mazelife

I uploaded a picture I took of an Amanita flavoconia, and it correctly identified it as the #1 choice. The mushroom wasn't particularly well visually isolated in the photo either, it had sprung up among a bunch of moss and twigs and only occupied about a quarter of the frame, so I found this fairly impressive.

> Medicaid options vary much more (and they're different in every state, because Medicaid is administered at the state level), but the equivalent private plans for Medicaid coverage also typically perform much better than the public ones.

I'd be interested to see these findings. Do you have links?

As far as Medicare Advantage is concerned, it's not the least bit surprising that patient satisfaction is higher. But I wouldn't go treating that as some kind of referendum on Government-run healthcare:

"Many private [Medicare] plans require no additional monthly premiums, yet the government pays an average of $849.90 in monthly subsidies to insurance companies for a person on Medicare Advantage, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. That is about 14 percent more than the government spends on people with standard Medicare, according to the nonpartisan Medicare Payment Advisory Commission."

MA was supposed to demonstrate that private insurers could deliver care at lower costs than Medicare, and it hasn't done that. Basically, for every $1.00 the gov spends on a medicare patient, it pays $1.14 in subsidies for an MA patient, with the evidence indicating a lot of that goes straight into the pockets of insurers as profit [2]

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10... [2] http://theincidentaleconomist.com/medicare-advantage-cuts-on...

> and serves as an employment subsidy for many small businesses that would, otherwise, not employ anyone

It would serve as a generous subsidy to _any_ employer that doesn't want to pay a living wage. It's not clear to me why the federal government should be subsidizing the practices of companies like Walmart, who are already costing the government $6.2 billion in public assistance[1]. But that's effectively what an expanded EITC would do [2].

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2014/04/15/report-... [2] http://www.princeton.edu/ceps/workingpapers/165rothstein.pdf

There are two separate issues in play here. You're conflating the static/dynamic dimension of language classification with the strongly-/loosely-typed dimension of languages which is what the poster you are responding to was talking about [1]. These two dimensions are orthogonal: languages may be static, but weakly typed (like C), or dynamic but strongly typed (like Python).

I'll allow that there's inevitably some degree of opinion involved here, but I tend to agree with the parent poster that implicit conversion in languages like Javascript, PHP, and Perl is just another vector for bugs, and outweighs any of the advantages you get from having your language coerce everything for you. But then again, i'm one of those people that likes my language to force me to be very explicit about what I mean, so YMMV.

Regardless, the strict equality operator is not at all sufficient to avoid the dangers of JavaScript's implicit conversions. Pretty much _all_ the operators are going to coerce types for you, whether you meant for them to or not. For example, this function:

function increment(i) { return i + 1; }

Adds one to number right? But let’s say you’ve neglected to convert some user input in a form to a number as you should have done elsewhere in your code, and you end up calling increment("1"). This will return "11". So now you potentially have introduced a serious math error into your code you may not notice right away. Conversely, if you did this in Python, the function would have raised a TypeError immediately, because you can’t apply the arithmetic operator to two different types. You can’t just “avoid” type coercion in these loosely-typed languages by understanding the specifics of how it works, because you may not even know it’s happening until you start seeing unexpected results somewhere.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_and_weak_typing

I don't believe it's even doable. Could I pick up an instrument and learn to noodle around on it from watching YouTube videos for a few weeks? Possibly, although for some instruments I doubt even that's possible. But to attain basic proficiency, much less the level of mastery required to play at a professional level just isn't possible without someone to show you how and to correct you when you're wrong (and thousands and thousands of hours of practice, of course).

It's really not. Intonation, posture, attack, phrasing, proper breathing... technique in general for singing or any instrument cannot be taught without being right there with the student. If you are at all serious about learning to play an instrument, YouTube and MOOCs are not a solution.

...or art and music. Good luck learning to play the violin over the internet.

Dan Golding's response seems pretty on-the-nose to me. Although I think he's right to cite Zimmer as someone who pioneered a certain method and style that has become prevalent in a big chunk of movie genres, I think the real culprit here (if you want to lay the blame somewhere) is just the economics of the Hollywood filmmaking system, which prizes cost-control, speed, and consistency of product above all else.

It's sad to see the composer Patrick Doyle get cited in both of those video essays for his music for Thor (which I agree, is generic and boring) because it illustrates the extent to which really talented film composers can get absorbed into this system. His scores for Henry V [1], Dead Again, and Carlito's Way all stand out as really shining example of 90s-era film scoring.

