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matham

62 karma · joined June 8, 2019

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matham··on How London cracked mobile phone coverage on the Underground
I'm having a really hard reading this. Not only are the paragraphs are so short, they each feel like part of a uncompleted thought.

The content doesn't feel AI generated, but maybe it is? I read somewhere that short paragraphs is an AI signature!?

matham··on LineageOS 23
With Titanium Backup unmaintained, Neo Backup [1] works pretty well. It has some potential issues with restoring wifi/bluetooth/sms as those were still experimental, last I used it. But sms at least worked. I'd suggest a 2nd backup app of those, just in case.

[1] https://github.com/NeoApplications/Neo-Backup

matham··on You almost never see a clock at the mall
From the study:

> It became imperative to develop an operational definition for the music variables slow tempo and fast tempo; that is, how slow is slow and how fast is fast? To answer this a sample was selected at random from the trading area of the supermarket. Subjects were chosen to reflect the age, sex and other relevant socioeconomic characteristics of the store's customers. Each subject was asked to listen to several instrumental musical arrangements and to classify them as slow, fast or somewhere in between. A total of 95% of the subjects classified musical selections with a tempo of 72 beats per minute or fewer as slow. Selections with a tempo of 94 beats per minute or more were classified as fast. Thus, the range from 73 to 94 beats per minute was considered between fast and slow, although this category was not directly a part of this study. Therefore, based on these findings, slow tempo music was defined as having a tempo of 72 beats per minute or fewer, an average of 60 and a standard deviation of 6. Fast tempo music was defined as having 94 beats per minute or more, an average of 108 and a standard deviation of 7.

> However, perceptions of slow and fast may vary across geographic regions or demographic parameters and therefore, the reader must be cautioned against generalizing these findings too far beyond the scope of this study.

matham··on You almost never see a clock at the mall
What you're quoting is their literature review, not their study. Their study was:

>... conducted in a medium-size store operated by a large, nationally known chain of supermarkets ... The study covered a nine-week period starting on January 28 and ending on March 31, 1980...

... M0=no music, M1=slow, M2=fast music...

...they measured (1) traffic speed (2) daily gross sales (3)...

...for (1) they found: traffic flow was significantly slower with the slow tempo music (Ml mean = 127.53 seconds) than for the faster tempo music (M2 mean = 108.93 seconds) ... Ml stimulated an even slower pace than no music (a mean of 127.53 seconds for Ml compared to a mean of 119.86 for Mo), although not statistically significant...

...for (2) they found: The higher sales volumes were consistently associated with the slower tempo musical selections while in contrast, the lower sales figures were consistently associated with the faster tempo music (MI mean = $16,740.23 compared with M2 mean = $12,112.85). This difference is significant...

matham··on Teens inundated with phone prompts day and night, research finds
This is the primary reason I root and install greenify. To prevent these spammy apps, that I sometimes use, from running in the background and sending notifications. Unless I open the app in the forground specifically.

Too bad greenify is not being maintained anymore

matham··on My best techniques for evaluating character
The fact that PE guy spent time looking up the son means he already had a vibe something was off about "Joe".

So while I agree that if you lie about small things I'd think you'd also lie about large things - I'm not sure it'd be backed by data, like much of pop-psychology. So I think the lesson here is to listen to your gut for red flags rather than evaluate someone based on some list of features.

matham··on Show HN: Hacker News bot that automated archive finding and commenting
I misread it as "Hacker News bot that automated archive finding and tormenting"...
matham··on GnuCash – Open-source personal and small-business accounting software
Is there somewhere a good list of spending categories to use with it? Every now and then I run into a transaction that I can't quite fit into any category and have to squeeze it into something (un)related.
matham··on Polars: Fast DataFrame library for Rust and Python
>NumPy (and Pandas) is still missing a proper missing value (NA).

But if it's missing a missing value, doesn't that mean that it has a proper missing value?

I'll let myself out now...

matham··on Send: A Fork of Mozilla's Firefox Send
Do you know what led Mozilla to stop this experiment (I'm assuming spam)? Will this not be an issue for your instances as well?
matham··on Request for comments regarding topics to be discussed at Dark Patterns workshop
Thank you! This is something that has been annoying the hell out of me on instagram using desktop Firefox.

