pflats

Is it a cultural problem, or is it culture?

Is there a minimum empirical success rate you would be comfortable setting for a procedure that could significantly extend a patients life?

Personally, I think the best solution is to push large medical groups to mandate professional development on palliative care in their oncology departments. Start with the nurse practitioners.

Good news: iOS changed the default behavior of the side buttons: they always control system/media volume now. (Unless you flip a switch in settings.)

I think the bigger safety against this isn't that Apple reviews apps, but that submitting an app to the store requires money up front and some way for Apple to identify the person behind the account. It's by no means foolproof, but I imagine it redirects a lot of bad actors to easier attacks.

Word does its own mathematical typesetting with a GUI, but it also lets you use some LaTeX-like formatting if you want. 5\cdot2=10 will give you exactly what you typed, but if you hit space after the cdot, you'll get the centered dot symbol. Notably, it uses parens instead of braces, so you'll want to do \sqrt(2x+1).

Most annoyingly to me, \frac and other commands not directly associated with a symbol do not seem to be supported. That said, it's still extremely useful for my narrow use case (high school teacher semifluent in TeX with colleagues who are not).

edit: Also, it supports more symbols than its GUI provides; the only way to get the arc symbol that Geometry teachers like is to use \overparen.

The cameras have to be 4K+; the final product can be UHD. See the "IMF Master" section.

They do allow it.

I am truly confused by this screed.

>• Stupid Question 2: Trisect an arbitrary angle only using straight-edge and compass.

>Many, very smart people, tried in vain, to solve this problem, until it turned out, in the 19th century, to be impossible

>• Stupid Question 3: Double the cube.

>Ditto, 2^(1/3) is a cubic-algebraic number.

>• Stupid Question 4: Square the Circle.

>Many, very smart people, tried (and some still do!) in vain, to solve this problem, until it turned out [...] to be impossible.

>Today’s Mathematics Is a Religion

>Its central dogma is thou should prove everything rigorously.

To me, that's the entire point. You prove things rigorously so that (among many other reasons) when someone considers trying to square the circle, you can point them to the proof that the circle cannot be squared.

I don't follow your concerns on the headline. How is "a blanket ban on social media sites is unconstitutional" substantially different from "people can't be banned from the internet"?

Perhaps we're reading it differently, but to me, the headline says "you can't be banned from the internet as a whole", not "you can't be banned from a narrowly-tailored subset of the internet".

Etymological research is rarely cut-and-dry. The authors are aware of this, and the quotation is being held as a counterexample to "the conventional wisdom that the word “southpaw” originated “from the practice in baseball of arranging the diamond with the batter facing east to avoid the afternoon sun. A left-handed pitcher facing west would therefore have his pitching arm toward the south of the diamond.”"

The article goes on to point out that southpaw was almost definitely a boxing term before it was given its baseball "etymology".

I keep thinking that "employer" is the biggest confounding variable here. A quick survey of some of the big players, whom I would presume pay premium salaries, seem to favor spaces over tabs.

e.g.

https://google.github.io/styleguide/cppguide.html#Spaces_vs....

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/programming-g...

I can't find an Apple style guide, but the first file on the most recent commit to Swift uses spaces as well.

https://github.com/apple/swift/blob/e0f75bf841631a50f9ab6502...

I was curious too, so I took a closer look.

The beginner/"pupil" curriculum is 28 "days", or 448 study-hours.

Conveniently for comparison, a college course is generally 15-16 weeks long. A 4-credit course would be 4×16 hours classroom hours, so a 4-credit course with 3 study hours per classroom hour would be 12×16 hours.

So the beginner curriculum is equivalent to two and a half of the hardest 4-credit courses in your degree program.

The intermediate/"specialist" curriculum is 37 "days".

I would imagine the "acm day" is both to not scare away the potential student and to actually make designing curricula of that magnitude feasible. (I used to write K-12 curricula professionally, and it's no small task.)

O(1) is a subset of O(n).

It's not just the reporter, and I wouldn't want to single her out.

