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bsmithers

139 karma · joined July 6, 2017

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bsmithers··on The Porsche Macan EV is being recalled because its headlights are too bright
Really? I think we have exactly the same problem in the UK. Granted, my eyes are more susceptible post laser surgery, but headlights are definitely getting brighter and higher as the years go by.
bsmithers··on Deep Live Cam: Real-time face swapping and one-click video deepfake tool
> And yet there have been several recent studies that show the younger someone is, the more likely they are to be scammed online.

I think you are misreading the post. Pretty sure they meant

you could trick me into believing I was talking with Elon, but you could not trick me into believing I was talking with my son

To which I agree personally, though I don't know how universal this is.

bsmithers··on Michelle's List: A free, anonymous landlord review site
One big difference is that there are lots of reviews for $CommonPosition. With this, you'd have to expect that most reviews are the only one for a given property/landlord
bsmithers··on Show HN: Peanut Butter Spinner
I find that storing the jars upside down works surprisingly well.
bsmithers··on Does offering ChatGPT a tip cause it to generate better text?
From the article:

> Unfortunately, if you’ve been observing the p-values, you’ve noticed that most have been very high, and therefore that test is not enough evidence that the tips/threats change the distribution

It doesn't look like these p values have been corrected for multiple hypothesis testing either. Overall, I would conclude that this is evidence that tipping does _not_ impact the distribution of lengths.

bsmithers··on When did people stop being drunk all the time?
4.5L of 0.5% ABV beer would not make you drunk. For comparison, this is equivalent to less than a pint of a typical mainstream beer. Indeed a 0.5% ABV drink can be branded alcohol free (at least in the UK).

Would 4.5L of 2% ABV make you drunk? Depends how quickly you can drink it. It's 9 units of alcohol. We commonly assume the body can process 1 unit/hour so if this quantity was consumed over an entire day, I don't think you'd get merry.

I'm not saying it's a good idea to drink like this, just highlighting the impact of ABV on the outcome.

bsmithers··on Show HN: Pipes puzzle (a.k.a. Net) on a hexagonal grid
Love the game. Couple of nits on the site:

- changing puzzle size seems to break the back button - scroll behaviour is a bit strange

(Pixel 5, Chrome, if it helps)

bsmithers··on Aggregating away the signal in your data
Excellent article. Faceted visualisation is an incredibly powerful technique.

Something the author hints at but isn't quite explicit: manual inspection of individual examples from your dataset can help you understand what questions to ask, what category to facet on, or the bug in your aggregation.

bsmithers··on An Opinionated Guide to Xargs
Not to be pedantic, but that's a bit of a non-argument. _Of course_ you can do it with xargs and shell, but imho parallel is generally more convenient, especially for remote execution. It provides a higher level of abstraction for such tasks.
bsmithers··on Please don't say just hello in chat (2013)
I don't get this at all. What happens if they reply to you - maybe hours later - when you are the one presenting?
bsmithers··on Please don't say just hello in chat (2013)
I think it's on you - as the receiver of a message - to appropriately deal with your messaging app of choice such that it doesn't interupt your flow. Otherwise, you are placing an impossible burden on the sender of the message to some how telepathically know if it's a good time. IMHO, your preferred workflow makes it seem that your time is more valuable than the other person's as you're now asking them to hang around waiting until they can actually ask their question.

The asynchronous nature of messaging is important to preserve.

bsmithers··on Somerset cattle grid mistaken for wall by car sensors
I assumed the intention is to alert a driver who really needs to take a break. I don't see what other use it has, other than to annoy me when overtaking a cyclist.
bsmithers··on Somerset cattle grid mistaken for wall by car sensors
The refusal to lock was probably that you'd not fully switched off the engine. I've had this on my Qashqai. The fuel-saving system that automatically turns off the engine when you're stopped and out-of-gear can be confusing. This behaviour often happens when parking but it seems you still need to press the stop-start button to "completely" turn it off in order to lock the car.

