skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Many scientists receive only cursory training in statistics,

This seems to be true (at least I have many younger colleagues who are woefully ill informed about even basic stats.) but it's very strange.

Most of what I learned of statistics, including tests for significance and regression, I learned in senior high school at the age of 17.

Learning not to search of correlations like this is pretty much equivalent to ensuring that you do not over fit your data set which is surely such conventional wisdom that no one getting a scientific education in the last sixty or seventy years should have missed it.

I'm aware that there is a lot of highly sophisticated statistical analysis that I don't know about but things like p value are not among them.
Point taken. I think the kind of bias that is most insidious is bias that is not easily recognized and affects hard news. The most important issue is "can I trust what I read here?" The most dangerous kind of bias would be bias that affects articles that are presented as fact and has the effect of deceiving the reader without them being aware of it.

>> I'm not sure how you'd objectively define high standards or trustworthiness except in a circular manner.

Firstly, the examples of bias in that link you provided don't affect trustworthiness. Second, I'm not sure how you might define those terms, but one way to measure a trustworthy publication would be to ask people if they trust it. In other words, you would be measuring its reputation.
Sure, but the Netherlands being such a small country doesn't have the "need" for higher speed limits. I know the same holds true in Switzerland, where crossing the country basically takes a 3-hour drive, so there is not much you can gain from going a bit faster.
Cassini set for first Saturn gap plunge
You can't compare population densities that way. They vary far too much from place to place. In the US, for instance, 2/3 of the population lives east of the Mississippi River. Most of that other 1/3 lives on the west coast (largely California), while states like Wyoming are almost completely empty (~500k people total). Also, if your number includes Alaska, that skews it horribly because Alaska has an enormous amount of land and very little population.

Similarly, the Nordic countries are not homogeneous: most of the population lives near their southern borders (on the Baltic Sea), while their northern areas are barely populated at all. It's very similar to Canada: most of the population there lives within 100 miles of the southern (US) border.

So you can't compare population densities like that: you have to focus on specific areas. What's the population density of Malmo versus Philly? Stockholm vs. DC? And even here it's hard to compare, because for instance "DC" could mean just the District itself, or it could mean the much larger metro area around it, and all parts that are reasonably commutable. Most of the "DC" population lives outside of DC.

Offhand, I'd say Sweden has substantially better public transportation because most of the population lives in a few large cities, and also because it's a better-managed country that invests more in infrastructure for the common good.
> we've got a lot of dynamic speed signs which show a speed limit which fits the current traffic conditions.

> Rush hour - 80 km/h

Does "rush hour" mean something different in Germany? You couldn't go 80 km/h in rush hour if you tried.
Sweden has its share of problems. It's not a fantasy state where everything is hunky-dory. The south of Sweden is a European hotspot for anti-semitic violence, for example. It also currently has a spate of hand-grenade attacks by organised crime, the only area of its kind in the West[1].

As for 'incredibly homogenous', they have a larger foreign-born population (15%) than the US (14%) or the UK (12%). While that number doesn't tell the full story, sure, it does show that Sweden isn't some hermit-state. And it's neighbour Norway has the highest immigration rate of any western democracy that isn't a city-state.

Trying to find reasons to exclude Sweden as a comparator is basically condoning bad behaviour. It's not a perfect fantasy state; they're just doing really well in the quality-of-life stakes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_grenade_attacks_in_Swe...
All Windows binaries are signed. Changing the embedded PNG will void the signature. Not sure what Windows will do if explorer.exe has a bad signature.

There is also a Windows system integrity checker service which disallows changes to protected Windows files, and repairs them automatically (using a cached copy).
chamera -> camera
Desperate Families Driven to Black Market Insulin
Why You Should Eat Your Airplane Boarding Pass Once You Take Your Seat
As someone who's been through the pain of making UE3 fit for a game it wasn't built for that's one the best nuanced answers I've seen on the subject.
Any numbers on latency Envoy adds for each request ?
That's terribly judgmental, friend.
The paper:

http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(17)3...
What's wrong with justified envy anyway?

Why is it ok to normalize 1 instinctual response (greed) but not the other (envy) ?
Adobe effectively forced Apple to build the Carbon API for OS X delaying the release by a year or more.
TypeScript vs. Flow, part II
Welcome to humanity. I doubt Facebook cares a lot of its users as well. They are living off the network effects of an incumbent monopoly.
Ask HN: What was the 3rd party library that was used to hack HipChat?
https://blog.hipchat.com/2017/04/24/hipchat-security-notice/

They don't disclose what library it was. They may be waiting until that library can be patched etc.

