

Jeff, I respect you, but I don't understand where you are going with that comeback.

For a brief history of all the other colors, I recommend looking at this veritable hokum post[0]. Make sure to look at the expanded timeline with explanations below infographic.

[0] http://www.veritablehokum.com/comic/mummy-brown-and-other-hi...

They did. [1][2] According to Brett Cannon who made the decision it came down to three things: GitHub has a built in social network, GitLab has no killer feature over GitHub, and Guido the beloved BDFL prefers GitHub.

[1] https://snarky.ca/the-history-behind-the-decision-to-move-py... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13611387

Neat.

I use the following incantation when authorizing folks to ssh into my servers via github public keys:

    curl https://github.com/[github name].keys >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

[github name] here should be replaced with github username of your friend or colleague. Really handy because I can just authorize them without a human request/response loop and manual key moving. Simple and no external tools needed. Normal caveats about authorizing people apply.

This is is not a knock against SeaHash, but I was looking at buffer.rs [0] and noticed pretty much all the code is wrapped in unsafe {} blocks. How much advantage is there to rust implementation vs c++ if unsafe is used so liberally? I ask this in ernest.

[0] https://docs.rs/crate/seahash/2.0.0/source/src/buffer.rs

> Hundreds of Iranian refugees are currently residing within the country, having been displaced from their war-torn homes.

I find this sentence weird for 2 reasons. Firstly "hundreds" is multiple orders of magnitude fewer than the number of refugees in Europe now or the number of ethnic and religious kin taken in by Albania in the 90s. Secondly, what Iranians are being displaced from their "war-torn homes"? There is no war in Iran. For me this calls the rest of the article into question.

What can BBC teach us about trust?

Normally I would just downvote this kind of comment and this kind of article and move on. However because of your earnestness in educating people on the subject, I will not do that. Instead I will explain what is wrong with it and why it deserves the downvotes.

Quite simply the dbdebunked article is hard to read. Too hard to read in fact. It isn't hard to read because the content is complicated, but rather because of the organization of the content is poor. It starts off with a call to action to read another article and immediately follows it up with what appears to be somehow related but poorly referenced block quote. There was actually several triply nested quotes in there amongst other writing smells. Taking the time to edit is important.

When an author is writing for an audience it is their duty to be understood. Having the audience exert extra energy in reading because the author is unwilling to exert energy in writing is inefficient.

There might be something brilliant in the dbdebunked article, but I am unwilling to puzzle it out or subject others to it.

Zhirinovsky, the populist leader of the LDPR party with ~20% of the seats in the Russian Duma, put suffering and otherness at the center of creative process. In his lament to Putin about the lack of cultural development in Russia he said the following:[0]

    Why did Dostoevsky become a great writer? 10 years of hard labor.
    What conclusion do I draw? We must incarcerate.
    After being in jail for three, four or five years, a Dostoevsky will appear...

    [sic]

    The history of art and culture is developed by jail or by sexual minorities.
    We utilize neither today, therefore we don't have any great cultural creators.
    A straight person living in a luxurious Moscow apartment will not create.
    For creativity you need a trouble maker. A freak will create.

I don't subscribe to his views, but I do find his opinion relevant to the article. Hope you are richer for having read it.

[0] https://youtu.be/Hl_VvgpwNMw?t=4m54s

What they have in common is one is BBC's candidate for "Worst collision in the history of space flight" and the other one is mine.

Agree with your comment on opposite endings for small changes in inputs.

Strictly thinking, Space Shuttle Columbia colliding with foam was worse[0] than this.

It is amazing how Mir courted disaster[1] but ended its mission without fatalities or serious injuries. I wonder what if anything could be learned from this?

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaste... [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir#Accidents

Wait until they realized that solving their spaghetti problem with microservices resulted in them operating an Italian restaurant.

Pushing complexity onto interprocess/machine communication will just result in higher levels of spaghetti. Do you really think that same people who would construct a monolith poorly would do a better job building a distributed system instead?

I don't mean to be too dogmatic; there are legit use cases for services. I am just highly skeptical of microservices as a solution for complexity.

  I have just been reading Charles Buonaparte’s [sic] two last volumes;
  uncommonly dry and disgustingly crammed with nomenclature!

In the early 19th century too, overuse of jargon was met with derision.

I never used OneDrive, but I was a hotmail user back in the day. Sometime in late 2003 early 2004 Microsoft decreased the max inbox size from 6 MB to 2 MB [1]. A few months later gmail came out with a 1 GB inbox. It was clear to me Microsoft was standing on the wrong side of internet history then and it looks that way to me now.

[1] I could not find a citation for this. Sorry, you will just have to trust my memory from a decade ago.

