skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article attacks falfsificationism in part on the basis that scientists don’t seem to actually behave according to “naive falsficationism” in which you supposedly should immediately throw out a theory as soon as you get some conflicting empirical data.

The article notes that collecting empirical data to falsify a theory depends on auxiliary theories (eg testing the idea that smoke causes cancer in rats depends on our ability to precisely define and identify when cancer is present) and so most scientists will question these auxiliaries rather than the main theory if conflicting data comes out. This is presented as evidence that scientists don’t actually practice falsficationism.

This whole discussion completely ignores uncertainty and the fact that theories describe not only relationships between variables but also involve parameters that need to be estimated.

If I fill a rat cage with smoke and the rats don’t get cancer, I don’t immediately assume all previous studies were wrong. This isn’t ignoring my duty to falsify, it’s realizing that the theory that smoking causes cancer describes a causal relationship between variables (smoking -> cancer) it also implicitly or explicitly depends on parameters (in this case, how much and how long a rat must be exposed to smoke to cause cancer at some incidence rate). Given that many other studies found the causal relationship, it is more likely that my experiment messed up the parameters of the causal model (eg I didn’t administer smoke long enough) rather than messed up the causal relationship. And parameter estimation is subject to uncertainty.

Now if I’m absolutely sure I’m getting all my model parameters correct, and I can only be confident if other people get the same results. Then I’m moving toward falsifying the theory.

The point is that science involves positing theories, and theories are descriptions of causal relationships and generally involve parameters. Much of science is just estimating model parameters given that we assume some model to be tentatively true. You assume your model to be tentatively true, eg smoking causes cancer, now you need to estimate the effect size which is a parameter problem.
All serious GCs end up being a combination of reference counting and tracing, given enough time.
> Is your statement that 'only falsifiable claims are meaningful' itself falsifiable? If so, what sort of experiment would you set up to test it?

As a mathematician, I've always looked on this issue with some bemusement. Physicists are particularly egregious in their abuse of mathematical notation, yet get very fussy about what constitutes "proof." If we consider a result measured to "five nines" of uncertainty -- scratch that -- if we consider a million results measured to "five nines" of uncertainty, than we're almost certain to have "proved" a falsehood. And that's assuming that everybody is using complete models with no missing variables (protip: they're not). And then they turn around and heap scorn on "soft sciences" which deign to apply scientific methodology to systems too small, and far too complicated for such simplistic modeling, where experimentalists jump through extraordinary hoops to avoid ethical disasters.

The need for falsifiability is a strongly-held opinion. And don't get me wrong, it's a great rule of thumb. From a mathematical basis, I can take a stab at your question. If you have a million data points, you can find a million-degree polynomial to fit it. If you're allowed to adjust the polynomial every time we make a new observation, it's unfalsifiable. However, that approach is rightly seen as problematic because the predictive power (that is, meaningfulness) is zero. But of course, this is only an existence proof (aka, an anecdote), that some unfalsifiable theories are meaningless. It doesn't prove that all unfalsifiable theories are meaningless.
How would you define and reason about integration without infinite series? Genuinely curious if someone has tried to do that.
Ask HN: Getting traffic to your MVP – how did you do it?
Hi everybody!

Early testing and working with MVP's is super important but I am struggling figuring out how to get some traffic to the website that can be converted to feedback.

What are your thoughts? Any methods or mediums that have worked for your particularly well?

I appreciate all the help.

Take care,

Valentijn
Really nice! One suggestion would be to have a list of resources for slightly more theoretical materials, so curious students can be exposed to deeper parts of ML (of course, such materials need links to applied tutorials like this). Perhaps can be done through the pull requests of the community.
What if it was a neutral experience or even a positive one? I would think detention alone would be a deterrent. Infrequent contact with loved ones, no agency to set your life in the direction you want. I think decreasing recidivism should be a goal and we should be willing to spend money to help make it happen.
This article is correct, but this the points it brings up about discoverability are somewhat misrepresented. iPhones usually make it easy to do simple things and hard to complicated ones. That’s why you can see tech illiterate people being able to use iPhone so well: they just tap on things and scroll, and it usually works. But these people have no need or can get by without accelerators or advanced features, so iOS chooses to hide them. I’m not sure if this is the ideal design, but it does allow for visually pretty products that work a lot of the time. Note that Apple has recently started moving away from the iOS 7 design of “minimalism is the best”, so some of the things mentioned in the article are not relevant anymore or significantly less of an issue.

