vilhelm_s

This will be a private jet, and they are pretty expensive. Apparently flying in a Bombardier Learjet costs something like $7000/hour [1], while a first-class ticket is more like $1000/hour.

[1] https://www.aircharterserviceusa.com/about-us/news-features/...

CDA 230 immunity doesn't apply to federal crimes, only to civil lawsuits and state crimes. This was prosecuted under federal laws against child pornography, so it would not help them anyway.

I guess it's not specific to academia either. Startups work exactly the same, they tell stories to investors to get grants, and are often staffed with idealistic people straight out of college.

"Haskell's trace function is a refreshing desert in the oasis of referential transparency." --Audrey Tang

Looking back on historical GHC releases, the earliest one available on the web page is version 0.29, released in July 1995, and it already has the trace function. I would guess has been there for a long time.

Yeah, the cited pages don't seem to have any scholarly references, and one of them notes that "the authenticity of the story has been questioned", so I rather doubt it.

The idea of computable reals go back to at least Turing. The idea is that a real number (or an operation on real numbers) is computable if we can compute the decimal digits, one by one. This way, if the user wants to know it to any desired precision, they just have to wait until the computer has printed that many decimals. You can equivalently treat them as terminating computable functions of type (nat -> bool), which computes the n:th binary decimal.

This is actually a quite constructive notion! At least, it works well with intuinistic mathematics, which is why Andrej Bauer is writing about it.

I thought the unreliable airspeed indicators section was particularly interesting because it can be read as a list of everything that the Air France Flight 447 crew did wrong...

The linked document explains this, but it's because there is no federal copyright law for pre-1972 sound recordings. Before 1972 there was no federal copyright law for sound recordings, and then congress did not want to change the state-law copyright status of recordings made before the federal law was passed, so it was intentionally left non-preempted so that state law applies.

It seems his kids are named Reiser too, so presumably they encounter the name quite often? (https://www.mercurynews.com/2012/07/17/jury-awards-hans-reis...)

The responses are not that small-scale, the guidelines call for vaccinating as many children aged 0-5 as can be done with good coverage, e.g. half a million children within 14 days and 1-2 million within 6 weeks.

http://polioeradication.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/sop-p...

Isn't this evidence in the other direction: if the drug already existed and was acquired for $11 billion, then that suggests that they expect the profit to be about $11 billion. Otherwise, wouldn't they bid up the price more?

The government mostly funds basic research, but then there is a lot of work to turn promising leads into products. Googling a bit, in 2017 the pharma companies spent $70 billion on research while the NIH spent $38 billion.

I think it's the "right" price, you want to incentivize companies to try to develop drugs that will do the maximal amount of good.

Like, you could imagine a system where you don't have a free market at all, the government would directly fund both medical treatment (like in Europe) and medical research (like nowhere right now, but you could imagine nationalizing the drug companies). So then, before the hepatitis-c drug exists, you are paying $500k for each liver transplant, and you try to figure out how much money should be allocated to that drug research program. You'd want to fund it at roughly the expected cost saving, multiplied by the probability that the drug development is successful.

In the actual system, if the drug companies try to develop the drugs, and then charge about the same price as the cost of the previous treatment during the time they hold the patent, then their expected payoff (so how much money they will put into research) is the cost of the previous treatment times the probability that they will be successful---so this high price is basically what we would want to allocate anyway. And if the drugs are paid for by the government, their expected spending over all the drugs is similar to optimal amount of direct research funding.

The "bad" pattern he calls out is not exactly the Trioplan soap-bubble style, it's the thing you get from a mirror telephoto lens.

In Trioplan images[1], the light intensity smoothly increases towards the edge of the disk of confusion, and creates a sharp edge. I agree that this looks kind of nice, although it's a quite specialized effect.

In mirror lens images[2], the "disk" of confusion is actually a ring, with two sharp edges rather than just one. This is not at all pretty, and as far as I know basically nobody buys these lenses for this effect.

This actually matters a lot, because other than this, mirrors are superior to refractive glass lenses in almost every way (note that astronomical telescopes are always mirror-based), so if it was not for the bad bokeh we'd all use them.

[1] https://fujilove.com/the-legend-and-the-bubble-bokeh-review-... [2] https://hoaiphai.wordpress.com/2011/10/18/recumbent-review-t...

Based on my experience from using Ubuntu, it's perhaps more accurate to say that the Ubuntu 19.04 (and earlier) compositing window manager is slow enough to make new hardware feel old. It's extremely noticeable.

The blogpost they link to says as much:

> Gnome Shell 3.32 in Ubuntu 19.04 feels slower than Unity and other desktops. If you have a slow machine then it won’t run smoothly. Perhaps more surprisingly even if you have a fast machine then it still would not run completely smoothly.