Anyone have ideas on what it was?
The import statement just loads new commands into the command line environment.

You can get to a desktop (after importing the gui commands) via:

$ desk

The screen will appear blank. (The default desktop is black.)

The shortcut to open a terminal window while in the gui is Alt+t.

The file explorer is Alt+o.

Create new folders with: Ctrl+Alt+f.

I know these shortcuts work on ChromeOS, haven't tested them on any other platforms.

After nearly 5 years of development, there is soooooooooooooo much more to this thing.
Hmmmm. That website is ... unconvincing. At best.

The heart of De Correspondent is our founding document from 2013 – a manifesto of sorts – and these core principles have informed how we’ve built De Correspondent ... 1. De Correspondent provides an antidote to the daily news grind. 2. De Correspondent challenges oversimplification and stereotyping.

Here are the top four headlines from the "selected stories from our archives" section on the front page:

"This is how we can fight Donald Trump’s attack on democracy"

"If Shell knew climate change was dire 25 years ago, why still business as usual today?"

"We’re heading into dark times. This is how to be your own light in the Age of Trump"

"How billions vanish into the black hole that is the security industry"

These headlines read exactly like a typical front page of the Guardian. How is this "challenging oversimplification" or being "an antidote to the daily news grind"? I can find content like that anywhere on the internet for free, its value is literally zero.

The Manifesto itself does not seem very consistent. It says things like:

Correspondents are fair and independent, yet also explicitly subjective

and

De Correspondent is ambitious in its ideals, yet modest in its claims

after making a series of decidedly not modest claims. It also has this amusing statement:

Although De Correspondent is a commercial, for-profit enterprise, we do not strive to maximize profits for shareholders. A profit ceiling has been stipulated in our statutes: Any profit distribution may not be greater than 5% of revenues.

But 20 seconds googling throws up a claim that the average profit margin in the newspaper industry is around 3.2%, which sounds about right. Average profit margins across all industries are 10% but the news industry is famously in decline and laying off employees, so 10% would be far too high. Aiming for 5% profit margins as if it's some great sacrifice indicates that either they believe their readers don't know much about business, or they themselves don't know. Neither possibility makes me want to subscribe.
A mitigation strategy here is to delay implementing any new feature for a single customer, in order to query your other customers as to whether they need the same or similar feature. Oftentimes you will find other customers who are interested, even if their exact needs are slightly different from the first customer's request.

Best case scenario you get to build the feature once, based on a spec that fits the needs of a larger pool of customers. This reduces the overhead of more customers inevitably requesting similar features weeks or months down the line.

Worst case scenario you still wind up releasing a feature that only one customer is going to use. At least you've tried your best to fold more customers' needs into a single unit of work. Better to have asked and found no takers than to have not asked and wound up with repeated requests for similar features once it's too late to combine the work.
I don't think that passing makes any sense on this kind of road. It's just bad for your wallet in both gas and maintenance on your vehicle and also it's bad for the environment.

The chief component in getting to one's destination is the traffic and the second one is number of lights you get stopped out. Since all the lights are timed to 40mph it doesn't make sense to go faster unless they re-engineer the road.

Generally any car that passes me will be stuck at the light ahead and if there is light traffic I will pass them because I have a rolling start and if there is heavy traffic it's all the same.

Staying to the right in this situation only makes sense if you're unable to accelerate at a reasonable speed or unable to go the speed limit at all.
Do people not get that this also shortens the life of the car?

I mean, let's say I use it for a total of 12,000 miles per year. that's 10% of the time. If I rent it out for an additional 50% of the total time, that's going to hit 72k miles in a year! For the average person they are going to have to replace cars ridiculously fast, and increase, not lessen, the burden of car ownership.
The Hidden Author of Putinism (2014)
The article was talking about 55 mph speed limits on freeways -- highways restricted to vehicular traffic only. Roads likely to be used by pedestrians or cyclists will have a limit of 25 to 45 mph.
Say “Hello World” in 10 programming languages
It's unwise to rely on a Wikipedia for legal analysis; at best you should treat it as a good starting point for your more detailed research.
This is what made the article a maddening experience to read, for me. Thankfully the article called out to these practices just a smidge at the very end.

But it seems wrongheaded to focus on 85/15 out of safety, in areas where the safety concerns are for surrounding property, bikers, and pedestrians. I'd love to see more emphasis on designing roads for intended speed limits.
I think it's safe to assume that, while self-driving tech will have broad-reaching DL-AI applications for Alphabet, there is a plan to directly sell the self-driving tech somehow. Otherwise why create the brand Waymo? If it was simply left as experimental Alphabet/Google research I think you would have a stronger point.
Both the US and Europe are about 10M square kilometers in size, with Europe ending up marginally larger.
Even your own map doesn't show that.