Also,

> The Magic Mouse works differently than the track pad, which is different than gestures on the iPhone or tablet. Why?

I have never seen this be an issue? On macOS, you scroll with two fingers because you have a cursor, and on iOS you use one. Since Magic Mouse has an alternate way of moving the cursor, you can actually use both methods.
But as we know, these examples are not 'great', they're lousy explanations because they are not testable. Good explanations are another matter altogether as Deutsch points out in his criticism of the instrumentalist view of quantum theory.
The author makes some good points, but does not propose his own criteria for what distinguishes a good theory from a bad theory, which seems like a cop-out to be frank.

I imagine a big appeal of falsifiability in its early days, stemmed from its opposition to religious dogma. Imagine dealing with someone whose answer to every question comes back to God. "Why did the patient die?" "Because God decreed it." Talking about germ-theory must have been a massive improvement over theology, hence why ideas like falsifiability must have arisen to provoke people to think in more critical ways.

My own standard for evaluating theories comes down to the following: The simplest explanation that best fits existing data, and makes useful predictions for the future.

"Simplest" because we need to prevent overfitting.

"Fits existing data" because the whole point of a theory is to explain what we see around us.

And "useful predictions" because it will actually provide practical benefit to us. As opposed to a theory like "God decreed it", which may be extremely simple and error-free, but provides us with no practical benefit at all.

As I see it, falsifiability is a side-effect of the second and third requirements. If a theory is making useful predictions, we might as well check to see if it's accurate. And if it's not, there's no point in holding on to a theory that's making faulty predictions. Falsifiability, in this perspective, isn't a requirement in and of itself - it's a natural consequence of the requirement that theories be useful and fit any data at hand.
I have been in a number of workplace situations where I try to accurately convey uncertainty of outcomes and people latch onto that part, and not the ~95% accurate core message I am really saying.

Then they go to ask an overconfident jerk who is maybe 10-20% correct, but expresses it as 100% certain.

Then I get the reputation for being the one who never knows what he is talking about, and the next time something comes up they won't even ask me, they will go straight to the overconfident one who consistently gives bad advice with no room for doubt.

So I guess the short way of saying it: I think it's great to communicate when you are not sure, but you need buy-in from everyone that this is what everybody does. You can't have people that assume uncertainty is weakness, or expect that the world is more certain than it is. And it can get troublesome when you have a mix of different levels of honesty and humility. People get shafted for being honest.
Flappy Bird Demake that fits in a tweets worth of JavaScript
I specifically referred to western pseudo-democracies
What’s unclear is the degree to which these construction problems are unusual for a project of this magnitude, especially given some fairly one-off designs.
Addition:

I have been working with AdWords for some targeted traffic, although it is quite expensive. Maybe it is still the go to option but would love to hear your thoughts and experience.
>A cynical man could be inclined to think that with this change, they casually removed a possibility of pilots/airlines realizing the existence of MCAS: "we have thrown off the right switch to unlink the autopilot from the trim motor and there is still something making automated stabilizer inputs, what could it be?"

It's worse actually. They've taken a procedure, and are raising it on a pedestal as if to say "See, this is how a 737 flies! It's all right there! You can stop looking now!"

It's as if they don't want anyone to realize that this plane simply does not fly like a 737. Which is what has been getting shouted from the rooftops since the first disaster.

What I find wickedly ironic was it was exactly Boeing's insistence to "not inundate" flight pilot's with technical information, and give an accurate accounting of the vast differences in the minute details of the aircraft that created the problem.

Someone looked at the checklist item of "both stab trim switches to cutout", didn't look into what that actually meant, and changed the plane to fit the procedure. This change cost extra effort. Instead of using the same switches and wiring they were using before, they actually degraded the granularity of control of the plane to hide the differences.

I can't imagine the thought process at the time. Be nice to see what the documentation turns up.
Which is why I find helium balloons so damn distasteful. Probably the amount of helium used in balloons is not all that significant in reality, but helium balloons are complete vanity throwaways, so it is more of a question of principle and symbol.
> but classic music or pos-rock are a very effective way to cancel environmental noise.

