derstander

> What prevents matlab users from switching? The syntax is similar.

I’ll offer my perspective. I’m switching little-by-little. Why don’t I just rip off the bandaid and switch whole-hog immediately? The literally twenty years of tools I’ve developed in MATLAB.

At work, I’m paid to perform analyses, develop algorithms, and document that work to my colleagues and our sponsors. I’m not paid to learn Julia. If I’m working on something completely novel where none of the MATLAB building blocks I’ve wrote over the years are useful, or the porting time is a small (for some arbitrary and subjective definition) of the overall task time, then I’ll do it in Julia.

The toolboxes aren’t a huge sticking point for me: Mathworks has only somewhat recently developed toolboxes geared toward my particular domain, so none of my code relies on them. My ability to share with colleagues is a bit of a sticking point. We’re predominantly a MATLAB shop (and this seems true not just at my company, but in our particular niche in industry). There has been some movement toward Python. But if it’s anything like the transition from Fortran to MATLAB — which was still on-going when I started in the early 2000s — then a full switch to either Python or Julia is still a ways off.

I can only tell you what works for me. My note-taking varies based on multiple parameters.

The first is the nature of my work on the project. My strategy is different if I am a project leader or individual contributor. If IC, then I only take notes on actions I need to take, supporting data that will help me take those actions, things I am waiting on from others, upcoming events, or interesting asides I want to think about later.

If I am in a leadership role, then unfortunately I need to take more notes. I need to keep track of all of those things I mentioned above, but for everyone — minus the asides.

But I do not take verbatim notes about what people say in either case.

If you’re in a semi hostile environment then you probably want more detailed notes as a CYA measure. But the real solution there is to get out of that situation — I know, easier said than done.

If you’re working with people that have proven themselves unreliable in the past, then you may want more detailed notes specifically about their interactions. But for people with a history of getting the job done, you need less detail.

Honestly it sounds like you may be trying to take too many notes. Important questions to answer for yourself are: 1) how does this meeting help me do my job? 2) what specific information in this meeting is going to help me do that?

You’re probably not a court stenographer. Take only the notes that help you do your job. If you need more detailed notes, then consider a technological solution. If you’re on a call, some meeting software enables recording (and notifies all the participants that that is the case, which I think is important from a privacy perspective).

In any case, I try to minimize the amount of notes that I take. Each one pulls me out of the moment and increases the chance I’ll miss something important. I also take notes with a pen and paper. And I review notes at the end of a meeting and augment them after the fact when necessary. Finally, I “import” them into my personal project management system to ensure I am tracking all the actions, waiting-fors, and calendar events.

I think you're reading more into this study than the study itself says.

"Conclusions: Our study shows higher levels of neuroticism in patients with post-COVID syndrome" does not imply that "long COVID ... is likely psychiatric."

I'm an engineer, not a social scientist, but to my eye this study doesn't determine the direction of causality. It certainly seems plausible to me that a chronic illness could cause the neuroticism they measured, rather than vice-versa.

Further, the authors themselves seem to imply that there are non-psychiatric symptoms of long COVID: "Secondly, we evaluated the correlation between the main personality traits and the neuropsychiatric features of post-COVID syndrome" suggests that there may be non-neuropsychiatric features.

I think that, as unsatisfying as the prospect is, it's just going to take more time and work for humanity to really understand this virus -- including the nature of long COVID.

As an aside, this article from 2019 [0] suggests that ME is not (or at least not purely) a psychiatric illness.

"The US Institute of Medicine (IOM) in 2015 conducted an extensive review of the literature, including expert testimonies from the most prominent US ME/CFS experts and concluded that ME/CFS is a ‘serious biological illness’. Similarly, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) concluded that ME/CFS is ‘not a primary psychological disease’ (Green et al., 2015)." [0]

[0] Geraghty et al., "The ‘cognitive behavioural model’ of chronic fatigue syndrome: Critique of a flawed model." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6482658/

> very little of the content is true journalism; much of it is effectively op-ed

What is your alternative for a true journalism / non op-ed radio news station?

Other than some tech sites and link aggregators / discussion forums (hello hackernews), I limit my news-reading to the AP and Reuters sites. But I’d be interested in learning about radio-based news sources, provided that they’re either accessible in my area or online.

> ELIZA's the name of a crude parody of a chatbot, produced in the 1960s.

I think this is unfair to the technical challenges inherent in implementing something like ELIZA (in the 60’s!).

Crude parody would be fair if it was released today. A phrase that might better account for the state of computing in the 60s would be “distant precursor to modern chatbots”.

If Wikipedia is to be believed, ELIZA was written for the IBM 7094 which boasted performance of something like 200 kflops (yes, kiloflops).

