DavidSJ

37 ms·

211.
by DavidSJ 5y ago
There's always the CMBR rest frame.
212.
by DavidSJ 5y ago
If Facebook's earnings growth is 5 percentage points per year lower than previously believed, then after less than five years, that's 20% less profit. Markets extrapolate growth rates into the future, not just the next quarter.
213.
by DavidSJ 5y ago
I think we should either evaluate arguments for ourselves, or rely on a broad consensus of experts in the field in question. If we resort to argument from authority, but cherry pick our authorities to be those which agree with our preexisti
214.
by DavidSJ 5y ago
In biological sciences we have to integrate multiple kinds of evidence — in vitro (or in larva? — in the mask) lab experiments, animal models, randomized controlled trials in humans, descriptive statistics of human populations, in silico si
215.
by DavidSJ 5y ago
> According to the article, in the only large randomized studies that have been performed, masking showed little, if any benefit. From the first one [1] they linked: > odds ratio, 0.82 [CI, 0.54 to 1.23] … Although the difference obs
216.
by DavidSJ 5y ago
I suppose the parent might mean that the stories are encrypted while at rest, but not that their generation itself is encrypted, which indeed would be rather difficult.
217.
by DavidSJ 5y ago
Note that parental control apps are a type of stalking software; it's just that society is okay with it.
218.
by DavidSJ 5y ago
Obligatory Bryan Cantrill rant on Oracle: https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m1s
219.
by DavidSJ 5y ago
My childhood dentists were Drs. Herzburg and Needleman.
220.
by DavidSJ 5y ago
The Bucharest Metro logo looks like the Wonder Woman emblem.
221.
by DavidSJ 5y ago
If you can match a golden ratio to everything, then it cannot identify anything. Certainly not beauty or good interfaces.
222.
by DavidSJ 5y ago
In the study, participants with no background in art, were shown an original image and distorted versions of a statue. The original statue’s proportions reflected the golden ratio. The original image strongly activated sets of brain cells
223.
by DavidSJ 5y ago
There's a huge subfield, called behavioral economics, in which economists study the ways human behavior deviates from utility maximization. It's been around for 70 years or so.
224.
by DavidSJ 5y ago
From my reading of where neuroscience is at the moment, it is a tenable hypothesis that the posterior neocortex (a major functional component of human cognition) is essentially a statistical inference machine. There are a number of facts su
225.
by DavidSJ 5y ago
I see arguments like this a lot but they always seem to me to be begging the question. What is understanding? Are we sure human understanding is not just patterns and combinations of patterns in our huge volumes of experience?
226.
by DavidSJ 5y ago
They're not assuming anything about what miners do with the coins once they mine them. They're just assuming mining is efficient — that the cost (inclusive of capital, energy, etc.) of mining is roughly equal to the benefit of min
227.
by DavidSJ 5y ago
I think this is standard. It's the difference between a single episodic memory (formed by the hippocampus) and a learned statistical pattern (identified by the neocortex).
228.
by DavidSJ 5y ago
Perhaps the most famous example of discrete "things" being solved by calculus is the Prime Number Theorem, and more generally all of analytic number theory, which uses calculus (and often complex numbers) to answer questions about
229.
Mouse Mouse (a computer mouse made out of a real mouse)(instructables.com)
2 points by DavidSJ 5y ago|0 comments
230.
by DavidSJ 5y ago
If Apple wants to tell everyone that they have to use iCloud Keychain for their Time Machine backups to work, they can do that, but Time Machine backups shouldn't silently not work, only to be discovered when you've lost your data
231.
by DavidSJ 5y ago
I moved from Safari to Firefox because if you're not using iCloud Keychain, the passwords Safari saves are not backed up properly with Time Machine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24626562 So I hope that, unlike
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by DavidSJ 5y ago
At best this is an accounting trick. It wouldn't solve the global supply/demand imbalance.
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by DavidSJ 5y ago
Sometimes those curfew fines actually cause flights not to depart. Some years ago, I was sitting on the tarmac at John Wayne for about an hour, hoping to make it just under the nighttime curfew, but ultimately the flight was canceled and I
234.
by DavidSJ 5y ago
In that case, I’ll shamelessly plug 14 year old me’s Escape Velocity web site, which I still think is pretty good: https://web.archive.org/web/20050924134158/http://davidsj.co...
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by DavidSJ 5y ago
One advantage of a global menu bar is that items at the top of the screen are effectively an infinitely large target, so you can rapidly move the mouse to them without worrying about overshooting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wi
236.
A 1982 chess computer plays itself by mechanically moving the pieces [video](youtube.com)
80 points by DavidSJ 5y ago|24 comments
237.
by DavidSJ 5y ago
High school English class was like this for me too. It was usually obvious what my teacher wanted students to say but it just seemed all so contrived and I couldn’t bring myself to participate in the silliness. On my report card she once wr
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by DavidSJ 5y ago
By contrast, I have the 639th Reddit account and I don’t seem to be anywhere close to the top percentile in karma.
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by DavidSJ 5y ago
The brain is a lot of different components working together. Perhaps the bits which do statistical learning are functionally distinguishable from the bits which generate permutations on the data. (This is in fact how modern neural network t
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by DavidSJ 5y ago
The most immediate reason is that hydrogen is a group 1 element, meaning its outer (in this case, only) shell contains just a single electron, in its s (spherically symmetric) orbital. The electronic structure of an element greatly influenc

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