pavelrub

Such as?

So pretty much every government expense, no matter how shitty or worthless, is "pocket change" and can be ignored, as long as it's at least an order of magnitude less that the cost of the F-35?

Do you use the same reasoning in your personal life as well? Buying worthless stuff as long as they cost less than 1% of the cost of your house?

Even if that were the case (and I seriously doubt that splitting the F-35 into multiple platforms would have resulted in a smaller budget, reduced development time, or better overall value. At the very least it's not trivial that that would be the case), it tells us absolutely nothing about the value of the F-35 compared to the Shuttle. I have kitchen gadgets that attempt to do too many thing at once and would have fared better as separate devices. They are cheaper than the F-35, so I guess the F-35 must be a failure.

Deer are mostly crepuscular and other than that more active during night time than day time. What you saw likely has little to do with the street lamps.

What a bizzare comparison. The shuttle isn't a fighter jet and and has nothing to do with this. The question is what military value does the F-35 provide, and will provide, during its operational years. Nothing about the history of the shuttle program can possibly give us an answer to this question, and the entire comparison is absurd.

Egypt also has one of the highest number of traffic-related deaths in the world. I don’t quite understand why your interpretation of it turns into a criticism of the “west”. The Egyptian system you describe is a dangerous mess, and significantly inferior to western traffic laws.

The paper doesn't explain anything at all. If we are alone in the galaxy - it tells us absolutely nothing about why this is the case, and certainly not that it's unrelated to the factors in the Drake equation, as you seem to claim. On the contrary - the "explanation" it offers relies precisely on the assumption that the factors of the Drake equation are responsible. The only thing it says is that we should incorporate our uncertainty of them when trying to make an estimate. It might be interesting, but it adds absolutely nothing new about why we might be alone, other than "because some factors could be lower than we think". Duh.

Why is it odd? Those are very different kinds of "torture". This is like saying that it's odd that people are against waterboarding, but are fine with keeping people locked in prisons, even when done for purely retributive reasons.

Vegans have this bizarre tendency of reducing human ethics to a bunch of incorrect generalizations (i.e. a dog is sort of like a cow, therefore it's "odd" that people eat cows but consider it wrong to eat dogs), and are then baffled that the world doesn't follow their artificial ethical formalism.

Interesting. Do you have the same opinion regarding any country whose military has killed unarmed civilians - including US and UK - or just Israel?

Yes - both a secular Zionist Jew in Tel Aviv and a Satmar Jew in the US (both are, by the way, most likely Ashkenazi) would see themselves as belonging to the same broad group of people with shared customs, culture and history - the Jews. This is why we refer to both groups as "Jews".

This doesn't of course mean that their "subjective sense of identity" is identical in its entirety, but that's pretty much the case with every ethnicity.

> Now, there is some cultural and genetic commonality between the two groups, but is it sufficient to say they are the same ethnicity?

Of course, because both groups view themselves as belonging to the same group of people, with shared customs, history, religion and tradition, that dates back to the Kingdom of Israel. What you don't seem to understand is that ethnicity is a social concept - the criteria isn't "how much two people have in common", but whether a shared identity exists between them. You should ask yourself what makes you refer to both Ashkenazim and Mizrahim as "Jews", and what makes them refer to themselves as such, even among people who don't believe in Judaism.

> Well, Italians and Spaniards traditionally share a religion (Roman Catholicism), speak related languages, and share some biological ancestry – does that make them one ethnic group?

If they share the same ethnic identity then of course.

You are confusing Judaism - the religion, with the Jewish people - an ethnorelegious group. Many modern Jews are atheists - they certainly don't believe in Judaism, yet nobody would doubt that they are Jewish, nor would they deny this themselves. Similarly - a Jew can become a christian or a muslim yet ethnically still remain a Jew. The same cannot be said about christians or muslims.

What a bizarre comment. Saying "Jews, in general, aren't an ethnicity" is almost an oxymoron - for it is precisely the identity shared between this group of people, that justifies the existence of words such as "Jews". There is an evident sense of shared identity between different populations of Jews, based on common history, culture, customs and traditions - this is the very definition of ethnicity, and this why we refer to all of them as "Jews".

The difference is that this "appropriate size" (= cost of materials) is smaller for circles than it is for any other shape.

What we consider to be “mental well being” is also a product of evolution, and there is certainly correlation between mental health and ability to survive. It’s unlikely that evolution ever favored practices that go strongly against mental health, though it is possible that the criteria for mental well being has also changed by evolution.

Whether today we consider ancient practices abhorrent or not is a different matter though. In general those can be explained by cultural differences, and there is no need to invoke mental health. Improvements in psychological well being isn’t universally correlated with increased pacifism, as some people here seem to think. Modern western civilization is a product of very specific historical events - not a progression toward our "evolutionary ingrained instincts". If anything, judging by the vast majority of human history - our "evolutionary ingrained instincts" are far more tuned toward violence than what is considered acceptable today in the western world.

A mentally healthy individual in modern US would act very differently from a mentally healthy individual in ancient Rome.

Suffering from "psychological problems" isn't a prerequisite for mounting human skulls on stakes. It would only be true in a society where it goes against the cultural norms - similar to how eating an animal would be a sign of mental distress in a hypothetical vegan culture of the year 3,000, but certainly not in most of today's world.

