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scherlock

155 karma · joined August 16, 2023

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scherlock··on Jacquard lab notebook: Version control and provenance for empirical research
The fact that software engineers are the only folks with the skills to do what you just said.

When I was working on PhD thesis 20 years ago, I had a giant makefile that generated my graphs and tables then generated the thesis from LaTeX.

All of it was in version control, made it so much easier, but no way anyone other than someone that uses those tools would be able figure it out.

scherlock··on Exactly-Once Payments at Airbnb
So, you use DB row locks as a shared mutex? Am I reading that right? You created a centralized mutex service that your services use to share state with the cunning use of DB row locks.
scherlock··on Disney's Internal Slack Breached? NullBulge Leaks 1.1 TiB of Data
All their APIs are rate limited. Disney would have a Grid and with Grids you get data dumps. The feature is normally used for litigation and you need pretty high admin access to get a dump. They either found an exploit or they compromised an Admins account.
scherlock··on An abundance of Katherines: The game theory of baby naming
I named my kid Dexter. Despite my best efforts he won't wear lab coats or speak with an accent. When I try he just asks me to go buy some plastic drop cloths and goes back to sharpening the kitchen knives.
scherlock··on Nutrition Science's Most Preposterous Result
I'm thinking something like it's a proxy for self control. Being able to restrict yourself to a relatively small treat shows self control which probably is good indicator for avoiding other foods that might cause heart disease.
scherlock··on Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful
Yeah, I've done custom skinned apps in WPF that were deployed via zip file. Unzip and run the exe. Worked fine and even did p/invoke. Either they are ignorant about MS windows development or just a fanciful idea about how it should work.
scherlock··on FAA investigating how counterfeit titanium got into Boeing and Airbus jets
Ohh, I've done this. I bought some titanium bike parts and I was suspicious if they were titanium. I measured the weight of the bolts then dropped them in a graduated cylinder to get the volume, mass divas by volume is density, I then looked up the density and it was the same.
scherlock··on [dead]
What did the author do? Ask Chat GPT to write an article about API Governance and use that word as much as possible?
scherlock··on The Stanford Startup and the MIT Startup (2013)
Might as well called Stanford B2C and MIT B2B. Yeah, B2B needs more capital since they are building a plant while B2C is really about sourcing materials, packaging and marketing. Completely different businesses, different CapEx and OpEx models, different risks and different investors.
scherlock··on Commuter train window cleaning conundrum in NJ
The windows are not glass, they are 1/2" polycarbonate, per the article, which is easily scratched and susceptible to UV damage. That is the problem. They could likely be polished but then they need to retest the windows for safety compliance.
scherlock··on One RaspBerry to replace my K8s cluster
This is the author learning new tech on personal projects. Nothing wrong with that. Resume driven development is when a technology gets shoe horned into a project since someone wants to pad their resume.
scherlock··on The Myth of the Second Chance
Also, the reason people go bankrupt in the US are very different than the reasons people go bankrupt in Europe. 2/3 of personal bankruptcy in the US is linked to medical debt somehow. That is not the case in Europe.
scherlock··on Ukraine's New Factory-Smashing Drone Is a $90k Sport Plane with a Robot At
Might be a slow moving, low flying civilian air craft isn't what the AA system is looking for as a possible threat.
scherlock··on Engineers find a new way to convert carbon dioxide into useful products
I'm pretty sure I read a scifi dystopian novel where a scientist develops a bacteria that eats plastic they release it and the novel follows the after effects.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/86452.Ill_Wind but it appears there are a few books that explore this idea.

scherlock··on Longest sustained rise in people too sick to work since 1990s, says thinktank
Stop subsidizing corn production. Invest in making fruits and vegetables cheaper. Encourage development that includes high walkable and bikable aspects while minimizing driving aspects.
scherlock··on The Black-Scholes/Merton equation [video]
Sorry, yes, that is the better definition.
scherlock··on The Black-Scholes/Merton equation [video]
Implied volatility is really the standard deviation of the price over time. You can calculate it by look at prices in the market. Then interpolate values. Where banks get funky is that the market for options go out about 3 years, but a banks will write options going out much much further. For those options, they are really just guessing, no matter how much fancy math they do, it's all to dress up a guess. And the traders don't care since they won't be around when the option expires
scherlock··on Antarctic English
Crud is widely used. My kid's pediatrician and my PCP both use it to describe a general cold or cold symptoms. I'd say it has been in general use for about decade.
scherlock··on Researchers taking on fraudulent science
The major issue with research is how only successful results are viewed as worth while, and study results without a "positive" out come is viewed as a failure. So this means researchers are incentized to p-hack or falsifying results since they need more funding.

The reality is these negative results are just as useful and can either help other researchers avoid dead ends or they might have a not great result but with some refinement to methodology might be worthwhile for further study.

Researchers should be judged on the quality of the research they perform, not their outcomes. A well crafted study that shows that further research shouldn't be done should be just a well received as a well crafted study showing more research should be done. The focus should be on the design of the study first, since no matter what the results it adds to the corpus of knowledge in a meaningful way

scherlock··on I looked through attacks in my access logs
Yup, 99.999% are script kiddies running bots that look for unsecured servers or indicators for known exploits.
scherlock··on How to get new nuclear built faster
How about this, why don't SK, UK, French and US regulators get together and agree on a common set of regulations for reactor design. Then they can focus on the site specific regulations unique to each installation.
scherlock··on Live record of being fired from Cloudflare during a redundancy plan [video]
Yup, is they say you didn't meet metrics but can't articulate what those metrics are then they are incompetent and lying. Wouldn't surprise me if those two yoyos were contractors and not actual employees and just reading from a script.
scherlock··on It's Been 2 Months. Why Can't NASA Open the Asteroid Sample Container?
Wish they had a photo of the two bolts they can't get out. Though I wonder if, in the vacuum of space, the metal of screws and the metal of the containers contact welded together due to high machining tolerances.
scherlock··on The Seamless Communication models
My mom used to do English/French translation. Her favorite example was the word "file". That word has multiple translation in French depending on the context, and that context may simply be implied by who is speaking. You may not be able to figure it based on the conversation alone.
scherlock··on Sam Elsom's seaweed solution to tackle climate change
Why would ranchers spend money on reducing negative externalities they don't have to pay for? If ranchers had to pay a methane emission tax, they would buy it in a heart beat.
scherlock··on What if OpenDocument used SQLite? (2014)
If you have a db, why not just model it as unsaved data? I.e. all changes get stored to the db, but have a flag of unsaved. If you open up a file and there are unsaved changes, you can prompt the user to either make them saved or discard them.
scherlock··on What learning APL taught me about Python
Because what is happening I the list of ages is being transformed into a list of booleans where it's true if the age is greater than 17. This list of booleans is then turned into a list of integers where it's 1 if true, 0 if false. This list of integers is then being summed.
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