Hacker News Reader

bloafon Apple asks staff to return to office 3 days a week starting in early September

Work thou for pleasure; paint or sing or carve

The thing thou lovest, though the body starve.

Who works for glory misses oft the goal;

Who works for money coins his very soul;

Work for the work's sake, then, and it may be

That these things shall be added unto thee.

bloafon Sodium rutin extends lifespan and health span in mice by 10%

https://www.cancer.gov/news-events/cancer-currents-blog/2020...

Everything old is new again.

bloafon After years of conflict and instability, Iraq is opening up to tourism

Climate change is real, and oil is in decline. These countries will only become harder to live in, and their incomes will only decline. That these countries will modernize and liberalize in the face of these challenges is not at all a foregone conclusion.

bloafon After years of conflict and instability, Iraq is opening up to tourism

While possible, it is equally possible that the Iraq of 30 years from now is just as unsafe for LGBTQ people as it is today.

bloafon Naomi Osaka faces default from Grand Slam for refusing to speak to media

I wonder if Osaka showed up and only said "I didn't understand, please repeat the question" until the interview was over if she would end up banned.

bloafon Different browsers see different colors

I wonder if this is why h.265 HEVC video playback on firefox is noticeably darker than in edge/chrome.

bloafon A new replication crisis: Research that is less likely to be true is cited more

OR if someone is going to fabricate results, they fabricate them in a direction that they expect others will find interesting.

bloafon Perverse Downstream Consequences of Debunking

Another issue:

If you frame your goal as "stop the spread of disinformation" rather than "convince people to return to the fold," is this result even perverse?

If you can make all the people who believe in crazy conspiracies act in a toxic and obviously partisan way, does it limit their ability to spread their ideas? I.e. does debunking push people outside the overton window?

bloafon How college became a ruthless competition divorced from learning

You don't need a humanities degree to document your local coal mine's history or contribute to your local art culture. You do need a STEM degree if you are going to serve your local community as e.g. a doctor or an engineer.

I'm not commenting on the relative value of the endeavors, just pointing out that there are opportunity costs associated with choosing a humanities degree over a STEM degree in our current environment.

bloafon The compiler will optimize that away

I too suspect "data oriented programming" is just array programming rebranding itself.

bloafon Pass: The standard Unix password manager

To anything with read access to your chosen storage filesystem.

bloafon Pass: The standard Unix password manager

It feels nice and clean, but also like it is leaking the list of sites I use.

bloafon Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

Could we just make something that spams the FLoC algorithm with garbage so we get put in random interest cohorts?

bloafon How to make a Python package in 2021

I do that where I work because we have an internal git that is wide open, but packages from the outside world need to get whitelisted.

More controversially: With a few (<10) lines of code in your setup file, you can make an install-able module out of jupyter notebooks.

bloafon US hunger crisis persists, especially for kids, older adults

Economic slowdowns have historically been associated with increased life expectancy, despite their impact on mental health:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00210-0

bloafon Drinking strong coffee before exercising increases fat-burning, new study finds

My personal experience is that establishing a good exercise routine helps with the diet a lot. If you're pushing yourself fitness-wise, you start to notice the impact diet (and sleep) has on your performance and select for foods that won't make you miserable during your workout.

bloafon Here We Go Again

I think you've hit the nail on the head. When I see a slogan like "don't be seen as misogynist" my brain fills in "don't be seen [by whom?] as misogynist."

Is Stallman actually impeding the FSF's mission, or just pissing off a vocal silicon valley minority who are already on board with the mission?

bloafon Here We Go Again

You asked "where did you find Andy mentioning anything about a new kind of ideological purity?"

I answered with a line where he specifically demands the FSF get rid of people "perceived" as misogynist. I.e. apply a modern gender issue ideological purity test.

Now you have claimed this is a defense of abusers. That is an equivocation, an intellectually dishonest rhetorical tactic. The discussion up to this point was about perceptions of misogyny, which is not the same thing as abuse.

bloafon Here We Go Again

> Of course I would rather that the FSF wouldn't allow itself to be seen as an essentially misogynist organization. So clean house, FSF!

bloafon Here We Go Again

So many of these nonprofit software orgs seem to be run like small town churches. Board members are selected through some combination of ideological purity, zeal, and nepotism rather than any sensible measure of competence or efficacy.

