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prestonh

81 karma · joined April 6, 2017

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prestonh··on Starlink broadband speeds slow as subscriber numbers grow
I'm curious, what sorts of speeds do you mean for "slow"?
prestonh··on How does find by example work in the Pharo Finder
La
prestonh··on US will now offer gender-neutral X option on passports
> The woke disease. Which has also taken our world close to WW3 recently.

Reference?

prestonh··on Book Review: “Viral” by Alina Chan and Matt Ridley
I don't think there's much direct evidence to support natural spillover event other than that much of the initial spread could be localized to a wet market, which may have had vendors selling meat from animals known to carry these types of viruses. That seems like pretty weak evidence, though. Other than that, IMO we should have very high prior weight assigned to the natural origin hypothesis in the Bayesian sense, so even without new direct evidence it's still reasonable to believe that hypothesis to be more likely.
prestonh··on Interactive C++ for Data Science
Just restart your kernel if you think something spooky related to state is occurring. This is the number one criticism I see of notebooks, but it is so easy to deal with if you are aware of it. The benefits of being able to rerun an isolated part of your code far outweigh the harms IMO.
prestonh··on Siberian town in arctic circle hits 101°F (38°C)
Why do you believe the next will be worse? Covid is already a global pandemic and will likely reach a majority of the global population before going away.
prestonh··on What is the unique value proposition of selling honey?
How does Windows hurt science?
prestonh··on No person who was born blind has ever been diagnosed with schizophrenia
It's because we usually dont multiply percentages, but instead work with normal decimal figures.
prestonh··on Tesla's self driving algorithm's overlay [video]
Sure, but if we can match that number of fatalities with self driving cars it will inarguably be a success from a utilitarian standpoint.
prestonh··on Show HN: Teapong – A two-player game for fans of Pong and the Utah teapot
Given your learnings, how are you going to redesign your engine to have less tightly coupled components?
prestonh··on Goodbye, New York, California and Illinois – Hello where?
I got that reference.
prestonh··on The Cybertruck is not brutalist
I know nothing about cars, but I've been wondering how anything remotely resembling what was shown could pass a crash test. It's going to have to be radically transformed, so why bother even showing a design at this point?
prestonh··on Tesla Cybertruck
Moving with a pickup truck sounds miserable. Why not just rent a uhaul?
prestonh··on Tesla Cybertruck
That's exactly what I thought of when I first saw the car.
prestonh··on SpaceX's Starship Mk1 just blew off its bulkhead in a pressurization accident
I agree calling it a success is too rosy, but I think people are really thinking od this as progress, not a regression like the event itself would naively suggest, because the company relies on hardware failure to inform design improvements.
prestonh··on There are many small orbital launch vehicles proposed or under development
I havent researched the orbital dynamics much here, but wouldnt it be possible for the satellite fragments resulting from a collision at orbital speeds to have much greater speeds, possibly ending up in elliptical orbits with lower total drag? Seems like just waiting for orbits to decay after a Kessler syndrome like event wouldnt be feasible.
prestonh··on YouTube autoplay gave a lost Japanese classic new life (2017)
This is hilarious, because this is the exact album I'm listening to right now (I've probably listened to it over 100 times...). Youtube's algorithm, for all the evils it does radicalizing people, has led me down a deep music rabbit hole and completely transformed my taste in music. I suspect that there are a lot of other listeners out there like me that have had the same experience.
prestonh··on Netflix open-sources Polynote, an IDE-inspired polyglot notebook
It seems like the tool was mainly invented to deal with the issue of hidden state in notebooks, but I don't honestly see what the big deal is. Jupyter notebook is a tool with hidden state being a gotcha that you can learn how to deal with extremely quickly. I've been a Jupyter notebook for several years so haven't had this problem often in recent memory, but I've led workshops where we teach users how to use the notebook. Inevitably hidden state issues come up, but students very quickly learn that restarting the kernel is a necessary part of the workflow and figure out when they need to do it.
prestonh··on Tom Delonge’s UFO Research Center Is Making Politicians Demand Answers
Was there anyone there with you that also saw?
prestonh··on In effect, Seattle is decriminalizing the use of hard drugs
Perhaps you got lucky. Belltown isnt as bad as some other areas, but in my one year of daily walking commutes through Belltown I saw

1. A person OD'd (presumably dead) at a bus stop

2. Someone passed out, face down in the gutter

3. Multiple people shooting up (usually pants down, shooting into leg)

4. A guy that would regularly walk around shouting and gesturing angrily, making everyone near by visibly anxious

5. One guy literally rolling around in the middle of the street during rush hour, holding up busses and cars

6. A fight, fortunately broken up caused by a homeless guy spitting on another guy

7. People selling stolen goods in the open

8. Finally, some guy got shot in an alley in the middle of broad daylight on like, a Tuesday a couple weeks back.

Not offering suggestions, merely documenting my experiences. I am genuinely glad you had a good trip to Seattle, though

prestonh··on Burnout caused by chronic stress is widespread
Huh? People communicate about work all the time in my office and having the ability to initiate conversations fluidly means more efficient collaboration. Fewer meetings, and easier to keep all parties in the know.
prestonh··on After 6 months of working fine, Tesla software update drives at barriers again
Is it, though? If every car that drove that route was a Tesla on autopilot, you'd probably have more traffic fatalities than the national total, and that doesn't even factor in every other similar traffic barrier this can occur at.
prestonh··on What principal investigators taught me about my failure to land tenure
You're right, I was trying to dumb down p-values to make a point about perverse incentives in academic publishing. What's worse is that other factors that increase the Type I error rate (only positive results are published) only compound the effect.
prestonh··on What principal investigators taught me about my failure to land tenure
What's good for the field (we've decided) is when we only allow a 5% Type I error rate (95% of published positive results are correct). What's good for the individual is to drive their Type I error rate up just enough so that they can publish as much as possible without getting caught.
prestonh··on The heroes of the Thai cave rescue
I get that Musk is a controversial figure and that this event was a debacle, but I dont know how you can ignore SpaceX and Tesla, both arguably the most successful companies in their fields right now by some metrics.
prestonh··on Study Identifies Effective Mental Strategies for Aversive Challenges
My own experience confirms that article's point (for myself, at least) as a negative example. I tend to, maybe because of my academic background, view the end of a project as always on the horizon, never near. That subtlety in my mindset I think affects the way I approach work. I constantly want to reactor, rebuild, and extend the functionality of projects rather than focusing on just wrapping up the damn things and moving on. I recognized this earlier, but dont think I fully appreciated its impact until I read this article.
prestonh··on A Harvard Astronomer on the Interstellar Object ‘Oumuamua
Depends on your priors for the parameters in the Drake equation.
prestonh··on Crater under Greenland points to climate-altering impact in the time of humans
But the total probability of the event happening "recently" (even if this is a fuzzy description) is far lower than the probability of it happening further away. If there's an event known to occur once in a trillion years and we observed it in our lifetimes, wouldn't you think that was remarkable?
prestonh··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2018)
Sneaky
prestonh··on Humanity has wiped out 60% of animals since 1970, major report finds
We could use both to be honest.
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