duchenne

All measurements used to be a mess: lengths, weights, and so on. At the French revolution, they broke the status quo by introducing the metric system. Originally, the metric system also included a new calendar:

- One day has 10 hours.

- One hour is divided in units of 10, 100, 1000 (probably deci/centi/milli hours).

- One week has ten days.

- Each year starts at the fall equinox.

This calendar was used for 14 years. Then, Napoleon decided to bring back the previous calendar system as he reintroduced Catholicism as a state religion. Indeed the revolution calendar was purposely anti-christian: it moved the first year from the birth of JC to the year of the French revolution. Several religious events like Easter were hard to compute. Christmas was the day of the dog...

Anyway, we could have got a calendar system that makes sense, but History decided otherwise.

It is worth noting that streets were dangerous even before cars. For instance, Pierre Curie (Nobel prize and husband of Marie Curie) was killed by a horse-powered truck in the streets of Paris in 1906. He was 46.

But pedestrians at that time had the freedom to walk in the middle of the street at any time. You can clearly see it in this fascinating video of Paris in late 1890s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fo_eZuOTBNc

Galileo was sentenced to house arrest, for disobeying a direct order from the pope to tell geocentrism and heliocentrism were both possible.

This was actually the best scientific conclusion at that time until Foucault proved that the Earth was rotating two centuries later.

Actually, the worst enemies of Galileo were the Aristotelians which teachings were not based on religion. They used the inquisition to stop Galileo.

source: same wikipedia article.

It seems to me that, without the pro-rata term, a founder could forcefully dilute an early investor by selling newly issued stocks at a low price to himself or his friends.

Am I missing something?

> neither Bezos or Branson made it to orbit.

It is true that reaching orbit is much more difficult than reach space but Branson has another company called Virgin Orbit that did reach orbit.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Orbit :

> The first successful flight was on 17 January 2021, which delivered a payload of 10 CubeSats to low Earth orbit (LEO)

It uses an unusual strategy. A boeing 747 carries the rocket under its left wing. So, it does not need a spaceport and can can be pre-aligned on any orbit.

Bezos is also trying hard to reach orbit with the New Glenn space rocket. But this one had a lot of delays.

Why not both?

This is a false dichotomy.

I guess it is easy to dismiss the message from ordinary people, since they do not express themselves as well as the professional speakers we are used to listen to. If instead of saying "I want a haircut.", they would say like Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." would they be taken more seriously?

In the movie version of "I Robot", since the three laws of robotics prioritize saving life over following humans' wishes, the AI ends up locking down every humans in their own homes for their own safety. Could facebook sensor this movie since it pictures the lockdown as an evil action?

For instance, in France, more than half of private sector employees have already been furloughed. This is unprecedented. So, who could predict what would be the consequences, including in terms of life? The food production in Southern Europe is down. Can we know for sure that their will be no starvation?

Several countries have not decided to do a stay-at-home-lockdown including Sweden, most of Germany, Japan, South Korea, 95% of China. Praising the strategy of these countries should be authorized. Several eastern and northern Europeans countries are opening up as well, even though the disease is still there.

People should be able to take a calculated risk. When people drive to their job, they consider the risk of having an accident, and the benefits of being able to reach their work place, then they take a decision.

The most accurate data about the fatality rate of covid-19 may come from the Diamond Princess cruise boat where everyone has been tested. The 60-to-80 year old infected passengers had a fatality rate of ~2%. There was no fatality among the infected much younger crew.

Now, the government should inform people with data, and let them take a decision. For now, it seems that the overwhelming majority of people in France, Italy, and Spain want the lockdown, so they should be able to get it. But people who want the opposite should be able to express their voice as well. Otherwise, the democracy cannot work.

(Sorry for the bad English, it is not my native language.)

Since this 13th of February, the Koreans recommend the use of hydrochloroquine for patients infected by the covid-19 [1]. The Covid-19 fatality ratio in Korea is one of the lowest in the world, around 1%.

The study in France showing a spectacular drop in covid-19 viral load after only 6 days of hydrochloroquine treatment has been directed by Pr Didier Raoult who is the most cited researcher on infectious disease in the world. [2]

Anecdotally, I personally know a patient who took hydrochloroquine, and indeed the viral load dropped quickly, even though the lung damage is still there.