[1] Great example of his work here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-yZNMWFqvM

This doesn't necessarily take away from some of the points that the article was making about how film music is used as a status symbol or method of signaling how a film should be received, but there's a nice simple reason why "BRAAAM" is everywhere these days, particularly in a lot of big-budget, CGI-heavy franchise movies. As if often true, time is money in this business; if you're a composer who is brought in to score these films you likely have a shorter-than-average amount of time to do it in and you're well aware that you're not being paid to make art. In other words, there's an enormous amount of pressure to just crank it out quickly. This is how you get scores that sound so generic, and are in fact, the equivalent of aural wallpaper. Studios don't expect anything more and even if they did, composers probably don't have time to write that kind of music. Better to crank out some generic filler and thrown in a few surface-level effects (e.g. "BRAAAM") stolen from better, more interesting scores.

I fully agree with you on that. Pulling research out-of-context is still a go-to move by anti-science politicians [1]. Frankly, I'm half-tempted to track down that $84k study on why people fall in love. That's a fascinating topic that underpins so much of the human experience; more power to any scientist who thinks they can make heads or tails of it.

[1] http://www.npr.org/2011/08/23/139852035/shrimp-on-a-treadmil...

The fact that the paper is meant to be taken somewhat facetiously is signaled right there on the title page: "This research was supported by a grant from the Committee to Re-elect William Proxmire."

"Proxmire was was noted for issuing his Golden Fleece Award, which was presented monthly between 1975 and 1988, in order to focus media attention on projects Proxmire viewed as self-serving and wasteful of taxpayer dollars. The first Golden Fleece Award was awarded in 1975 to the National Science Foundation, for funding an $84,000 study on why people fall in love."

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

This has to be the ne plus ultra of Python scaremongering. It describes some sort of bizzaro world of a doomed language which it populates with Machiavellian Python maintainers, brainwashed developers, and a small group of heroic holdouts who see resisting Python 3 as a moral imperative. Apparently having too many string formatting options is a moral issue (three, to be specific).

As someone who writes a _lot_ of Python code (mostly in 3 but with occasional switches to 2), who maintains several libraries which work in both 2 and 3, and as someone who uses a wide range of libraries in stats, machine learning, networking, web development, etc. in my python 3 work...this piece seems totally disconnected from reality. The problems it describes are relentlessly overblown when they're not simply manufactured from whole cloth.

Put another way: the differences between 2 and 3 are not great, the vast majority of libraries you'd want to use (i.e. are actively maintained or of at least good quality) work in 3, and while I don't doubt there's great piles of Python 2 code moldering away big "enterprise" apps and those sorts of places, it's ever been thus in that space, no matter what the language, and doesn't pose any sort of existential threat to Python.

(edit: I used to recommend "Learn Python The Hard Way" to newcomers, and have just kept reflexively doing that over the years because I wasn't aware of a better resource. But if this article has accomplished one thing, it's that it's spurred me to look for a replacement)

Did you even read the article? They searched his home twice after he had already shown he wasn't a danger to himself or anyone else and wasn't inside the house. The second time they trashed the place. The whole point of the article is that the US Court of Appeals says the exact opposite of what you're asserting here: the searches were not reasonable.

"Because it was (and is) clearly established that law enforcement officers must have an objectively reasonable basis for believing an exigency justifies a warrantless search of a home, and because no reasonable officer could have concluded such a basis existed for the second more intrusive search, the officers were not entitled to qualified immunity across the board."

I've seen variants of this argument made up and down this thread, and I don't think it holds any water. And I say this as someone that thinks the NSA's mass surveillance is morally wrong, unconstitutional, and probably ultimately counterproductive.

I'm willing to stipulate there's an avenue for civil disobedience in which leaking of private information is used as a way to apply pressure to actors within the government and private industry who might be sanctioning the NSA's practices. In other words I could see a course of action that includes widespread, comprehensive attempts to hack and leak the emails of FISA court judges, employees and appointees of US intelligence agencies, executives and board members of companies like AOL, Palantir, and Verizon who are known to have enthusiastically participated in this surveillance, and elected officials in the executive or legislative branches of the government who have supported or perpetuated this spying. The idea being that if the people who keep this system of surveillance grinding onwards experience the personal consequence of having their private info leaked to the public, they might reconsider their actions.

I could see a course of action like this and even agree there's some valid arguments for it, but it's also incredibly dangerous, and would require, I dunno, a great deal of judgement and restraint to not cause huge collateral damage to perfectly innocent people, or to end up ruining the lives of people who were only tangential participants in the system. In other words, this strategy is deeply problematic and dangerous at the best of times.