"Important incremental progress in ________" just doesn't get an article in the Times.

I hate these articles. They give people a lot more hope than they probably should.

Keytruda/pembrolizumab is not new. It's the same drug that Jimmy Carter famously took for his melanoma. It and Opdivo/nivolumab are PD-1 inhibitors that are amazing developments in treating late-stage cancer that doesn't respond to chemotherapy.

They're also not the miracle that news articles like to breathlessly push. This one does a decent job of pointing out that this is the first time a drug has been approved to treat cancer based on its genetic profile, rather than the type of cancer. That's an awesome development!

But then you get language like this:

"All carried genetic mutations that disrupted the ability of cells to fix damaged DNA. And all were enrolled in a trial of a drug that helps the immune system attack tumors.

The results, published on Thursday in the journal Science, are so striking that the Food and Drug Administration already has approved the drug, pembrolizumab, brand name Keytruda, for patients whose cancers arise from the same genetic abnormality."

Compared to the abstract:

"Objective radiographic responses were observed in 53% of patients and complete responses were achieved in 21% of patients."

That's around the 30% success rate these drugs usually have. They're great, and they can change your life - if you're one of the lucky ones. If you have a family member that needs this treatment, I hope it works.

But it's a lot of money and a lot of hope for a treatment with some rough side effects that for the average patient will either do nothing or give them a few more months to live.

It's a development, a great one, but the reports really need to rein in their enthusiasm. I'd be curious to see the entire statements the doctors in the article made, because I imagine they were more tempered than the selected quotations imply.

That's ridiculous. Leave is leave; it's an employee's right that's offered in law or in their contract, and they should not be punished in any way for taking advantage of it.

If the employee would otherwise exceed expectations and took paternity leave, then they still exceed expectations. If they were hired in March and worked for 40 weeks, they would not be penalized for failing to work in January or February. Leave should be handled the same way.

If the employee was not professional about taking leave (didn't give any notice, did not work with colleagues to organize coverage of his tasks, etc.) then things are different. Similarly, if they promised to do something while on leave and didn't, then that would be an issue.

No, it's not.

I love Desmos. It's a great tool for the classroom. I use it whenever I can.

It's also not a replacement for a handheld calculator. If the internet goes out, you lose your calculator. If it is working, then you're policing students to make sure that they're using their device for calculation. If it is working and you have the best students in the world or a locked-down network, it's still slower, less precise, and more annoying to use a calculator with virtual buttons than a handheld calculator with physical buttons.

Because of the nature of classroom instruction, there was almost always going to be at least local monopolies on calculators. If you're reading HN, you probably didn't struggle to figure out a graphing calculator. Many students do. Part of a lesson is often teaching students how to use a calculator, and it is far easier to only give a single set of instructions. Regardless of how well you have the other students working independently and how well the teacher knows all three+ calculator brands, the most valuable resource in a class is teacher time and attention. If a teacher spends 15 minutes explaining how to use a calculator instead of 5, that's 10 minutes of class time that students don't have access to the teacher to learn math. That adds up quickly.

As a result, most schools decide, independently of any marketing, to standardize on a single calculator. As the article notes, TI got to where it is because it spent a lot of money supporting teachers for free. Momentum took it from there.

On top of all that, the other thing a lot of people overlook re: the TI-84 family (and other handheld calculators) is how fast it is. Not the processor, but the speed at which it gets you an answer. It powers on and is instantly ready to go. You don't get that with any computer solution. Shared devices have to be logged into. Browsers have to open. Web apps have to load.

TI also has a new classroom calculator with an ARM processor and a bunch of other features, the NSpire. It's sold at about the same price points as an 84. Most teachers I talked to found it infuriating: you hit the power button, and you have to wait a few seconds for it to boot. Then when it does, it loads a menu screen where you can choose if you want to do calculations or something else. The old hardware just worked: you hit on, and before you can touch another key, it's ready to go.

Hey now, the newest TI 84s use the eZ80!

