jpfed

It doesn't show that they're harmful; it shows that they have a cost. The question is whether the benefit exceeds the cost, which depends on making some sort of quantifiable conversion rate between "acrimony and uncertainty" versus "more women getting coding jobs".

Think of it like this. Linear models in statistics break out the prediction for a given case in terms of main effects and interactions. All women get hit by the main effect of being a woman; it just so happens that some women are buoyed by other main effects like wealth, whiteness, etc.

Now, it may turn out that you might want to evaluate an aggregate measure of disadvantage per person, so you can sort people by level-of-disadvantage and apply that first. But that method may be brittle; if you choose the relative weighting of various forms of disadvantage wrong, then you're applying your benefit in a way that deviates from the "true" perfect-information order anyway.

One way of resolving this is to say "we're not going to attempt to apply this benefit in a perfectly Rawlsian order; we're just going to pick a main effect to attack and, while doing less good than a perfect-information solution, will still almost certainly do more good than harm.".

>What kind of heartless monster trains kids to be as literal as possible all the time?

Kids start out as literal as possible all the time, no training necessary. As far as my kids are concerned Amelia Bedelia's a documentary.

The thing about G+ is that it wasn't their core business. There are a lot of replies to my comment talking about existing solutions... which are also peripheral to the companies offering them. I hope that at some point someone makes what I described their core business, with the ability to get your data out painlessly as a hedge against the finite lifetime of the service.

>There's something to be said for having an album of photos that you pull out a couple of times a year to show a select group of others.

My perhaps unreasonable hope for a Facebook killer is just a paid personal archive of your own photos, writings, etc. with the assumption of privacy by default.

>The issue is that the reason why governments have tax cuts for certain groups is because that's how they win votes.

Isn't that an oversimplification, though? Governments also use tax cuts to shape behavior.

...which leads immediately to the question of whether they're using the fact that HDDs have multiple platters.

I would be very surprised if these situations would be mirrors of one another. The way MeToo played out in my social media, I never saw friend A sharing an experience that friend-of-friend B posted. Rather, friend A shared their direct experience. Re-shared stories would have no doubt caused an inflated sense of actual prevalence... but that's simply not what I observed.

I have many friends that reported their own direct experiences with sexual harassment and assault. I would actually be pretty shocked if anything like that number had directly experienced violence from immigrants.

Yes, that is possible. Part of MeToo, as interpreted by liberals, was establishing a sort of quorum of those who had been victimized. The fact that other survivors were coming out with their experiences made it seem safer for each person to feel like they could reveal their own experiences. If liberals were disproportionately likely to notice the quorum, then they would be disproportionately likely to contribute their own stories, resulting in a positive feedback loop. That may be an even better explanation for the discrepancies than algorithmic balkanization.

In either case, for the people that I observed posting about it, MeToo was not symbolic; it was explicitly grounded in personal experience. But it's possible that the messages propagated differently in different areas of the social network, such that some others viewed it as symbolic.

MeToo is an interesting example.

I suspect that Facebook and Twitter have their own linear algebra models of who is interested in what, and that factors into their choices of what content from your friends makes it into your stream.

After the wave of MeToo posts on Facebook and Twitter had died down, I asked my friends on Facebook to characterize how many MeToo posts they'd seen. Liberals reported seeing far more MeToo posts than conservatives did.

Something I didn't ask about, but have seen after the fact, is that conservatives and liberals seem to have a totally different idea of what MeToo is about. Algorithmic balkanization may have contributed to these differing ideas, and cordoned most of the MeToo-related activity in a liberal cluster of the social graph.

I saw a lot of personal stories of harassment and abuse from my friends. The sheer volume of them was undeniable. I could never say, given the experiences my friends reported, that it was mostly symbolic. Those experiences were very much concrete. It is possible that my particular subset of the social graph is disproportionately affected by sexual harassment and assault, which would affect the validity of any conclusions about the broader society I might draw from what I saw. But, for the subset of the social graph I observed, there is simply no way to call it symbolic.

I call this the "attractor basin hypothesis" of problem solving- your mental state is in one attractor basin and you need to be in a different one; a break gives you another chance to enter the right one. If true, it may be possible to get the same benefit as taking a break and returning to the work by doing something that jolts you out of your current attractor basin. Maybe that just means asking the right question (c.f. oblique strategies).

Can we say that a CA is reversible if, in order to deduce the previous state, you must know the initial conditions? With your CA, if you did not know that the current state ultimately descended from one cell, you would not know whether the previous state involved two towers separated by an empty cell.

