petsfed

Back when I was "playing" (in the dismissive sense) at being physicist and physics teacher, what I found was that the secret to actually understanding something was being free to fiddle with the parameters of the thing to try to dive a preferred outcome. That's more or less the mission statement of Bell Labs in its heyday.

I don't understand how you can exist in this space (that is, Hackernews and the larger startup culture) while being dismissive of folks out there exploring their particular parameter spaces, outside of practical constraints.

> Shame though, it was the only game that kinda had that level of realism, with "rifle from prone while waiting can hit you at 400+ yards, but if you're running around you struggle making hits under 100 yards" that encouraged very methodical play with teamwork and spotting.

The original Ghost Recon came out the year before, and the Delta Force series was already well underway. I recall enduring the interminable mandatory training of America's Army, just to discover that it was a flashier, gamey-er version of games I was already playing.

In fairness, I think you can definitely see AA's impact on the design of e.g. Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter on the PC, but hilariously (and true to form) when ArmA came out in 2006, its clear they took not one cue about how to build a playable game.

No, because you need ultra-cold or ultra-low density (or both, as with 21 cm hydrogen) gas. If your mean free path divided by your mean molecular velocity is significantly less than the relaxation time, then the the atom/molecule gets knocked out of the necessary high-energy state well before the transition occurs with sufficient frequency.

With [O III] in particular, it only gets into the necessary state via collisions (that's the easy part) occurring in extremely low density plasma, but then it relaxes via photon emission (that's the hard part). So if it gets knocked around by another collision, then the photon never gets emitted in the first place.

I submit that if the concept of quantum transitions is alien to whatever recipient of that probe (if ever), then any attempts to communicate are hopeless anyway. That is, if the recipient's physical reality is so different from our own that they can't at least get back to "oh, this distance means that transition, now the rest of the plaque makes sense", then no asynchronous communication will bridge that gap.

I've never liked the definition of forbidden transitions as "transitions not predicted under the broader approximation", because its rare that anybody actually lays out why a given approximation is used, and therefore why that approximation is inappropriate for the "forbidden" situation.

The reality is that with e.g. 21 cm Hydrogen, or 500.7 nm Oxygen (which I knew by heart, back in the day), its hard to keep a given atom in the appropriate state long enough for it to relax by emitting the appropriate photon. Indeed, we can't create a pure enough vacuum in a large enough chamber that such things happen frequently enough to be measurable.

No more probable than any other value, whole or otherwise. In particular, its (per wikipedia) 21.106cm.

Its funny how our brains find nice whole numbers unsettling in the natural world. I was always sort of weirded out by the distance light travels in a nanosecond: just shy of 1 foot. How weird it is that it flops between systems!

When I use it in an IT (or honestly, any non-physics or non-physics) context, I typically mean "how many different ways can we do it with the same effective outcome?".

To whit, "contract entropy": how many different ways can a contractor technically fulfill the terms of the contract, and thus get paid? If your contract has high entropy, then there's a high probability that you'll pay your contractor to not actually achieve what you wanted.

The tricky bit about the NOAA affiliated survey was that the debrief was mandatory. The underlying justification for the whole study was that they were finding a higher rate of "I experienced harassment" in the debrief vs. in anonymous surveys and via criminal complaints and they wanted to understand why, and how to apply a correction to the anonymous surveys to address the manifold negative pressures on reporting.

> Presumably someone who's been the victim of sexual harassment or assault would be more inclined to participate in a time consuming survey to have their voice heard.

If you read the paper, you'd see that for certain kinds of incidents, this is true. If its especially egregious harassment or physical assault, those tend to get reported more often, even through regular channels. But if its just the bog-standard hostile-workplace stuff that we all have to attend annual seminars about, the reporting rate is very low, because the victims rarely feel like anything will be done about it. And its rare that anything's done about it, because the leadership doesn't have firm enough evidence that its a widespread enough problem to even do something about. What I'm saying is that even in the light of that NSF report, the Antarctic leadership are doing the same calculus you are and saying "well, it seems pretty endemic, but we don't really have any specifics". To which I say "well, then collect some specifics".

Also, re: data from military personnel, I don't have a clear idea how to address that, except to say that if military personnel are harassing civilian staff, or vice versa, that's a pretty serious problem irrespective of location, and the DoD maintains an office specifically to address that for all situations where military personnel regularly work alongside civilian personnel. So they, too, should be doing the same thing.

