Hacker News Reader

willchangon Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds

What was Alex Roman's lie? I'm having a hard time figuring that out.

willchangon Soybean oil affects hypothalamus, causes genetic changes in mice: study (2020)

You can start with fried items from McDonald's:

    https://querysprout.com/what-oil-does-mcdonalds-use/#:~:text=For%20some%20people%2C%20it%20may,of%20its%20main%20cooking%20oils.

willchangon The impact of sexual abuse on female development: a longitudinal study

As a man, is there anything I can do or avoid doing in the workplace to make it easier for coworkers like you? Let's assume I don't know and don't suspect anything specific about my coworkers. I just want to know if there's anything that would be pretty easy to implement, that would make a difference.

willchangon What to Learn

This wouldn't be Hacker News if someone didn't comment that ACTUALLY a random walk of n steps will get you sqrt(n) in some direction, which is much better than log(n). I guess my special skill is being pedantic.

willchangon When did Neil Armstrong set foot on Mars?

This yields the same result:

  when did neil armstrong set foot on poop

willchangon Netflix is creating a problem by cancelling TV shows too soon

There's a good chance Netflix is behaving rationally.

Shows are like startups. The payoff is a very skewed distribution, i.e. median and mean are vastly different. After one season, I'd argue you have a pretty good estimate of the earning potential for a show. Maybe you're even off by a factor of two or three, but since the goal is to find a show with 10x or 100x the viewership, you're better off canceling a show with median success.

Actually it's probably a lot easier to predict the payoff for a show after one year, than for a startup. Startups can take multiple years to find product-market fit; shows rarely pivot dramatically.

[Update: I got the facts wrong with the following example, as someone nicely pointed out below! I think the general principle still stands.] Tuca & Bertie, for example, was canceled after one season, but the same people went on to make Bojack Horseman, which was a much bigger hit. Bojack would not have happened if Tuca were renewed, and Tuca would never have gotten as popular as Bojack.

willchangon Truisms (1978)

Here's another list of them: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~field/holzer/living.txt

willchangon A class-action suit imperils California freelancers

The opposite is true. If you are a freelancer, healthcare premiums are an above-the-line deduction, which practically has the same effect as a business expense. This is better than a regular deduction because you get it even if you don't itemize deductions. See https://turbotax.intuit.com/tax-tips/home-ownership/deductin...

willchangon Pink Trombone

Yes, just click in the nasal cavity above 'lip' and 'hard palate', respectively, to get [m] and [n].

willchangon Pink Trombone

You're right. It sounds to me like [s] with lip rounding, where the teeth don't contribute as much acoustically, but it does indeed sound like an [s].

willchangon Pink Trombone

This is amazing. I can get it to make almost any speech sound, but one I can't get is [s], because the model lacks teeth!

willchangon Towards a Better Pythagorean Cup

Toilets work the same way! When water in the bowl rises to above the highest point in the drain, everything (hopefully) siphons out.

willchangon The Case for Learned Index Structures

How about searching the web? I'd rather most queries take 1 second, and 10% taking 10 seconds, than every query taking 5 seconds.

I don't understand how you can be so confident about attaching a utility function to latency.

willchangon AI Model Fundamentally Cracks Captchas, Scientists Say

Captchas are useless for their intended purpose if a bot can get it right better than every other time.

willchangon Images of New MacBook Pro with Magic Toolbar Leaked in MacOS Sierra 10.12.1

"currently unavailable"

http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/xps-13-linux/pd

willchangon The Case Against Reality

"Neurons, brains, space … these are just symbols we use, they’re not real."

Such bullshit. Yes, they are symbols, but "just" symbols? They don't approximate reality at all? If so, how would he even know?

Edit: Let me elaborate. Yes, it's possible the world is just one big movie set, and nothing is remotely what it seems to be. It's possible everything is just a dream. But this is among the most banal of ideas. We have only made progress as a species by identifying deep, universal consistencies that have proven more reliable than anything else we know. Various scientific revolutions do not change the fact that the game is the same: to account for our observations parsimoniously. Now this guys says, it's all "just" symbols. Such bullshit.

willchangon Winner Takes Most

Something's going on that's more than just network effects. Google was arguably not the first dominant search/advertising company, and Facebook was not the first social network, etc. But these companies can convince very good engineers that it's more profitable to join them than to compete against them, whereas their predecessors failed to do that. How they do this merits more investigation.

willchangon Why I'm walking away from one of the best jobs in academia

I would love to read an account of the games that administrators play, or of how businesses use universities to "launder money", if you know any. We've all seen numerical analyses that suggest that administrator compensation is way out of whack, but I've yet to read a good ground-level account of it.

willchangon Two months in inner Mongolia

The pictures stopped loading halfway through, but up to that point, I was entranced. Even the writing, by itself, is fun to read. It's rare to see someone with talent in both visual and textual forms.