Kids vary dramatically in terms of what they need from parents. For some, a high degree of autonomy is appropriate. For others, very much not so.

Well, there's a pretty cool DJ with the username "mkb" across a few different sites. Aaronson is correctly noting that any superconducting quantum computer needs to be at least ten times as cool as that guy in order to work.

One problem from the fossil fuel industry's perspective is that, while scrubbing doesn't suppress their activity, doing it is essentially an admission that there's a carbon problem. And once you do that, you give up the protection that controversy and doubt affords you, and people might start demanding more extreme measures to curb carbon.

Paying people to spread misinformation that maintains controversy and doubt (e.g. https://cei.org/ , who also helped maintain doubt surrounding the link between smoking and cancer) is far cheaper than the reckoning that could eventually result from admitting that carbon is a problem.

>Is it possible for Rust to have any new or surprising mechanisms that cause loss of constant time execution?

The ubiquitous assumption that all code should be executed as fast as possible isn't new or Rust-specific but it will be a continuing source of security surprises for the foreseeable future.

I don't know if it's centrism that enabled infrastructure, so much as the two major parties seeing each other as legitimate rivals that could be negotiated with. Without a common enemy since the Soviet Union disintegrated, the parties have lost their sense of mutual legitimacy. There's nothing visibly* urgent enough to push us into e.g. building a continent-spanning system of highways.

*Climate change doesn't count because one side doesn't see it as a threat.

If burn-in is a serious threat to the usable lifetime of the display, I wonder whether the laptop could be configured to display a continuously varying image in an attempt to save the screen.

Where I come from, the solder is not much of a problem. We paid everyone a ton of money to replace their pipes, leaving only solder and fittings as lead sources, and we have very little lead in our water to speak of.

https://www.npr.org/2016/03/31/472567733/avoiding-a-future-c...

I think a lot of people (especially on HN) view racism in terms of internal processes rather than results. If the current implementation is race-blind, that satisfies them.

https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/8wz6g3/impartial_a...

Similarly, if you want to give up e.g. soda, don't say "I can't drink soda". That's just some arbitrary restriction imposed on you. Instead, say "I don't drink soda". That's part of who you are now- you're a person that doesn't drink soda.

>None of them has been successfully replicated, and the ethical problems that plague them would preclude them being re-run now.

This is false; Milgram's work was replicated many times in a variety of settings.

Cool, thanks!

>Bindings to Lua (raylib-lua), Go (raylib-go) and more!

Is there a list of other bindings somewhere? I didn't see one in my admittedly cursory look.

It's possible to use salt water and limestone to capture CO2; I wonder whether brine could be used for this purpose.

This made me think about code. I've long thought of incremental refactoring as "following the gradient" of good design principles, but this essay opened up new connections for me.

For example, I've heard elsewhere that great programmers possess the skill of being able to decompose large changes into smaller commits, making the code no worse as they go. Having the ability to see the small changes that get you where you want to go corresponds to finding the direction of change that gets you past the saddle point.

Random restart is a standard tool in the kit of stochastic gradient descent. But if local minima are rare, it may be overused. You don't have to rewrite your code if you can see the refactors and gradual improvements that get you where you need to go.

One scenario that may allow another player to dethrone Facebook is with a service that provides value without absolutely requiring network effects.

My suspicion is that the way to improve legibility is to consider ways to make symbol images more robust to noise. In particular, if a symbol image were perturbed, would the context help you figure out what that symbol should be?

For each letter, we can build a histogram of contexts that letter occurs in for a sufficiently large corpus. An example is the letter "o", whose occurrences in the previous sentence have the following contexts: f_r (twice), t_g, c_n, _c, c_r.

Each letter's context histograms have some similarity with each other letter's. We want different letters that have similar contexts to have widely differing appearances, because if their appearances were similar, their contexts will be of less help to the reader in disambiguating. And letters with sufficiently different contexts may be allowed to be more similar in appearance (note e.g. the archaic long "s", which despite visual ſimilarity to "f" is easily distinguished from it by the different contexts it appears in).

Actually serious- have scientists tried given study participants psychedelic drugs specifically to understand the mechanisms underlying people's sense of what is significant or important?

This was a very useful guide for me a couple years ago. I had to print html documents (thankfully, just a reasonably-well-defined subset) from a .NET Winforms app, but driving a browser to do it was too slow and flaky. So I used the OP as the starting point for a C# layout engine.