Hacker News Reader

tpeoon Average annual hours worked per country

Reported by whom? What do those quotes mean?

tpeoon Average annual hours worked per country

>Average annual hours worked is defined as the total number of hours actually worked per year divided by the average number of people in employment per year. Actual hours worked include regular work hours of full-time, part-time and part-year workers, paid and unpaid overtime, hours worked in additional jobs, and exclude time not worked because of public holidays, annual paid leave, own illness, injury and temporary disability, maternity leave, parental leave, schooling or training, slack work for technical or economic reasons, strike or labour dispute, bad weather, compensation leave and other reasons

https://data.oecd.org/emp/hours-worked.htm

tpeoon There's no limit to longevity, says study that revives human lifespan debate

Probably not running, and probably not within our time. World population in 1881 was a couple of billion short of that.

tpeoon There's no limit to longevity, says study that revives human lifespan debate

It means that mortality rate doesn't approach 100% around some given age, which would be the hypothetical biological limit. I don't see the issue.

tpeoon Software updates: the “unknown unknown” of the replication crisis

If the statistical significance of your results is algorithm-dependent, shouldn't they be regarded as suspect? Perhaps it might be just a failure of imagination on my part, but I find it odd to think that changing a software package might budge estimates far enough to push them outside the zone of statistical significance unless they were only marginally significant in the first place.

tpeoon The impossibility—and the necessity—of distinguishing science from nonscience

>Popper’s idea that scientific theories must be falsifiable has long been an outdated philosophy. I am glad to hear this, as it’s a philosophy that nobody in science ever could have used . . . since ideas can always be modified or extended to match incoming evidence.

I don't know what is the context of this quote, but this sounds like a deep misrepresentation of Popper's position. As far as I know, he explicitly addresses the issue of ad hoc and auxiliary hypotheses. Unless this is part of a bigger point about some the "fine-tuning" of theories i.e. just how much the main proposition can be off the mark given the additional hypotheses.

tpeoon Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital

I'd say that lambs are more associated with docility than with peace, and it's a very fair association to anyone who has ever had any contact with sheep. Animal symbolism seems to have much more to do with animal traits, animal behavior or supposed animal behavior (e.g. strength with bulls, courage with lions and altruism with the pelican) than anything else and I see no reason to break that pattern. Furthermore, if it were the case that the reverence of some animals were due to degree is which they are useful, compared to the degree to which they are removed from preferred human ecological niches, then the most revered animals on the earth should probably have been fish.

tpeoon Life Is More Than Compounding Money

There is more to life than smiling and talking to people on a daily basis.

tpeoon Aristo – A system that reads, learns, and reasons about science

I'm not sure if 'philosophical' is the right word, but I'm sure there's a haiku in there.

tpeoon Google Is Pushed to Tie Executive Pay to Progress on Diversity

Supposing there's a 1955 Cadillac Series 62 Coupe in the middle of Antartica, which most likely there isn't, it didn't fall there from space.

I have no particular stakes on this discussion besides this one, I just dropped by to say this: I don't see any problem with the construction of that statement. At least as an informal or "folk" logic argument.

tpeoon How to Stop Negative Thoughts in 180 Seconds Without Meditating

>According to the National Science Foundation, an average person has about 12,000 to 60,000 thoughts per day. Of those, 80% are negative and 95% are repetitive thoughts.

What does any of this even mean?

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2012/05/09/th...

>Copernicans like Thomas Digges, Christoph Rothmann, and Philips Lansbergen, spoke of the giant stars in terms of God’s power, or God’s palace, or the palace of the Angels, or even God’s own warriors. [...] The anti-Copernicans were unpersuaded.

If you aren't the guy to be in some way off put by the way science and religion were rubbing together in this instance or by the sort of historical baggage implied in it, then this is perhaps one of the funniest things -- as in genuinely funny -- about Early Modern science and philosophy. That's what I think, at least. Everyone kept invoking God as if that were an argument, but whenever tables turned and people went through the same motions on the listening side they just went "... yeah, nah, I don't think so."

tpeoon How to Grow Stronger Without Lifting Weights (2014)

Where can someone read more about these neuronal adaptation induced injuries?

tpeoon Emissions of banned, ozone-depleting chemical CFC-11 have climbed 25% since 2012

The overall, just-worrying-factor of this aside, I think it's rather surprising that "someone, somewhere" is putting up CFC-11 in the atmosphere and somehow the only way people got a hold of this was by looking at the ozone layer. If that's indeed the case, that would be a reminder that though there's a lot of information about a lot of stuff nowadays, much of what matters to us can still be going on on completely in the dark.