But let's not kid ourselves that that's even what's going on here. You could try to argue that Hillary Clinton, as the likely next president, is a part of this system, and so she should be on the list of people who are targeted for leaking in the course of civil disobedience. But Trump also supports this surveillance, so he should too. But the thing is, we don't have to guess at the motives of Wikileaks here, they are quite clearly making no such civil disobedience claims [1]. And if you look at whose information is being leaked—Clinton campaign staffers, the DNC—and estimate where these particular actors fall on the scale of culpability in the NSAs spying (hint: well down the list), you start to see that trying to ascribe some higher civic purpose to these particular leaks isn't warranted.

[1] https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/press-release

The problem with relying on journalists is that when everything is just dumped out there, the decontextualization and misrepresentation comes so fast and furious that it's uphill battle to counter once it's out there. Jonathan Swift puts it better: "Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect."

There's a really good interview in the intercept between Glenn Greenwald and Naomi Klein about this exact issue. [1] Greenwald mentions:

"So [Wikileaks] were very much an ardent and enthusiastic proponent of that model — that when you get tons of information that belongs in the public eye, you have the corresponding responsibility to protect not only people’s physical security but also their privacy. I used to defend them on that all the time. Somewhere along the way, WikiLeaks and Julian decided, and they’ve said this explicitly, that they changed their mind on that question — they no longer believe in redactions or withholding documents of any kind."

"I think WikiLeaks more or less at this point stands alone in believing that these kinds of dumps are ethically — never mind journalistically — just ethically, as a human being, justifiable."

[1] https://theintercept.com/2016/10/19/is-disclosure-of-podesta...

I don't believe the passage you quote from supports your assertion in any way. Here it is in full:

"I'm certain the poll-directed insiders are sure things will default to policy as soon as the conventions are over, but I think not. And as I've mentioned, we've all been quite content to demean government, drop civics and in general conspire to produce an unaware and compliant citizenry. The unawareness remains strong but compliance is obviously fading rapidly. This problem demands some serious, serious thinking - and not just poll driven, demographically-inspired messaging."

To unpack that (along with context from the rest of the email), Podesta's correspondent is bemoaning the fact that politics has begun to be covered as entertainment and celebrity gossip. He suggests that any hope that things will take a turn for the better after the election is misplaced, and that there's a larger issue: "we"—and by this he clearly means media elites, people in public office, and in general the milieu to which he belongs rather than some shadowy cabal of which he is a member—have not upheld their duty to help keep an informed and skeptical citizenry. He suggests that misguided attempts by the media to keep people compliant and docile have started to wear thin, but that in the absence of information and understanding all that anger is liable to attach itself to a demagogue like Donald Trump.

In short, he is advocating the exact thing mentioned in the article: informed civic and political participation! This is a perfectly anodyne line of thinking, and I don't really see what cause is served by stealing and leaking this person's private correspondence. And who is this dark and Machiavellian correspondent? This guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Ivey

Maybe my understanding of what you mean by "shooting the lights" is wrong, but based on what I believe you're saying, this is not permitted under an Idaho stop law either. Cyclists may treat a red light like a stop sign. So they need to come to a full stop, then proceed through the intersection if it's clear of pedestrians and cars. That is very different from just blowing through a red light at an intersection.

As a cyclist myself, I've noticed a common case where you end up on the receiving end of driver frustration is when you come to a stop at a red light and are situated in the middle of a line of cars waiting for the green. When the light turns, it's going to take you longer to get up to speed than the cars, which often results in frustrated and dangerous behavior by the drivers behind you trying to get around. Having the option to be able to proceed through a red after stopping _when it's safe to do so_ lets you get a jump on things.

(Sorry, I should have "straddle" rather than "dismount". )

> For an experienced, physically fit cyclist, riding in good conditions? Perhaps.

But isn't this the case with all traffic laws? For example, the law may permit drivers to go 55 mph on a certain road, but in a driving rain that speed could be dangerously fast; it's incumbent on drivers and riders to adapt to the conditions around them and their abilities. Idaho stops permit cyclists to behave a certain way at intersections, but it's still incumbent on the cyclist to do what is safe in that situation.

> But I see examples almost daily of cyclists running red lights and in doing so causing disruption to pedestrians and other road users who were trying to cross the junction properly.

