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sonofgodon “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

https://research.umn.edu/units/irb/how-submit/new-study , find the document that points to "determining that it's not human research", leads you to https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bw4LRE9kGb69Mm5TbldxSVkwTms...

The only relevant question is: "Will the investigator use ... information ... obtained through ... manipulations of those individuals or their environment for research purposes?"

which could be idly thought of as "I'm just sending an email, what's wrong with that? That's not manipulating their environment".

But I feel they're wrong.

https://grants.nih.gov/policy/humansubjects/hs-decision.htm would seem to agree that it's non-exempt (i.e. potentially problematic) human research if "there will be an interaction with subjects for the collection of ... data (including ... observation of behaviour)" and there's not a well-worn path (survey/public observation only/academic setting/subject agrees to study) with additional criteria.

sonofgodon Babies' random choices become their preferences

Hmmmm.

Let's assume that the baby has a perfect ordered ranking of blocks, 3 > 2 > 1, but that the experimenter doesn't know what it is.

There's three scenarios for what the new, third block is: 1, 2 or 3.

If it's 2 or 3, then the rejected block in the first round has a score of 1, and so we'd expect. So we'd only expect the baby to switch in a third of the cases, as opposed to 50% of the cases where the blocks are assumed to be equal.

"However, in the critical test trial that followed, 16 of 21 infants (76.2%) chose the new block (block C; Fig. 1)"

I can't work out the p-value vs. 66% compared to 50%, though...

sonofgodon Life on Venus? Astronomers See a Signal in Its Clouds

The probability of developing a probe, it travelling to Venus and analysing the data from it within that timescale is worse than 50/50.

sonofgodon Signs of Life discovered on Venus and atmosphere

https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1910/1910.05224.pdf talks at length about it -- the result is known to be wildly invalid for gas giants, as they have the temperatures and pressures to have viable chemical pathways to phosphene.

sonofgodon Ask HN: What is your favorite motto?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

"Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won't mistake for the genuine article." -- Nathan Poe

sonofgodon Your mind will not be uploaded (2014)

datapoint, to update to 2020: we can now map a third of a fly brain.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/22/21076806/google-janelia-f...

sonofgodon Japan’s Entry in Flying-Car Race Takes to the Air

I agree.

In two dimensions, a vehicle moving North-South and a vehicle moving East-West have to cross into each other's path at some point, and 2.5D solutions (bridges and flyovers) help but require significant investment in resources that simply isn't possible at every junction.

In three dimensions, this simply isn't the case; we can separate different directions of traffic by height, and provision of dedicated corridors for changing route is merely a matter of making regulation rather than infrastructure.

There's a reason why we've had autopilot on planes for significantly longer than on cars.

sonofgodon Motoko, a programming language for building directly on the internet

* What are the usecases where this [the Internet Computer and/or Motoko] shines?

* Can you expand on Orthogonal Persistence -- is this a "per actor" persistence, or from the references to blockchain is it some sort of shared state between actors?

* How does the internet look/feel/work different once this exists?

sonofgodon Conventional Commits

Once the decision has been made that Node 6 is no longer supported, it is then possible to refactor the code so that it uses appropriate modern idioms, such that the external behaviour is unchanged for Node 6+ but will no longer be parsable by Node 5.

In this specific case, it is both a refactor and a breaking change.

sonofgodon Garmin services and production go down after ransomware attack

That's passing fourteen times further away from the moon. It won't have any effect on satellite operations.

For a sense of scale on satellites: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Earth_orbit#/media/File:Or...

sonofgodon Show HN: Non-grid-based path finder

How do I finish drawing an obstacle?

sonofgodon The Incredibly Stupid One

Part of the recitation of names mentioned in the article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-7ktaSAjGA&t=1950

Less musical than I expected...

sonofgodon Forbidden Haskell Types

There was a part of me hoping that this would be "forbidden" in the sense of "forbidden knowledge".

I was, surprisingly, not disappointed.

sonofgodon U.S. Supreme Court deems half of Oklahoma a Native American reservation

So let's say fraud has a standard tarriff of ten years. And we agree that committing two frauds is twice as bad, so we add them together. Still makes sense. And someone defrauded a LOT of people. Say sixteen THOUSAND.