Every time I login it prompts to show notifications; I always decline so it shows it again next time I log in. This time I accepted, but blocked it from within firefox.

I get it's not a dark pattern because it's clear it's not the browser asking, but still it's very annoying.

matham··on Judge: Citibank isn't entitled to $500M it sent to various creditors last August
>Now you have to tell your household "I didn't have time yet to put all the clean stuff out but the light is off, please remember that".

Search for "dishwasher magnet", which is made exactly for this.

matham··on Viral 'I'm not a cat' filter is decades-old software
This is very annoying. I sometimes want to see how BBC is covering events from a UK perspective, but it always redirects to bbc.com.

I could switch my VPN to UK, but it never seems worth the effort.

matham··on Anthony Levandowski Pardoned
It's an artifact of history, when 200 years ago it may have taken weeks for states to count votes, certify and send representatives with the results, assuming they made it to the capital and didn't die during travel when their horse fell into a river or something...

Plus, once confirmed (on the 6th), it does take some time to change cabinets etc.

matham··on Infosec implications of the US Capitol physical breach
It symbolizes nothing. A flag is a symbol for an idea and means nothing on its own. A death is not a symbol for anything but means a lot on its own.

I really don't understand how this is relevant to flying that flag which represents much intentional suffering, to which the above poster objected.

matham··on Infosec implications of the US Capitol physical breach
Sure, but there's a difference between coming with riot gear and attacking protestors, and posting 10 cops to guard all of congress and then have them walk away when protestors show up leaving the doors wide open.

They could have easily guarded the building itself. Close the doors and post 30 guards at each entrance?

matham··on Games people play with cash flow
I think this is the difference between a valid argument and a sound argument. A valid argument means the conclusion follows from the premise, kinda like the quoted argument in the article which seems to be valid.

A sound argument is one whose premises are also true. This is where the quoted argument in the article fails. The premises either are false or don't apply to all startups. This is basically what the author means by a argument that is missing premises. It's not really that a premise is missing, but that without additional into it may seem like the argument is sound,but with additional into you realize it is not sound and therefore leads to a different conclusion instead.

matham··on 'Havana syndrome' likely caused by directed microwaves – US report
Ok, but I think your examples are specific to the social sciences where the method used is not sufficiently close to the scientific method to be reliable enough. Hence you're likely to see systemic biases in junior and senior authors alike as the field may not converge to "truth".

But in fields that the method is closer to science (e.g. physics, chemistry, neuroscience), I would expect that the overall field is converging to the truth and that senior authors will therefore be more tuned in to the best estimate of truth or how to get to it than junior authors.

matham··on 'Havana syndrome' likely caused by directed microwaves – US report
Isn't it expected that as scientists understand their field in greater depth, they make less mistakes and their papers would be closer to the truth and be rejected less?

It's not like many of these fields are just starting up.

matham··on 'Havana syndrome' likely caused by directed microwaves – US report
You seem to be conflating the problem of weak or no pear review (i.e. the reason why paper-mill publications are shitty), with the problem of judging a paper by the author's name and not purely by its content (i.e. what the OP proposed).
matham··on Interpretability in Machine Learning: An Overview
If we value interpretability for the particular model, e.g. as in the loan example or where by law you have to make sure race was not a consideration, I'd say yes. In places where interpretability has no additional value, than of course no.

But it of course depends on the exact value trade-off, which any model designer already has to consider.

matham··on Elon Musk Shows the Germans How to Move Quickly
I don't. Please elaborate.
matham··on Spies can eavesdrop by watching a light bulb's vibrations
What if you use one random source to contentiously change the white noise parameters (mean, std).

E.g. use something like a illuminated disco ball that continuously randomly changes the source light angle and intensity.

matham··on One company's plan to build a search engine Google can't beat
I have been using DDG a little more frequently recently, however, it's image search was useless whenever I tried it.
matham··on Stealing secrets from developers using WebSockets
If you use uBlock Origin, you can prevent any connections to localhost by default.