> … how is the Bay Area housing market artificially inflated?

I shouldn’t have an opinion on this because I don’t live in the Bay Area or closely follow its politics, but the most common refrain I see is that policies (e.g., zoning) prevent building more and higher density housing, thus artificially limiting supply.

> … all these pro-WFH arguments here at HN give me almost hikikomori vibes.

This doesn’t match my experience. I’m a teleworker with a family and the percentage of my life spent interacting with other human beings is much higher than when I was a single person commuting to the office every day, or even a person with a family commuting to the office every day.

Sure it’s the same few people instead of the dozen or so in an office and the smattering when I went out at night. But those relationships with the fewer people I interact with now are a good deal stronger than those other cases.

I think it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that the current norm of commuting in to an office or other workplace is anomalous in the history of humanity. People certainly had varied and meaningful personal relationships before this. The bulk of humanity weren’t essentially reclusive hermits prior to the start of the rat race.

There are certainly benefits and drawbacks to then as now, but people spoke in person with their neighbors, engaged in civic life, found community in their faith, etc. Many of these social outlets have been replaced in bulk for a lot of people by a work social life and a nightlife out at restaurants and bars where relationships may be many but more fleeting. And maybe some of our interpersonal skills have suffered for it. Certainly there are feuds and rivalries of historic proportion before office culture, but I think conflict management is developed more when there are difficult people in your communities that you just need to deal with — think of decades-long neighbors.

But I’m sure some of these are my own biases: I went from living in a city and commuting to work to living in a very rural area and mostly teleworking.

Do I miss the city? Yes, certainly: arts and entertainment events, cuisines of any kind in walking or public transportation distance, etc. Do I miss going into the office every day? Sometimes: I honestly do like some of my coworkers enough to be real friends with. Am I the American equivalent of a hikikomori? No: I have stronger personal relationships with both family, neighbors, and members of my community than ever before — and certainly than more so than when I commuted to an office every day.

I do listen to a lot fewer podcasts and new music without a commute though.

What are “Berniebucks”? A cursory google search suggests that they are either Safari Ltd’s reward program or Bernie Sanders fundraising for his 2016 run for President, but neither of those seem germane to this conversation.

Is the notion that Bernie Sanders is somehow responsible for all of the economic stimulus given to US citizens during the pandemic?

The article says:

> Owners of Roald Dahl ebooks ...

> Readers who bought electronic versions ...

It has been proven to us (members of the general populace) time and again that we're not actually "buying" and we don't "own" digital media: whether ebooks, digital movies, music, or games. We are licensing or renting them. And apparently the terms of the license often include altering the contents or removing access (e.g. the Kindle 1984 fiasco) at the whim of the licensor. To be honest, I'm not really sure if the license explicitly allows that or not -- I'm not reading multi-page terms and conditions every time I make a digital purchase, even though I know I should -- but it has certainly happened on multiple occasions.

It's odd to me that we've accepted this for digital purchases. Can you imagine checking out at a grocery store and being presented with a hundred page amalgamation of terms of use for every item you're buying?

I know government regulation is a non-starter for many, but I personally would not mind if the government established some sort of digital version of the first sale doctrine and stopped businesses from using terms like "buy", "purchase", or "own" for practices that did not meet those criteria. Sure, let Amazon license you ebooks that can be edited or revoked at the whim of Amazon or the publisher, but let's "call a fig a fig and a trough a trough".

Neither does Sci-Hub. I'm certainly willing to advocate for copyright reform through legislative action, for instance, but of all the hills I could die on it's not the one I'd choose above all others with respect to monetary fines or imprisonment.

If copyright was more reasonable, we could also have avoided the whole hullabaloo about Roald Dahl: those who want censored versions could have them, and those who want the originals could have those. I think we'd see a rise in small-run book-on-demand style publishing, which I have always had a soft spot for.

> The beauty of digital libraries is (if they are free) endless copies can be made. That's where real longevity stems from.

Unfortunately this is demonstrably not the case with libraries’ current digital offerings. Not only are endless copies not allowed to be made, they often are more costly and have a limited amount of borrowings allowed of them.

https://www.wgbh.org/news/local-news/2020/01/06/inside-the-e...

AFAIK the U-2 does not carry weapons. It is an intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) platform.

I'm not at all plugged into astronomy, though I have worked in radar for quite awhile.

Can you comment at all why a technique like Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar (ISAR) is not used? That relies on the rotation of an object to generate cross-range resolution through sampling a diverse set of aspect angles (and is certainly useful for non-uniform, non-planar surfaces). If the rotation rates of the asteroids are known, then that minimizes one of the main challenges in forming quality ISAR imagery. For the use-cases I'm familiar with, we need to estimate the rotational motion because vehicles do unfortunate things like accelerate and turn while we're trying to look at them -- the nerve! And ISAR has certainly existed before the paper you linked in another comment was written (and also before the previous study the paper itself references).