That might not be the case if you are an obsessive classical music listener. Personally, as a fan of the Baroque played on period instruments etc. (the "historically-informed performance" style), the muzak versions of Bach played in public places really grind my gears.
Also https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/05/10/helium-short..., via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19888138.
Not how we use it now, but the total amount of helium needed to run an MRI machine (with recapture) isn't all that much. Devices like acoustic cold fingers can use a very very small amount of helium to create a steady heat pump. Currently, such devices are not integrated into MRI machines because tubs of liquid helium are cheaper, but there is no reason why we couldn't build a closed-cycle MRI machine that didn't use any net helium.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse_tube_refrigerator
> This means that a theory is never falsifiable simpliciter, but only relative to a set of background assumptions. Therefore, if we say that a theory is only scientific if it’s falsifiable, then it follows that no theory, not even a theory as successful as Newton’s law of universal gravitation, is scientific. Of course, this is absurd, so falsificationism is false.

You can consider the union of the theory and background assumptions to be a single theory. The premises do not imply that no theory is scientific.

An analogy to mathematics is pretty apt. The Riemann hypothesis (RH) is falsifiable in the crude sense described, but cannot be proven or disproven without an axiomatic basis. If you were able to derive a contradiction from RH and some other accepted theorems, you would think that falsifies RH. However, if you wanted a more concrete picture of what was proved, you might reduce the other theorems to Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory (ZF) so you have the result that RH + ZF is inconsistent/false. Maybe in some other axiomatization RH is true, but the general community accepts ZF so that means RH + ZF is false effectively means RH is false.

I do agree with some of the sentiment of the article. There should be thought about how to actually test what we say we are testing (not having a reliance on background assumptions) and to accept negative results rather than just find something to blame.
Thanks! I guess I missed it.
The Undermind Episode 22 – A Podcast about Brood War AI
Discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19887816
Here's a specific example. Claim A: "If nothing is wrong with your experiment or analysis, you will observe that the speed of light in a vacuum is the same in all inertial reference frames up to experimental uncertainty." Claim B: "If nothing is wrong with your experiment or analysis, you will observe that the speed of light in a vacuum is different in every inertial reference frame up to experimental uncertainty."

Every experimentalist realizes that their real result is "I didn't make a mistake -> the answer is X," not "the answer is X." That's the correct way to encode an experiment in logic, leaving aside the high sophistication of how "I didn't make a mistake" gets treated in practice.
I'm pretty sure that's not possible, since the integral is defined as a limit of Riemann sum.
Why would reading be better at conveying this info then video
I am unable to understand how people in Manhattan are so divided by this development. It is just a bunch of buildings.
Does listing on ltse absolve the company ofthe standard rules around going public like Sox compliance?
Pilots need access to a toilette, but also there are rare cases where pilots need to look out of side windows. There's also flights with crew changes. And the very rare case of crew incapacitation. A case where a pilot needed to gain access to the cockpit but couldn't, Germanwings Flight 9525.
Is what you are asking is to have challenging remote work, without being a senior developer? If so, it's going to be difficult.

Most companies aren't going to give you challenging work, unless you have the experience to handle it. This is happens even more with remote work, because you will be unsupervised for long periods of time.
> Many of the residences were sold to foreign owners.

There isn’t a section of NYC to which this does not apply.

All over Manhattan and in 7+ figure properties in every borough, the percentage of foreign buyers is higher than ever.

This doesn’t even take into consideration the phenomenon of foreign investors in the multi-family rental and flipping market.
It’s nice to see these initiatives. A couple of points of feedback:

- There’s a lot of talk about open but I want to see names, faces, keys, of the people in control. Who runs the domain? DNS? Etc. Who is behind this?

- What’s the point of mirroring NPM? Why not fork the registry and add your own features that aim to make it more reliable and secure?
Would we (as adults) be able to learn a totally new language, unrelated to ours (say, Chinese, for those of us who speak Indo-European languages) just from being dropped in China and listening to conversations in Chinese all day? It would be an interesting experiment to do.
Germany also does a lot of other things right. The problems in the US with regards to the penal system are largely rooted in the fact that we can't be arsed to treat anyone in this country decently, except maybe a few of the ultra rich.

Everyone else:

Fuck you if you get sick. Not our problem.

Fuck you if you have a kid. Not our problem. Maybe keep it in your pants next time.

Fuck you if don't need and can't afford a mansion. No, we absolutely don't believe that the insane square footage and cost inflation of housing has anything to do with our homeless problem. Why are you bringing up crazy talk like that?

Fuck you if you want an education. We are going to load you up with student loans that will ruin your life for decades to come and that you mostly can't discharge via bankruptcy, unlike most other forms of debt.

