ojnabieoot

Maybe a reference would help - I'm not sure how this is a meaningful statement.

It seems that there could be many somewhat "generic" Western European jokes about despots which date back to Roman times. But without more information I can't think of any jokes at or about Hitler specifically that could possibly date back to the Romans.

> Presumably whatever anti-plagiarism software journals are using today is similarly limited.

Sadly, I am guessing the problem here is the anti-plagiarism software was never run, nor was the article ever even read. Especially given that the issues were found disproportionately in one specific journal, this seems to be outright corruption on both sides of the equation.

> if they do not protect against variants or breakthrough infections?

The vaccines do not provide absolute immunity but they very clearly and obviously provide protection against variants (dramatically reducing the hospitalization and death rate), and against breakthrough infections (dramatically reducing the likelihood of transmission). Your comment is just ignorant misinformation.

The fact that vaccines are not completely bulletproof is known to children and any adult who is interested in a good faith discussion about this: those who have had a flu vaccine are familiar with the very mild form of the flu you can still get. The symptoms are far milder than an unvaccinated flu infection, but vaccines boost your immune system. They do not make you superhumanly immune to disease, and it's preposterous to hold the COVID vaccine to an impossibly high standard.

If I were the union I would take the opportunity to campaign on this. Say that Amazon’s leadership is so untrustworthy that they tried to rig an election they probably would have won fair and square - and, more importantly, that the federal government under Biden might actually have your back if AMZ tries to retaliate against you.

The problem is that the election was clearly unfair and there was a widespread sense that the people voting in it thought it was unfair. A 70-30 vote in an election where you know the authorities are watching means absolutely nothing.

As for this:

> The evidence seems to be based on the word of a single employee. If that's enough evidence to overturn an election, it will be hard to have one that isn't overturned.

You are reading this very myopically, ignoring crucial context with a sliver of the article (and not being helped by some weak writing). The snippet should be read as this:

> Myers’ recommendation centers on the mailbox [which was unquestionably on Amazon’s headquarters and which Amazon management unquestionably pressured employees to use for voting], according to one of the people familiar with it. During the NLRB hearing, an employee said Amazon security guards used keys to open the mailbox, testimony that former NLRB chair Wilma Liebman said could be reason enough to overturn the result.

So there was plenty of direct evidence suggesting improper behavior, which not even Amazon contested. That was not enough to overturn the result. But just the one piece of deeply serious eyewitness testimony on top of the documentary evidence would be enough. And of course there was far more evidence than just that one employee: Liebman’s comments are obviously a rhetorical device used to illustrate the severity of Amazon’s transgressions and not a literal description of the merits of the case.

I think you misread it. I believe they mean that among the coastal nations, the US ranks 3rd in terms of polluting its own coastline. I also don’t have access to the paper, but the number 2 coastal nation then pollutes its own coastline worse than the US.

For me (as someone formally diagnosed with schizophrenia): as a child I had a lot of flickering lights/shadows and brief whispers/noises, horrible depth perception, frequent dizziness, and bad temperature coordination (sweating or shivering way too much in response to weather).

One particular indication which I thought was universal but is apparently somewhat uncommon: visual “snow” in low light conditions, meaning that dark rooms look like grey TV static to me. (When my eyes are closed in the dark I usually just see black.)

I do feel the focus on lobbyists and corruption distracts from the more serious problem: part of the solution will have to involve reducing certain luxuries for many upper-middle-class people: less real meat, less AC in the summer, less driving, much more expensive clothing and furniture, etc. ExxonMobil isn’t the problem here, it’s ordinary citizens who don’t want to make the sacrifice. And the problem isn’t “corrupt politicians” so much as “politicians who want to win elections,” aka all politicians. And “we simply have to elect liars who are guaranteed to lose their election after betraying their voters” isn’t an option.

The process will certainly involve some pain and serious injustices, even if it’s necessary for the long term. Reducing meat consumption in particular is one that won’t be solved by electric generation technology, and lies directly on powerful cultural fault points in the US/Canada (“it’s the hippies and college professors who took your pork chops and bankrupted our hard working farmers!”). And eventually we will simply have to ban beef and pork.