Andy's complaint seems to me to be that they are selecting for the wrong kind of ideological purity (i.e. yesteryear's free software ethos instead of today's gender issues), and I think this criticism misses the forest for a tree.

bloafon Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

US lab shut down temporarily due to inadequate waste sterilization. They were infecting monkeys with ebola? https://wjla.com/news/local/cdc-shut-down-army-germ-lab-heal...

bloafon Hacker's Guide to Numerical Analysis

I saw something like that years ago (I think someone had done it in matlab?) and was recently struggling to find it again. Thanks so much for posting!

bloafon You can't censor away extremism or any other problem

You can take that up with the authors:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/271714033_Political...

bloafon You can't censor away extremism or any other problem

I have some unprofessional sociological suspicions, so I will lay them out as assertions with this caveat serving as the blanket qualifier.

First, some observations:

1. Research has found that the probability of conspiratorial thinking is quadratic with respect to political extremism in either direction.

2. Dangerous political movements are predicated on an "us v. them" mentality, almost by definition of dangerous. What makes a group dangerous is precisely the fact that they are willing to harm people in concrete ways, and willingness to harm requires a targeted "them".

3. Distributed censorship and other forms of persecution are actually conspiracies with an inherent "us" and "them." The more groups (media companies, government, etc) censor similar ideas in similar ways for similar reasons, the more apt appears the description "they conspired against those ideas."

Therefore: the problem with censorship is that it makes the conspiracy theorists right. Censorship is also an acknowledgement that the censor and censored are in fact different and opposing groups. No longer can the censor say "come on guys, we're all on the same team here," they have ceded that high ground.

Both of these effects can actually help extremist groups attract new people. As they say Plures efficimur, quitiens metimur a vobis: semen est sanguis Christianorum: the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.

HOWEVER

All of this analysis is a kind of "perfect sphere on a friction-less plane" view of the market of ideas. We must not fall into the trap of thinking that if we removed all censorship, the market of ideas would be efficient. If censorship is an effort to artificially devalue some ideas, there is also the countervailing force of amplification which artificially inflates.

The problem is that money has always (and technology has recently) enabled people to distort the market of ideas through amplification. There are actually bad actors (e.g. Russia) who actively amplify ideas beneficial to their interests by putting engineered talking points into fake social media accounts.

I do not believe it is possible to fight such a strategy on the same terms. Amplifying contrary ideas simply increases polarization. Attempting to re-level the playing field via censorship has the problems I listed earlier.

bloafon Dr. Seuss books deemed offensive will be delisted from eBay

The Canadian paper, National Post, seems to have a discussion:

https://nationalpost.com/entertainment/books/here-are-the-wr...

However, I have seen some disagreement among different news sources about what exactly led to the bans.

bloafon Understanding deep learning requires rethinking generalization

That's not my reading. I think they are saying that models which *can* over-fit the data in both theory and practice, appear not do so when there are in fact generalizations in the data.

bloafon Flutter 2

Microsoft seems to be wandering around in the same field, with their slow expansion of dotnet & Blazor.

bloafon NYTimes Peru N-Word: My side of the story, in four parts

The witches in a witch hunt are "guilty" of making their communities uncomfortable, but we are perfectly comfortable pointing our fingers at the intolerance of the communities rather than the idiosyncrasies of the witches.

bloafon NYTimes Peru N-Word: My side of the story, in four parts

There is a difference between indifference and dispassion. Because of the author's long career and varied experiences, he is able to see that most issues are not black and white. The problem is that high school kids are not academically dispassionate; they are not equipped to see deviations from their orthodoxy as anything but sinful.

People should be able to live and work with people who are academically dispassionate; no one is perfect and there are worse sins in the world. Indeed, I believe in the benefits of diversity: communities need people who can face emotionally charged issues head-on and come up with new ideas even if unpopular.

bloafon Gradient Free Optimizers: A collection of modern optimization methods in Python

Came here to ask about the Powell method. I find Powell is typically what engineers come up with if asked to optimize something "by hand" without a mathematical model of the system they are optimizing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powell%27s_method