telchar

Alright, thanks for the info. I'll look into those.

It's not that I think they're really that different, but one is very optional and the other is so hard to live without these days. I'm absolutely not happy about the inclusion of those features in phones but the alternatives to having a smartphone are slim and difficult to live with.

Speaking about unblockable ads, I had to set up a pi-hole to block ads at the network level because I couldn't block them on my ipad on any browser. Why does Apple make it so hard? Am I missing something?

I'm not convinced that this will change anything in the near term. While the Obama administration had started (cautiously) pivoting from Saudi to Iran (see the nuclear deal, increased criticism of the Saudis, very limited engagement in Syria), the current admin threw that away and has reaffirmed their affiliation with the Saudis.

So while they might make a show of being upset, after the way they snubbed Iran they have nowhere to go if they want to pivot from the Saudis to a different potential regional ally. Further, Trump is expressly in favor of violence against journalists [0] so he's not going to push for punishment for this.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2018/10/19...

Looks like a fun little data science project but I don't see any data here that would be useful to determine similarity among women and thus who would benefit from which type of BC. The closest thing I see is age. I think you'll need a better data set if you want to make something that's more useful. That said it's a good idea in general - someone should get on that.

I suspect GP means a filter that makes the video appear to have the hallmarks of a deep fake without actually changing the apparent participants.

You're right that the gratuity is optional, but there is still a strong general expectation that most people will tip. The optionality gives the tipper discretion in any specific situation, not an indefinite free ride with no social consequences. The server wouldn't work for $2.13/hr (presumably) without the expectation, so by never tipping the GP is freeloading on the other customers.

Likewise there is an expectation of good service from waitstaff, but they're not obligated to give good service. They too have the option of giving better or worse service at their discretion. So if a server wants to give everyone equal service that's their right. But if I want to develop a reputation as a good tipper to get my service prioritized over GP by servers who differentiate then that's ok too, and rational I think.

If you want to claim to be principled about this then you should inform the waitstaff at the start of the interaction that you don't intend to tip. The price they ask has expectation of tip built in implicitly - failing to disclose that you won't tip is therefore a lie of omission. I hope you're not that sort of person.

In what country? The US is still mostly per per procedure. There are codes for procedures and for diagnoses and they both get factored into the bill.

Nevertheless there is concern about any data that goes into an EMR. There is always concern about what happens in the worst case scenario where something very bad happens to a patient and their whole record is examined in a courtroom after the fact. If, say, a machine learning model predicts that thing X will happen to the patient and it wasn't acted on, a hypothetical lawsuit may go worse for the provider than if the predicted risk of thing X weren't part of the record.

This doesn't mean that the doctors bury their heads in the sand, but it is a part of the reason providers are resistant to adopting these tools. Relying on their own knowledge and intuition may not be better but it won't hurt them as evidence in a hypothetical malpractice suit. The decision support tool has to be sufficiently better to outweigh this.

I hold no opinion on the validity of this line of thinking, but I can say that it is part of the calculus, at least for some.

To be fair, there is also a significant lack of evidence that they haven't. It is difficult to collect data in this area because of the setup of the electoral system (both its federated nature and the lack of possible verification of individual votes). This together with the tight margins of modern American elections means potentially significant fraud could hide in the noise. In-person fraud would be hard to hide but electronic fraud is possible and there are interested, capable parties out there (e.g Russia) who shouldn't be discounted.

So to say that 'we definitely don't have an "election integrity" issue' isn't correct. There is nothing definite about it - we just have a consensus that we don't have a problem. You could say the same about every data security breach until they were discovered. I have noticed that there is a significant cultural interest in propagating the idea that our elections are sound so I tend to take the idea with a grain of salt as long as our system is as vulnerable as it is.

Populism is just the antipode to elitism. Too much elitism (e.g. pre-revolution France, gilded-age America or any kleptocracy of which there are numerous examples) is problematic too. A dose of populism can be a useful solution to that problem. For example, the New Deal seems to have worked out pretty well.

Just like anything else, populist policies need to be considered carefully and applied judiciously to work out well. To hold that all populist policies are simply to give out free money is a straw man argument.

A knee jerk response to any populist policy is a low-effort way to implicitly support elitist systems. These policies should at least be fairly considered on their own merits in the context of the actual economic system.

I'm not making an argument for any specific policy here, but I've seen far too many policy proposals waved away as "populist" and therefore not serious.

But then how would we know the value of a Nobel prize? I'm sure the University of Chicago economists would tell us that you can't have an efficient market for Nobel medals without such transactions.

I downvoted you for making a throwaway comment. I come to HN for substantive discussion, not throwaway snark. Please take that elsewhere in the future, there are plenty of other outlets.