This is the first car I've owned with "modern" driver aids and it is true that they are somewhat temperamental. For example, the auto full-beam headlights get very confused in fog (which can be dangerous!), whilst I often get a warning noise when approaching sharp bends at a perfectly safe speed.

bsmithers··on Am I Happy At Work? Analyzing my entire career
Really interesting. It must take such discipline to collect this data for 3.5 years.

Trying to answer the question of "does work make me happy?" is much more complex than comparing happiness levels between work and non-work days - they are not independent. How much of your happiness of a non-work day is precisely because it is a day off? An imperfect analogy would be the feeling of enjoying a holiday but also being glad to be home at the end of it.

bsmithers··on The ramifications of a new type of gene
An overblown title -- non-protein-coding genes have been known about for a long time.

However, the transport of micro RNAs on sperm is a pretty cool mechanism - hope it is correct!

bsmithers··on Airlines inching closer to dynamic pricing
I find it odd that they refer to this as dynamic pricing. I know someone in this industry and they've been doing 'dynamic pricing' for decades - specifically pricing for expected and actual demand.

I suspect they've deliberately avoided the more contentious-sounding 'personalised pricing'.

bsmithers··on 10,000 steps a day: Might there be something better?
So did they compare the total number of steps in the 2 groups? Although the 3x 10 minutes only counted for 3,000 steps, the participants in that group could easily have walked 7,000 steps outside of that 30 minute window.

Also, do people really think walking 10k (or indeed n-k) steps is a substitute for intense exercise?

bsmithers··on Galapagos finches caught in act of becoming new species
Whether or not the speciation is "complete" is not really the point - the title of the article says they are "...caught in the act of becoming new species" - in fact the article highlights the difficulty in stating what determines something to be a separate species.
bsmithers··on Sick of Ruby, dynamic typing, side effects, and object-orientation (2014)
If you haven't discovered issues with your language of choice then you haven't used it enough
bsmithers··on Feynman’s Breakthrough: Disregard Others
It's interesting that a few people are relating this to team work. I think that is a misinterpretation. By 'others' I would infer something more like 'competitors', though I mean that relatively loosely. Essentially, ignore what other labs are working on and focus on your own (group's) works.

My own PhD supervisor had a similar attitude, though it runs against how many others approach a problem I feel. For example, I'm unconvinced that starting a project with a thorough literature review is necessarily the best plan. It can shroud your thoughts, make you miss the same things everyone else has and make you feel that all the work has already been done.

bsmithers··on Relicensing React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js
Yes, you're absolutely right. I missed that. Apologies.
bsmithers··on Relicensing React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js
>please take this time to at least consider GPL varients (A/L/GPLv3) for as much of your tooling as you possibly can. (perhaps CC0/CCBY/CCBYSA for content)

I'm sorry but Creative Commons themselves declare that their licensing should not be used for software.

https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-comm...

bsmithers··on Uber London loses licence to operate
>We have a perfectly healthy cab ecosystem in my city, app-driven and with fare competition and city regulation

Sure, but that doesn't exist in the majority of cities. The user experience is why I use Uber.

bsmithers··on Uber London loses licence to operate
It does now
bsmithers··on Learning Python Without Library Overload
I see quite a few people disagreeing with the author but I think there's a key difference between:

a.) Learning python when you are also a beginner to programming

b.) Learning python when you're comfortable in another language

If, like the student in the story, you are in category a.) then I think the author is definitely right. The distractions of myriad libraries isn't helpful.

However, for category b.) it depends a lot more. I think there is value in understanding the core of a language but - depending on experience, familiarity with similar languages, end goal etc - I think we're talking between a few hours and a first sketch at a project before you're hindering yourself by ignoring the rest of the ecosystem.

bsmithers··on What Is Ethereum?
Thanks. In your example, how could one hope to prove they had rendered the animation correctly? Presumably each node must be able to verify the correctness of this in order to process the contract?