I have used DataGrip from OSX, Windows, and Linux to connect to MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and SQL Server. This is what I found.

  + Multiplatform, including OSX
  + Multilingual, can connect to many DBs
  + Decent Ergonomics.
      Queries don't lock up the UI.
      Connection closing does not close the query window.
      Doesn't crash.

  - Doesn't seem to have code gen from entity.
  - Not as robust as native clients.
      Doesn't seem to comprehend Sql Server views and stored procedures
  - A little weird about having to explicitly fetch schemas before you can browse a database. Can take a long time sometimes.

When I need to just query data, it is great. However, when exploring an unfamiliar database it gets weird and I can't rely on it to inform me in a decent way about the presence of non-table things in the database (like views and stored procedures). I would also not rely on it to administer the database.

Overall, it has quickly become my favorite DB tool, and I look forward to JetBrains filling out DataGrip's missing features.

Do people actually prefer talking to bots instead of interacting with apps? Bots don't need to be installed usually, so that makes them lower barrier, but neither do websites.

They are useful when you want to query them with tasks that have a lot of degrees of freedom. These tasks may be easier to describe in human language where the user highlights the important parts forgoing the need to have a complicated GUI with lots of buttons. In these cases though, users don't know what the bot is capable off. GUIs are more discoverable because they present possible options with bad GUIs hiding even more possibilities in the submenus. This is one advantage over GUIs I would like to see bots explore.

In my experience however bots are not good at doing the right thing when queried with a task that has a lot of degrees of freedom. I own an Amazon Echo and at times I feel like I am reciting incantations to get it to do things I want from it; this is especially true of Alexa's "skills". If I have to memorize specific commands for the Echo to respond, it becomes a glorified voice operated command line to me. A verbose, inaccurate command line without a man page.

I think 360 video is great for personal use. Earlier this year I bought an $350 Ricoh Theta S and shot some 360 video. Here is an example of my friend [1] colliding into me while skiing (might want to turn the sound down though, sorry). With just a 180 camera you wouldn't be able to see what happened and why.

3D cameras are great, but 360 takes you a long way toward immersion when used in a headset. Stereoscopy works well only when the objects you care about are between 6 and 20 feet from the camera. Outside of that stereoscopy doesn't give anymore depth cues simply because of how close together our eyes are. Here is a photo wigglegram [2] I took with a $20 Nimslo 3D; it's widest lenses are as far apart as your eyes. Note how flat the background starts to look after the second row of people? That is because they are too far.

As a weird camera and VR enthusiast, I have found it non intuitive to predict what will work or not. I hope this facebook rig and software that uses "optical flow to compute left-right eye stereo disparity" will be immersive and practical. 360 in 3D facebook and google promise sounds fantastic. In a few years, I hope we will have something for the non-professional content producer.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/fooladder/videos/vb.8800136/1010602... [2] http://fooladder.com/post/115435676962/at-the-concert

Issues raised in the article aside, I am here to argue semantics.

The article used the word start-up 3 times, plus one more in the title of his book. The company he worked for however, HubSpot is 10 years old and public and thus by definition is not a startup. Other two companies mentioned, Amazon and Netflix are both over a decade old and public and thus are not start-ups by any stretch of the imagination. Startups and tech companies are not synonymous and using them interchangeably is harmful to our discourse. If we can't agree on what words mean, how can we agree on deeper issues?

PS. I also have issue with author's use of the word "tech worker" to describe telemarketers. I maybe wrong, but a "tech worker" to me is not someone who works for a tech company but rather is one who creating the tech.

Congratulations to Justin Kan.

It is interesting that Snapchat is developing in a direction where people are promoting it for use in communicating with them in a business context. When calling people to follow someone on Snapchat you should include their username or QR code though.

Since BBC decided to talk about propaganda, I will call them out on their own coverage of civilian deaths from the war in Eastern Ukraine.

When civilians were killed in Kiev controlled areas BBC described their deaths as result of rebel activity. When however civilians were killed in rebel controlled areas, they were described as having died from shelling without perpetrators being accused but the fact that it was a rebel area highlighted. A lot more people fall into the second category than the first. Even in straight forward cases of deaths resulting from air strikes against cities, BBC did not assign blame to the government.

It was so bad, I have been tempted to go over every BBC story about the war in Eastern Ukraine and analyze for the language it used to discuss the causes of civilian casualties. Maybe I will.

EDIT: It appears I am not the only one to have noticed this particular bias of BBC. Alan Dix, a professor at Birmingham University, goes at length with examples about this issue at the BBC[1].

[1] http://alandix.com/blog/2015/02/13/lies-damned-lies-and-the-...