You're trying to rebut an article neither I nor the article was making. An "Idaho Stop" permits a cyclists to treat a stop sign as a yield and a red light as a stop. If a pedestrian or automobile is already in the intersection or will get there before the cyclist, the cyclist must yield, including coming to a full stop if necessary. If a cyclist is just blowing through stops signs (or failing to stop fully at red lights), they're still breaking the law under Idaho stop rules; they'd be legally at fault in the event of an accident and I'd hope any policemen who observed that kind of behavior would cite them.

> I also think the article was too quick to gloss over the argument that on the same road, the same rules should apply to everyone.

I see it differently. Cars, bicycles, and pedestrians all have completely different behaviors and properties. I think laws should be designed to maximize safety and usability of roads for each class of users (while balancing all those interests, which its the tricky part). When we categorically lump bicycles into the same set of rules that cars must obey, it seems to me we're treating them as an afterthought and putting them into a disadvantageous position to the heavier, faster moving vehicle with less visibility. And this a good example: given there is concrete evidence that Idaho stops make things safer for bicyclists, it doesn't really matter what you or I "feel" is true about the issue.

> However, I would argue that creating a "them and us" culture between cyclists and motor traffic is dangerous

I can easily match all the anecdotes about bad cyclist behavior appearing in these comments with stories about drivers who've darted in front of me into reserved cycling lanes in the middle of a block so they can double park, or blown past me with about an inch of clearance from my handlebars even though state law requires 2 feet, or who've honked at me or shouted obscenities and threats because I'm (lawfully) riding on "their" road. (The best part is when they tell me I should be biking on the sidewalk instead!) I don't think trading anecdotes is a useful way to adjudicate this specific issue, but in many US cities, at least, there is already pervasive "us vs. them" hostility to cyclists. I think the best way to break down this "drivers-vs-cyclist" culture is to get more cyclists on the road, where, in most places in the US they are vastly outnumbered by automobiles. Cities with large volumes of cyclist traffic tend to have less accidents per capita because drivers and pedestrians are used to them being around. Laws that make cycling more safe and enjoyable tend to make people ride their bikes more. They also signal that municipalities that adapt them view bicyclists as more than just second-class users of roads.

Although the article alluded to studies that show this approach is safer it didn't bother to cite any. Here's one based on results when the law passed in Iowa: http://docplayer.net/1126976-Meggs-jason-n-stops-harm-bikes-...

Slowing down as you approach the stop sign, scanning the full 360 degrees around the intersection (which, unlike cars, cyclists are able to do easily and quickly), being prepared to stop if necessary, but continuing on through if there's no reason to do so, is perfectly safe.

I'd make the analogy thusly: as a cyclist coming to a stop sign, I've got to come to a stop, get off my seat and set foot on the ground, remount, then get going again from a standstill. When you're doing this every few blocks--which is not at all uncommon when biking in the city--it gets extremely frustrating. As a car driver, imagine if you had to come to a complete stop at a stop sign, turn off the ignition, then restart the car and continue on your way. It feels like the same thing. (edit: used more clear terminology)

Not all arguments from expert opinion are fallacious. In this case I think that those authors are recognized, themselves, as excellent prose stylists. Therefore it's reasonable to accord their opinions more weight than the average person's. If I'd said something along the lines of "Dan Brown says Proust is a master prose stylist and he's a writer..." then you'd have a point. Also, they are pretty representative of the critical consensus on Proust's particular strengths. Finally, they all happen to have written on Proust and what they like about him, some of them quite extensively. (Sadly, not all of it is available online. John Updike penned a very nice piece years ago on the ways Proust shaped him as a writer and the difference he found reading him first in the Moncrieff translation and then later in French; doesn't seem to be available anywhere.)

>> Well, arguing about literature never really leads anywhere.

A problem with the inherent subjectivity of art in general, I suppose. But nonetheless, it can be an enjoyable past-time if kept civil and respectful. Anyway, I appreciate you explaining what it is that you don't like about Proust, even if we don't see eye-to-eye.

Well, you're welcome to your opinion, but the statement "Proust (sometimes) writes long sentences" is a fact, not a value judgement. Whether the prose can be understood or not is how we separate good writing from bad, and in Proust's case it's not hard to follow what he's saying. There are, by the way, a large number of people who would strenuously disagree with you and consider Proust one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. Among them are people like Edmund White, John Updike, André Aciman, and Vladimir Nabokov, formidable prose stylists themselves; in fact, here's Nabokov explaining precisely why it is that Proust is so unique, using an illustrative passage to come to an understanding of how Proust's prose works as it does: http://www.catskill-merino.com/blog/nabokov-on-proust-in-blo...

...Nabokov being a good example of a person who never shied away from making sweeping value judgements about authors, but was usually willing to back up what he said with examples.

