scottfr

The Web Extension APi doesn't seem too suitable for browser automation as it doesn't have support for simulating key presses or mouse movements (other than HTMLElement's click method).

Yeah, you can simulate events, but that can be a lot of work (e.g. typing an 'a' key might require you to simulate all of keydown, keypress, and keyup and set various non-standardized properties on them). And that won't even work in a standard text input as isTrusted is set to False on events you generate. Simulating something like a Tab key press will require you writing code to try to replicate your browser's logic in determining what the next element should be.

Why would this be preferable over something like Selenium?

"Aramis, or the Love of Technology" is a fascinating book on the attempted launch of such a system in Paris.

https://www.amazon.com/Aramis-Love-Technology-Bruno-Latour/d...

This is interesting

> Instead of ignoring unrecognized HTML and SVG attributes, React will now pass them through to the DOM.

Does that mean we can start using "class" instead of "className"?

Their Blueprint React component library is also quite nice:

http://blueprintjs.com/docs/#core/components/button

I know this is supposed be about unnecessary regulation killing a company that was bringing wins to both homeowners and providers, but... am I reading this right:

"By the Summer of 2015, we had onboarded over 1,200 Heroes, provided care to a few hundred clients ... In June 2015, we raised a $20 million Series A, bringing total funding to $23 million."

So two years and $3 million dollars after they launched, they had only "provided care to few hundred clients". And using those metrics they somehow raised another $20 million dollars?

It seems like they had other problems then a change in the regulatory landscape.

Quick back of the envelope calculations. For AC Transit (the primary Bay Area bus system):

  The Annual number of riders is: 54,987,132 [0]
  The average trip is: 3.1 miles [1]
  The budget is: $398.4 Million [2]
 

This means the cost per passenger mile on AC Transit is: $2.33 (398,400,000/(54,987,132*3.1))

According to [3] the cost of an Uber trip in San Francisco approximately: "$2.20 plus $0.26 per minute plus $1.30 per mile" (I don't use Uber so don't know how accurate this is.

If these numbers are accurate and generalize to other US transportation networks, public bus systems in the US are massively inefficient and are ripe for disruption/better solutions (note that Taxi's which aren't massively VC subsidized, are also ball-park cost competitive with the price of AC Transit on a per mile basis);

(Of course an Uber/Taxi has huge advantages for the user over buses in general, not the least of which include for most points of origin/destination pairs the large time savings compared to a bus.)

[0] http://www.actransit.org/about-us/facts-and-figures/ridershi... [1] http://www.actransit.org/wp-content/uploads/designing_with_t... [2] http://www.actransit.org/about-us/facts-and-figures/budget/ [3] https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-Uber-charge-passengers-f...

(sorry that these numbers may come from different years, don't have a unified source)

Edit: Also when calculating the cost effectiveness of the Uber/Taxi you should divide by the average number of riders. It's probably close to 1, but even something like 1.1 on average would result in a 9% savings on a per passenger mile.

Agreed, I naively bought this book. Then I found out you were not allowed to use the source code in the book for commercial purposes without purchasing a separate very expensive license.

Definitely, recommend you stay as far as way from this as you can. It's my own 1-star review on Amazon.

With arrow functions released and class properties likely to be approved soon, this has minimal value and is probably not worth the cost of the extra complexity to the language.

I'm a huge fan of R^2 and you should be too.

The simple way to think about R^2 is that it is a measure of relative predictive accuracy (and that is exactly how it is calculated). This is both a more accurate (and a more useful definition for most tasks the HN crowd would work on) than saying R^2 is a measure of the distance from the true model.

All the figures and findings in the post are completely reasonable given that definition (the linear model performing better in the first case is due to the high variance of the author's data, other samplings would lead to the reverse result).

When reading about any predictive technique the first thing to focus on before trying to understand the predictive mechanism is to understand the predictive accuracy of the model. A paper like this should have extensive discussions of overfitting, underfitting and overall predictive accuracy. The entirety of this paper's attempt to address this is:

"Last, to avoid arbitrary fitting and to obtain a robust measure of forecast skill, we apply a fourfold cross-validation scheme for each model: the model is fit to three-fourths of the data to predict the remaining one-fourth out-of-sample, and the procedure is repeated for each one-fourth segment of the time series."

