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tombone12

227 karma · joined May 22, 2016

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tombone12··on Raytracing a Black Hole
You always get some back scatter from a glass surface, so any magnifying glass is much more like a mirror than a black hole.
tombone12··on GDPR: noyb.eu filed four complaints against Google, FB, Whatsapp, Instagram
The national agencies evaluates the complain and take a decision, which I hope will happen before the end of the year. Exactly how it happens depends on the country, as the GDPR leaves room for national legislation also on the section on the Supervisory authority.
tombone12··on GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers
That's funny, you expressed confusion just two post back about whether you are doing falls under GDPR :)
tombone12··on GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers
So like a CEO, that is liable for all violations employees do that they've not managed to put on someone else?
tombone12··on GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers
I'd say if you put it on a indoor table, a measly cubic centimetre of sand can make a (small) pile, and a random estimate on the internet states that there are 8000 grains of sand in a cubic centimetre.

So n = 8000 makes a sand pile.

tombone12··on Harvard Classics Book Download
What you are describing is what must be done when one embarks on a project of literary study.

If you just want a story, which is what almost all readers actually read for, just read it as it is, and if doesn't make any sense you are perfectly entitled to think it was a shitty book.

Frankly I think a (fiction) book must always be able to be read as-is, unsupported by outside means, else it is no longer a book.

(You hear that Greg Egan?! You wrote a really bad text book or a pretty good fiction book with pointless homework included every now and then.)

tombone12··on Harvard Classics Book Download
Props for using the proper name of Ibn Sina!
tombone12··on How will the GDPR impact machine learning?
No, you have to ask and receive consent explicitly for the processing you want to do, not as part of some larger package.
tombone12··on How will the GDPR impact machine learning?
GDPR applies to "natural persons", which I think mostly excludes animals (I base this on us killing animals all the time and it doesn't count as murder).
tombone12··on How will the GDPR impact machine learning?
I don't know any accountability processes for the moderation on hackernews, but I'm sure you've considered that already.
tombone12··on How will the GDPR impact machine learning?
That's a novel claim, usually security experts are always complaining that people just click "accept" and ignore all the warnings of broken crypto and all that. How foolish they will feel when they realize that all that was missing was putting "GDPR" in the popup and people will automatically stop ignoring warnings!
tombone12··on How will the GDPR impact machine learning?
If EU citizens go to the Chinese to give up their rights they are probably giving their consent, but good luck providing any sort of service to EU citizens without actually having a legal presence inside the union.
tombone12··on Losing the Nobel Prize
It's not really mistakes that is the issue though, its more the fact that they got reeeeelly close to outright fabrication.

They had a very shaky estimate of an important background (the foreground) and instead of being cautious they put out a video like this as part of the announcement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlfIVEy_YOA

tombone12··on Losing the Nobel Prize
Go read Hossenfelder's review instead, its a better teardown. The fourth paragraph is:

> “Losing the Nobel Prize” is well written and engaging and has a lot of figures and, ah, here I run out of nice things to say. But we all know you didn’t come for the nice things anyway, so let’s get to the beef.

tombone12··on Losing the Nobel Prize
I don't know how to estimate their reckless from the outside, but it is simple fact that however sensitive, they only had one waveband and so no real way of estimating the foreground contamination. I think it is also well established that the foreground estimation was made by looking closely at pictures from a presentation showing preliminary Planck skymaps of the dust emission, and then building a foreground model from that.

They also put out this adorable video as part of the announcement, maybe not the greatest show of caution ever: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlfIVEy_YOA

tombone12··on A new JPEG format
You got a vote, in exchange I want 10% of all your karma for the next year, or your account password retain the possibility of "correcting" the growth path of your account.

