makmanalp

This reminds me of an experiment where they had a babysitting company fine parents for being late to pick up their kids. The reaction was that parents would be late more often, because they felt they'd "paid" the price. It's not quite the same but there is an overarching theme around the idea that once we think of something as a monetary transaction, we behave differently.

I REALLY really recommend that you read "A Genius In The Family" by Hiram Percy Maxim, his son. It's absolutely bonkers hilarious and a nice window into the inventor himself, who apparently loved to cause a ruckus and a good laugh.

Gutenberg link: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks09/0900131.txt

Harvard Center for Intl' Development | Front End Developer | Boston, MA | FULLTIME / ONSITE

We're a research center (https://growthlab.cid.harvard.edu/) that focuses on the question: “Why do some countries grow while others don’t?”, and we study issues of economic development. We have people from a wide set of backgrounds, including economics, public policy, computer science, mathematics. Our center often works directly with counterparts in different government organizations across the world. Our software team is a is a small one (5 and growing) embedded within the larger organization of researchers and data scientists. Our audience is policy makers, researchers and economists.

Our data visualization tool (http://atlas.cid.harvard.edu) just got shortlisted in the Information is Beautiful awards, and we're working on an even larger new section that adds a storytelling-style profile for every country in the world, where we guide you through the process of what your country currently makes and what it could be making in the future, while making some of the more technical concepts more approachable.

Frontend stack: React / Typescript / Webpack / Node / D3

Details here: https://sjobs.brassring.com/TGnewUI/Search/Home/Home?partner... or E-mail annie_white at hks dot harvard dot edu

Why look at nominal though? Inflation adjusted makes a lot more sense to me, especially when we're talking about household income.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N

The story here is quite different - only a 19% increase, and much more unstable over the years. Most of the increase happened before 2000. Almost no change since then.

I wonder if the older iteration counts as prior art now?

I heartily recommend altair, which is maturing nicely - while the API is not a clone of ggplot, it takes the same grammar-of-graphics idea and applies it to interactive graphics.

It's 5-6 lines of code per chart for most examples here, with a few more lines for interaction (e.g. selection and linked brushing across graphs).

https://altair-viz.github.io/gallery/index.html

Argh, it's so frustrating to see this kind of sentiment. We're truly spoiled by choice. The libraries don't all serve the same purpose, and not everyone needs every library. This is literally a guide to help pick which one I may want. What more could one ask for??

That said, I understand it sucks to build on top of someone else's code only to have it be discontinued, but honestly it only takes a few minutes to judge a project's maturity. Here are some very easy rules of thumb. Don't write a lot of important code relying on a library that:

- Is younger than 3 years old. - Has less than 3-4 major contributors and 20 overall contributors. - Has lost steam: a lot of issues and pull requests open and stale with no triage tags, no discussion or responses. - Doesn't seem to have any automated testing / packaging infrastructure set up. - Doesn't seem to have a regular ongoing cycle of releases, be it long or short. - Doesn't have nicely laid out documentation. - Doesn't seem to have a user base, as indicated by a preponderance of questions and answers on stackoverflow, etc. - Just posted their "we made a cool new thing" post on HN a few weeks ago.

Yes, the cutoffs are arbitrary (and flexible!), but this hasn't failed me yet. The python world is filled with many wonderful and mature libraries. It just also has a lot of up and coming, promising young ones. Use whichever!

This is kind of interesting because your recipe is 95% hydration (water / flour - this is how bakers do ratios), which is crazy high! I've never heard of this before, but I see you don't really shape it so much as scoop it into the dutch oven, which makes sense. Something like 55% is normal for commercial bread, 70% hydration would be much closer to a nice sourdough from the bakery, 75-80%ish for something like ciabatta (using bread flour w/ approx 11% protein) or when you are using whole flour.

To expand on this point, check out this talk by the CockroachDB VP of engineering[0]: they used raft but found out that it's approximately as complicated as paxos. They also do non-quorum reads, all through the leader replica)

[0] https://atscaleconference.com/videos/scale-2018-run-your-dat...

> all (not really all) I/O goes to their cluster FS (Colossus, sort of).