That's a good point, although unfortunately I could see them getting away with extra power due to the interstate commerce clause that they use to justify so much else.

You're making the unstated statement that those parties have the same propaganda models. I think it's pretty clear that they don't.

Presumably you're speaking cynically about how copyright is treated. For the official, stated reason:

Article I Section 8. Clause 8 – Patent and Copyright Clause of the Constitution. [The Congress shall have power] “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”[0]

[0] https://fairuse.stanford.edu/law/us-constitution/

No, there's way more to data science than competitions. But for someone who is already a data engineer more or less, I think it could be a good window into the complexity of modeling.

I've been working as a data scientist for several years and have written some pretty gnarly looking SQL myself. I have a background in math and hard science so I have some understanding of the scientific method as well. While I respect our DBAs I wouldn't call any of them qualified to be data scientists.

While I have been able to hold my own in this job I went back to school to pursue a graduate degree (partly) because being in the field has shown me how much more there is to know. While it's easy enough to train a simple model in R there are so many ways to fool yourself and produce an invalid analysis and so many variations on otherwise-simple problems.

It seems this field has a lot of variation. A glorified report writer might get the DS title but they're not going to get the really cool jobs.

If you're interested in data science try out a kaggle competition and try to place high. The variety of methods and tricks people try to improve their entries can be illuminating, I think.

I don't want to pile on but that sentence strongly reminded me of the oldish saw about "a data scientist is a programmer who lives in SF". I've never heard of anyone using JS for data science. What might it have that's anywhere comparable to the tidyverse or numpy/scipy/sklearn?

It seems a lot of posters aren't willing to consider self-driving cars feasible until the cars are as foolhardy as the bottom-decile driver while still maintaining a perfect safety record. But most of accident prevention is in the planning more than the execution. It seems only reasonable to expect SDCs to avoid situations that some human drivers would brave if the risk is too high.

The answer to your question is basically "no". Humans aren't getting better at driving in the aggregate - new ones are born, learn to drive, get better, then get worse, then die off. On average humans are as good as they're going to get (with small variations due to culture and different training programs).

On the other hand the self-driving cars are just getting started. It's entirely reasonable to suppose that they may surpass the average human in the next X years. And they won't get old and confused and eventually replaced with new cars that have to learn from scratch -- they should get more or less monotonically better. I think the optimism is warranted even if the timeline and technology is uncertain.

But it would be incidentally reduced by a carbon tax since that would cause some coal plants to be shut down.

Neoteny, I believe.

I agree entirely on the crosswalks. Around here the pedestrian signal comes on at the same time as the left turn signal so that pedestrians and drivers get to fight for space on the crosswalk.

This makes crossing with the bike on the crosswalk even more inconvenient than it would otherwise be on the bike, which as the other poster pointed out, slows one down considerably. Maybe separation of level is the right answer. Bike boxes, painted areas that let cyclists cross lanes in front of stopped traffic, may work but only if the intersection is adapted for them, otherwise they're just yet more deceptive deathlures.

Further, to progress beyond quaestor (tax collector) in Roman politics a politician had to put on public games and such to win popularity (as an aedile). Where did those funds come from? Yep, excess taxes collected.

It's not unlike winning friends and donors for campaign funds by playing nice with wealthy special interests as a modern politician in order to progress up the ladder to national office and then continue to win re-election.

I'd add that a significantly under-discussed element of safe biking infrastructure is safer intersections. My city has lots of bike lanes that are sufficiently wide (and many that aren't) and no consideration all at for how a cyclist is supposed to safely traverse an intersection. My commute requires me to cross several lanes of traffic to get from the bike lane to the left turn lane on a road where cars go ~40mph - there's no way to do that without a significant risk of getting clobbered. That's to say nothing of the potential for someone hooking right through me when I go straight at an intersection as apparently no one checks their side mirror before turning.

Unfortunately even cities that consider biking infrastructure often seem to ignore how to connect bike lanes in a reasonably safe way. The only city I've seen that does this is Portland, OR and they make heavy use of separated paths to do so.

Humans suck at these classification tasks things too, though, if you set your expectations high. Is it a cat or a bag, or a weird shadow? Doesn't matter, I ran it over before I could figure it out and react. Or maybe it turned out to be a boulder? Now I'm one of 35,000 traffic fatalities this year in this country.

Computer vision has been improving rapidly in the last 10 years, I think it's too soon to rule out the viability of a camera-based solution entirely. Though I do hope improved lidar technology can improve on humans.

The problem is that Wal-Mart doesn't pay a living wage. Are you suggesting instead that the problem is that it's possible for people earning below a living wage to get public assistance?

An act which incidentally is credited as the most beneficial piece of US legislation to date in terms of addiction reduction and prevention.