braindongle

>...counting words, which is what data analytics and machine learning are really all about

The piece is welcome anti-hype, but, what? How can a true expert in the field say something like this? Or, maybe I should tell my colleague who is working on ML for diagnostic radiology to think of voxels as, uh, words?

Critic: "System for Dream Control", i.e., "People are suggestible as they fall asleep."

Fan: "But this is closed-loop. It keeps you in the hypnogogic state."

Critic: 1. Optimize a simple open-loop system using, say, number of repetitions, inter-repetition interval as f(repetition), and amplitude as f(repetition). Use your outcome of choice (e.g. the Alternative Uses Task) and a factorial design to explore the space. 2. Optimize closed-loop system for the same outcome, exploring its parameter space. 3. Randomize 100 people to (1) or (2) 4. t-test on the means 5. Get back to me 6. Even if p(2>1) < 0.05, (2) is still just a fancy example of "people's thoughts are affected by words that they hear."

Dr. Horowitz may be onto something. Let's not get ahead of ourselves with clickbait headlines while we wait and see.

Please don't use "guys" this way. This is not PC nitpicking, It's important. "People" or "folks" may not have the ring you're after, but too bad.

What is the best RSS reader that has a customizable tiled layout, like http://www.protopage.com/? By this I mean, I have (nearly) the whole screen at my disposal, can choose the number of columns and rows, and the height (number of article titles) for each tile/feed. For my money, no other layout comes close in terms of information ingestion efficiency.

Thank you. Hacker News works because adults make their points succinctly and without personal attacks. The exchange above this is the kind of "you don't understand" "no, you don't understand" time-wasting that killed Slashdot.

The rude part is that Youtube is forcing Wikipedia deeper into the fake news wars, and not even talking with them about it, apparently.

To wit: "The gap in life expectancy between the richest 1% and poorest 1% of individuals was 14.6 years (95% CI, 14.4 to 14.8 years) for men and 10.1 years (95% CI, 9.9 to 10.3 years) for women"

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2513561

I would love to hear a digital forensics expert weigh in on the doomsday prophesies surrounding this sort of thing. Yes,digital fakery is going to get more and more convincing, but we are not without weapons in the defense of truth. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/5487389/

Wha? Isn't the VPN market about accessing geo-restricted content? My non-geek friends often ask me "Can I stream X for free?" Moral and legal questions not-withstanding, the answer is often yes, using a VPN service.

Could restriction-avoidance come back to bite you someday via logged behavior? Perhaps, but it sure wouldn't be in the interest of a VPN provider to allow that to happen. Should one lose sleep over appearing to be in the UK in order to stream Eurosport? Tough sell.

"Send all of your traffic through us so that we can keep it private and secure" is absurd on the face of it. I'd like to think many non-technical people can see this, yet want to watch the Olympics on CBC because, more curling!

Ah, I see. Thanks. Interesting. The minifier must be smart enough to know that you're not doing anything with the return value, since the two aren't equivalent in that respect.

  false && console.log('foo');  //false
  if(false){ console.log('foo') }; //undefined

JS novice here. Is this an idiomatic way to conditionally perform an operation in JS? It saves typing, but if(){} is much more explicit.

  a && this.oo.push(x.V.TH);

I was aware. Thanks for mentioning that. Personally, I think that the layout of the site, the size of things, the number of clicks it takes to get to particular information are all important when my goal is to understand what messages they are selling, not just to consume their content.

Tangential: I follow cnn.com because they matter and I think we need to read widely these days. I just couldn't deal with the aggressive, auto-play video all over the place, so last week I wrote a userscript to monitor all of their pages for video and strip it. My cnn.com experience jut got a lot better.

https://openuserjs.org/scripts/braindongle/CNN_remove_video/...

From my pithy mentor: "There are no randomized controlled trials demonstrating the efficacy of parachutes." Similar logic here.

In the context of this thread, I thought: if I don't want the machine to presume male or female, than what do I want it to do? he/she was what I came up with, but this does not address non-binary gender or fluid gender, weaknesses which were on my mind.

