astrophysician

12 ms·

31.
by astrophysician 6y ago
Ah I gotcha yea, I just misread the article. That makes more sense and seems much more reasonable.
32.
by astrophysician 6y ago
Question: is it not a standard procedure to stop a Phase III trial early when the statistics warrant it? Isn't this a pretty cut-and-dried statistical question? Naively I would think that there's nothing controversial about ending
33.
by astrophysician 6y ago
Not just radio astronomy but any other type of research astronomy. Astrophotography has different goals. If you want a good picture, this isn't a huge deal. If you're measuring pixel-level brightnesses using state of the art equip
34.
by astrophysician 6y ago
...wow. (1) astronomers are pretty darn aware of everything going on, and it's really shocking as an astronomer to see these sorts of claims. There have been close collaborations with Space X to try to mitigate some issues, but these
35.
by astrophysician 6y ago
Hey Andy, I've got a question: I went to analyze your raw data dumps and saw a couple of things that I wanted to understand: * A hard drive may go missing in the data from one day to the next without appearing as "failed" --
36.
by astrophysician 6y ago
Not technically; I've got a PhD in astrophysics but no longer work in the field. You can contact me at astrophysicianhn@gmail.com.
37.
by astrophysician 6y ago
I really enjoy reading the Backblaze analysis on this every year, it's such a valuable and interesting data set. I do have one suggestion: it would be great to go one step further and add confidence intervals for the AFR estimates. E.g
38.
by astrophysician 6y ago
I disagree -- "studies" like this give people the potentially misleading impression that psychedelics are helpful for depression and other mental health issues, so people who otherwise would have not used them may be more likely
39.
Ask HN: How do I split my life between countries?
1 points by astrophysician 6y ago|0 comments
40.
by astrophysician 6y ago
Sure! I think your questions are very reasonable, we'll have to see how it all shakes out.
41.
by astrophysician 6y ago
> Is it a cost thing or a capability thing? i.e. is it possible for Starlink to have what they want without interfering with terrestrial astronomy or are we really choosing one or the other? Quite sympathetic to astronomers if it is cost
42.
by astrophysician 6y ago
You make a fair point -- I think maybe it is not totally fair to blame the companies here -- they are in a competitive environment and really the best we can expect is for them to follow the letter of the law, which it seems they mostly did
43.
by astrophysician 6y ago
Still a lot. * NEO's (asteroids) are really only detectable at twilight so this would severely hamper efforts here, and I hope most people would understand how important NEO detection is from a practical, human-survival standpoint. * D
44.
by astrophysician 6y ago
This is really a worry. * Many experiments and a lot of science cannot be done from space, even if delivery costs were much cheaper. E.g. LSST (0.5 billion in US funding alone, + lots of other funding sources), or wide-field astronomy impor
45.
by astrophysician 6y ago
> I'm not trying to really frame it as SpaceX. I think it's a bit more fundamental than that. There are benefits to lots of satellites providing services, there are benefits to decreased launch costs. SpaceX is only really in t
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by astrophysician 6y ago
To be honest, I understand where you are coming from, and share your opinion that many issues are more important than astronomy, including humanitarian issues. I think actually most astronomers would agree with that (the ones that I know, a
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by astrophysician 6y ago
Yep. Lots of very clearly uninformed opinions here. Can confirm there are many advantages and disadvantages of space-based vs ground-based telescopes. Saying "well astronomers should just use space telescopes those are better" is
48.
by astrophysician 6y ago
I think what he's basically saying is that priors (i.e. domain knowledge + custom, domain-inspired models) help when you're data limited or when your data is very biased, but once that's not the case (e.g. we have an infinite
49.
by astrophysician 6y ago
Hi, sorry for the delayed response! > Can you give some examples where frequentists hit these alleged flat-prior landmines? I am admittedly a Bayesian by training, not a frequentist, so perhaps it's just my ignorance showing, but I&
50.
by astrophysician 6y ago
> I wouldn't consider estimating, say, the mean length of a population of fish contrived (unbiased estimate: x-bar). Nor would I consider estimating the probability of an event based on observations of the event happening or not hap
51.
by astrophysician 6y ago
I appreciate your comments. > Bias has a very specific specific mathematical meaning in statistics--the difference between the expected value of the estimate (under the sampling distribution) and the true value. Right, I'm aware of
52.
by astrophysician 6y ago
“Non-Bayesian” stats uses bias in the exact same way that Bayesian stats does, because Bayesian stats and frequentist stats are mathematically equivalent. When someone thinks they’re not using priors, they’re wrong, they’re usually using a
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by astrophysician 6y ago
> what are you arguing for? no analysis? or do you wish to change the analysis? Or why do you claim that analysis is premature to remain on topic? There's a difference between a team of academics/statisticians analyzing policin
54.
by astrophysician 6y ago
no one is objecting to Bayes' Theorem here at all. I am directly addressing your argument: there is _inherent_ bias in policing data, and doing a Bayesian analysis will make it very easy to fool ourselves into trusting the results whil
55.
by astrophysician 6y ago
Yea but you're ignoring biases in the data that are difficult or impossible to disentangle from the underlying effects. What happens when you see an area with 50% higher violent crime rate? Is that because there are a large number of c
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by astrophysician 6y ago
> Turbulence is far more important than HEP maybe ("importance" is somewhat subjective and I think it's totally valid to have that opinion), but I would argue HEP and maybe early universe cosmology are more fundamental
57.
by astrophysician 6y ago
You could say the exact same thing about AI: people who don’t really understand it can dominate a given “AI” culture at a given company, and then others come away with the wrong impression of what it is and what it can and can’t do. To say
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by astrophysician 6y ago
As a total outsider following this from a distance, I sort of feel for Facebook and other social media platforms facing this problem -- they've run up against a fundamental issue for which there doesn't seem to be any satisfying s
59.
by astrophysician 6y ago
> I took envelope to mean the operating conditions under which the control system is stable. For many control systems this isn't really a confidence interval except insofar as the parameters of the control system are imperfectly kno
60.
by astrophysician 6y ago
I mean, part of the problem is that no one can seem to agree about what "AI" even is anymore; you described a control theory model that "calculate[s] the envelope" which I'm interpreting to mean some sort of confide

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