Edit: Blame rests with my crappy Comcast connection, not with the website.

willchangon My Parents Were Home-Schooling Anarchists (2011)

I generally sympathize with homeschoolers, but these parents seemed pathologically unable to doubt themselves or admit to mistakes. They were unable to see that their son, James, needed help learning to read, and even seemed to minimize his unhappiness. They did nothing to prepare their children for public school, despite professing to know how unpleasant the social environment can be. When James was picked on by his classmates, he never let his parents know — presumably because they were so unattuned to their children's experiences that it would have been pointless.

These parents doubtless believed they were virtuous in rejecting the culture of the times, but they went quite a bit farther and were basically delusional. People like that should not homeschool.

willchangon Elliptic Curve Cryptography: a gentle introduction

There is no design trend more inimical to the function of the web than gray on white text. If only it stopped at gray values of #444444, which is bad enough on old displays or in bright ambient light. The text on this site is #7f8d8c — more white than black — and the strokes on the letters in the equations are quite fine. Yes, it looks nice and clean to have so little black on the page, but the tradeoff is that I have to squint to read it.

willchangon Another Patent Troll Slain. You Are Now Free to Rotate Your Smartphone

In the same vein, the most bravado-laden thing an American president ever said was Madison announcing his intent to fight the Ottoman states that were sponsoring raids on American ships:

The United States while they wish for war with no nation, will buy peace with none, it being a principle incorporated into the settled policy of America, that as peace is better than war, so war is better than tribute.

willchangon [dead]

Give me a break. Is it absurdly childish to give pregnant women special seats on a bus because in general they are less mobile? It's common to base a social norm on the general characteristics of a class of people.

willchangon What Should a 4 Year Old Know? (2010)

Lots of people object to what you are saying, but I'm relieved to hear someone say it. Many 'specializations' are actually worlds unto themselves, with endless amounts of things to learn. They are fun to explore (for a kid of a specific bent) and there is no reason not to explore them as early as possible, just as I wasted no time in taking my toddler on hikes to see parts of the world different than where we live. In my own life, there were many things I regretted learning about until it was too late to devote much time to them.

It seems to me that the biggest advantage to being a generalist is that as parents, we can identify what a kid is good at, and can start him down that road. Things go wrong when a parent is not himself enough of a generalist to figure out what the kid likes, and just pushes him toward something random or prestigious.

As for those that object to what you say, I wonder why they insist on putting words in your mouth. Perhaps they don't believe that a young kid could be interested in any deep topic without coercion; which relieves them of the responsibility to try to find what this topic could be. But my attitude is that as a parent, I may not find it, or maybe it's not there, but the potential upsides are large enough that I will keep thinking about it.

willchangon My life in typefaces (2014) [video]

We don't all design type, but we all cope with imperfect and rapidly changing technology. Carter describes what it was to make the best of it. There's much to learn from such an attitude.

willchangon Regex Golf

A non-cheating solution, 79 points.

  ^((xx?|xxxx)(\2{7})?)(\1{63})?$

willchangon Free Font: Norwester

Peanut gallery comment here, on what is a really handsome font. On the S, the angularity at the two ends of the middle stroke seems at odds with the larger radii almost everywhere else. The slant of the stroke stands out in a pleasing way, but the corners are jarring. I wonder if rounder corners would preserve the first effect while mitigating the second. I suppose 2 and 5 would have to be reworked a bit if you go down this road.

willchangon iPad mini

Agreed that the copy is cloying, but surely you realize that the point is that some people prefer a smaller device? When I showed my wife this link, she immediately requested one for Christmas. This was surprising, as she had never before shown the slightest interest in an Apple offering. Then she said that this was going to sell like hotcakes, because at this size, it's not too big to fit in a lady's purse.

willchangon If you're not going to become a professor, then why bother pursuing a Ph.D.?

This statement is essentially a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.

No, it's not.

A post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy is to assert that X causes Y _solely_ because X and Y co-occur. Philip asserts that doing the Ph.D. caused him to be wiser, savvier, etc, but he did so on grounds other than just citing their co-occurrence. Much of the rest of the article explained _how_ X caused Y, i.e., how doing the degree resulted in this or that bit of wisdom.

On a broader note, it really bogs down a discussion to point out 'logical fallacies' when they aren't there. Ideally, we'd all go out of our way to try to see another person's point, even when it's poorly made, but the antithesis of that is to criticize a point on technical grounds, when those technical grounds aren't even there.

willchangon Your body wasn’t built to last: a lesson from human mortality rates

> Anyone who paid attention during introductory statistics will recognize that your probability of survival to age t would follow a Poisson distribution, which means exponential decay (and not super-exponential decay).

Small correction: survival to time t under the lightning bolt scenario follows an exponential distribution. A Poisson distribution, besides for being discrete, has factorial decay, not exponential decay.