(https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/boosting-the-real-time-perfor...)

I'm imagining Splinter from ninja turtles.

No, it's not a phonemic alphabet. The idea is that it should have a symbol for each phone, i.e. each sound you can make with your mouth. Different languages will then cluster those phones into different equivalence classes (phonemes), but the standard practice is to pick a representative sound from the equivalence class, and use that as the IPA letter for the phoneme. Allocating a symbol to a phoneme is is odd.

Liskov's work on programming languages is (of course) well known. She then switched research topic to distributed systems and among other things developed the "Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance" (PBFT) algorithm.

I thought this was interesting, because like 10 years ago I had never really heard of her distributed systems work, and kindof thought of Liskov as a one-hit-wonder. But now in the last few years PBFT is suddenly pretty hyped, because it's a key part of a bunch of new blockchains, so maybe she was far ahead of the curve...

I don't know how the 1965 photo was made, but he went on to take more later, apparently in connection with amniocentesis. [0]

> LN: Oh, yes. There has been a revolution by a German optical company called Storz. They have made an endoscope with a diameter of 0.6 millimeters and one that is 0.8 millimeters. So now we can check the human embryo in a very smooth and very nice way.

> NOVA: Do you go through the cervix?

> LN: No, not the cervix. We make a kind of laparoscopy through the uterine wall. You know when the doctors are checking the genes with amniocentesis? We have done a few cases here in Sweden and in Europe during amniocentesis. And there we had the opportunity to take wonderful pictures of the fetuses.

I guess during laparoscopic surgery you typically insert a camera anyway, so maybe taking some additional photos doesn't add so much risk.

[0] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/odyssey/nilsson.html

I mean, a real hologram (made using light interference) is also not Holodeck hard light.

I think it can do both, the gif above the caption "It’s the truly futuristic, deeply immersive display we’ve always dreamed of" appears to project in front of the screen.

The study had 8 people where the surgery caused "very" or "extremely" bothersome visual problems, and 4 people reporting difficulty performing activities due to these; I guess those are included in the 6 dissatisfied people.

So in the study the article refers to, when asked after 6 months "Currently, how satisfied or dissatisfied are you with the result of your LASIK surgery?" on a 6-point scale, the responses were:

    Completely satisfied         69.9%  (151/216)
    Very satisfied               22.7%   (49/216)
    Somewhat satisfied            4.2%    (9/216)
    Somewhat dissatisfied         0.9%    (2/216)
    Very dissatisfied             0.9%    (2/216)
    Completely dissatisfied       0.9%    (2/216)

(this is from eTable 4 in the supplement here: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaophthalmology/fullartic...).

If the FDA guy concludes from this that the procedure should never have been approved, I'm tempted to say that it reveals more about the risk-averseness of the FDA than about the dangers of the procedure.

Why would it? E.g. if mining has a 1% return on investment and there are three actors with 4, 5, and 7 units of hash power, and they reinvest profits into more mining rigs, then a year later they will have 4.04, 5.05, and 7.07 units of hash power---the ratios stays the same.

I'm not sure what effect this judgement even has. The court declared that the search policy was unconstitutional but denied the request for an injunction, so I think right now there's nothing preventing the ICE from continuing to search devices even in that district?

No.

> As part of the relief sought, Plaintiffs seek expungement of all information gathered from, or copies made of, the contents of Plaintiffs’ electronic devices including social media information and device passwords. [...] Although this is not a criminal case, considering the remedy for the unconstitutional search in the criminal context is illustrative of the extraordinary nature of the remedy sought here. Even where law enforcement officers have conducted a search in violation of the Constitution, the “fruits of [the] search need not be suppressed if the agents acted with the objectively reasonable belief that their actions did not violate the Fourth Amendment.” [...] even where criminal proceedings followed a border search that exceeded the bounds of the Fourth Amendment and the fruits of same were suppressed, expungement of the border agents’ files would not necessarily follow. Nor should it where other deterrents to border agents’ unconstitutional searches remain in place. [...] In light of this other relief, including declaratory relief, the Court DENIES the request for expungement of information

https://www.aclu.org/sites/all/libraries/pdf.js/web/viewer.h...

It's not even a circuit yet, this is a district court judgement. It is not a final say.

The Davy Crockett made an appearance in some 1959 plans for an Army base on the moon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Horizon):

> The base would be defended against Soviet overland attack by man-fired weapons:

> Unguided Davy Crockett rockets with low-yield nuclear warheads > Conventional Claymore mines modified to puncture pressure suits