porpoise

Very cool.

In a similar vein (but much less techinically sophistcated), I recently realized that making "cloze" cards (esp. ones w/ a large number of deletions and/or incremental-reveal cards) in Anki can be made a much less painful process by ditching the native method in favor of an almost entirely CSS implementation (basically, you use Anki's editor to underline the cloze deletions, use a line of JS to add innerText as an attribute to the element, and use CSS to make each answer appear in a little pop-up as you hover over (or touch, if on mobile) a blank. An example: https://streamable.com/xwewa4).

HN has a ton of emotional content. But it really depends on the topic/thread. For example, I clicked into a thread recently where I found that at least 80% of users commenting have been blocked by myself for posting that type of content, and this is what I literally see:

https://imgur.com/a/nGFvx08

(I use a script so users can be blocked with one click)

Whereas in this thread, it's only about 1% (1 blocked in 73 comments).

Despite me having a huge block list, I'm consistently amazed how often I'd click into a huge thread with hundreds of comments and find that I've blocked not even a single user.

I do this all the time, but mostly outside. A nice bonus of doing this outside (besides the fresh air, etc) is you can often recall precisely where you were and what was on your visual field (since it's constantly changing unlike at home) when you had a particular thought, so you can refer to to it later as "that thought I had when I was approaching that icecream truck in Red Hook".

If you are self-conscious like I was when I first started doing this, it helps to put on some kind of headphone, if only to put yourself at peace by the thought "they'll just think I'm talking on the phone".

When I have a good thought, I record it on my phone (or dictate it into Gboard, which works offline) and later upload the mp3 to an app called Otter, which gives extremely good transcription and allow me to search through years' worth of voice notes by text but also be able to instantly hear myself talking from 2 years' ago, which I find to be much more effective for resuming a train of thought than looking at typed notes.

It's become increasingly common to refer to this vaccine as the AstraZeneca vaccine or simply the AZ vaccine even though before concerns were raised I only saw it refered to as the Oxford vs vaccine. Does this mean that the alleged issues mostly lie with AZ as opposed to Oxford?

“We cannot judge either of the feelings or of the characters of men with perfect accuracy from their actions or their appearance in public; it is from their careless conversations, their half finished sentences, that we may hope with the greatest probability of success to discover their real characters.” - Maria Edgeworth

It's interesting to think about what is it about keystrokes that tend to make people worry about privacy. I don't think it's as simple as "they are storing a lot more data than I assumed". It can't just be a matter of degree. The reason must be broadly along the lines given in the Edgeworth quote.

The reports I linked to argue that (i) demand has been significantly reduced. The paper I replied to argues that (ii) a reduction of demand is significantly correlated with a reduction of poaching. Not only is there no "outweighing" of the former by the latter, but the former depends for its point on the latter (i.e. there is no reason to care if (i) is true unless (ii) is true).

The tweet is from this month. The NG article is from 2018, but the WWF article postdates the Nature article.

China banned all ivory trade at the end of 2017 and by all accounts (see WWF and NG sources cited in the tweet) it's been working quite well.

https://www.twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/13397828106309...

Dexpot still works fine even though it hasn't been updated for years. And I love being able to have 9 virtual desktops arranged in a 3x3 grid and a semi-permanent transparent "minimap" of what's on each desktop as well as my current location in the 3x3 grid. But it has an issue which makes it unusable for me, something which may or may not be a bug, i.e. on switching to a desktop, if that desktop contains more than one window, all of them are brought to the front one after another, causing considerable delay if there are >3 windows present. The native win10 virtual desktop feature doesn't seem to have that issue.

Interesting link about TouchCursor.

Personally I prefer to use left alt key instead of space key, as I can hold down the left alt with minimal effort (right alt takes over the duty of left). For this to cause minimal conflict, I use Sharpkey to remap physical left alt to e.g. F16 at the OS level, then define the desired behavior for F16 in ahk.

This came out a while ago and I remember thinking it'd make the single file approach to TiddlyWiki effectively frictionless if you are Chrome user ...

https://web.dev/file-system-access/

When writing my dissertation, I found that changing the font to Comic Sans or Papyrus is an effective way of forcing myself to be self-critical and preventing myself from, for lack of a better phrase, "falling in love" with what I wrote (the "scholarly" classic-looking fonts like Sabon, Garamond, Baskerville tend to have that effect on me)

I can never bring myself to throwing away food where the labor of other people has been involved (cooking or growing) . I can justify myself by various consequentialist arguments, but deep down I know that I have a moral duty to eat it. I am morally bound to not throw it into the trash, regardless of whether there are any staring children in the world that can be helped by my action.