I'm far from an expert on file systems or semantic versioning, but the one thing I've heard is that APFS changes the way filenames are written to and read from disk. HFS+ (the old file system Apple OSes used) would automatically normalize file names so you couldn't have two files with names that look the same to a user but are represented with different byte sequences. APFS does not do this on the file-system level. (I heard thirdhand that some APIs might still do the normalization, but I don't have any links or details on that and don't want to spread bad info.)

http://mjtsai.com/blog/2017/03/24/apfss-bag-of-bytes-filenam...

Initially, I was thinking the same thing. Given how fast the average Apple consumer updates to major iOS releases, I imagine that rolling it out over a point release is actually part of the plan.

Presumably, if something does go wrong on the individual level, the support burden on the genius bars will be lower (since major iOS releases have traditionally come alongside hardware releases), and if a major bug is found, the number of devices affected will also likely be smaller.

It stills feels wrong on a gut level, and semver folks might not be happy with it, but it seems to make some real sense.

edit: Also, if it went out with 11.0, coordinating all the bug fixes for a 11.0.1 would almost definitely take longer than whatever will be in 10.3.1 release, letting any APFS issues get tweaked faster.

It's not as helpful, but I like to teach my high school students: Say you're planning to rob a jewelry store. You can rob it constructively or by contradiction.

You could case the joint, figure out the guards and the employees, their schedules, their uniforms, the jewels on display, the layout of the place, and so on. You can make a plan, an appropriate scenario, disguises, make a copy of keys, some costume jewelry, some fake uniforms. Really know the place inside and out, Oceans-11 the whole thing. And if you do it right, you can make it out with the jewels before anyone even knows they were stolen.

Or you can get some masks and some baseball bats, steal a semi truck, and drive it through the front window of the jewelry store. If the jewel cases aren't open from the impact, or if someone gets in your way, well, refer back to the baseball bats.

Both accomplish what you set out to do, but the first is clearly more elegant and often takes more work and study, requiring/granting a greater understanding of the system. And future thieves would learn a lot more studying Danny Ocean than they would Johnny Smash-and-Grab.

>all the statute cares about is whether authorization existed or not.

No, that's not all the CFAA cares about.

>(a)(2)(C) Whoever intentionally accesses a computer without authorization or exceeds authorized access, and thereby obtains information from any protected computer;

Thus my confusion. Why present the case as "without authorization" (based on the TOS) in the first place, when "exceed[ing] authorized access" (based on the C&D) seems like a much lower bar to clear and is less likely to provoke nonprofits complaining about precedent?

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1030#a_2

"Oracle sent Rimini a cease and desist letter demanding that it stop using automated scripts. It did not, however, rescind Rimini’s authorization to access the files outright. Rimini continued to use automated scripts, and Oracle sued. The jury found Rimini guilty under both the California and Nevada computer crime statues, and the judge upheld that verdict—concluding that, under both statutes, violating a website’s terms of service counts as using a computer without authorization or permission."

I'm a little confused here. I'm with the EFF that violating the TOS shouldn't be criminal. But if you're given a C&D that says "stop using automated scripts" and you continue using automated scripts, why is the TOS relevant at all? Isn't Rimini clearly exceeding their authorized access (left available for manual downloads) based on the C&D?

I'm not sure pure numbers will be the issue. Whether GT grants 25 or 2500 MS degrees in Analytics is irrelevant; the quality of the graduates with that degree is what matters.

Provided they do not relax their standards, I don't see there being an issue. An MS appeals to professionals who are unlikely to relocate for a program. I'm in a suburb of NYC; if I wanted an MS, I'd have to consider commuting to Princeton or Yale, at an hour and a half to two hours each way, to the much closer NYU or Columbia but with similar travel times once the intersection of mass transit schedules and class times are considered, or to the state school 15 minutes away with a much less prestigious program.

Meanwhile, GT has a prestigious program at a cost comparable to or better than the state school, with no commuting issues. It's the program I'd go into, and I live close to a surfeit of prestigious CS programs! There are plenty of qualified applicants across the country that don't have the option of "drive to your favorite of the 3 nearby Ivies".