I don't know The Dillinger Escape Plan too well, but I like that!

It's funny, but I've noticed that as my musical tastes have broadened over the years, the line between what sounds "beautiful" and "ugly" has become considerably more blurry. I can still recognize particular harmonies as consonant or dissonant, but that mapping in my brain where consonant -> beautiful and dissonant -> ugly has started to really break down.

One of the first times I noticed this was happening was probably 15 years ago, listening to Salomé by Richard Strauss. The last scene has this incredible dissonance, a polychord that's an A7 with an F# stacked on top: two chords that absolutely do not belong together in any diatonic piece of music.[1] When I first heard that I thought it sounded awful. Now it has a kind of strange beauty to my ears and is one of those musical moments that always sends a shiver up my spine.

[1] Give a listen here if you like: https://youtu.be/Op1VoQXXARs?t=431 I started the clip at 7:15, the chord comes in around 8:53 but that whole section is shot through which these ugly/beautiful sonorities.

Other commenters here have done a good job picking out specific problems with the author's arguments. It's always frustrating when someone who is capable and knowledgeable about one subject decides to try their hand in a different field without having bothered to do any real research or study in it. And it's doubly so when they proceed to then dismiss, literally, the entire field as "superstitions," and "unscientific" even as everything they've written betrays that they haven't bothered to familiarize themselves with basically any of the work that's been done in music theory or psychoacoustics in the last 100 years.

I usually love it when articles about the intersection of music and computation show up on HN, but in this case it's really unfortunate. At least it's sparking some good discussion, I guess.

Yeah, his discussion of the tritone was where any remaining sympathy or interest in his argument evaporated for me. His discussion of it is completely simplistic and not grounded in any way in the complex historical context of that interval.

Listen to the opening of Debussy's "Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvnRC7tSX50). Tritones everywhere: flute plays a melody that outlines a tritone (C# to G). In come the oboes and horns playing a tritone which is part of the A# 7th chord the harp outlines. Then a Bb dominant seventh, with horns and strings playing another tritone. Tritones abound until the music finally settles into the tonic nine bars later, and yet who would argue with the idea that this is one of the most beautiful openings in music?

It's ironic that he likens works based on the tritone to McDonalds (!?). When I hear someone savage a work of music they've never heard, and describe the sound of an augmented fourth as "awful" and call any piece based around the tritone as "[not] natural or good or beautiful or true" I would suggest that person's musical taste is limited and simplistic, sort of the musical equivalent of the McDonald's hamburger.

Well, as I mentioned in another comment, that means that companies that actually bother to reach out to communities they are involved with and cultivate relationships with members may have a competitive advantage. I have no illusions that the MegaCorps of the world are going to change how they do things, but there are companies that don't follow that template out there.

Second this. I'm in my 30s now, and I've realized that companies that treat people with respect don't hire this way and that's the kind of place I'm happy at. If that limits me to work for companies under a certain size, I'm OK with that.

I think that's a bit of an uncharitable reading. He anticipates a similar objection with, "You’d lose out on entry level talent! Maybe, or maybe part of your operations would be getting to know college kids." (Emphasis mine.) What I took away from the article is that he's suggesting that your company find other ways of developing relationships with outside people, rather than putting out a call for strangers to line up and jump through hoops when they need to hire someone. Another example: So many companies rely heavily on open source software, but how often do they take the opportunity to form relationships with the people who build and maintain it?

When you say, "What would fix the problem is for people to define 'desirable' in different ways, with a bias toward 'the place that I actually ended up at'," that seems to me very much what he is suggesting.

My company, which is a tech company, pretty much does exactly what the author describes as his preferred process: "I strongly prefer code reviews and evaluation of my public code samples and am just not interested in discussing why manhole covers are round or in reliving college coursework from 15 years ago." It's one of the reasons I wanted to work for them, and I think this kind of approach has the potential to be a competitive advantage. It takes more time to evaluate a candidate (though not unreasonably more) but opens up a much wider field of people and—from what I can tell—selects for better fit.

I don't know that this is "something that would matter to a business" per se, but here's something else they're working on with it: https://www.ibmchefwatson.com/community

The most detailed accounting I've come across of the economic realities of the record biz (including the myriad ways an artist can be screwed by his or her label) is the book "So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star" by Jacob Slichter (drummer for Semisonic). It's a really fantastic read I recommend to anyone who wants to be a professional musician or just wants to understand the industry. If you want wild antics and groupies and what not, skip it. But man does it ever go into a lot of technical detail of how the recording industry sausage gets made.