It's possible that those people indeed had "deep psychological problems" (though you have presented no evidence) - but the connection you are making isn't there.

Kids have strong familiarity with swipe UIs and iPhone games. This won't make them switch to programming-based UIs any more than growing up with a TV turned one into an electrician. In fact, the opposite is likely to be true - the more "magical" and abstracted away the UI is from the underlying technology - the less likely it is that its users will develop any intuitive understanding of what lies beneath.

Musk has never used Mars as an explanation for any of his non-SpaceX ventures. His own explanations for why he got involved with Tesla, started The Boring Company, or invented the Hyperloop have nothing to do with Mars or space.

> When you see the child in absolute terror, ask yourself "is this the right way to entertain a child, through pure terror?"

Maybe instead of reaching all kinds of dubious conclusions based on anecdotal evidence on how children look like during certain parts of the movie, you should instead ask the child, after the movie is over, whether he liked it or not. I think you will find that the vast majority of children greatly enjoy most Pixar movies.

The claim that Pixar movies, or the levels of violence depicted in them, are harmful to children or to society, has zero evidence in support of it.

I don’t know, I’m under the impression that people here think that winning with a 20% predicted chance of winning isn’t indicative of anything wrong with the polls, because it’s like predicting the outcome of a die, and therefore nothing should be done at all. This false analogy is precisely what I’m trying to disprove.

I agree that there are currently no strong arguments about what were wrong and how to fix it, but I think it's because it takes time to investigate those things. According to Pew, the American Association for Public Opinion Research has a committee investigating it, and they should release their report in May. It took a 6-months investigation to come up with a report about what went wrong with the Brexit polls, so it will probably take a similar amount of time with this.

Sure:

[1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polls-missed-trump-...

[2] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/09/why-2016-ele...

While it will take more time to figure out the precise reasons for the failure of the polls, the consensus is that such a failure indeed happen, and there are a number of competing hypotheses for why it happened. Other than on HN, nobody claims that the errors were due to some inherent unpredictability which cannot be addressed through better methodology.

I would say that predicting the chances of an asteroid hitting Earth based on looking at a crystal ball is a pretty bad prediction.

I agree with your general point. Whether a better prediction could've been made based on available data is really the key question here, and this is exactly what allows us to say that crystal ball predictions are bad.

In the context of predicting election results, I think it is fair to assume that, in principle, there should be enough available data (or an ability to collect such data) to make more accurate predictions. This also seems to be the assumption of all major polling agencies, and was also the assumption in investigating the results of Brexit polls. This is precisely where it differs from dice rolling. It therefore makes sense to assume that the predictions were inaccurate due to methodological reasons, as opposed to pollsters having no practical way of accessing the relevant data.

> you should be arguing how their methodology was wrong and what they could have done to find the true proportion +/- some standard error with however much confidence level

There are countless of arguments about how their methodology was wrong and what could be improved, all over the internet. Almost nobody disputes that the models were bad. I thought this part was obvious.

> 20% chance of winning and then actually winning does not seem all too unlikely to any reasonable person.

It seems about 80% unlikely. But the question isn't whether it seems unlikely or not, but whether it makes sense to call the prediction results "wrong". 20% chance of an asteroid not hitting Earth and then not hitting Earth might not seem extremely unlikely, but the prediction that it had an 80% chance of hitting Earth is still a bad prediction.

If it was your job to measure all the things that affect the roll of a die, and this is the result of your prediction, then I would indeed say that you failed to do your job properly. You could defend the result by claiming that it is impossible to get better measurements, and that the 16.6% chance is a reflection of our unavoidable ignorance of the system, but this doesn't really seem applicable to predicting election results.

What you are essentially saying is that every prediction that doesn't claim certainty is always correct. If I "predict", by looking at a crystal ball, that there is an 80% chance of an asteroid destroying Earth tomorrow, and no asteroid destroys earth, do you think that it makes sense to say that I was correct in my prediction, because I said there was a 20% chance of it not happening? Surely you must agree that there some sense in which my prediction was wrong, or at the very least more wrong than NASA's prediction. The election predictions were wrong in the same sense.

> The CEO of Mobileeye (who is an ex-machine learning professor)

The CEO of Mobileye is Ziv Aviram and he was never a professor. Amnon Shashua is the CTO, and he is still a machine learning professor at the Hebrew University.

The US military superiority over the rest of the world is exactly what allows the kind of globalized world you are talking about.

You are right, I didn't really think about the practical implications. oldPin = bestPin makes a lot more sense now :) Thanks.

Very cool! How much is it affected by the method of new pin selection after each time we add a line? I.e. currently you are doing oldPin = bestPin, and the first pin is selected at random... wouldn't it be better to just add lines based on a Hough transform (with rounding to the nearest pins) - starting from the line which covers the maximum number of points, and going down?

The reasons you consider it to be such a good film probably have more to do with cinematography than writing, acting or directing. The beautiful shots are a direct result of Emmanuel Lubezki being the DP - the same style can be seen in Birdman, Gravity, The Revenant, and some of Terrence Malick’s films.

It is a matter of fact that a huge number of people are excited about space colonization. So it is obviously important to them. How about letting them do what excites them, instead of telling them that their problem isn't "real" enough according to your personal definitions?