I know some people who worked on the NOAA Alaska fisheries study, and they were using pretty widely accepted methods for estimating e.g. "bycatch" - the incidental catching of undesired species during commercial fishing operations, because its impossible to have 100% coverage in the moment of all fishers everywhere. In general, compliance with the Endangered Species Act is evaluated via surveys that are processed and extrapolated using these same methods. The reason the paper even got published was because it turns out that those methods are pretty novel for e.g. human bycatch.

If you look at the figures from the paper, its pretty clear that the stated variance is because of year-over-year variation, rather than absolute uncertainty of the method (which checks out, if Ass-Grab-Greg or whoever finally got fired in 2016, you'd expect the harassment rate to drop in 2017, but you can't just ignore 2016 and prior when reporting for the entire interval).

I think I was ambiguous on who raped (or attempted to rape) her, but the point still stands. While its certainly possible, it seemed like such a non sequitor to have her fall immediately for her savior, after a rape whose sole point was to make it clear that the russians are the bad guys.

I think Clancy was misunderstanding his audience in believing he needed to add rape to all the other bad things, trivializing rape, and probably most importantly for the purposes of this discussion, insisting on a superfluous romance subplot in a techno-thriller. Its been a long time since I read Red Storm Rising, and the main thing I recall is that I hated the romance subplot. It was a human interest story when I picked it up for the guns and bombs and missiles and things.

That mandatory debriefing was part of the reason why the data was better. That's what I'm saying.

If the relevant Antarctic authorities were performing an end-of-season debrief with each and every employee, following the paradigm used for marine fisheries observers, they might go from "59%, but some punter can claim its actually 14%" to "actually its like 70%, and here's the mountains of data to prove it".

I specifically referenced the marine-fisheries example because, outside of grievous injury or death, the observers cannot leave until the captain of the boat they're narc'ing (your words) on chooses to return to port, and only if the captain of that boat returns to a port they can easily go home from. Which is a pretty serious problem when the harasser/assaulter is the captain. The analogy to Antarctica is pretty strong in that light.

I mean, aside from the weird civilian rape-to-romance subplot, yeah. Technically it holds up well. Which is true for most of Clancy's novels.

I don't think all artists are leftists, but I do believe that all art that has a broad impact is progressive in character, if not in intent.

Did the Renaissance painters who used single-point-perspective do so in service of seizing the means of production? Obviously not. But they did do so knowing full well that it was a break from the previous art styles, and that such a break was a good thing. Likewise for the rise of the novel, the fall of meter in poetry, digital and electronic art, etc etc

At the end of the day, one of the better (although still incomplete) differentiators between art and simply craft is the deliberate pursuit of novelty of expression. That is, an artist is always trying to say something new, or say something in a new way. You can be exceptionally good at producing the exact same painting, but that doesn't make you an artist, simply a craftsman (and there is nothing wrong with being a craftsman).

Broadly speaking, all existentialism was leftist in character because its core tenet was a rejection of old ways. Definitionally, you cannot reject the old order without being liberal/progressive/leftist/etc. Which, again, was in response to the 15-20 million killed during WWI, the most deadly 4 years in Europe since the plague years.

Again, I think you're inverting causality by blaming Marxism for post-modernism, when they are instead related results of the same overall trend, that was simply catalyzed by WWI (there's definitely a read on e.g. the 1917 Russian Revolution that it happens at least wildly differently without Tsarist Russia entering the war).

By just about any reasonable accounting, the willful deconstruction of the concept of art reached its peak during and after World War I (e.g. Dadaism), specifically because of the wanton and apparently pointless destruction of an entire generation of French, British, Germans, and Russians (and others besides, but they bore the brunt of it). There was a very widespread questioning of traditional mores, which arguably bolstered the broader Marxist cause, but its definitely an inversion of causality to say that Marxism caused existentialism.

>The survey[1] had a 24% response rate, so that 59% number is extrapolated from that, it's actually just over 14%.

That's not how statistical extrapolation works.

Here's a recent study that uses modern statistical modelling methods to extrapolate actual harassment rates from reporting rates that suffer strongly from self-selection bias in a similar environment: [0]

Perhaps they can repeat the original study in light of the suggested methods just published.

0. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/marine-science/articles...

Because my 5-year-old daughter has experienced something akin to sexual harassment. Its grim out there, but its far grimmer in Antarctica, and other isolated places where victims have little recourse in the moment [0].

