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rndn

1,742 karma · joined December 8, 2014

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rndn··on Tell HN: Full Hacker News dataset now available on BigQuery
There are items in there that are deleted/[dead] on HN (and not very recent). How come?
rndn··on The Hostile Email Landscape
In wich ways is this different and superior to a fee?
rndn··on Graffiti on ‘Homeland,’ Unnoticed by Producers, Calls Show Racist
'The series dangerously feeds into the racism of the hysterical moment we find ourselves in today.'
rndn··on Auto-Generating Clickbait with Recurrent Neural Networks
Could this RNN model perhaps be used to filter click bait headlines from HN automatically? Perhaps one could perform some sort of backward beam search to figure out how likely a particular headline would've been produced by it. If there are words in a headline that the model doesn't know, one could perhaps just let it replace it with one that it knows.
rndn··on Reddit Presents: Upvoted
Maybe I’m mistaken, but it seems to me that Reddit would be much better off as a dontation-based non-profit. It seems ethical that nobody should make money off of user-generated content except the users are compensated for their time (which is unpractical); at least not beyond what’s necessary to keep the system up and running and occasionally add handy features to it. I bet the amount of time it takes to develop and run Reddit fades in face of the collective amount of time there is spent on creating and curating content by millions of people. I’m actually surprised that none of the comments here are touching on this point.
rndn··on The microservices cargo cult
What do you mean exactly? I mean that the status symbol aspect of a cargo cult is a crucial part of its self-reinforcement mechanism.
rndn··on Reddit Presents: Upvoted
I’m not sure what this site is supposed to be for: Is it (a) to generate more ad revenue for reddit to be finally self-sustaining or (b) an attempt to come up to the expectations of Reddit's VC shareholders (i.e. a separate startup to generate more revenue than necessary for self-sustenance).
rndn··on The microservices cargo cult
I think a cargo cult also has something to do with signaling, sort of like a status symbol ("They can't really be Y if they are not X!" -> "Look at us how X we are!"). It's a self-reinforcing meme that is used as a heuristic for value estimation, but usually fails catastrophically because of its heuristic and self-reinforcing nature.
rndn··on The Future of the Internet Is Flow
Beautifully said and matches closely my intuition and how it is depicted at the beginning of the film Her.
rndn··on Firefox 41 can screenshot a single DOM element
I have this script bound to cmd-shift-6: https://github.com/jomo/imgur-screenshot
rndn··on OS X El Capitan on the Mac App Store
Then lets steelman this point of critique: Why doesn't Apple keep their OSes in beta for a couple of months more to release something that is really stable? Is the sample size of beta testers really too small? I doubt 6 months or so later would be a big disadvantage to the competition, quite the contrary, I think releasing more stable 1.0s could be a considerable advantage.
rndn··on OS X El Capitan on the Mac App Store
I think that's an idiom.
rndn··on OS X El Capitan on the Mac App Store
I think the same applies to TeX distributions. It awfully slow for some reason, perhaps it double checks each file to avoid bit errors in system critical files?
rndn··on New Campaign to Help Surveillance Agents Quit NSA or GCHQ
I'm not sure whether evaporative cooling [1] could be a result of that, i.e. that if the sane quit, you are left with the insane. If that's the case, such a campaign would make things worse.

[1]: http://lesswrong.com/lw/lr/evaporative_cooling_of_group_beli...

rndn··on Apple’s New San Francisco Fonts
Helvetica Neue is not optimal either, especially due to the light weight used in iOS 7-8, but it I find it still acceptable.

For my taste San Francisco looks a bit too blocky due to the flattened curves along the vertical axis. It's not bad, but I like Google's Roboto typeface, for example, better.

rndn··on Declining Student Resilience: A Serious Problem for Colleges
Your grand-parent comment was about refuting the conjecture that it's due to helicopter parenting or a weakness of the students; then your parent comment was written as a supporting anecdote, and finally your comment claimed that the anecdote is not in support of the refutation at all, however without showing any efforts to explain why ("nananana").
rndn··on Apple’s New San Francisco Fonts
I agree with that. San Francisco seems optimal for button captions, app names and other more unique, short pieces of texts, but seems sub-optimal for running text.
rndn··on Declining Student Resilience: A Serious Problem for Colleges
Your comment is the equivalent of "no, it's not, nananana"…
rndn··on Declining Student Resilience: A Serious Problem for Colleges
I think a similar development can also be seen in countries without any tuition fees, but my sample size could be too small to say that with certainty.
rndn··on Why the Human Brain Project Went Wrong and How to Fix It
You've got no clue what you are talking about, do you? The thing is that many mega projects fail because of ridiculous reasons; mostly because high ranking people make dicisions outside the range of their expertise. Startup projects have very different characteristics and different stakeholders (i.e. mostly private). If 90% of the money could be saved then that's pretty bad.
rndn··on Against Method
That's right, I should've written "diametrically different".
rndn··on Against Method
Some see it differently: http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/optimalscientist.html

But it would still be anarchic (without the laws of human psychology and social interactions at least). However, it would be an algorithm, and thus, in its broadest sense, a method.

rndn··on Why the Human Brain Project Went Wrong and How to Fix It
There is a great recent Omega Tau episode on the reasons why mega projects often fail: http://omegataupodcast.net/2015/09/181-why-megaprojects-fail...
rndn··on The International Flag of Planet Earth
And that's the fundamental flaw of human nature that prevents collaboration at a large scale: Everything needs a story, a hero and a name. That that slows decision processes down almost to stagnation, and it often results in decisions that aren't based on reason, but on names, heroes and stories. To some extent reputation is certainly a useful heuristic, but at some point everybody has to accept that they are only bags of cells that have to execute the most rational action sequences in order to survive. In that sense I would actually be in favor of a simplistic Earth flag design. We'll likely have to remove any memetic baggage from our decision making in order to survive.
rndn··on The International Flag of Planet Earth
I like this one by a Hello Internet listener:

http://i.imgur.com/WT7TUAf.png

https://www.reddit.com/r/vexillology/comments/37udsu/my_best...

rndn··on Women view professional advancement equally attainable, but less desirable [pdf]
Are you saying that these women subconsciously set the bar for being a good mother unreasonably high by judging their own behavior worse than it is, and thus signal a superior ability to care for a child to the other mothers?

Couldn't it instead rather be signaling to conforming to the modern idea that child raising is an oh so important task?

rndn··on New Horizons: Pluto displays rippling terrain
It's great seeing a big publisher like BBC linking to raw data and full resolution images. It seems they are beginning to understand the medium.
rndn··on Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy shows a higher-quality internet is possible
That title is better, thanks.
rndn··on Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy shows a higher-quality internet is possible
Sorry, I wasn't aware that this was a moderated title. Perhaps something like "The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy shows that high quality online encyclopedias are possible" (not a writer myself). "Trashy" sounds so dismissive, hence elitist in conjunction with "Stanford".
rndn··on The Princeton Companion to Applied Mathematics
Here is the Princeton Press link: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8350.html
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