The idea that Elon Musk is spending 35 hours a week (or even 20) engineering at SpaceX is preposterous. He is blatantly lying here, or pretending a few hours of doodling each week constitutes “chief engineering” work.

People are focusing on the pettiness and timing but the US government had very good reasons to do this (and other countries should follow suit):

1) The increasing commercialization of spaceflight provides many opportunities for unscrupulous grifters seeking to con scientifically illiterate millionaires, potentially at great risk to human life. Governments really should clamp down on who is and isn’t qualified to call themselves an astronaut.

2) As someone who supports companies like SpaceX being involved in space exploration: it is extremely gross for the focus to the on the personal feelings and childish fantasies of three billionaires, one of whom is notorious for blatantly abusing his employees, the other notorious for blatantly lying to his customers[1]. Branson seems by comparison to be an ok person... but he’s not an astronaut, and it’s disrespectful to real astronauts to suggest otherwise.

[1] While Bezos at least seems to acknowledge that he bought his ticket, the fact that Elon Musk still calls himself “Chief Engineer” at SpaceX is an embarrassment, and a slap in the face to all the engineers who actually show up to do work at SpaceX.

> why Summers is still remembered as an egregiously noteworthy case of incipient cancel culture.

Come on, man. If you’re the president of an organization and you get yourself into a situation where the majority of your women employees think you’re a reactionary bigoted jerk, then it doesn’t really matter if you actually deserved it or if you merely made a PR mistake. It doesn’t even matter if it’s due to an unfair media feeding frenzy! You are the president and you badly failed in your mission to lead that organization.

Summers absolutely deserved to lose his job as president (which was a voluntary resignation). Even if you give him the greatest possible benefit of the doubt, his actions were profoundly irresponsible leadership. And he didn’t lose tenure, he just lost a cushy side gig. Other university/corporate presidents have lost their job for far less.

This is what I said:

> Specifically, [the “variability hypothesis”] is a bold scientific claim that contradicted current and 2005-era understanding of human biology, and requires far more evidence than some economist’s musing. Summers was wrong (factually and morally) to suggest otherwise and Pinker was wrong to defend it.

It is very much a Flying Spaghetti Monster problem: at this point the preponderance of evidence is that there is no inherent difference in the reasoning abilities of men and women, and that any measured difference is much more easily explained by societal factors than genetics. The default hypothesis is that there is no difference and I have not seen any convincing evidence otherwise - evidence which purports to show a difference is always tainted beyond usefulness.

Your argument is equivalent to the observation that I haven’t personally mapped out all of Earth’s orbit so how can I prove there’s no Flying Spaghetti Monster? It is not very convincing!

This is probably the most compelling reason to view Pinker as a less-than-good-faith actor here: https://newrepublic.com/article/68044/sex-ed

In 2005 then-Harvard president started a firestorm when he suggested that women were underrepresented in STEM fields because of genetic differences in academic ability. Pinker argued that people were being too politically correct, and suggested that the (true) fact of genetic differences between men implies that there could be a genetic difference in cognitive ability.

But the assumed “fact” that women were statistically less skilled than men in STEM fields was already starting to disintegrate in 2005, as boys were falling behind academically and girls were accelerating, a trend continuing in to 2021. It is ridiculous to think that women somehow got better STEM genes in the space of 40 years. Sociological and political/economic factors are clearly responsible for the change and current discrepancy.

So the idea that the difference is “genetic” is horseshit and has been horseshit since long before 2005. Specifically, it is a bold scientific claim that contradicted current and 2005-era understanding of human biology, and requires far more evidence than some economist’s musing. Summers was wrong (factually and morally) to suggest otherwise and Pinker was wrong to defend it.

Note that Pinker didn’t merely defend Summers’s right to make unfactual remarks. Pinker defended Summers on the merits. I think he continued to defend these views as recently as 2014. In my view this (along with Pinker’s general reactionary tendencies) gives people a good reason to suspect that he’s a sexist jerk who can’t be trusted to engage with “cancel culture” issues honestly.

Regardless of the extent that the increase is due to statistical noise or socio-political factors: it is obviously incorrect to look at one deeply unusual year and proclaim the trend is “reversed.”

> But is C going to be too hard for young kids to play with?