As a side note, that paper by Ostro et al. is very interesting to me; it's like being familiar with Leibniz's notation for calculus and seeing something written using Newton's notation (or vice-versa). I skimmed the references and all of the ones I saw seemed to be from astronomy / astrophysics sources. It's almost as though we have two fields using similar methodologies to look at different objects that don't seem to talk at all and have developed different dialects.

Edit: maybe delay-Doppler imaging is akin to ISAR, like medical tomography and SAR were shown to be mathematically related?

That’s almost one whole Wyoming worth of people (~578k in 2021)!

In reading through this comment section, I think that it’s an interesting microcosm that accurately reflects broader American society. And this ostensibly more rational than average group can’t have this conversation without getting heated, so it’s no wonder that our gun laws aren’t evidence-based.

On one side, we have people that are livid that literal children are being murdered - and in schools. And on the other side we have people furious that a right bound up in the fabric of the founding of the country is under threat.

And you know what? Both these sides are right. Children are literally dying in schools. And a foundational right is under threat.

I (of course) don’t have the answer to this or even how to hash it out. In some sense, I don’t think the argument is over facts themselves, I think the disagreement is about the axioms underneath everything.

There are some that have the position that it’s not acceptable that one child die to guns. And if someone has personally lost a child to gun violence, can you blame them? Their axiom is no child can die from guns - the right to life, liberty, etc.

And on the other side, if the primary reasoning behind 2A is discouraging or actively fighting tyranny, why shouldn’t they have a fully automatic machine gun? Why not even more capable weapons than that? Their axiom is that tyranny must not take root here.

Rights are often in tension — definitely in this case. But I don’t really see productive conversations happening along these lines: both sides are too entrenched.

I pulled “vaccination” and a second “COVID-19” out of the title because it was too long for field. But the intro I pasted below from the paper’s introduction is a good summary. There’s no separate abstract.

“In early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic, persons who recovered from infection had increased risks for new-onset cardiometabolic diseases, including diabetes, hypertension, and hyperlipidemia.1-3 In the current pandemic phase, which is dominated by less virulent Omicron variants,4 it remains unclear whether risks of cardiometabolic disease after COVID-19 infection persist or have become attenuated and whether vaccination status is associated with these risks.“

> We only have their pinky promise that the new analytics are anonymous.

Isn’t Homebrew open source? One could audit the source themselves. If you’re talking about what happens on the server side yes, but I don’t see the difference with any other computer I connect with over the internet.

[1] https://github.com/Homebrew/brew

I think the goalposts here have shifted a bit.

> That's not, as the article puts it, "for the rich".

I agree with that statement. But

> You can walk onto any Nissan dealer's lot anywhere in the country and drive off in a brand new Nissan Versa…

Does not support the first statement. Avshalom posted a link to a Nissan dealer where new Nissan Versas are not available to drive off the lot at all. I looked at my local dealership and it also does not have any new Versas available. As both of these dealerships are indeed in the country and neither have new Versas available, the assertion just isn’t true. I think you’re overestimating how well Nissan is stocking their affordable models and trims.

But to your point about new cars being solely for the rich, I could drive off my local Hyundai dealer’s lot with a new Elantra for something like $23k which I also consider within reach for those not rich. I also looked at my local Honda dealer, but they apparently want to play games and refuse to show prices on the web without jumping through additional hoops.

Regardless, I would probably buy a lightly used car again.

I was in the same boat! But your description summarizes things both more succinctly and eloquently than I could have managed.

If you’re holding off on reading Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” because of the title (like we were), please give it a shot.

I almost wonder if the title is made to appeal to people more ruthlessly ambitious than I and maybe nudge them to be a little more understanding of others and make them more socially successful to boot.

I found Covey’s “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” to be somewhat similar in that the title seems to be targeting highly ambitious people while the subject matter is useful to a broader audience. But I think that book only has a couple sections of interest to the OP. There are also some faint religious undertones to the 7 Habits that may escape the notice of or not bother most that I am unfortunately predisposed against.

The rule of thumb that seems to be common among my peers is that monopulse offers an angle accuracy improvement of roughly 10 to 1 for objects with nominal SNR (13ish dB).

So a radar with a real beam width of 1deg employing monopulse would result in an accuracy of 0.1deg if the object can be reliably detected.

Note that different organizations use the same terms for slightly different bands. In the IEEE nomenclature for radar, UHF is 300MHz to 1GHz. 3GHz is solidly within S-Band. And L-Band is in between them.