That's how you sentence someone for 141,078 years... (They served eight.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest_prison_sentenc...

sonofgodon We can't send email more than 500 miles (2002)

POP I believe is "point of presence"; I believe its meaning is "the point at which our network connects to the internet".

sonofgodon We can't send email more than 500 miles (2002)

$ is the shell prompt; he's not typing it. "3 millilightseconds" is the distance light travels in 3 milliseconds, the time a "zero" timeout would take to actually timeout. (This comes directly from the definition of the lightsecond: how far light travels in one second) "miles" is what he wants to see that distance converted to. Turns out it's 558 miles; one mile is 0.00179 of 3 millilightseconds.

sonofgodon YouTube deleted an electronics repair channel [video]

And this costs over $300 an hour. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/...

sonofgodon GNU GCC does not round floating-point divisions to the nearest value

Strongly recommended watching, in my opinion: very clearly describes some quite complicated manipulations, the circumstances in which they work and how to move between those circumstances, to achieve what should be impossible.

If you're going to watch one commentated "tool-assisted" run, this is it.

sonofgodon GNU GCC does not round floating-point divisions to the nearest value

Thank you for the clarification.

sonofgodon GNU GCC does not round floating-point divisions to the nearest value

An example where this matters -- a new Mario 64 trick on the Virtual Console version because summing round-towards-zero numbers over a sine wave cycle produces a small delta which builds up over a couple of days to make a jump possible

https://www.kotaku.com.au/2018/06/the-mario-64-trick-that-ta...

sonofgodon Ask HN: Impossible Ideas?

Temple OS seems impossible, and yet exists.

sonofgodon How Can You Help the Internet Archive?

I think it's more interesting what's missing:

* any mention of funding

* any mention of legal issues with controlled sharing

And I think that's deliberate.

I'm going to read this as "It's OK. We've got this. (But we don't want to say that too explicitly for legal reasons)."

sonofgodon Scraping Roger Ebert’s reviews and finding his favorite movies on Amazon Prime

If you need a more stateful version of requests:

    import requests
    session = requests.session()
    # now use session like you would requests
    session.get("http://httpbin.org/cookies/set/name/value")
    print(session.get("http://httpbin.org/cookies").content)

sonofgodon Saying “All Lives Matter” to Siri Now Redirects You to Blacklivesmatter.com

#nailedit

sonofgodon Researchers: Rubber Bullets Often Cause Death, Permanent Injuries

The quote from the original HTML page is incorrect and dangerous misinformation. From the linked PDF:

> KINETIC IMPACT WEAPONS

> 8.5.4 Skip-firing off the ground causes an unacceptable risk of serious injury.

sonofgodon Recovering the Lost Apollo 10 LM Software [video]

There's some projects. Like arctic archival of github repos: https://archiveprogram.github.com/

Granted, this is only a snapshot, and preservation is a big problem. And you can't easily preserve gigabytes of data in dead tree format...

Generally the best approach is "Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe" but moves to streaming media and game rental services worry me.

There also needs to be a recognition that what we see is often a very small fraction of what existed... most things won't survive, unless successive generations of people continuously care sufficiently about them. Or they're ubiquitous that we'll find at least one...

sonofgodon Study finds political bias skews perceptions of verifiable fact

https://sci-hub.tw/10.3386/w26675

sonofgodon Study finds political bias skews perceptions of verifiable fact

Because they've been asked to. And I expect that if there's hesitation, the survey runners ask them to give their best guess.

And if they don't guess, and move onto the next question, then they're eliminated from the aggregated results.

sonofgodon Prowords

Interesting to hear a few variants from this used in the recent Dragon launch.

"good readback" to confirm that the other side has correctly readback the information just sent "go for ..." you have approval to...

but more often speaking relatively normally: they were having some problems with the hardline, at one point Dragon saying:

"that was an improvement but, uh, completely unreadable"

sonofgodon JWT scope claim compression using a bitmap

That's a great garden path sentence. (or at least beautifuly ambiguous)

I initally parsed it as "[The] James Webb Telescope ([which is a tele]scope) [team] claim [they can] compress [pictures somehow] using a bitmap".