skytreader

> Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the US. Should we have blood pressure/cholesterol "passports" to pressure people into being healthier?

Is heart disease exponentially contagious with the potential to strain medical resources in a matter of days?

Again, these aren't interventions against social freedoms, rather an intervention to prevent a public service from being DDoSed, so to speak. The measures a matter of _hospitalization_. It's pointless to compare a "cause of death" metric to a "plain case count" metric.

As I mentioned in another comment, let's not forget that preventing spread through all these measures is all in service of a greater goal: avoiding strain on public health infra.

To put it another way, it doesn't matter if vaccinated people can still catch and spread the virus (any virus, even) as long as this infection chain does not result to an unmanageable pipeline of people who might need intensive medical care. In this context, the main benefit (but by no means only) of vaccines is the decreased hospitalization rate.

> Attempting to protect someone by taking away their ability to make that choice is equivalent to removing the option to eat enough food to become obese.

We do that to obese people already. It's called a diet. Some of them even go farther than mere "prescriptions" but with psychological tricks to keep people on track. Also, really, comparing obesity to COVID19 is an apples to oranges thing. Obesity is not even viral.

What you're missing is that in all these measures that seem so controversial (lockdowns, vaccination campaigns) preserving an individual's life/health is secondary to the main goal, a means to an end. The main goal is to not overwhelm the public healthcare infra.

No one cares if you want to go to a concert when you're ill but when that illness has the potential to strain public health resources, then that's a different story entirely.

For comparison:

> People with COVID-19 have had a wide range of symptoms reported – ranging from mild symptoms to severe illness. Symptoms may appear 2-14 days after exposure to the virus. Anyone can have mild to severe symptoms.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/symptoms-testing/s... (emphasis added)

Don't forget what makes COVID19 so insidious: without testing, it takes time before an infected contagious person shows symptoms. By the time they decide to stay off public spaces, they have already potentially spread the virus.

With the common flu, you know almost instantly so you stay home to recover.

Fat people know their condition and it's their choice to eat fast food anyway. And obesity is also non contagious.

Any chance your colleague has a YouTube channel and is named "Matt Parker" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBX2QQHlQ_I ?

At the risk of diluting the discussion here, do we know where they got the "TV Tuner" footage? I've been tuned to a channel with "WJLA" at the upper left (I think, aka "ABC 7"---I don't know I'm not American) for some time now; it started with a clip that is related to the 9/11 attacks but after heaps of ads I'm now watching relatively mundane news (traffic and weather updates, anyone?).

On one hand it's just impressive to me that they have this footage and it made my curiosity itch. On the other hand, a project like this can only gain from having verifiable sources. So do we know how/where they got all these footage?

I think it would help if Reloaded and Revolutions are viewed as one film; maybe chop off a few parts here and there too.

Reloaded, the cerebral philosophical expository arc. And then Revolutions, just guns and fists a-blazin'.

Maybe you're talking about Windows, I don't really know. But I gotta say, I wrestled through using Ubuntu ca. 2010s because they included a cool Matrix wallpaper by default. That's cooler than knowing how to quit vim.

Amusing anecdote involving div soups: Back in 2010 in one of my CS classes, the professor maintained a Google Sites to communicate with her students and upload slides. At the end of the semester, she wrote a list of students who must take the finals to get at least a passing grade.

The thing is, you view it Chrome, the list displays normally, a handful of students. But you view it in Firefox and it's an empty list. On Firefox it would look like

> (MM/DD/YY) Here's the list of students who must take the finals:

>

> (MM/DD/YY) [Next reminder...]

Sucks to be a Firefox user and be on that list.

A few years later, maybe 2015/2016, with a few years in the industry under my belt, I remember this curiosity and rechecked. Firefox is still not showing the list. I open developer tools to inspect and I'm greeted by an eldritch, decadent, and blasphemous nesting of divs. I did not try to understand it but it seems the stylesheet in use indents divs a certain amount and they abused this rule to get the list to the indentation they want. Probably it hit some limit in Firefox.

I've never used Google Sites so I can't guess whose fault is this. But it's unlikely my prof hand-wrote that HTML.

With this article, it seems to me that Twitter devs, for all their fancy dev toolchains, could only produce slightly better HTML than my professor. Perhaps the industry in general is really not much better than Google Sites, seeing our reliance on such bloated frameworks. What a sobering thought.

P.S. I did look her up just to check if this bug is still present. Her Google Sites is still up, she still teaches, but she seems to have taken down her earlier course pages.