I went out of my way to provide as conservative of numbers as possible, so if that's a strawman, I don't know what to tell you. Even a cursory glance at incomplete statistics [1] on the subject show that the per-year rate of harassment at the peak ages is commensurate with the per-contract (again 4-6 month hitch, so double or triple that rate to get the per-year average) rate of all women in Antarctica.

0. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/marine-science/articles... 1. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7485046/

I want to buttress a sibling comment and dig into how misleading your quoted statistics are.

While there are complicating factors, in general, probabilities add linearly. So for the average woman in the US, who lives for 77 years, she therefore has a 1% chance of being sexually harassed during any 1 year of her life. Obviously, this follows some distribution, but still, the odds of it happening in any one year of her life probably peaks around 5-10%.

I couldn't find good data on how many seasons the average Antarctic worker puts in, but let's say its around 10. That means the average woman working in Antarctica has a 5.9% chance of getting sexually harassed per year. Except, the average contract length in Antarctica is 4-6 months. So while a woman in the US has a 0.5% chance of being sexually harassed in a given 6 month time frame, a woman in Antarctica has an average 11.8% chance of being sexually harassed for the same time frame.

Do you understand the difference?

Is there a reason why you went with traces rather than pours? I count 7 signals per board, and they're all meant to be low impedance. You could even expose copper on the back of the board to be used as ad hoc heat sinks without spending any extra money. The weird little triangle loops on the back really stand out to me, even though you probably don't need to worry about the impacts of a loop in your circuit.

There are a million different ways to ascertain "income" to evaluate whether or not a person is paying their "fair share". That we doggedly refuse to do any of them if your income is not subject to payroll taxes is a big reason why people (rightly, I think) don't trust elites.

To be honest, I have no special qualms with businesses doing their level best to minimize their tax obligations, provided they invest in their workers and/or R&D. Its just that they don't. The whole point of the old-timey ridiculously high highest marginal rate was to induce companies to do literally anything else than just pay their top executives more. Higher wages for the rank and file, investment in facilities, R&D, charitable giving, etc etc etc all have far greater impacts on society than the equivalent quantity shipped to the fed as taxes. If the ultra-rich want to avoid paying taxes by instead donating large sums of money to charities with broad socioeconomic impact, I have no problem with that either, for the same reason.

The issue is not that the ultra-rich don't pay their "fair share" (whatever that means), its that the tide that raises their ships does not raise all ships equivalently, and the ways they avoid paying that "fair share" disproportionately benefits only them. I don't really benefit if Jeff Bezos donates a lot of money to Jeff Bezos' nonprofit to manage his art collection or whatever. I do benefit if he just paid an equivalent amount into the general tax fund (or donated it to the March of Dimes or something).

I regularly pay out 20% of my annual income in the form of taxes. Its hard to be super sympathetic to e.g. Elon "I paid $11 billion in taxes last year!" Musk, when most years he pays far far less than that, and his net worth (as figured by his borrowing potential) grows proportionally a lot faster than mine does.

I disagree categorically with this. Yes, in principle, the court cases would be easier if the law was written with the complete regulations in place to begin with. However, facts on the ground change faster than the legislature is able to move at the best of times.

It has always been the case that you or I could sue to overturn a rule from the EPA or the BATF or the FDA. At which time, you assemble subject matter experts to buttress whatever claim you might have, and the regulatory bodies present their experts and then a judge and jury decides. It’s pretty far from perfect, and it has some of the same flaws as the legislative approach, but the important strength is that national defense spending policy is not held up on where the sustainability of dolphin bycatch for tuna lays: 15 or 16 dolphins killed per 100,000 tons of tuna harvested.

I think the underlying premise to requiring the legislature draft all regulations is “the legislature should not be making rules about things they don’t understand”. But 1) that sure as hell hasn’t slowed them down before, and 2) the fact that e.g. airplanes are very complicated is why we want regulations around their manufacture and operation in the first place. It’s confusing to me that the conclusion folks seem to draw here instead is “it’s too complex for the legislature to engage with in a timely fashion, so I guess we just have to accept all these plane crashes”.

I think this is a really good explanation of the underlying problem.

The example that is top of mind to me, because it hits pretty close to home, is stuff like the Environmental Protection Act or the Marine Mammal Protection Act. The laws direct designated agencies to come up with rules to accomplish whatever the act is meant to do, but it does not get into specifics, because lawmakers rightly recognized that they are neither environmental scientists, nor economists of the industries those acts regulate. So if an administration says "holding hands and singing Kumbaya in the commissary is sufficient to accomplish the goals of our mandating legislation", and neither the legislature nor the courts are unwilling to call the executive on it, that's the ball game.