According to Pr Didier Raoult, the hydrochloroquine has been routinely prescribed for decades to prevent Malaria, with well known and limited side-effects.

According to him, the in-vitro effectiveness of hydrochloroquine on covid-19 has been confirmed by several labs independently, including his own lab and the lab of Mr Zong the most cited researcher on infectious disease in China. (Sorry, I am not sure about the spelling)

[1] http://m.koreabiomed.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=7428 [2] https://scholar.google.fr/citations?user=n8EF_6kAAAAJ&hl=fr

The hard part is to do 10K tests per day like the South Koreans did to successfully contain the spread of covid-19 (or 60K tests per day since the USA have 6 times the Korean population).

This would include gathering saliva samples and bringing them to the PCR machine in a safe way.

Is anyone here aware of some research trying to quantify the death toll of such a large-scale quarantine?

For instance, closing universities could result many years later in ill-trained doctors and then bad diagnostics.

The economic downfalls could result in an increase of poverty and homelessness-related deaths and suicides.

> +/!10

I personally find the given example harder to read than the equivalent in python/matlab/javascript with lodash/probably many other languages

sum(range(10))

sum(1:10)

With "K", you have to know a few new conventions. In the second case you just have to read, and the data flow is more obvious.

I love the following Feynman's quote:

``In those days, one of the theories proposed was that the planets went around because behind them were invisible angels, beating their wings and driving the planets forward. You will see that this theory is now modified! It turns out that in order to keep the planets going around, the invisible angels must fly in a different direction and they have no wings. Otherwise, it is a somewhat similar theory!``

The point is that, still today, we have no idea why mass attracts mass. We observe it. We measure it. We model it. We predict it. But, we do not understands its mechanism. At that time, it was making people crazy to think that an object could remotely affect another one. Now, people just accept it. But, when you think about it, it really sounds magic.

I have also used an LG gram for 5+ years. The touchpad is just normal.

Maybe, you say that it feels cheap because it bends a little bit when you press it. I guess that is the price to pay to have a 17 inches laptop under a kilogram.

However, I did not notice any mechanical failure. The keyboard is still as solid as day one. I just had to change the battery at some point, it was super cheap and easy to change by myself with a standard screwdriver. I regularly loose the charger, but it is also cheap to buy a new one.

The rocket equation states that the amount of fuel that you need (to send a given payload into orbit) increases exponentially with the escape velocity of the planet:

mass of the rocket with fuel = mass of the payload * exp(escape velocity / engine exaust velocity)

That is because the faster you need to go, the more fuel you need to use, but now, you also need even more fuel to accelerate the fuel that you just added. So, it becomes exponential.

So, if the earth was bigger, its escape velocity would increase, and the amount of fuel needed to power a space rocket would increase (exponentially) so much that it would become unpractical. Vice versa, with a smaller planet it would require exponentially less fuel to reach orbit.

The only solution would be to have an engine with a higher exaust velocity. With the current technology, ion engines have very high exaust velocity but low thrust are very energy hungry. The thermal nuclear engines have both high exaust velocity and high thrust, working prototypes have been built, but all projects were boxed 60 years ago because of the fear of an accident.

Confucious would reply:

When the wise man builds an incredible machine that can bring us to the Moon, the fool looks at the bags of feces.

More seriously, because of the rocket equation, bringing more payload back would require a lot more fuel. Bringing this additional fuel to the Moon would also require even more fuel.

The Saturn rocket is still the biggest rocket ever made. Probably, the engineers back then did not want to make an even bigger one just to bring back the bags.

It is very disappointing that in 2019 we still have to rely on trusting a software vendor or reading the app souce code if it is available. That would be great to we have an OS-level system to give fine-grained permissions and restrictions to desktop apps, like on lineageOS?

A quick google search seems to contradict your statement: https://jakubmarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/number-of...

Average number of languages spoken: France: 1.8 , Germany: 2.0 , Spain: 1.7 , Portugal: 1.6 , Italy: 1.8 , Greece: 1.8 , Poland: 1.8 , Sweden: 2.5 , Finland: 2.6 , UK: 1.6

I have question. Do you think that this could be used as a brick to build an alternative web browser?