> At the Nuremberg plant where it makes graphite leads and pens, it has developed an "anti-break system" for coloured pencils.

> This extra coating around the coloured pencil leads stops them breaking when sharpened, which Staedtler says has boosted sales.

It seems Faber-Castell also has this. E.g., https://d2j6dbq0eux0bg.cloudfront.net/images/28404083/189426... , the sign below "Triangular Grip" indicates that. I've been using the ordinary 12-pack and I remember reading about this on their packaging.

Of course, there are a lot of ways to explain this but it seems strange to me it did not converge on a patent dispute this being Germany, and they already had a lawsuit over claims on being the oldest manufacturer, what's another one between friends.

Flattered by your interest but now I'm afraid the words "DSL" and "Lisp-like" might've given the impression of far more complexity than the project actually was. Keep in mind the core engine is ~200LoC. Maybe twice that at most. But really, there were far more rules than engine logic in the end.

The project was started for legal compliance so I don't want to go into specifics in case I make a slip one way or another. It did not run in the production cluster per se but was important nonetheless. (Actually, gods forbid it run in production!)

Very vaguely, it simplified structured data. A rule is recursively defined, base cases being simple rules that just returned primitive data. The original data could be an object with deep properties but most rules just simplified it to one with less fields.

I call it "Lisp-like" because after writing a handful of recursive rules, I had flashbacks of when I studied (actually) Scheme in uni. The tree-structure and meta-rules certainly gave that impression. I did not parse parens though, rather the rule syntax is JSON dictionaries. I hope this aided in readability---it should be self-explanatory what each rule did---and so my team did not find it too esoteric.

I don't remember the exact volume of data we processed but it was in the tens of GB, if not low hundreds. We parallelized it and had maybe 20 runners working concurrently. You can claim mapreduce (ha!) at this approach but honestly I think we could've parallelized it as easily if I did not go with this DSL-approach. :)

I feel like the bit you quoted already captures what I think came of it after I turned it over. It is even from a paragraph labeled "Honest negatives".

Complete certainty of how it turned out is a bit too much to ask. For every story like mine, there's an equivalent story of a legacy system in boring Java/C that no one wants to touch, works like magic, etc.

FWIW, I wrote a pretty extensive documentation of the project before I left, including recommendations for improvement[1]. Again, it's foolish to claim complete certainty but the nature of the project was such that they are unlikely to need to rewrite anything on top of the engine. Any modifications and additions moving forward would be in the declared rules, not in any of the logic. And for that, they have hundreds of examples from me to copy from.

And if they do need to touch the "parser", at ~200LoC the complexity is certainly far below, say, a Spring J2EE code base. It's all in one file too, that shouldn't be too bad.

[1] If I may use HN as a small soapbox, actually, months later, I figured out a further small addition to that project that would've made working with it far easier. If any of my previous team recognizes this and this project is still in use, feel free to reach out to me for one last brilliant idea. :)

I'm not sure how the study you linked is an indictment of the weak version. It seems to fall well under my understanding of the consensus that the weak version is only true to a certain extent and definitely not to the extent Sapir and Whorf originally claimed.

So this does present an interesting result, and one that (AFAICT---I am not a linguist by training) does run counter to the claims of SWH but, more importantly, the study is limited only to spatial reasoning. Surely there are more areas of thought than that?

Has it? I'm genuinely curious to know. "Widely considered discredited" sounds like it's met the same fate as ether or alchemy.

I commented on SWH a few months ago in HN too when another user, claiming background in linguistics, replied that it factors in your world view but not as huge a factor as other cultural considerations. That sounded reasonable.

So as of the last time I looked up SWH (a few months ago), my knowledge of its consensus is that:

- the weak form ("relativism") is true to a certain extent, and definitely not to the extent Whorf originally proposed.

- the strong form ("determinism") is largely debated and, personally, I think it's indefensible as a thesis.

> What can you say in this language that would be impossibly inconvenient to say in others?

Maybe it's just me and my possibly-unreasonable infatuation with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (SWH) but I've come to think it also applies to many things in life, PLs especially so. "Weird languages" aren't valuable because you can deploy it in production, rather because it will help you recontextualize a problem (in SWH-parlance, it helps you see the world differently).

You can also say, SWH is an academic formulation of the beloved programmer motto "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail". If all you know is an imperative syntax, all problems look solvable by breaking them down into a series of steps/procedures.

