erwald

i am the author and i didn't mean to be wishy-washy about it. i read several of the papers involved and think it's more likely than not that qwerty was designed for fast typing, or at least not designed to type slowly. but i wouldn't say it's a done deal -- the paper i cited gives the most convincing argument, imo, but it didn't move me up to 100% confidence or anything. i didn't want to give the appearance of being too certain, because i'm not.

the very next sentence reads: "This idea is apparently false."

sadly, a spanish multinational is planning to open up an octopus farm this summer -- the world's first commercial octopus farm -- which is to breed and kill something like 300,000 - 600,000 octopuses per year.

(i wrote about this development here: https://www.erichgrunewald.com/posts/against-octopus-farming...)

sweet, thanks. looks like you pretty much got there before me. i wonder what it is about doing this that makes people want to blog about it ...

conclusion which also works as a kind of abstract:

> The processes involved in changing one’s mind are unusually stark when it comes to Latter-day Saints changing their minds about their religion. This is because various social, cultural and psychological factors incentivise members to keep believing that the Church is true even as information readily available online makes a compelling argument that it isn’t. Some Latter-day Saints overcome these forces and reach the latter conclusion anyway. This is a difficult, disorienting and painful undertaking. But it is also somehow beautiful, and I suppose what I find so beautiful about it is that it is the scout, the doubter, the truth-seeker, an underdog here if there ever was one, who wins out despite it all.

uhm, good point, fixed. that was just a mistake.

edit: for the record, I wrote the article and also posted it here. so I figured I could take the liberty of changing the title when sharing here.

yep, I do mention this approach in a footnote, though it looks kinda awkward to me. maybe just because I’m not used to it. it’s definitely not necessary for reading aloud, where it’s enough to know that there’s a punctuation there. but when reading silently it does make more sense.

i think the idea is that the kids did not earn their inheritances.

there was a discussion about experiments on rats here recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27491498 :)

humans have kept dogs and cats and horses around even though many of them aren’t used for their original purposes anymore, so I’d be surprised if some sentimental folks didn’t keep a few cows or sheep or whatnot around just for fun.

it could take other forms though, for instance you could identify people who are already maintaining or creating significant foss projects and pay them while they keep working on them. probably it makes sense to limit this to the most productive/driven few. it should be really straightforward (though time-consuming) to see if someone is cheating, because all the work is there in public view in the form of git commits.

there are a number of replacement methods, though i don't know if they cover all the cases. these include using tissue cultures, diseased humans and software modelling. also, when drugs have been deemed sufficiently safe, they can be further studied using human volunteer trials.

the attitude that "people need to be blamed" will never improve reliability in the long run. people come and go; systems and processes endure. blaming people is the best way to avoid making durable improvements to systems and processes.

ah yes, of course, that was a misreading on my part, sorry. the title is somewhat misleading, but if you go have a look at the original problem you see that it provides as inputs random-access arrays, not linked lists. i only changed them to lists in the initial, naïve solution in order to keep things simple at first.

traversing them won't get you O(log(m+n)) complexity.

though at that point it sounds no different than a hobby, really.

MuseScore is such a great piece of free software, I assume this will be beneficial for Audacity!

That is some impressively fast mitigation for an unexpected problem. 6 minutes to start the incident process, another 6 minutes to identify the issue, and another 25 minutes to start rolling out the solution.

> Why do workers remain in low-productivity areas when they could experience wage gains elsewhere? While the literature has proposed a few explanations, including the high cost and risky nature of migration, this column uses the case of China to examine instead the role that pollution plays. It finds that severe pollution can induce workers to relocate from productive to unproductive regions, suggesting that pollution control, coupled with policies facilitating migration, has the potential to bring about extra economic gains in developing countries.

Yeah Serious Eats is great. Usually very high quality recipes.

No, I think pje is saying that existing tools are just fine & new tools are unlikely to improve things on the margin.