Does anyone have a feel for why the big three music labels haven’t developed their own music streaming services similar to how large film studios have? I’m certainly not complaining, mind you; it’s nice to be able to listen to a lot of music in one place.

Is music just less vertically integrated? E.g., music publishers don’t own radio stations whereas film and tv publishers typically own tv stations?

> Covid times destroyed trust in so many institutions.

I don’t dispute the negative impact of the pandemic on trust in many institutions. And I won’t speak to the broader world, but Americans’ trust in our institutions has been taking a beaten since long before the pandemic.

Pew Research Center has written about trust in government over time. We seem to be asymptotically approaching some lower bound rather than seeing a sharp drop. [1]

I remember reading about declining trust of Americans in our institutions more broadly but without digging through my notebooks I’m not certain precisely where. My guesses would be either Watt’s “Mortal Republic”, Lukianoff’s “The Coddling of the American Mind”, or maybe Putnam’s “Bowling Alone”. Someone with better recall than I have would probably know.

I think the pandemic is more of a “straw that broke the camel’s back” rather than a fundamental driver of mistrust.

I mostly bring this up because I don’t think focusing on the side effects of public policy with regard to the pandemic will solve the broader and more deep-seated issues about our trust in our institutions.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2022/06/06/public-trust...

I don’t really follow astrophysics, but there were hypotheses that the motion of the solar system through the galactic plane, which has a periodicity, would induce impact events. A cursory search suggests that recent analyses of crater data may not support those hypotheses. Here’s a link to a 2011 paper suggesting as much.

So the notion was certainly a reasonable one even if not ultimately true.

https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/416/2/1163/1058876

> //sidenote we also want to abolish all public unions (including teachers union) as public sector employees use their union to corrupt the election process in their favor screwing over the tax payer who ends up having no one in their favor in contract talks.

This sounds like trading away some freedom of association for a small group of people — ostensibly for the greater good — which isn’t very pro-liberty in my eyes. Where I live, while the taxpayers do not attend these contract talks we have the final word in that we ultimately decide to pass the school budget or not through voting.

What’s the definition of a booming economy? Florida’s GDP per capita is much closer to Vermont than California; the real GDP growth rate for Florida, while high, is also lower than California. [1]. Though of course with a large population the overall GDP for Florida is high.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_terr...

> The vast majority of the announced layoffs were white collar jobs, people getting $100k, $200k or more per year. That does not fit the story of rich getting richer, does it?

This is a relatively minor quibble, but I would say that the discussion of what happens to people making 100k or 200k a year says absolutely nothing about what is happening to either the rich OR the poor.

While someone making that much money might be considered rich compared to the global average, the prices they need to pay for necessities are not the global averages. They may be paying much more for housing, in particular, if they’re based in the Bay Area or Seattle environs.

If one is working for the bulk of their money for wages or salary rather than making it on investments then I would suggest one is not rich.

That's fair, but certainly not my definition of a full grown adult.

I think we're talking past each other here.

> Such organizations literally calculate those 'indexes' on ! perceptions !.

Yes, that is literally what I said: "The rankings themselves are based on expert perceptions."

> Leaving aside just by selecting the 'right' sample you can make anything happen, there is a bigger elephant in the room: Cultural differences.

Yes, I do not disagree here. Regardless, this is orthogonal to my original comment. My original comment was that the notion that Ukraine was the most corrupt country in Europe leading up to the current events is not supported by either the article used as a reference nor the underlying data source that the article itself used.

For the sake of expediency, I granted many (implicit) assumptions that I would not otherwise agree to such as that "corruption" can be quantified on a one-dimensional axis (among many others). Because the original commenter referenced an article and, therefore, an underlying data source implicitly, I granted those assumptions and showed that the conclusion still does not follow the data. Because the original commenter ostensibly believes the veracity of the statement and the validity of the data source then I can grant those assumptions and show that the conclusion does not follow, regardless of whether or not I personally believe those assumptions; I don't need to address those assumptions to address the statement.

> In countries like France, Russia and Eastern Europe, complaining is a national sport.

It seems like you have a fundamental concern about the Transparency Institute's methodology. I totally agree with this concern. Regardless, it would hopefully be part of the TI's job to calibrate these cultural norms out in order to compare across the world.

> So these indexes are just PR and propaganda vessels that pitch the world view of their establishment and their society's culture.

I don't necessarily disagree with this but, again, this is orthogonal to the context of my original statement. You seemed concerned in your previous comment about Randian biases in the corruption metric. That's a completely valid point, but my reference of the Nordic countries was just to illustrate that I do not think that is quite the case here. If, as I understand your most recent comment clarified, you're more broadly concerned about any sort of biases in the metric, then I agree.