Well - sorta. Cluster FS just means disk I/O is now network I/O (EBS is a bit like this). Now you push the hairy problem to a different area: your network topology starts to matter a lot. You might end up having to think about not scheduling too many I/O heavy jobs behind the same switch or something. AND disk I/O is now competing with network I/O. AND it might now be hard to predict the destination of where all that I/O is going to be when scheduling the job, whereas previously it used to just be local.

So the problem doesn't go away. But maybe you say it's just easier to wire everything up with gigE / infiniband so that you're massively under-capacity, and call it a day, and that might be a fair tradeoff.

Re #2, if you haven't tried the newest versions recently (and especially with the jupyterlab beta which has a nicer completion GUI), I'd encourage you to take a look! It's come a long way, along with the library that's doing the completions under the hood.

The majority of the complaints I hear about notebooks I think come from a misunderstanding of what they're supposed to be. It's a mashup between a scientific paper and a repl. So it's useful for a bit of both:

a) Just like with a paper, you can present scientific or mathematical ideas with accompanying visualizations or simulations. From the REPL side, as a bonus, you get interactivity, and the reader can pause and experiment with the examples you're giving to improve their understanding or test their hypotheses. If I change this variable, how will the system react? You can just try it!

b) Just like with a REPL, you can type in and execute commands step by step, viewing the output of the previous command instead of running the whole thing at once. From the document side, as a bonus, you get nicer presentation (charts, interactivity, nice and wide sortable tables, etc) than you would in a shell, which comes in handy when doing things like data exploration or mathematical simulation.

It's decidedly NOT there for you to type all your code in like an editor and make a huge mess. It's apples and oranges w.r.t and a poor substitute for something like PyCharm or VS Code or vim. It is there for you to a) try things out yourself, and whatever you discover hopefully eventually make it into proper python modules b) make interesting ideas presentable and explorable for others. That's all!

When I see stuff like "out of order execution is confusing", I don't disagree, but it does make me wonder how long and convoluted the notebooks these people work with are - probably a ripe candidate to refactor stuff out into python modules as functions. When I see stuff around notebooks for "reproducibility", I'm a bit confused in that notebooks often don't specify any guidance on installation and dependencies, let alone things like arguments and options that a regular old script would. In that regard I think it's barely an improvement over .py files lying around. When I hear "how do I import a notebook like a python module", I'm very very scared.

Granted, I've seen huge notebooks that are a mess, so I understand the frustration, but it's not like we all haven't seen the single file of code with 5000 lines and 10 nested layers of conditionals at some point in our lives.

Re: Silexan, I'm noticing a lot of stuff that seems very off. "Kasper" seems to be the author of almost every study around silexan, like article #1 above (doi 10.3109/13651501.2013.813555) and this meta-analysis [0] where Kasper et al seems to be analyzing three of their own papers!

Article #2 (doi 10.1097/jcp.0000000000000615) is a meta-analysis that seems to not have Kasper in the author list, but then if you read the full article you'll see that every single one of the studies they analyze minus one are all Kasper's!

Isn't this super shady? How is any of this kosher????

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And the Kasper meta-analysis I mention above was funded by the makers of Silexan:

> The research presented in this paper was funded by Dr. Willmar Schwabe GmbH & Co. KG, manufacturer of Silexan, who was also the sponsor of the trials included in the meta-analysis. The statistical analysis plan for the meta-analysis was conceived and the analyses were performed by the biostatistical department of Dr. Willmar Schwabe GmbH & Co. KG under the responsibility of co-author SS. The company also provided the raw data of the trials included into the analyses. A first draft of the manuscript was prepared by Andreas Völp, Ph.D., an independent medical writer who was reimbursed by Dr. Willmar Schwabe GmbH & Co. KG, who also independently performed the risk of bias assessments. Open access funding provided by Medical University of Vienna.