Wihtout using any third party service, you could use an SSH tunnel, with autossh for automatic reconnections.

    autossh -L 2080:localhost:80 192.198.1.14

And then, you'll be able to visit your dev website on http://localhost:2080

Firefox will believe that your service is local, and will allow the activation of the camera and the microphone even though you do not use https.

As a consumer, I can buy an already manufactured pair of jeans or an already programmed Adobe Photoshop for a fixed price.

As a producter, the cost of building a jeans factory does not seem to be inherently more predictable than the budget of a software development project.

Yes, there is a possibility that the sample is biased. But that does not matter for this experiment.

The OP says that the model should be built with people in the same room than him, and then the human RNG should be executed with the same people.

As a consequence, OP has to capture the bias of the people in his room to make his RNG work.

The model would break only if the people in the sample change their strategy to pick random numbers after some time.

The data from Reddit is just used as an example of how to make a human RNG from redditer random picks.

As long as the training and testing are done from the same group of people, there is no issue, even if this group is biased.

Moreover, I don't see any prior reason to believe that redditors and HN readers would have different biases. That would be an interesting experiment, though. However, the predominance of the number 7 in article's data might be a western culture thing.

Overfitting typically happens when the number of training samples is small compared to the number of parameters of the model. It especially happens when the input space is high-dimensional.

Here the input space has a only one dimension. The model has 10 parameters. There are 8500 samples. So, the author safely assumes that no over-fitting occurs.

Games factory? Thanks to that game, me and my friends made many games without programming back in middle school.

https://www.softpedia.com/get/Others/Home-Education/The-Game...

GP's point of view: A poor person can have a small safety net that separates him from absolute poverty and homelessness. If they start their own business, fail, and end up without enough money to pay for the rent, the consequences could be terrible. They also have a finite time to save enough for a descent retirement. Spending several years on a startup with a high fail rate can dramatically reduce the quality of their old days.

I feel sad, because this is not the right debate to have, and I initiated it.

First, I repeat: What he allegedly did is a serious and horrible crime.

Also, people need to see the elephant in the room. These two victims' case is weaponized by some governments to scare whistle-blowers. Assange directly or indirectly exposed many horrible crimes, including war rapes, group rapes, mass murders. People need to remember this video of soldiers in Irak shooting at human beings from far away while laughing and listening to rock music, and shooting again at wounded survivors crawling on the floor. People need also to remember the images of war prisoners tortured, humiliated, forced to be naked and raped with sticks.

But, more importantly, people need to make sure that future whistle-blowers fell safe to expose this kind of hideous crimes.

Prisoners' case [nsfw]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisone...

Assange is accused of unlawful coercion and "lesser-degree rape" (mindre grov våldtäkt).

In the first case, the complainant willingly had an intercourse with him. But after sex, she realized that the condom had a hole. She claims that he made it.

In the second case, the complainant also willingly had an intercourse with Assange, they slept naked together. The next day in the morning, he penetrated her without a condom while she was sleeping. (The main problem seems to be the "without a condom" part)

This is obviously serious. He could have transmitted STDs to the complainants. Unprotected sex should be agreed by both.

But, when someone reads "rape" out of context, he could imagine that Assange used a knife or something to force a woman to have sex.

Source: https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/4/12/18306901/julian-ass...

But, in South Korea, the replacement fertility rate is already lower than 1, and it keeps decreasing every year.

A manager is not the only person that can provide you accountability.

What about users/clients, or partners/co-founders?

If you try to ship a super simple prototype very quickly and get a few users, you would feel accountable to them, and that would give you the motivation to keep building until you make a great service.

Alternatively, you could team up with someone. Have a chat every day to share your progress, get some new ideas together, and stay excited about the project.

> Amazon has literally won everywhere else in the world.

FWIW, Amazon is also quite small in South Korea, which is the #1 country in ecommerce spend per capita.

There, the market is fragmented into many players big and small, and the delivery times are much shorter than in the US. For instance, if you order on Martet Curly before 11pm, you get fresh grosseries delivered the next day in the morning.

Interesting case: Seoul. No earthquakes. 20-story buildings everywhere [1]. Construction cranes everywhere.

Still real estate is very expensive ( 13K$ per square meter for something downtown [2] )

The main effect of building so much is that now almost half of the South Korean population lives around Seoul.

[1] https://www.mensjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Seoul... [2] https://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/in/Seoul