Speaking from personal experience, I “learned C” alongside actually learning BASIC when I was 10-12. When I say “learned C” I actually mean I “learned basic imperative programming with C-style syntax”: simple single-file programs inside of a main block. Arrays (probably all statically allocated), but few (if any) pointers of scalar quantities, no structs, and I doubt I ever even used headers or macros. By contrast, I understood the BASIC runtime and overall language much better than I did C.

But I was able to be reasonably effective for a kid: writing simple ASCII games, interfacing with some educational robotics toy with a C library, physics simulations, and so on. So I don’t think C is too difficult for kids, or even necessarily more difficult than any other language. The complete specification for C is obviously too complicated for most kids, as are the details of safe and performant native code, but you can quite effectively create small programs with a minimal subset of C.

That said, it is probably harder to find reference material for kids learning C in 2021. And the nice thing about Python is that kids can much more easily do more complex tasks, plus it has a bespoke interpreter for learning the basics. Kids are also more able to create their own complete applications in Python than C. Of course learning basic imperative programming with C is a very enriching experience for a child. But doing the same with Python-style syntax seems like a perfectly fine replacment.

In my view C is ok for kids - it might even be the best choice if you’re focusing on hardware - and that the important thing is getting started with something. But I would caution against using C unless the specific code you have in mind is relatively simple. Complex memory management considerations or data manipulation that’s very close to the metal is probably inappropriate for first-time young learners.

A lot of people have Chrome installed alongside Firefox or Edge or whatever and will just try the video somewhere else. So YouTube actually gets more revenue and Chrome gets free advertising. If a major website works on Chrome but doesn’t work correctly on Firefox most users will tend to blame the browser instead of the website and think “I stopped using Chrome because of the memory issues but at least it’s reliable.” The logic even sounds superficially reasonable.

Great link, thanks.

The line about “all of this is stuff you're allowed to do to compete, of course” (from the Firefox exec) reads like a winking acknowledgement that Google’s behavior is dangerously anti-competitive and deserves a federal antitrust investigation. Google has a pattern of abusing their uncontested market dominance in search engines, and considerable leverage in office web applications, to shore up one of the few product lines where the competition is steep.

IANAL but it does seem like textbook stuff you’re not allowed to do to compete.

I agree with you in general. But I think in this specific case it’s a bit more complicated: the downsides aren’t as bad as they normally would be, and the use of primitive flow constructs arguably has an advantage in this domain:

POSIX and similarly stuffy requirements (even if “soft”) means that this code is fairly static. While there is some bloat in the pragmas, etc., these applications are necessarily slow to change and I think it’s reasonable to say that they won’t suffer from feature bloat anytime soon. So the normal software risk considerations are a bit different here. Further, any changes to the code will be fiercely reviewed, and the individual programs are small enough that increases in complexity will be quickly spotted. Relatedly, these programs are small enough that, if a refactor to more structured code were necessary, the work would be quite feasible. So while the risks of goto are real in any C program, in practice I think they’re quite minimal here.

And I do think you’re missing an advantage. These are core userspace functions that perform safety- and security-critical kernel interactions. So I definitively agree there is a strong argument to use safe code, modern abstractions, and so on. This is especially true for modern PCs that really can afford to spend a few extra cycles creating a folder.

But a modern code construct, correctly applied, is only as safe as the compiler. This is not guaranteed! A common “gotcha” with buggy C compilers is inappropriately pruning instructions because the compiler optimizes away a loop or else statement. It is hardly a frequent issue but similar bugs have shown up in recent gcc/clang releases. And in particular core developers who are working on operating systems are more likely to be using shaky C compilers.

Using gotos and ugly global state has the distinct advantage that generated assembly tends to have less “surprises.” If there is a bug in the compiler it will be less well-hidden; if there is a bug in the program then there is less mental work between analyzing the C and analyzing the disassembly for debugging.

Again, in general I think you’re correct and that my argument is ultimately more of a judgment call.

EDIT: I didn’t really want to address any structural advantages of goto for, e.g. exception handling via breaking loops earlier, etc. I am not a domain expert enough to comment appropriately but it does seem there are cases where properly abstracted cleanup code in C is more spaghettified than a goto: https://lkml.org/lkml/2003/1/12/203

It wasn’t “challenged” by that scientist, the scientist provided additional information about the newer state of the art.