Many people in the West find this frame of mind totally alien. Most people in the east immediately understand it, as did I think most Westerners (at least) before the 20th century.

https://books.google.com/books?id=oJFBAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA32&dq=ru...

> I find it interesting that we never list other country origins when discussing their issues

I don't remember ever reading a headline, clicking into it, and discovering that it's about something happening in China. The country origin is almost always advertised right in the headline itself.

In fact, since I'm not a fan of most China coverage in mainstream media, the above fact allows me to filter much of it out simply by CSS (using uBlock's implementation of the :has-text selector), with no need for JS (via userscripts).

> was because it showed initial promise - first in China and then outside of China

This is incorrect. The idea of using HCQ didn't come from China but from a French doctor, nor did China ever promote using HCQ as a treatment. See the timeline for HCQ in connection with Covid [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroxychloroquine#Timeline

Not sure if this is unintended behavior, but after clicking from this thread to the site and doing a few searches (all while remaining on the same page), I wanted to history back to this thread but it took me 7-8 clicks to do so.

Is the idea behind the 33 yes-no questions thing a combinatorial point, though? World population is 7.5 billion, the smallest natural number n such that 2^n exceeds that number is 33.

So it shows you can uniquely identify any human with 33 yes-no questions, but reaching a member of a set isn't necessarily analogous to reaching a state of understanding.

One of the my favorite apps, Scapple (from the same company that produces Scrivener), stores their data using just this approach (plaintext + character ranges), but in XML. It does make the data file much more readable, and it makes it possible to grep for text without having to worry about regex to skip through tags, but IMO the convenience is outweighed by the fact that there is no way to do mass search and replace (that is, using external tools) without totally messing up the formatting.

IMO the best approach is inline makeup but for the text editor to have the ability to hide tags. An example is PowerGrep's docx editor. You can open an .docx file and it will be editable entirely in plain text, but when you save it, all the formatting is preserved. In some way existing text editors (e.g. Sublime) are already capable of doing this via some kind of fold by regex functionality

I wasn't saying physics has been completely already, only that it seems fairly easy to imagine a future point at which it becomes completed. Physics becomes "solved" as it were, much like checkers, and there's no more physics research to do, only problems of physics education, science communication etc remain. On the other hand, it's not at all obvious that we can easily imagine chemistry one day becoming "completed". Part of the reason is perhaps because the properties of compounds are not straightforwardly predictable from those of their constituents; chemistry remains heavy empirical, computation chemistry is never seen as a central branch of chemistry.

> and it feels to me that page loads are much faster, and in some case more readable (pages feel 'cleaner'?)

More readable, and also helps one focus on the content. A lot of web publications with literary pretensions (New Yorker, Quillette, LRB …) use pretty classic-looking externally loaded serif fonts for their articles, which not only slows down reading but can also (IMO) make one less critical of the content than one otherwise would be.

If I were the editors of these magazines I would be seriously tempted to force the use of Comic Sans for all article content. May not be good from advertising point of view but it signals a kind of intellectual honesty that I suspect is valued higher by their readership than a "classic look"

1. The document you linked to is about domestic, not foreign policy. If that isn't clear from the nature of the document itself, see in particular these quotes:

> The document is critical of "extremely malicious" ideals spreading in the Chinese society, such as ideas of (Western) constitutional democracy, civil society, universal values (freedom, democracy, and human rights), neo-liberalism, and freedom of the press (described as the "Western news values").[1][2][13] The document warns that such subjects undermine the Chinese Communist Party's control over Chinese society.[2]

> According to news analysis by a reporter at The New York Times, the emphasis on political discipline is intended to forestall leftist, or Maoist, opposition to needed economic reforms avoiding the split which resulted in the Soviet Union during Gorbachev's reform efforts when media freedom resulted in publishing of a great deal of critical historical material and alienation of the mass of party workers.[7]

The document shows that China's leaders were worried that the spread of western values within Chinese society could turn China into the next Soviet Union and were acting to prevent that from happening. I don't see how this could be read as proving any claim about their foreign policy aims, much less the extremely strong claim that China aims to usurp or replace the US.

2. I agree Taiwan "feels that way [i.e. like a sovereign country]": they have their own elections, passports, currency, … But I'm not seeing how the question about Taiwan bears on the claim (to the extent that clear empirical meaning can be attached to it) that China "explicitly set out" to usurp US's place.

