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z2210558

46 karma · joined November 14, 2015

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z2210558··on Sublinear Time Algorithms
Assuming shuffled list: estimate of mean, estimate of cardinality etc etc
z2210558··on The risks of cleaning with bleach and other disinfectants
I thought that smell was chloramines, rather than chlorine itself?
z2210558··on First Image from Sony Star Sphere Satellite Released
"HNHTD"?
z2210558··on 'Bin chickens' learned to wash poisonous cane toads
I’m sorry to have to let you know that the pied currawong is in fact parasitised by the channel billed cuckoo (the world’s biggest cuckoo in fact).
z2210558··on “The entire Human Rights team has been cut from the company.”
The same way traditional media does?

c.f. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_T%C3%A9l%C3%A9vision_Lib...

z2210558··on Ask HN: Where do you escape for non-clickbait thoughtful/informational content?
+1 for this, and for the equally good (but slightly different in tone) New York Review of Books
z2210558··on Reasons to not use PCA for feature selection
L1 regularisation is the usual way (see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lasso_(statistics))
z2210558··on Was China Betting on Russian Defeat All Along?
> ...without being invaded by a dictatorship.

Why only dictatorships?

z2210558··on Very fast rocket
IIRC the light coming from in front of you gets blue shifted, each photon increasing in energy, and the count increases because of the geometric changes you see in the video (the angles in front seem to shrink).

Light from the rear red shifts (each photon has less energy), and there are fewer as some of the (formerly incident) photons "rotated" to the front.

(edit: typo)

(edit: didn't read the question closely, this is about approaching c, not exceeding it)

z2210558··on Israel’s lucrative and secretive cybersurveillance industry
Who's talking about "imminent terror attacks"? Do you think that is the majority of intelligence work? Do you need it to be to justify blackmail?
z2210558··on When we lose weight, where does it go?
Can you give more detail about the fluorescing nucleus? I'm honestly amazed by this (and I have a degree in physics, which I guess is your point).
z2210558··on Fossil
It looks totally fine to me (lines are wrapping normally). Are you sure it's not something to do with your own browser?
z2210558··on ProPublica posts NYPD records, bypassing judge’s blockade
zipped file, with 33000 rows, and most columns chosen from a list of options, so it looks very easy to compress.
z2210558··on 1:60 scale Boeing 777 made from manila folders
This is beautiful.
z2210558··on Venezuelan ship sinks itself after ramming cruise liner with a reinforced hull
I only ever seem to see stories that look a whole lot like propaganda from thedrive.com. Who's behind this site?
z2210558··on Impossible Pork
I believe they're not, since it is designed to appear like something forbidden: https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/3907949/jewis...

edit: reading more closely it seems that you just have to be clear to observers that it's not actually pork.

z2210558··on How Did Indonesia and Malaysia Become Majority-Muslim?
This image [1] comes from "Converson to Islam in the Medieval Period" by Richard Bulliet [2]. The percentages inferred by Bulliet roughly track a sigmoidal curve. He makes an argument in analogy to the spread of a disease through a social network.

It should be noted that the deta is from Iran, but presumably the same arguments apply for Southeast Asia.

[1] http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-69BqAL9ARKg/T1WBF0NwxeI/AAAAAAAAAB...

[2] http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674732810

z2210558··on R generation
I think bit64 gives integer64, but like you I never need large integers - I don't do general purpose programming in R.
z2210558··on How Europeans evolved white skin (2015)
No it's different, and thought to have evolved independently. See e.g. http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/jou...
z2210558··on Are Australians Accidentally Redomesticating the Dingo?
Do you have references for the multiple migrations, especially from India? I know there was this paper: http://www.pnas.org/content/110/5/1803, but I had the impression that hadn't been replicated.
z2210558··on Jawbone of Earliest Modern Human Out of Africa Discovered in Israeli Cave
I wouldn't have said "shit source", but I think he's better viewed as a reasonable populariser than a proper source. He is up with the literature (in the sense that the day after a new paper is published, he blogs about it), but he's not an authority in any way, and some of what he writes about e.g. the gendered aspect of IE migrations is a bit florid and unsupported by facts, as far as I can tell. You'd never find a reputable scientist in the field (lets say someone from Reich or Willerslev's labs) pushing lines like that.

Regarding the Out of Africa (OoA) model, that is definitely still the consensus model. What is becoming clearer is that subsequent to the OoA event, there was substantial admixture within OoA populations, backflow into Africa, and introgression from Archaic Humans (i.e. interbreeding with Neanderthals etc). Razib refers to this as the "Braided streams" model, rather than a model where populations split and then remained isolated.

The real revolution in understanding seems to me to be the role played by human migrations in hte formation of modern populations (i.e. the refutation of the "pots not people" view popular since the 60s.

z2210558··on The 'Manhattan of the Desert': Shibam, Yemen's Ancient Skyscraper City (2015)
It was easyish to visit around 10 years ago - though there was a problem with Al Qaeda.

The civil war doesn't really seem to be a problem in Shibam iteself, (part of Hadhramaut, in the middle of the country, well in "red" territory in this map: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yemeni_Civil_War_(2015%E2%80%9...

Your biggest problem would probably be getting into Yemen itself. You'd need to get to the port of Mukalla and go overland from there.

z2210558··on Fidelity CEO Abigail Johnson says the company is mining cryptocurrencies
Yes, but is there something that Ripple is doing here that could not be done by any non-blockchain distributed system?

The chief value in blockchain seems to be in getting people to agree to do something at all.

z2210558··on SEC announces 'Cyber Unit'
Australia, for one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_enforcement_in_Australia
z2210558··on The Data Science Process
In my experience most are, but there is also some work in operations management and optimisation, product design (e.g. financial products, digital products) and other areas.

I think marketing is the obvious first use case, but in large organisations there are often gains to be made looking at operational data.

z2210558··on Nicotine Normalizes Brain Activity Deficits That Are Key to Schizophrenia
I'm sure that means "smoking or equivalent".
z2210558··on Internet of Things Temperature and Humidity Monitor
It's not just the DHT22's accuracy that's a problem, it's the calibration.

I have 8 of these, and they are up to 30%RH off - both in terms of their readings relative to each other, and relative to the true RH of a saturated salt solution[1]. Moreover, some of them have a strange "stickiness" to certain levels.

I've heard good things about the BME280, and that's what I intend to replace my DHTs with.

[1] See e.g. http://www.omega.com/temperature/Z/pdf/z103.pdf

z2210558··on World's Oldest Gold Object May Have Just Been Unearthed in Bulgaria
> When the ancient Greeks came to Europe from Egypt

What do you mean by this? My understanding is that the Greeks (along with all Indoeuropeans) originated north of the Black Sea?

z2210558··on 1958 Lituya Bay megatsunami
The description of the photo here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lituya_Bay#/media/File:Lituya_... refers to a fishing boat being carried over the spit into the ocean. Perhaps this is what you were thinking of?