They are dealing with time series data, which naturally has temporally correlated observations so a cross-validation like this will give a biased error estimate that will favor the more complex model (it encourages overfitting). I haven't delved into the details, but compared to the Ricker model their model is likely more complex so I have very little confidence in their claims of accuracy.

Of course, the choice of the Ricker model (developed in the 1950's) is really a strawman in any case. There are much better competitive techniques they could have chosen to benchmark their work.

Doesn't having to ask your users to go to chrome://flags and click the "Enable" button next to some very scary looking technical text have the same effect?

I can't imagine asking users (either public or internal) to do that.

What is the benefit of something like disabling on Tuesdays?

Isn't it simpler and just as effective to put the feature behind a configuration flag that is off by default and the user must manually turn on in the browser preferences? Both Chrome and Firefox already use this mechanism.

Correction: LocalStorage is synchronous not asynchronous.

You could have an auction for the 6 point slots, with the proceeds being divided and distributed to the group.

Yep, that's why I built it!

There are some great retirement calculators out there (e.g. firecalc), but I wanted a sandbox where I could explore different strategies and heuristics.

Thanks for the feedback!

1) Love the idea. I think that would be a great visualization.

2) Agreed, a simple function for this would be nice. You can currently doing it using some math based on the year, but it is a pain.

3) I think this would require collecting more demographics data to have a reasonable level of accuracy. I think the added complexity in UI might not be worth the insights.

The retirement income is adjust for inflation. All contributions and withdrawals are specified in today's dollars.

Internally, I model this be decreasing the Savings each time step to compensate for inflation.

The share button will embed your data in a url (Base64 Encoded JSON) that you can save or share with others. Your changes are also saved to local storage (use the Reset button to wipe that).

If you mean data harvesting for some sort of lead gen or analysis; absolutely not. I think this data is very private.

The double run does look a lot better.

Probably need to discuss how to isolate the component's Javascript.

Web component's JavaScript exists in the global scope so it can overwrite and be overwritten by scripts external to the component.

This is actually a major issue in my opinion. You can isolate your code to some extent using an IIFE but if you want to include 3rd party libraries that quickly becomes very hard to do. 3rd party libraries will also often directly modify the window object making any isolation attempts ineffective.

Agreed. I would actually be surprised if only a single lab had tried to reproduce a key result.

There may well be other labs which tried, and failed, to reproduce the original author's findings. In any event, it is unlikely we would know, as failure is unfortunately rarely publicized in academia (especially so when such failure is commonly dismissed out of hand for reasons such as a "lack of expertise").

I personally think the work this replication work is incredibly important and should absolutely be a key priority for funding institutions.

The linked article by Joel Spolksy is also great:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html

I wonder what the legal implications of having a "gender bias" detector are.

If you use Textio and publish a job description with the gender bias anywhere other than 0, doesn't that open you up to gender discrimination claims?

I was hoping for something like:

http://dropbox.scripting.com/dave/misc/appleHumanInterfaceGu...

300 pages of detailed ui/ux guidelines and rationales. It honestly was a joy to read when I first came across it 15 years ago.

This is very cool, but it isn't really "playing" the game. Instead it's "memorizing" how to complete a specific level through trial and error.

If you took this neural network and tried it on another Mario level, it would fail miserably.

This is really just an example of Bike Shedding.

Reviewing research papers is really, really hard work to do well. It takes a massive time commitment to truly digest and understand novel work to the level where you can provide a quality critique and review.

It's much easier to throw out facile critiques like the ones these reviewers provided. It shows that you know your stuff and did your job as a reviewer, without requiring you to actually understand the authors' innovations or lack-there-of.

80% of California water is used by agriculture and antiquated water allocation laws lead to massive inefficiencies in the agriculture sphere.

Stopping serving water in restaurants, putting bricks in your toilets, and turning off the fountain outside your company are all effectively irrelevant in helping conserve water. Everything of importance in solving our water issues can be found in the farm fields of the central valley.

"Beat the market" is misleading. In the article "beat the market" means be in the top 25% of the market, therefore equivalent to winning two coin flips each year.