Then we say the so-called 99 Percent are irresponsible and ill behaved and not a product of our shitty system that is actively chewing up citizens and spitting them out.
This was not a discussion pro or con nuclear power. I don't consider you evil because you are pro nuclear power. I consider you evil because you so easily dismisses as acceptable human suffering and death.

Just imagine your own grief and rage if it was your own children who got sick and died because someone else in a distant past just didn't care about what they did to your local environment.

I consider it one of the greatest problem we as humanity has right now that so many seem to be incapable to sympathise with people just because they are distant (in time or space). A death of a child or a spouse hurts as much in the Middle East or in thousand years (most likely) as it does in the US in 2019.
> If you were stupid enough to attach the PIN codes to the card then you're liable for anything done with it by law. Dispute process is trough the court system.

Regardless of the stupidity, that's still a pretty poor outcome. I assume the same applies if you were shoulder surfed, or you're an early victim of a newly discovered security bug? Or if you're kidnapped and forced to perform a transaction? It's kind of ridiculous to be made to have an item that creates essentially unbounded liability for you. This is exactly what I mean about "identity theft" morphing to be considered a real thing. This is commercially expedient, but utterly unjustifiable to those caught on the other side of it.

> It is already being done - national ID as loyalty program. Though it is not considered an issue because both card payments and loyalty programs already have all the same information

So you're saying there's no technical aspect that prevents stores from obtaining your identity? That's an outright failure. I've personally moved back to strictly paying cash for groceries [0], so this would certainly not be a welcome development for me.

> There's also the national and EU privacy laws that give one the right to be forgotten.

This is kind of the crux in that you're essentially trusting national laws to police the companies' use of the identifiers, and reign in their worst abuses. This is basically a non-starter in the US - industries basically buy the laws they want, and do whatever they like behind closed doors.

And sure, maybe we'll get to a future where GDPR-style anti-surveillance rights come to the US, are found to be workable, are enforced, actually enter into our culture, and further augmented with laws making it illegal to collect national identifiers in the first place (for anything but a narrow list of purposes) - only then would it make sense to discuss strengthening identifiers. Until then, it carries heavy downsides to the individual person.

[0] For the sale prices, ask the cashier to swipe the store card, enter a random phone number, or periodically sign up for new discount nyms with junk information. Which is all only possible because stores don't clamp down too hard, because requesting eg SSN would scare people away.
I have a friend that is a professional diver and he says he was told from his gas supplier that there is no helium shortage. According to that guy, one of the places helium comes from is natural gas wells, and we have a lot of them.

So what's the truth?
Verizon charges about $80 for unlimited data.
Because you spend more time on it? My reading is definitely slower than youtube videos. And still a bit slower than most lectures.
>If my idea clear, //

Did you do that on purpose? "[M]y idea is clear" is better, but still not great, not UK native at least. But then you said "if the idea they want to express is clear" later, which is perfect; so just switch "they" <-> "I" and you have a better phrase.
the latter is true, the former isn't - Ref counting is the first automatic memory management (actual name of the field) technique you learn in some of the seminal works.

Then you learn why it sucks and not for taking space for counter.
How much overlap do you think there is between the two groups you mentioned?
Writing a book is like writing a thesis. I decided I was going to write a book - it ended up being nine months, 55,000 words and 400+ footnotes. Every sentence was rewritten multiple times. And this was designed to be a breezy, accessible read - something you could read on your phone over the course of a day.

I write a blog as well. Writing a post takes three to five hours, to come up with a good linkable article. I've got this down, I think.

Today I tried uplifting a blog post to material for the next book. 1,500 words ... five hours, to bring the material up to date and up to book quality.

I like and respect books a whole lot more now.
Reginald Fowler, man tied to missing Bitfinex funds, out on $5M bail
Rust's region management also falls under automatic memory management, just "compile-time elided"
Two year olds are certainly taught to scroll. Its not a natural human gesture. In fact, what they're actually taught is to just try scrolling everything to see what happens because there's no way to know. This is why you see kids trying to scroll on televisions now.
“Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.”

― Alan Kay

Apple used to live by that quote, but maybe they ignore the latter part now.
What's wrong with taxing Netflix?

Internet companies have been able to avoid paying a lot of taxes, but that's not going to last forever.
Gotta love deregulation. How many institutions are left? Any? CFPB, EPA, HUD, Interior are all run by people that don’t believe in their missions. It’s all about undermining from inside. Who protects the public when private rights of collective action are forbidden by arbitration agreements and the government has been captured by private interests?