In my almost ten years in the industry, there's exactly one time I was able to apply an "unusual" paradigm to solve a problem. GvR might curse me because I sort of made a Lisp-like DSL in Python but I stand by my design decision. The end-result was a small (~200LoC linted with black) DSL parser with some DB access and a lot of rules which actually tried to solve the problem. When I found something wrong I just had to reformulate a rule, not actually wrangle with loops, conditionals, and control flow in order to rewrite logic.

Honest negatives: I had to turn over the project to someone whose background is in EEE, not CS, and I had to explain Higher-Order Functions to them. Not ideal! Actually, in fairness, I bet most in that team would have a hard time figuring it out because, hey, I made a Lisp in Python! But I still stand by my decision; it was the best for the problem given the resources and time I had.

Such dishonest statistics, this source. For example,

> One of these neighboring Southeastern states had a statewide mask mandate. The other two did not.

> [Shown: COVID-19 Deaths, per million, 7-day average]

But mask mandates do not claim to prevent COVID-19 deaths, rather transmission. A state with relatively low transmission but poor healthcare infra will see similarly unintuitive/surprising trends.

But it just removes photos from image search; AFAICT text search results are unaltered. Perhaps I would no longer see Boris Johnson failing to comb his hair in Google Images but I can still read articles about it and they will still have accompanying photos.

I'm not the guy you're asking but what jumped out to me is that this change creates a database of images of minors and the damning/ironic part is that these are images of people who don't want to be easily searchable to begin with. Imagine the damage if this somehow leaks.

If my wording above sounds convoluted then let me paraphrase: a blacklist is a database too. Google's blacklist will contain assured images of minors because the minors/guardians reported them as such.

Sure it can be hashed/MLed/Bloomfiltered instead of a tabular listing but someone with enough patience and resources can probably make something out of it. (To be honest I don't want to peddle FUD and I'm speaking out of my depth here so I'd be glad to hear an assessment from someone with qualified experience in this area.)

This would be greatly alleviated if everyone was allowed to remove their images in search. I can't help but think it would help https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28216733 .

But it's just an internet search of photos isn't it? You'll still get links to news articles and write-ups and anyone reading about Abu Gharaib tortures will still see these and the accompanying photos. A prospective employer googles your name, it could still come up, just not the photos.

First of all, interesting how there's a lot of (seemingly) massive and feature-rich open source games, very specifically today on HN's homepage (two by my count, which is a lot!). Open source games have come a long way since the last decade.

Second of all, nostalgia time! I didn't play TA, rather TA: Kingdoms, the medieval-fantasy version. I think today it might qualify as a re-skin but don't quote me on that (edit: I just checked Wikipedia, and no, it isn't a "re-skin" by any means). I started for the story mode but eventually I found myself drawn to the RTS mode. It's my very first RTS and, without aid of the internet, I independently developed tactics and strategy, identifying map choke points and which "kingdom" is best suited for which terrain.

With the traditional human faction, the best result I managed was this stalemate of a scenario in a labyrinthine map. I only ever managed to win with the dark/evil faction. I didn't like how they looked or their back story but their stats and abilities suited my style.

Good times! I didn't really keep up with the RTS genre but maybe I'll give these games a spin when I have the time.

> Do your google searches at work frequently involve porn or something?

If I want to look up example of string operations in C I might Google "c strings" or "c strings examples". Incidentally, in similar fashion to G-strings, a C-string is a type of lingerie.

If I'm doing quick graphics adjustments I don't want to bother the art department with I might use the fantastic GNU Image Manipulation Program and do a search for "gimp tricks" or "gimp tutorials". Incidentally, as anyone who's seen "Pulp Fiction" might know, a gimp is a type of BDSM gear. Definitely not savory for work.

This is why, much as I'm concerned about personalized searches, it's kind of non-negotiable for me that to function as a professional software engineer I should be logged-in to my Google account. It's the only way I can be sure not to get results from, say, Victoria's Secret.

Out of curiosity, how can one have three CS degrees? Do you mean you went through the (1) undergrad, (2) masters, (3) PhD cycle?

> Our field has a real problem with hubris and reinterpreting everything through a CS lens

Man, I agree if only because I, too, am guilty of at least having a phase like this. But I think I also observe it in the dev and academic CS community in general. I just don't know if this is a generic intellectual hubris or a type of superiority complex specific to "hackers". Of course my opinion is very biased and maybe even cynical but I'm tending towards the latter. I wonder how that came to be; I can only speak for myself, unfortunately.