"a country that has explicitly set out to usurp the US is useful"

Can you provide some evidence for saying that China "explicitly" set out to do this? The Chinese government has been consistently "explicit" that it does not aim to replace or supplant the US [1][2][3]. Perhaps you mean "actions speak louder than words" and that this intention is evident from the actions they've undertaken, in which case it would be nice to know what actions you have in mind, as well as how you ruled out boring explanations of those actions that China's leaders would have given themselves.

[1] https://amp.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3030717/ch...

[2] https://apnews.com/article/1c5193f5eb936b99b740b758da8efad3

[3] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wionews.com/world/not-tryin...

I wish IMEs were a thing for English input on desktops - the keyboard app you use on your smartphone is effectively an IME for all practical purposes.

I rarely need any spellchecking on smartphone because most spelling errors have been eliminated at the point of word entry.

The closest equivalent is probably the War on Terror, insofar as both purport to be a reaction to actual terrorist attacks and to be aimed at preventing future terrorism. We may then compare them in terms of (crudely) total actual suffering caused (less crudely, we need to take into account total potential suffering prevented - recall how Hiroshima was justified - but evaluating counterfactuals is a tricky matter so I will set that aside here). Even assuming the worst version of what's said to be happening in Xinjiang, there is no equivalence (in terms of actual suffering caused) with the War on Terror, which is estimated in 2009 to have resulted in 3.1 million direct or indirect deaths [1]. From a crude utilitarian point of view, there is simply no comparison: any clear-headed utilitarian given the choice to prevent exactly one of two will not feel that there is even a decision to be made.

Of course a natural reaction is to say that the Uyghurs have a legitimate cause, and the 911 attackers didn't. However, the official US theory of the motives behind the 911 attacks is "they hated us for our freedom". [2] According to this theory (as I understand it), the terrorists saw how free Americans were, saw how unfree they themselves were, became jealous, and attacked us. Now, there is no doubt that IF this theory is true, then the attackers indeed had no legitimate cause. But the theory (as I trust you will agree) is hardly believable, as it simply does not accord with our ordinary conception of how the human mind works. A more plausible theory of the motives is needed in order to make any assessment of whether the terrorists had a legitimate cause.

[1] https://www.democracynow.org/2019/11/15/headlines/analysis_f...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motives_for_the_September_11...

> China could have locked down travel from China that might have helped.

See [1] and [2] for fact checks on this point.

[1] https://www.factcheck.org/2020/05/trumps-flawed-china-travel...

[2] https://danielabell.com/?s=Ferguson&submit=Search

If by "inept, pathetic handling of the pandemic" you mean the cover-up or data fudging accusations, I highly recommend the four part series in Quillette that examines the merit of these charges:

https://quillette.com/category/covid-19/china-syndrome-serie...

Here's the Twitter thread where the author introduced the series and gave some helpful backgrounds:

https://twitter.com/phl43/status/1298053847844368386

As he says:

"Again, I know that many of you are skeptical, but this essay has required a ridiculous amount of work and I'm really confident about the conclusions I reach, so I hope you will read it with an open-mind. I will post the other parts in this thread as they are published."

The author also has very helpful comments on the recent CNN leak

https://mobile.twitter.com/phl43/status/1333563577324761091

posted this in another thread:

━━━━━━━━

Important context (see esp the tweet at the bottom) https://twitter.com/phl43/status/1333563577324761091

(Mirror: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1333563577324761091.html)

Important context (see esp the tweet at the bottom)

https://twitter.com/phl43/status/1333563577324761091

(Mirror: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1333563577324761091.html)

In some cases the problem can be somewhat mitigated if the search is incremental (and fast), as it basically allows you to refine your regex in real time and help train the correct intuition.

For example, you can type out "foo" at first which will, say, display 7 results, then when you add "()" you see the list shrunk by one, so you immediately know the regex missed one it's supposed to capture.

To add to the point about "very general tool", it's even possible to hack Zotero so as to give Word/GoogleDoc some rudimentary dynamic content or Roam-like features. Just define a custom citation format (but mentally pretend citations as Roam-like [[links]]), and in Word/GoogleDoc invoke the Zotero add-on for insertion citation. The autocomplete search is fuzzy and fast, and Zotero inserts a field code with unique id that makes it easy to keep track of all references to the same idea/thesis/concept even under different aliases. Better still, if you alter the dynamic content inside Zotero it can automatically update the displayed value of the field code next time you invoke the add-on.

I think it's still possible to go against conventional narrative on HN and get upvoted, but one needs to word one's comments with an extraordinary amount of extra care, completely stripped of sarcasm or confrontational tone, remaining objective even when under personal attack - in short, one is held to a much higher standard (in terms of quality and substance of comments) than those posting conventional opinion.