Also: shit, you're penniless, why did I invest? Whyy?

tombone12··on Breakthrough Announced in Dark Matter Detection Technology
There is a viewpoint about it too, basically a (kind of) popular account of the result: https://physics.aps.org/articles/v11/34
tombone12··on Breakthrough Announced in Dark Matter Detection Technology
Here, this should explain it in a bit more detail: https://physics.aps.org/articles/v11/34

It's written by someone more interested in conveying truth than hyping a null result, so it even mentions a woman was involved in inventing it! (rather than the copywriter who instead just mentions the man that gave it a name).

tombone12··on Breakthrough Announced in Dark Matter Detection Technology
[for this experiment] I presume he added silently, or did he just diss all the other axion searches out there?
tombone12··on Show HN: Periodic Table of GitHub
My browser rendered it as a long list, so it doesn't even respect the canonical table format :'(
tombone12··on Atmospheric CO2 levels accelerate upwards
There is probably intelligent conscious life out there in the universe, and considering the mass extinction we are setting up right now it might be best to leave it alone. So keep consuming, burn that coal and save the aliens (from us)!
tombone12··on Why is this little construction crane illegal in New York City? (2016)
No parent comment criticizing unions does it without the implication that they shouldn't exist. This is most easily seen by the total absence of any mention of a specific union, thus direction the objections towards the concept itself rather than any specific version of it.
tombone12··on StarCraft: Remastered to be released Summer 2017
> Cloud Saves for Campaign, Custom Maps, Replays, and Keybinds

So I guess it will be always online, no lan, Blizzard blessed servers only just like sc2...

tombone12··on The CIA's “Development Tradecraft Do's and Dont's”
How easy is it for automated tools to spot encryption routines in a binary? If my notepad replacement had call to encryption algorithms in it I'd be a bit surprised...
tombone12··on Google Street View Images Reveal the Demographic Makeup of the U.S.
For a site called technology _review_ you'd think they put in the effort to mention some limitations as well...

I guess one obvious one is that the correlations between cars and demographics change as cars get older and new cars appear, but I guess this can be useful for monitoring trends in years between censuses.

tombone12··on How we secretly introduced Haskell and got away with it
I don't know how I came across it, but Thomson's Rule for First-Time Telescope Makers seems relevant here:

: "It is faster to make a four-inch mirror then a six-inch mirror than to make a six-inch mirror."

http://wiki.c2.com/?TelescopeRule

tombone12··on The Other Half
"What’s the biggest single factor that puts you at risk for ignoring your health? Being a man.

Sociologist Lisa Wade, interviewed in New York Magazine, says that 'some scholars argue that being male is the single strongest predictor of whether a person will take health risks.'

Men like risk it turns out. Most of them also hate putting lotion on their skin (too girly) and being afraid of things (not manly). They are also more likely to have outdoor jobs and do household tasks that involve being outside the house. Think lawn mowing and BBQ-ing. They also pay less attention to their skin and so don’t catch early warning signs.

Women, generally speaking, don’t mind lotions, do pay attention to changes in our skin, wear sunscreen to avoid premature aging and wrinkles, and often also wear make up year round that contains ingredients that protect skin from the sun."

"[...] part of the reason that married men, or men with female partners anyway, live longer. They’re nagged into healthy habits and visit the doctor more often."

https://fitisafeministissue.com/2014/08/16/men-and-skin-canc...

tombone12··on What happened when Swedes tried six-hour days?
Workers aren't eager to fight for their rights at all right now, most unions in Sweden struggle just to maintain membership numbers.

That is the most exceptional thing about the trial: that it happened at all in a climate where collective bargaining is declining and the decline of the concept of a stable job.

tombone12··on Controlling your own wealth as a basic human right
"Nobody has the right to steal" is a tautology: theft is by definition the unsanctioned removal of something, so all theft implies the violation of some right. All property rights accomplishes in this sense is making stealing easier by extending the human rights to encompass basically anything, making it easier to find a means to violate someones right.
tombone12··on First China-U.K. Freight Train Departs as Xi Seeks to Lift Trade
That seems like a very low speed while the train is actually in motion, although apparently[1] american freight trains average around ~40 km/h. I would guess mostly it is various delays that keeps the average that low, and it seems most data is just distance/time estimates, not actual averages of instantaneous speed measurement.

[1] A bit old but fairly indicative as far as I can tell: https://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pu...

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