The US is 3.797 million mi². Europe is 3.931 million mi².
1. The speed limit should be tied to average driver reaction times, not the engine or safety of the car.

2. Speed limits help maintain a steady flow of traffic.

My father found driving in France terrific because all lanes were limited to 130 km/h. Steady flow, no stress. In Germany, driving on the autobahn is stressful. The speed difference between the lanes is too big. From my experience, it is: right lane 100 km/h, middle lane 140 km /h, left lane “Get out of my way you sucker!!” >180 km/h. Passing someone on the middle lane means taking the left lane and accelerating as fast as possible because the next space ship SUV is coming closer at rocket speed. They tailgate you, sometimes flash lights or use their left blinker to bully you to switch lanes. Because of that, many people cut into the safety distance of the car they just barely passed to get rid of the bully.

The speed difference also causes backpropagating traffic jams. To the observer there is no obvious reason where the slowdown comes from. It was simply created by people driving too fast compared to the car in front of them, having to brake, causing the cars behind them to brake, etc.
This Robot Knows When It’s Confused and Asks for Help – MIT Technology Review
We software engineers do not need to operate heavy machinery, perform surgery, or do anything physical at all, and we even have this fine invention called "Skype". Why anybody in the profession has commute time greater than zero -- I can't understand.
How long does it take for a train to get from London to Paris? A few hours? We have something like that: the Amtrak northeast corridor line between DC and Boston (with stops in Baltimore, Philly, NYC, and others along the way). Going from DC to NYC is probably somewhat comparable, and I think that takes 3.5 hours. However, going from the east coast to the west coast on a train means several days of travel. We do have that too, with Amtrak. It's horribly slow and no one uses it except people who really want the "see the nation on a train" experience. It's also really expensive, because you'll surely want a sleeper cabin for such a long trip.
Huh. I thought it was a law in CA, which it technically is... but with exceptions for highways with two or more lanes in each direction.
I don't think you have to be doing something interesting to be worth conned to. I know plenty of people who are just very pleasant to deal with and are well connected without having special skills. I am not one of them...
I was going to suggest different driver classes as a tongue in cheek solution. Because Americans would love more rules. ;)
I asked something similar when AirBnb announced Lottie, and the team (Jon Gold included) replied with great insights.
I hope you find this helpful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13547053
Upvotes on an anti-capitalist comment on HN?!? Why I never....

To all the 'gracious employers': we are sick of working for pennies while you peddle psychobabble to get us to work harder. The problem is our exploitation. The end.
> Did you even read the article?

Yes, and I directly addressed it's points. Did you read my post? Because you don't seem to address what I've said, and you ignore that I've more directly dealt with the points made in the article than you do in yours.

> 85% of people drive at a safe speed regardless of what the speed limit is.

No, traffic engineers have come to the conclusion that, because speed variance is a significant source of risk, the safest speed limit (considering auto vs. auto issues only) is the 85th percentile speed of traffic on the road, which (at least with patterns of enforcement over the time the rule was found and since) seems not to vary much based on posted limits, in any case.

That's​ the 85th percentile rule, and it's the single most common rule for setting speed limits in the US. Its incorporated in federal guidance, its incorporated in most state laws (though with some exceptions—e.g., school zones, upper highway speed limits—in virtually all of them).

Given that the 85th percentile speed will rarely fall on exactly a convenient numbee, you'd expect nearly half of limits to be below that because of rounding, and add in some conditions which create downward departures in limited cases, and, sure, as the article body says, most (>50%) are below. But that's not the headline's "every speed limit".

Not is it clear, as I stated previously, that the 85th percentile rule is ideal for safety for mixed use. There's considerable global evidence that lower speed limits are better for that.
Nice! (Your DNS is down at the moment, non-validation of WHOIS data. What a world.)
Don't see how that would be effective for speeding though.
U.S. FCC to launch 'comprehensive review' of media regulations
How could "technological civilization" collapse, at this point? We have extremely well-distributed records—spoken, written, digital, and more—of all of our technology and how to use it. "We forgot how" worlds are just impossible at this point, unless we all get a disease that renders us incapable of tool-usage, reading, and speech. (At which point we're not human anyway.)
Lawsuit Challenges Oregon Law Prohibiting Mathematical Criticism Without License
Just be a nice person. That'd not easy if you don't have the social skills but it works for a lot of people.
Police: Armless robot loses fight to drunk man
Kit Picosatellite DIY for Space Education
No one has ever had more control over their life than the privileged few enjoying the 9-5.