EDIT: Alternatively, and more innocently, this could be due to the end of the life-cycle of several appliances in Second/Third World countries -- or maybe even First World (do you know anyone with an aging fridge?). While a lot of people might have done away with their old fridges a long while ago, those that didn't might be seeing them all fail nearly at the same time.

tpeoon If you’re rich, you’re more lucky than smart. And there’s math to prove it

I think the whole point of the paper which the writers at PBS might have glossed over is simply "we can reproduce this outcome with an extremely simple set of hypotheses". That's how I read it, at least, and that's something that's bound to cross the mind of someone familiar with agent based modelling. And if all they want is produce a power law distribution over income, that's all they need. Further model complications only become relevant if they lead off to new conclusions, or different outcomes from the generally expected outcome under particular circumstances. What you're suggesting would be, on the simple basis of some academic pragmatism -- and the fact that they still have to start from somewhere -- left to further studies, adding stuff to this model while citing the original paper.

But all that you're suggest would indeed bring back at least some degree of agency to the whole thing, even if just as being able to find, sort and act upon opportunities.

tpeoon Ask HN: Anyone designs financial engineering tools as a hobby?

No, but I appreciate people who do.

tpeoon If you’re rich, you’re more lucky than smart. And there’s math to prove it

It would mean what this particular variable has been operationalized [0] to mean. Once upon a time things such as "heat" were just words, and as words they were used in a variety of different implicit senses in which at the time people didn't distinguish -- for whatever reason -- but that people thought that nonetheless were informative about the thing in question. Which is to say that words were used as heuristics, partly as reasonable descriptions, partly as expressions of gut feelings. With the association of heat with thermal expansion and the development of better apparatuses (e.g. the ordinary mercury column thermometers) as well as the diffusion of this concept among laymen though stuff such as weather prediction, it became the most salient form of "heat", and thus the standard use of the word when unqualified came to mean just that: what a thermometer reads. But other forms of heat i.e. the personal feelings of heat associated with climatic comfort, or the action of capsaicin or even wounds -- and this is the origin of the word "inflammation" -- came to be used only when qualified. These are all said to be "subjective heat". Now, I can only claim that all that I've said is merely opinion, since I haven't quite yet worked out to properly cite just who might have said this prior to me and for what reasons -- and which I currently wont, because it's scattered over stuff and I don't know even how to begin -- so this is all provided as is.

About ordinality, as opposed to cardinality, I can only say that I didn't see the connection at the beginning, but now that I've thought a little while about it, it does seem like a philosophically uncomfortable idea. But I'm not going to be the one to say why, at least not now.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operationalization

tpeoon If you’re rich, you’re more lucky than smart. And there’s math to prove it

What do you mean by an ordinal scale, and what does that imply? I'm completely blind on this usage of the expression.

tpeoon If you’re rich, you’re more lucky than smart. And there’s math to prove it

tl;dr path dependence.

tpeoon IBM bans USB, SD cards, flash drives and portable devices from every office

I too thought of it as being draconian at first but come to think of it, USB drives seem much less important nowadays than they seemed back in 2007. They're still prolific, but they aren't thought of as a boon as they once were. Maybe IBM is onto something.

tpeoon Library Genesis is down

At one point one has to ask oneself: what's even the point intaking down a website? I was the work of someone else and not of chance, as were the other cases in which libgen/scihub were inacessible. But really, at this point it probably takes more effort to take down a website to put it up on another domain. It probably doesn't take more than a couple of hours, at the worst case, while take downs -- if they have any bureaucratic existence -- must have been parked at someone's office for longer than that. Why these people still pretend they control anything on the internet?

tpeoon Gödel and the unreality of time

Left as an exercise for the reader.

tpeoon Literary fiction in crisis as sales drop dramatically

What if I bought a book with the intention of reading it, but with no established reading schedule or deadline to finish?

tpeoon A Map Showing How Much Time It Takes English-Speakers to Learn Foreign Languages

I think the variance among grammars is smaller than variance among vocabularies. Just take any two romance languages. Their grammars will be much more similar than their vocabularies are. This, I think, suggests that a large part of the difficulty involved in learning a new language is actually due to changes in vocabulary. Trying to learn a language with completely different words seems like a Stroop task on steroids.

tpeoon Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

"Wall Street is investing into the new pyramids. Here is why."

tpeoon Some Rules for Historians (1973)

What would be some examples of "scientific" historical works?

tpeoon MINIX – The most popular OS in the world, thanks to Intel

Everybody loses.

tpeoon A simple anonymous wiki

I see. But it seems rather unnecessary, specially given that it's only shown on the article itself. If it were displayed along search results or recent edits, I'd get it. But as it is it doesn't seem to do much.

tpeoon A simple anonymous wiki

I really like it. But why the line count?

tpeoon The Minimalists want you to be happy with less

The minimum might be a non-zero positive value.