Curious, I looked for guidelines and the best I could come up with was this, which seems helpful if you know the person in question, but not so much if you're referring to someone completely unknown: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-person_pronoun#Transgend...

I welcome advice.

It certainly can be difficult to work around gendered language. The point is to think about it and avoid it when you can. You never met your daughter's surgeon: "I'm sure the surgeon did all he could to help her." "I'm sure the surgeon did all that could be done to help her."

Maybe the former expresses your intent better (for some reason?), but why not use the latter?

This, of course, is quite aside from what a machine should do in ambiguous cases. In those cases, I just wanted to put a vote in for things like he/she (or: he or she) coming from machines rather than statistics-based presumptions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-neutral_language

Agreed. I edited my comment to add what I think would be a reasonable way to handle it. "he/she" is just silly for humans to say, but is seems appropriate when the text is coming from a machine and there is uncertainty.

"...such a statistical association is, well, meaningless..."

Good point, but it's even worse than meaningless. It's stereotype-reinforcing. That particular inference, that the role in society is such-and-such, so presume that the subject is male, is to be fought at every turn.

I would much prefer the awkwardness of "he/she" when the machine is uncertain rather than some "this is just the way things are" presumption.

"Crop the beaver"? Seriously? It also says "Shave the beaver"! Is it me? Is this thinly veiled high school innuendo?

Thanks for the thoughts. Room for improvement.

I had in mind something more like a bridge toll. Two people leaving NYC, one going to New Jersey, the other to Pennsylvania. To get over the George Washington bridge, they are charged different amounts.

The bridge authority (Comcast) is in bed with Jersey (Netflix), so they have an incentive to Charge the PA people (Hulu) more and keep the Jersey traffic flowing.

Is this an efficient doorway into understanding CSS grid, one that has the bonus of giving you useful code? Or, is this more of a crutch, the output of which will not educate you about the grid goodness?

I'd like it to be the former, so that I can be productive out of the gate and figure out what I'm doing as I go. That may be unprofessional, but I make quick-and-dirty prototypes for academics; nothing that has to scale. Plus, I'm lazy.

We geeks do indeed need to be armed with apt analogies for Net Neutrality and its absence.

My current favorite is: toll booths that charge you different amounts depending on your destination. Or, highways with different speed limits depending on your destination.

Great idea. Especially because it's low effort. People just don't stick with things that feel like a chore, but this just takes a moment and gets you thinking about what's right in your life. Nice.

An interesting angle here is the arms race between manipulation and forensics. In image forensics, clever people are using clever techniques to keep us tethered to some notion of authenticity in digital media. Like this guy: http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/farid/downloads/publications/wif...

These emerging video manipulation tools open new frontiers for related forensics research. In 10 years, when we see a video of someone doing something horrible, these people are perhaps our only hope of knowing whether or not what we're seeing ever happened.

I can imagine something like this being useful in psychotherapy. Your phone could ping you to answer once-per-day, allowing you to optionally enter comments.

American Clinical Psychology and Psychiatry are strangely devoid of routine outcome measurement. This would be a step in the right direction. Similar Likert-type scales could also be useful for people who struggle with intrusive thoughts or hallucinations.

"Maximization is charging the most you can extract in each sale"

Wouldn't that be the price that gets you one, or very few, sales? Isn't demand elasticity still a thing?

Speculation is fine and all, but the "we've got a 70% chance of not starting a full-on revolution in the streets" (paraphrased) claim sure is bold! It's the kind of wild ass speculation that one confines to after-a-few-drinks conversations with close friends. I guess when you're a big fish in the Valley, people think you know such things? "73%" would have been even funnier.

Haha. You and I both just simultaneously quoted the same absurdity and both followed it up with sarcasm.

Seriously. "the consequences of high minimum wages, excessive taxation, and mandate-happy public policy are not limited to the death of cheap sandwiches." No leap to conclusions about causality there. Nope. Can't possibly be that greedy bastards simply used this policy change as an excuse to make a statement.

Likely to have been conceived by George Clinton himself, whose taste is clearly impenetrable by us less funky souls: https://goo.gl/YZJDi5