At least in the US, "impeachable offense" is whatever the legislature will vote 2-to-1 for (which was revealed during the first Trump impeachment, and underscored why the second was such a farce. If 2/3 of the senate wouldn't convict a president stabbing a class of orphans on the capital steps, it doesn't really matter if its "legally" impeachable). Dunno if its as loosely defined in Argentina.

You've found a way to correctly anticipate new user needs and new technologies years, even decades, in advance?

And you've found a way to completely forestall the non-technical demands that force non-ideal design choices?

You're sitting on a gold mine friend.

My rooster was a jerk, but he deserved to die the way he did, which was the way he lived: picking fights with things that could kill him in an instant if they bothered to care. I'm glad that he died fighting the beak and talons of an osprey or bald eagle, and not to the remorseless (literal) machinery of market efficiency.

I've had jobs where I was called stupid to my face, repeatedly, and the expectation would be for me to enthusiastically nod, smile, and say "I can see why you'd feel that way, but..." then launch into my sales pitch for an extended warranty on a $70 printer or whatever.

By the end of each day, I was completely fucking drained, and the fact that I was sending out dozens of job applications every day for years to get out of that role was not lost on me.

Thanks! I did not see that previously. Going to edit my post now...

They keep saying that a "large" increase in minimum wage results in a 4.6% increase in case rate. But they don't [d̶e̶f̶i̶n̶e̶ ̶"̶l̶a̶r̶g̶e̶"̶ ̶(̶e̶s̶p̶e̶c̶i̶a̶l̶l̶y̶ ̶v̶s̶.̶ ̶"̶s̶m̶a̶l̶l̶"̶,̶ ̶w̶h̶i̶c̶h̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶y̶ ̶p̶o̶i̶n̶t̶ ̶o̶u̶t̶ ̶l̶e̶a̶d̶s̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶l̶o̶w̶e̶r̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶c̶a̶s̶e̶ ̶r̶a̶t̶e̶)̶,̶ ̶n̶o̶r̶ ̶d̶o̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶y̶] point out a margin of error or a noise floor early enough in the paper for a non-paying reader to see.

They also say that they "do not find evidence that capital-labor substitution could be behind the findings", but its again not within the scope of the free article to show how they were looking for such evidence, and what defined "capitol-labor substitution". Were they looking purely for "it costs $5k a year to provide everyone with safety glasses, but operating costs just increased by $50k on what used to net $60k of profit, so I guess we're not doing safety glasses anymore" or if the same reasoning was used on $600k of profit. The former is clearly capitol-labor substitution, the latter is being cheap out of spite.

Maybe these questions are being answered in a satisfactory manner, but the fact that they use a blend of wiggle words and hard numbers, with no clarifying context even in the abstract, suggests to me that this does not actually support the strawman everybody seems to be getting from it, which is "see, paying the person at McDonalds enough to actually make rent this month might get them killed! You don't want to pay them so much they might die, right?"

I've worked with several stepper motor driver ICs that feature a ground pad on the bottom of the IC and recommend an unmasked copper pour connected to the ground pad via thermal vias, on the opposite side of the board from the IC, sized at least as big as the IC itself. Like, the manufacturer's suggestion is literally to use the copper as a heat sink. If you wanted, you could then affix dedicated heat transfer features, like a traditional finned heatsink, or a heat pipe to a dedicated cooler.

If you keep this idea alive (and I hope you do!), you might consider shrinking the keyboard battery and designing its docking configuration so that it automatically charges from the main battery when stored in the laptop. A 3 month keyboard battery capacity seems sort of excessive when its mechanically part of a machine that charges daily.

I think one of the limitations to the keyboard concept you have is that it complicates using the laptop base as a stand for the screen in a tablet configuration. Outside of tablets with fully detachable keyboards (e.g. the Surface or the iPad pro), I don't think anybody has a good design for that. Was a touchscreen ever a consideration for stretch goals or design for expansion?

Hmmm. That's also an interesting solution to the same problem. Although honestly, the scenario where I want to have a removable keyboard, I'm likely using an external display (probably a hotel TV), and a small wireless mouse is a lot easier to transport than a keyboard (and more ergonomic than a keyboard small enough for transport) so the extra screen and trackpad are sort of lost on me.