If they keep the admissions process and curriculum/evaluation equivalent between online and in-person, then going online greatly expands their applicant pool but doesn't necessarily dilute it. If the program decides to relax their standards to get even more money, then they'll have problems, but that strikes me as being penny-wise and pound-foolish.

>There's serious pushback against rolling your own crypto. Your attitude towards it is good, but the hivemind-y attitude is to never do it under any circumstances. I'm sure that attitude prevents many people from experimenting and becoming crypo experts in their own right.

It's not a hivemind-y attitude, it's Software Engineering.

If you cannot show that a bridge will support a given weight, you do not build the bridge. Period. You learn that in your first Engineering course, freshman year. It's part of the responsibility of being an Engineer.

You can experiment with new bridge designs all you want, but until you can prove mathematically that the bridge is sound, you do not build the bridge. If you really want to roll your own bridge over the ditch in the your backyard, go for it, but think three times before inviting your friend to drive their truck over it, especially if you're not already an expert on bridges.

Cryptography is not a small or simple subject. If you are not an expert in the field, it is incredibly unlikely that you will not know enough to critique your own work. Instead of starting out by rolling your own, start by studying.

This is really cool for quick things, but for anything short of quick notes, I don't want to have to manually number my equations. I generally don't write top-to-bottom, I write subsections at a time.

Labels seem straightforward enough, but I'm at a loss for a markdown-y way to do a ref.

$$\exist 0 \in R \mathrm{s.t.} a + 0 = a \forall a \in R$$ (eqn:addid)

In addition to a zero as per (*eqn:addid), one must also show the existence of an inverse.

It's decent, but I don't love it. And further overloading the splat will be miserable.

>"$" ("$$" to be exact) is actually used in TeX to indicate opening and closing of statements/mathematical expressions.

Both are used. A single $ is used for inline math, the double $$ begins an equation on its own line. For example:

The solution to $ax^2 + bx + c = 0$ will be $$x = \frac{-b \pm \sqrt{b^2 - 4ac}}{2a}$$

The first block will be mid-sentence, while the second one will get its own line.

You don't get jail time for running a bat-corking company, or for making hockey sticks with "illegal" curves, or for deflating footballs, or for building a stock car that intentionally doesn't meet NASCAR standards.

I don't see how this is any different. People are going to cheat. They should get punished for cheating. If that cheating involves fraud, they should face charges for fraud. But it should not be illegal to drill a hole in a baseball bat and fill the void with ground-up bouncy balls.

If telling teenagers, "Read these books, do the problems, and repeat until you understand," worked at scale, then that's what education would be.

>And here I disagree, quite strongly. If I'm using "undocumented and warning-spitting methods" then I know what I have done is a hack and those methods could disappear or change at any time and I should proceed at my own peril.

We're in complete agreement, actually. I'm just saying that I generally don't expect things like that to change on a point release, not that it can't, won't, or shouldn't. You're definitely juggling chainsaws if you're in a situation like that.

Of specific interest: "This deprecation was announced and these methods removed/undocumented before 1.0.0 was tagged so arguably it was not part of the public API when 1.0.0 shipped."

I'm ambivalent. If I rev 1.0 - 1.1, then I'm going to assume the API won't change, even if I'm using undocumented and warning-spitting methods.

But I shouldn't be doing that, I shouldn't roll in a minor update without at least reading the change log, it's a FOSS project run by a volunteer staff, and brew never swore an oath to follow the laws of versioning as set by semver.org.

If the brew documentation said, "We use semantic versioning," then I'd say the complainants were correct. Otherwise, versions are just versions, and all you can count on is (Major Changes).(Medium Changes).(Minor Changes).(Tiny Changes).(etc.)

edit: Thoughts:

Years and years ago, I spent a lot of time and energy ranting about the fact that Google called GMail "beta software" when it was clearly not feature complete, and beta has a meaning, and we are just destroying a useful system of names for the software testing and release cycle, and…

But in the end, version numbers and development stages are language, and you cannot force your language on others, irregardless of whether or not you'd like to.