More to the point, if you are enough of a grown up to critically analyze the validity of an article and won’t be satisfied until you get something peer reviewed, then you are enough of a grownup to do your own research. Again the science and high accuracy of radioactive dating is very well-established. Generally the only people who disagree with it are cranks who believe Adam and Eve happened 10,000 years ago.

What is the purpose of your comment other than being an obnoxious troll?

Very nice work and much easier than trawling through the repository.

Some ignorant and probably cliched musing: when I look at small utilities like these I am always struck by a seeming distinction between best practices for little C programs versus best practices for large C applications (the author of the post touches on this ad well).

In particular, the explicit flow (including goto) and “pedantic” style is actually quite appropriate for something < 1000 lines and where the expected behavior is extremely well understood. In cases like pwd, mkdir, etc, trying to abstract too much is arguably a mistake for maintainability and understanding.

I say all this as an immutable functional-first dev who hasn’t done much native code :) And I think the various type-safe / memory-safe / etc versions of these tools are worth developing. But there’s something to be said about well-optimized native code that clearly “does what it says on the box” in a way that’s accessible to anyone who understands basic Linux programming - even if they can only contextually read C code.

(My only real gripe is typographic / linting related, mostly due to being a whippersnapper).

The science here is very well-established: http://www.meteoritestudies.com/protected_dating.htm

I didn’t mean it strictly literally. The original comment was a thoughtless namedrop of a brand new book (which means by tautology it’s irrelevant to the topic at hand) and doesn’t have a shred of reasoning behind it. So, functionally, it’s a billboard advertising Taleb’s book.

I am aware that the Cult of Taleb means that people are willing to advertise his work for free.

Racist “jokes” make people uncomfortable because it’s directly adjacent to racist insults, racist hiring/firing practices, and even racist violence. Employers have a duty to workers from employees that are potential threats, and to remove employees that are walking legal liabilities. And that very much includes employees who claim to be “equal-opportunity offenders.”

I understand that it’s more complicated when you are making jokes about your own ethnic group. But please understand that it’s not an issue of “bad culture fit.” As an example, employees who make relentless personal criticisms of their coworkers aren’t gruff people that have trouble fitting in to an upright corporate culture: they are jerks whose behavior rightfully makes them difficult to work with and hard to justify hiring. It is the same with making ethnic / racist jokes in the office. Just don’t do it.

(There is also a difference between ethnic jokes about Poles and racist jokes about black people or Jews, but that’s a different discussion. Both are really not appropriate for the office.)

I don’t think there’s anything here for mathematicians. The only nontrivial fact in the paper is that the approximation works well in medical practice (which is not something that Leibniz or Newton would have been able to tell you since there could be complicated biological factors confounding it - what if the ‘real curve’ has a bunch of spikes that don’t show up in measurements?).

However, the original paper really is incomplete because of its seeming ignorance of the real “trapezoidal rule.” It really needs a discussion along the lines of “the trapezoid rule from ordinary calculus can be used by diabetes practitioners with surprising accuracy” and explained that sources of error, discontinuity, etc., aren’t likely to affects the approximation.

But don’t worry about M.M. Tai’s feelings too much :) The paper is almost 30 years old and it’s world-famous for the silly error, Tai has already been throughly roasted.

There are a lot of them that say “using the trapezoidal rule” or something and cite the paper. I think that’s a silly case of unnecessary citations (having been a coauthor on a medical paper there’s a lot of pressure to ‘grab a citation that sort of works’).

But they almost always call it “the trapezoidal rule” - the original paper is quite famous specifically because of the embarrassment it brought to medical researchers, and implication that medicine is full of doofuses who don’t know calculus is pure clickbait.

I don’t think the author deserves much credit for “calling this out” - the paper was published in 1994 and has been a meme in math circles for about as long.

No it doesn’t, the specific point is that racial bias is just as bad among teachers as it is every other profession. I never said teachers were more racist than other people, in fact I very specifically said:

> Racism in US teachers is in fact a big problem, as is racism among doctors and bankers[1].