This might be a difference in values but to describe the metaphor as "flippant" is rather puritan don't you think? It's not as if the metaphor is reducing the gravitas of the issue. It does not even make a value judgment on whether or not slavery is wrong. It is a neutral metaphor at best.

If we as a society move to a state where a metaphor like so is verboten just because it is less pleasant or already considered "evocative" then how can we have deep and nuanced discussions on this period itself? You know the ones where we explicitly acknowledge the horrors of slave dehumanization, the terrible working conditions in the plantations, the violence stemming from these racist beliefs, among others.

Those issues are too heavy to be evoked by the metaphor (and frankly irrelevant to its purpose) and yet our current trajectory would want people to do away with it when it only serves to illustrates the relationship between computing resources. It's not even a comment on social history.

> if the analogy had been "master-apprentice" instead there probably wouldnt be as much pushback everywhere else

Except, you know, apprentices eventually become masters themselves. And the space isn't zero-sum; "Master Verrochio taught Master Leonardo" is semantically valid. It doesn't illustrate the semantics of, say, data replication where there is only one master at a time and the slaves are not supposed to be promoted. "Master-slave" captures the relationship succinctly.

True, it hearkens back to a dark time in US history but if that is the only criteria for censoring usage of this term, are we not also censoring discussions about this period? I agree with the sentiment to be ashamed of it but to the point where you can't even derive metaphors from it? Reeks of cowardly denial.

Just a bit more context that might explain why Haas might be the unhappy ones currently. There's a lot of capital-D Drama surrounding the team right now but I'll stick to these two facts:

- Due to financial reasons they had to let go their veteran drivers (just two in F1) from last season and are currently featuring an all-rookie line up.

- They've gone on record to say that they are not developing the 2021 car, instead focusing on the specs change for 2022.

So two rookies in a team that is basically just in the competition for the participation. At least one driver from Williams, the bottom feeders a season or two ago, have the chutzpah to aim for points finish this year. Haas can't be a fulfilling team to be in right now.

> "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win”

Great wisdom from Gandhi but I prefer the Silicon Valley way of saying things. More inspiring.

"This is what happens when you work to change things. First they think you're crazy, then they fight you, then you change the world."

From Elizabeth Holmes, founder and CEO of Theranos.

Pretty please be satire because that flew over my head the first time and I'm still not really sure if you are sarcastic or serious. What an exemplar of the cultish enthusiasm and logical inconsistencies I consistently get from crypto enthusiasts, which is exactly why I'm wary of the whole thing.

Man, what an uncanny trip! I don't mean to say it's any less impressive, but it was uncanny.

The surrealist nature of the piece notwithstanding, I was bothered by some of the artistic decisions made in the pictures. Maybe the lack of (traditional) perspective; but even that I can chalk up to a conscious Escherian aesthetic. I was also slightly bothered that the images were not available in higher resolution. Surely that should go without asking, in a piece going for this kind of artistic subject matter?

My suspicions peaked at https://moultano.files.wordpress.com/2021/07/1626575570_the_... because it really does not look like a cafeteria to me.

And when I got to the coda, it all made sense.

Long-ish PS:

> We believe that every book contains a world. But more than just believe, we know this, because we know that our world is made out of words. The person who created our world thought of words to describe just one of the rooms in our library, then saw it, and was so amazed at its beauty that he described more and more, and saw more and more.

I got chills when I first read this because it's so meta. Then I got to the behind-the-scenes explainer of the methodology and this quote (which, to be clear, I'm aware R. Moulton himself wrote) just reached another level of meta, if that's possible.

Thanks for the tour. I enjoyed it!

I had extensive bookmarks when I first surfed[1] the web. Then, that computer broke for one reason or another and I found myself staring at a fresh install of IE with none of my catalog. From then on I never built a bookmark catalog again.

I've replaced the functionality with various tools and tricks, from Google Reader to, nowadays, a simple dump list in Evernote with a loose tagging system. I guess now that you can sync bookmarks with Chrome and Google Account my original problem is solved but that solution came too late and old habits die hard (not to mention private data concerns).

I did take to bookmarking again lately though but mostly for work purposes: obscure pages in our wiki, some internal systems, the system we use to book leaves, etc. But if I have to change my work computer I would definitely have to ask around for those URLs again.

[1] Funny how using this term really dates my actions.