In contemporary society, things are nice enough that people typically trade a fraction of their time in exchange for work, income, and reduced risk exposure. This is a nice comfy abstraction over the cold reality that you need resources to live and you need to work and fight to keep living.

The alternatives to this are:
a) socialism/communism type deal where the government controls your work output and resource provision; even if it works out (it usually doesn't), you have far less control than you do now.
b) unspecialized agriculture-based society; every second of every day is spent producing just enough food and material goods long enough for you to raise children that take over when you die. Your options are limited; you are perilously exposed to acts of God (what happens if the crop fails?). You are not in control.
c) hunter-gatherer setup; you are still not in control of your own life. You have no option than to spend the vast majority of your day seeking food (without agriculture you really do need to spend almost all of your time on that work). Ask one of these people what a 'weekend' or 'vacation' looks like.

The reality is, modern society gives you many more options than were possible even 100 years ago. International (and even local) travel is commonplace; you can choose to start a startup or work for yourself; you can choose to buy or not buy hundreds of thousands of products, many of which were not existing or even possible in the recent past; etc. You can even choose to leave it all behind and live on the land.

Don't confuse dissatisfaction with your own life choices with lack of control.
There's a Compelling Reason to Upgrade to Premium Pandora
Why did old PCs have key locks? [LGR Retrospective]
Right, I didn't ask if other options existed but if Americans would choose them. You seem to have answered that question.

I think one reason Americans don't is because they like autonomy and comfort and cars are more autonomous and comfortable than other modes of transportation.
Sure, you do you and academics will continue to use formulations that have worked for about 2500 years or so while you claim it's useless.

Yeesh.
He obviously wants the speed limit on the sign raised to what the actual enforcement is (currently the limit +15 or so).
I guess I could see he might have an axe to grind wrt to his partner's ticket, but if he has a point, they should at least (being representatives of us poor ol citizens) respond to the point and not just slap a fine on him.

Seems incredibly petty.
5 Popular Programming Languages and Their Applications
I am not an anti-capitalist. In fact, I work in a prop trading firm, and Atlas Shrugged is always in my library for a yearly reminder on the direction this world is going.

And I _still_ think this article is a terrible advice. In capitalism, capital is the prime resource, to be gathered and kept. Being an employee is a good start, but I doubt it is a good lifelong strategy.
> It's also much easier to build infrastructure in regions of 447,435 km² than it is for 9.834 million km².

If that's true, so what?

Split it into 20 separate jobs, each equivalent to Sweden in terms of landmass, population, and budget.

Or maybe 48 separate jobs.
I can't really disagree with anything you wrote here, though I'd say that with Snopes and Politifact the clicks are in people thinking you're trying to be unbiased.

>I think it has to do much more with journalistic mindset shifting from duty to inform and disseminate the truth, to some kind of paternalistic mindset of making people form the "right" opinions...

Yeah that's what I'm getting at by criticizing the "explainers". That's exactly what they do...try to get you to have the right opinions. I'm probably giving people too much credit by only referencing the incentive structures, and ignoring or not acknowledging that they are also ideological motives at play.
So... it's the interregional distances between populated regions? Same difference honestly. The argument boils down either way to "US is too big".

Smaller countries or countries where half the country isn't populated (due to geography such as frozen tundra or large mountains), focusing population in a smaller region of that country don't have to deal with as many pockets of low density populations.

Because they're small.
5 MB.

https://gist.githubusercontent.com/riverar/f4a56b91580af1bd3...
Serious question: how do you think one _could_ implement Marx's solutions to the problems he claims he found, _without_ an authoritarian dictatorship? Not thinking so much small, voluntary communes but at the sort of scale of a modern city or State.

I'm pretty sure it was Marx himself who first used the phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat".
Dodo: 6502 Portable Game System Kit
Total Solar Eclipse North America - Aug 21,2017
There's also the issues of roads being designed to be traveled at a certain speed; the limit needing to suit all traffic, including heavy vehicles; and the limit needing to be somewhat suitable for poor weather, because some people don't actually drive to the conditions, especially when the conditions are marginally poor.
Marxism-Leninism might not work as a mechanism for efficient production, but it is mighty effective in exapropriating the rich.

One thing I have thought about recently is that with better ML if it would be possible today to model the economy well enough to now make Marxism work in practice. The soviets tried in the 1960s using linear algebra, but their models were not practicable. At some point it should be possible to model the economy well enough that capitalism is no longer the only viable alternative.