If you want to argue that racist doctors and bankers aren’t a problem then feel free. But don’t project your problems with reading comprehension onto me.

The “political incorrectness” angle is really an unnecessary and very stupid aside that tarnishes an otherwise decent piece:

> Nor could [Office Romance] be much less politically correct. One can only imagine what a modern HR-manager would make of Office Romance, of its “power-imbalances”, “problematic” attitudes and “inappropriate” behaviour. That said, the same HR-manager should at least pause to wonder what, in doing all we can to make such relationships shameful and unfeasible, we’re also doing to ourselves.

The correct answer of course is that any professional, HR or otherwise, prioritizes facts over nice stories in movies. And the facts are that many supervisor-subordinate relationships are exploitative, often start from illegal harassment, and in any event are bad for business. Putting concepts like power imbalances and inappropriate behavior in scare quotes is just creepy and indicates sexist contempt for victims of workplace sexual harassment.

Markowski is clearly working in his politics here (which are largely centered around hyperventilating about “cancel culture”), but even by the standards of the genre it is particularly gross to suggest that the only people concerned about bosses who sleep with their employees are the PC Prudes who run HR.

Racism in US teachers is in fact a big problem, as is racism among doctors and bankers[1]. And focusing on standardized test scores almost always hurts poor students because it rewards families who can afford private test preparation[2]. These are scientific facts with a great deal of evidence - evidence which is considerably more compelling than “it sounds good to Hacker News.”

You are just wrong. You cannot just make things up because they are ideologically convenient. And I am so sick of having the same zombie arguments with people who are recklessly indifferent to the facts at hand.

> In this sample, we found no significant association between occupation and level of bias (see Table 4). That is, teachers held levels of implicit bias, explicit bias as operationalized using a feel- ing thermometer, and symbolic racism that were not statistically different from the levels of nonteachers. This result persisted through all five models. That is, this lack of relationship held despite controlling for demographic factors (Model 2), educa- tion (Model 3), political preference (Model 4), or all of these characteristics combined (Model 5).

> In conclusion, we have found that teachers’ [anti-Black and pro-White] bias levels are quite similar to those of the larger population. These findings challenge the notion that teachers might be uniquely equipped to instill positive racial attitudes in children or bring about racial justice, instead indicating that teachers need just as much sup- port in contending with their biases as the population at large.

> Researchers, including those who work for the test companies, have known wealth is strongly correlated with outcomes on standardized tests for years. There are several reasons why. Wealthy students attend higher ranked schools within more financially resourced districts. Richer families can afford more tutoring, test prep and enrichment activities. The College Board never claimed that test prep could improve scores until it was available for free online, at which point the evidence of improvement came rolling in. Standardized tests are better proxies for how many opportunities a student has been afforded than they are predictors for students’ potential. Consequently, tests weed out budding low-income students instead of creating equitable access to institutions that help build wealth. This is why many colleges have abandoned using standardized test altogether.

[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.3102/0013189X2091275...

[2] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2019/05/17/student...

HN is unfortunately the extremely wrong place to discuss this :( Language like that can be used by bad-faith folks here to push the (false and ridiculous) idea that the Equitable Math people don’t care about mathematical rigor or logical reasoning.

The idea is that those attitudes encourage hypercompetitiveness among children and inappropriately reinforce the idea that math grades are a measure of “inherent ability.”

- “Independent practice is valued over teamwork” encourages a classroom where the “best students” come from families who can afford private tutoring

- “focus on getting the right answer” means that teachers don’t get an appropriate sense of where students are actually struggling, and again incentivizes the affluent privately-tutored student who doesn’t have to worry about explaining their answer.

It is not that either of these are inherently “white supremacist,” but they are inherently poor measures of mathematical understanding. The racism connection comes in by the fact that these are measures which can be “juked” by affluence, and that students from rough backgrounds are unfairly penalized. Given that racism in US teachers is also a big problem, it can lead to ugly situations like “Jimmy is dumb at math and can’t do Algebra II” rather than “Jimmy makes a lot of dumb sign errors and needs specific practice.”

In particular: these are (nominally) race-neutral criticisms of US public education with especially acute impact for black students, but also affect white students from tougher backgrounds.