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This is a great book, much more practical for the applied researcher than anything written by Pearl.

iron0012on Guidelines for Brutalist Web Design

I'm surprised that so many folks here (obv not everyone) have so readily accepted the word "brutalist" to apparently mean "simple, functional, and minimal", because that's definitely NOT what brutalism entails in the architectural world!

I really like a lot of brutalist architecture, but much of it is far LESS functional/useful/practical than other styles. Brutalism was an aesthetic, largely a reaction to existing forms--many of which were characterized by their utility! A lot of brutalist architects were rebelling against the bourgeois notion of a building as merely (as they saw it) "a place intended for humans to live, work, and play", and instead asserting the notion of a building as an artistic form in its own right, which often meant intentionally disregarding or downplaying the importance of the building's utility for the humans who interacted with it! Anyone who has lived or worked in a brutalist building can aver this truth: if the building served its function w/r/t humans, it was often DESPITE its artistic intentions, which prioritized almost everything else instead.

iron0012on Test-Driven Web Development with Python – The Book

Thoughtful Machine Learning by Matthew Kirk is the closest thing I've seen. It's several years old by now (2014). That said, I don't see many people trying to use this approach in practice.

iron0012on Justice Anthony Kennedy to Retire from Supreme Court

what does the constitution say about women's access to reproductive healthcare

iron0012on The impossibility—and the necessity—of distinguishing science from nonscience

I wouldn't normally say this, but since you appealed to authority first... are you aware of how absolutely dismal ASU's reputation is in academia in general?

iron0012on Ask HN: What do you do about too many open browser tabs?

I am the same as you. Way worse, actually. When things get really bad (e.g. 500+ open tabs in Firefox), I spend ~20 minutes closing as many obviously "left-over" and otherwise uninteresting tabs, and then I save all of the remaining tabs to a new folder of bookmarks, then close the window. It's not ideal, but it does make sure that "potentially interesting" things I've seen don't get lost forever in the internet ether.

iron0012on The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond (2006)

Good observation, gaming is absolutely a post-modern phenomenon. Any creative works with which audience actively engage and interact (rather than just observe)--and especially those that by necessity require the audience's engagement, or blur the line between the creator and the audience--are by nature post-modern.

iron0012on The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond (2006)

Right? It's so weird that the dudes that rail against postmodernism fundamentally fail to understand that it's not a single assertive ideology, it's just a simple observation of the way things are in the world around us. It's not like anybody has ever set out to "make postmodernism happen", it's just a condition that has arisen via historical consequence. So when people attack "postmodernists", it's like--you realize that these philosophers did not "create" postmodernism, right? They just describe what they're seeing in the world.

iron0012on High Salaries Are Weapons in the AI Talent War

Hm, I think I disagree with this. The famous statistician and scientist RA Fisher said "To consult the statistician after an experiment is finished is often merely to ask him to conduct a post mortem examination. He can perhaps say what the experiment died of." and less-statistically-inclined researchers in academia have often observed this to be true: when statistical/analytical/"data" related considerations are not taken into account during the early stages (design, planning) of a project, it is very difficult (and time and money consuming) to "bolt them on" after the fact. If "AI" (or whatever you want to call it) is going to be a fundamental feature of a product, data scientists (or whatever you want to call them) should be involved right from the very beginning.

iron0012on Which book describes all dirty business practises used in past?

There sure is: Capital by Karl Marx.

(wonder if down-voters have actually read this, or if it's just a boogie-man to them?)

iron0012on Science’s Pirate Queen

We scientists WANT (desperately want!) anyone and everyone, experts and neophytes alike, to read and pay attention to our work! The unavailability of scientific research papers is in no way due to snooty scientists restricting the availability of papers to others in the ivory tower. This is on the publishers, who charge massive rent-seeking mark-ups for actually doing very little work and providing very little value in this digital age. It is also on the system of sticks and carrots that prevents many scientists (notably those who do not yet have tenure) from publishing in free and open journals by tying our livelihood to publication in more traditional (non-free, non-open) journals that have high Impact Factors.

iron0012on [dead]

The sweet refrain sung by those "independents" who "aren't republicans" until the voting booth curtains are closed safely behind them. I wonder if you'll remember this disingenuous moment when you pull the lever for a straight GOP ticket for the nth time in your life come November. Probably not.

iron0012on [dead]

Of course they printed it: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/02/02/us/politics/n...

Ah, but you probably already knew that, since picking and choosing which heavily-spun facts to reveal is how Republicans operate, isn't it?

iron0012on An agoraphobic globetrotter who uses Street View to 'travel'

I understand and appreciate the concern for privacy, but something important was diminished when Google Maps started blurring the faces of people who appeared in Street View. I was surprised by the degree to which the previous sense of immediacy and vitality, the feeling that "you are there" was so severely crippled when the face of every human became a blur. :(

iron0012on Ibuprofen alters human testicular physiology

I also failed in a moment of his weakness

iron0012on Spotify’s Discover Weekly: How machine learning finds new music

DW playlist radio != DW playlist

iron0012on Berkeley’s Top Dog fires employee who went to white nationalist rally

Good.

iron0012on How to read and understand a scientific paper: a guide for non-scientists

The importance you place on the presence of a p-value suggests that you're probably not the best judge of whether a p-value is correctly interpreted.

iron0012on On average, skipping college and investing tuition costs nets a higher return

https://scholar.google.com/

The magic phrase to locate the literature you're interested in is "returns to education"

iron0012on On average, skipping college and investing tuition costs nets a higher return

There is a massive body of existing literature (the kind that's published in peer reviewed journals) examining the returns to education. A lot of that research, maybe most of it, suggests that going to college is a very, very good idea financially.

PLEASE, before you let a blog post dictate your position on this issue--and certainly before you recommend to an impressionable 17-18 year old that they not go to college--take the time to properly educate yourself.

iron0012on The ‘Terminator’ of startups says he’s seeing two to four wind-downs a week

Here's him making the same exact kinds of claims in 2011. He called himself (or claimed that people called him) the 'undertaker' back then: https://www.pehub.com/2011/08/silicon-valley%E2%80%99s-under...

iron0012on Welcome, ACLU

Nice concern trolling. The answer, as I'm sure you well know since you're arguing in bad faith, is that now is always the right time to do something good (like provide financial assistance to the ACLU). The argument that a good deed shouldn't be done now because it should have been done earlier instead is a ridiculous non sequitur.

iron0012on Lawsuit: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer led illegal purge of male workers

Nah, I never once heard anyone in Berkeley refer to a woman as a "dude" or a "guy".

iron0012on Lawsuit: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer led illegal purge of male workers

That's not true in my experience, and I doubt it's true in yours. While "guys" is sometimes employed to refer to a mixed gender group of people, it would be very weird for "guy" or "dude" to be used to refer to a woman. Argue in good faith, please. And try not to police PC here. You're not bringing anything to the discussion.

iron0012on More parents, students saying 'no' to homework

I am continually shocked by how willing people are to opine, completely sans any data except for their own (worthless) anecdotes, when it takes less than 5 seconds to google “homework meta-analysis”.

Believe it or not, scientists have studied whether homework is worth doing before. You know, using science. Here’s one example of such a meta-analysis: https://larrycuban.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/review-of-edu...

Unsurprisingly (to me at least), homework is positively associated with improved academic performance.

Was that really so hard? Was it really easier to bloviate, as nearly everyone seems wont to do, than to actually pursue the evidence?

iron0012on A Truth in the Law of Small Numbers

Here's an explanation that addresses this apparent inconsistency: http://andrewgelman.com/2015/09/30/hot-hand-explanation-agai...