And of the other authors:

> Hans-Jürgen Möller has received grant/research support, consulting fees and honoraria within the last years from AstraZeneca, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, GlaxoSmithKline, Janssen Cilag, Lundbeck, MSD, Novartis, Organon, Otsuka, Pfizer, Schwabe, Sepracor, Servier, and Wyeth. Hans-Peter Volz has served as a consultant or on advisory boards for Astra/Zeneca, Eli Lilly, Lundbeck, Pfizer, Schwabe, Janssen, Otsuka, Merz, Wyeth, neuraxpharm and has served on speakers’ bureaus for Astra/Zeneca, Eli Lilly, Lundbeck, Schwabe, Janssen, Merz, Wyeth, Lichtwer, Steigerwald, Hormosan, neuraxpharm and Bristol-Myers Squibb. Angelika Dienel and Sandra Schläfke are employees of Dr. Willmar Schwabe GmbH & Co. KG, manufacturer of Silexan. Siegfried Kasper received grants/research support, consulting fees and/or honoraria within the last 3 years from Angelini, AOP Orphan Pharmaceuticals AG, AstraZeneca, Eli Lilly, Janssen, KRKA-Pharma, Lundbeck, Neuraxpharm, Pfizer, Pierre Fabre, Schwabe and Servier.

[0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00406-017-0852-4

Does the 2013 rebuttal study in that link tell us anything about the safety of ingesting lavender extract (e.g. like the Silexan studies given above)? Wouldn't that involve much higher absorption than topical application?

Update: OK, weirdly enough, Tisserand seems to be highly involved in the aromatherapy industry per their own website, and the study [0] seems to involve researchers from the "Research Institute for Fragrance Materials" which sounds suspiciously like an industry-related group - is this reputable at all??

[0] http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1091581812472209

To be fair, they're talking about Kahneman's '79 research and then talking about how they build on top of that. I guess yours maybe could be modeled as the inverse planning fallacy - you hold over-pessimistic beliefs about the ease of the task. This happens to me too: e.g. when I don't call the bank to do something because I think I'm going to be on the phone for forever, and when I finally get around to doing it it really only takes 5. So perhaps the model could accommodate that, but I'll admit to having skimmed a bit and closed the page. I agree with your sentiment though!

Right - I don't mean to minimize the effort at all, it must have been a massive undertaking already! Thank you for all your work!

I'm very excited about the JIT query compilation stuff finally making it into postgres! A big win for OLAP queries, although it looks like they compile specific expressions within the query rather than the whole query operator, but that could change. I'm very curious to see how this interacts with the query planner (e.g. when it's worth the overhead or not).

I think Pico-8 would be perfect if:

a) The code editing story was a bit nicer (better resolution / builtin support for external editing and reloading etc)

b) If there was some kid-specific introductory game programming content for it (even "type all this in and play around with it after" worked for me as a kid)

This is the same strategy as news sites where you have to go to the "next page" fairly often within the article (what does that even mean) so the ads reload, or there's a dumb slideshow where every 5 images it's an ad. Or when sourceforge had its full on transition to a money sucking machine and they made the UI worse and everything multiple page reloads away just to show more ads.

It's like if Umberto Eco decided to go into programming instead.

True! It's popular in the middle east in general, and I'm sure it made it over with immigrants somehow, but up until a few years ago I only saw tahini and halva in the "ethnic" foods aisle, until tahini became a popular health food / salad thing and now you see it in restaurants, and now I'm seeing more and more cafes and bakeries with halva cookies, halva lattes, etc etc - that's all I mean.

Also you might also like tahin pekmez - which I haven't seen around at all yet: 3/4 tahini and 1/4 molasses mixed together for a spread - on toasted bread. Best warming winter / snowy weather comfort food ever! :-)

Hey! Unfortunately it's a bit hard to find English resources - both in the sense that there aren't many to begin with but also the books are difficult to get hold of.

Classical Turkish Cooking by Ayla Algar is, well, a classic. People often think the recipes aren't descriptive enough. But also it's quite comprehensive and has a lot of history too.

Aegean Flavors by chef Didem Senol is a wonderful take on aegean cuisine in Turkey - highly related to greek food.

Oklava by chef Selin Kiazim is a bit more of a modern / upscale restaurant take - she runs one.

Claudia Roden's book is not only about Turkey but quite great.

Hope this helps!

Ali Muhiddin Haci Bekir in Sirkeci is the defacto choice - their store still looks exactly the way it must have looked in the early 1900s. Cafer Erol in Kadikoy has a very nice storefront and a LOT of variety, and pretty decent hard candy ("akide") too. Divan is more of a western patisserie and has many locations, but good. Cemilzade is the off-beat version of Haci Bekir, also in Kadikoy. A lot of options: pomegrenate, saffron, twice baked, clotted cream ("kaymak"), coffee, coconut, pistachio, almost any fruit imaginable etc etc.

Just don't get the boxed stuff, and get a lot of variety of flavors. Also I seem to be the only person who hates the rosewater, but maybe that's just me.

For baklava, it's really a labor of love and there's a lot of great old and small shops. Gulluoglu used to be great and is still quite OK, but feels a but mass produced now. Smaller options are Köşkeroğlu, kafadaroğlu etc, but I don't know if it's worth seeking out especially - just duck into whatever small shop that seems busy during the day.

Probably what might be a better experience is trying /unfamiliar/ desserts: Kunefe is crispy shredded puff pastry with cheese in it, doused in syrup, served HOT with pistachio on top. Tulumba is the turkish take on churros. Halva is made of tahini and sugar, and is getting more popular in the US. Kazandibi is pudding that's been caramelized / burnt at the "bottom of the pan" - traditionally the gelatin in it comes from chicken breast (you can't taste it). More often it's now the "fake" version, still delicious. Lokma is turkish fried dough. Kabak tatlisi is made of pumpkin. There's so much to try, just get the stuff which you don't know what it is.

One thing to remember is that Turkish sweets are quite sweet - you're only meant to have one small piece. Of course that won't stop many of us from getting a whole plate :-) Usually you can ask for a half portion at a shop.

Finally if you're near Kadikoy, hit up Ciya too - regional foods from across Turkey that you can't find in many other places.

Hope you enjoy your trip!

I think also people severely underestimate how bland and repetitive the average person's diet used to be at the turn of the century, before food engineering and junk food. Meat and sweets were a luxury in a lot of places. Haute cuisine was reserved for the richest.

Oh finally, I'm so happy about the notifications / do not disturb functionality - super annoying to have chat and email notifications popping up all the time and having to fully disable / reenable them.

This is a nice connection and it's a kind of what's known as a structuralist argument - what you're saying is that the approach of "uptime is uptime is uptime" is wrong, and distribution of /where/ downtime happens actually matters a lot. Economics did run into similar issues with GDP because it assumed for a long time that "money is money is money", until it found out that just because both Iraq and Vietnam have similar GDPs doesn't mean that they're at all equivalent - one is heavily dependent on oil and has few development prospects, the other has a wealth of productive know how in a ton of different areas (shameless plug, I work on this tool):

Iraq http://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/explore/network/?country=108&pa...

vs

Vietnam http://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/explore/network/?country=239&pa...

Each node here is a specific product being exported "significantly" for a country of that size.

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So by a similar argument you could look at how similar the population that goes in and out of unemployment (seems likely to me) is every year, and what that implies about policies and job opportunities in the US.

Disclaimer, not an economist but work with a bunch of them. Of course, economists are already hyper-aware of focusing on a single measure and of all these issues with specific indicators, and surprise surprise, we have a wealth of alternatives that are published and are freely accessible all the time:

e.g. the BLS already releases all manner of alternative unemployment statistics (see "discouraged workers"): https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm

e.g. for income inequality, a crude but well known measure is the Gini index which measures how dispersed incomes are in a population: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SIPOVGINIUSA#0

e.g. Consumer price index is another approach measuring access to basic goods: https://www.bls.gov/charts/consumer-price-index/consumer-pri...

Household net worth is another one that the article mentions.

The matter of which number is chosen as the official measure of "goodness" is the real issue and that is a political matter, and because depth of public (and shockingly often policymaker!) discourse on the matter is stuck at "did the thing go up or down". I'm dubious that switching to a different indicator will solve the problem per se - perhaps make it harder to game.

For bytecode level transformations rather than AST level: https://github.com/llllllllll/codetransformer

The bar in academia (over-generalizing here) was so low for so long that anything around including your code with your publication still gets placed under the historical title of "reproducibility" - that's probably where the confusion here is arising. I agree with your sentiment, but grandparent probably just meant "a lot of people release their code as notebooks".

Aghhh, what I wouldn't give to have experienced this :-) I don't know how many were ever "printed", but it doesn't seem like any resurfaced online - I guess that makes sense, given the nature of the thing!