skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
IMHO the simple problems with reproducibility (of statictical studies) can be solved with pre-registration, which should become a standard. The rest really is a system crisis.

Imagine: Scientist A uses (a statistical) method M to assert X. People praise A until scientist B uses method M and cannot assert X (which BTW usually doesn't imply X is wrong). People wait for scientist C to use method M and re-check assertion X. People then take the majority vote (or meta-analysis) for true.

That's the way much of science works today. It becomes a problem only in the following situations:

0. People hunt for statistically significant results.

1. X is mostly irrelevant to anyone who does not belong to the in-group of A, B, C, and peers. So nobody else really notices or cares about X.

2. There is no other way to observe any meaningful consequence of X other than by method M -- which eventually results in #1.

3. Method M is really expensive and complex, it's an almost impossible undertaking so that B or C most likely won't get a funding.

4. Everything is ok, actually, but the people who pay for the study don't care about A's methodological fineprint as long as the results play well with their other goals.

The presented list of "factors that build reproducibility" focuses on #0, for which pre-registration is a simple and clean solution. IMHO the list is much to narrow and focused on academic practice, though.
Mr Sellout himself
> I'm okay being hired as a "senior software engineer" and working my way up, but they insist on interviewing me as a staff level, which I clearly am not capable of achieving.

> but it's those damn algorithm questions I just can't get past

I was under the impression there was a minimum bar on the algorithms that applies regardless of seniority and whether you pass the interview as a junior/senior/staff/etc. was mostly dependent on communication, system design interview, etc.
The roots of climate science stretch much further back than you might think
But they're really not dead, they're just different. Writing a postmortem on something that isn't dead is difficult.
/thread

I feel like this kind of "research" is the bulk of neuroscience papers that I see these days. Or they're at least the ones that get shared the most because they claim to explain things that haven't been explained yet.
Yeah I now realise people replying are not agreeing that TV != any audio-visual content.

When TV is attacked there's defenses bringing up digital textbooks.
Anything based on wealth will have the challenging task of valuing assets, which is why the cutoff for where current wealth becomes a factor should be pretty high, so you only have to look at areas generating significant economic activity. One solution could be to limit wealth measurement to liquid assets and real estate -- any real world implementation will only be a heuristic. Better to have false negatives than false positives.

I still maintain the easiest solution is to fix and improve graduated income brackets. They are so ridiculously broken and most likely the main driver of increased wealth inequality in the US over the last few decades, and yet somehow are not the focus of the issue. We also already have the infrastructure to measure economic income activity -- it's just tweaking rates and thresholds.
> I also remember reading somewhere on HN that the creators of Protonmail have some dubious ties

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21680293

Interestingly, u/protonmail's contributions is littered with comments trying to defend ProtonVPN against such allegations here on HN. I guess, user paranoia is the bane of privacy-as-a-service upstarts.

Re: Zoho:

As a Zoho user myself, I must point out that though India isn't 5 eyes or 9 eyes, it has some of the most restrictive laws in terms of Internet freedom and is a surveillance state.

Ref: https://internetfreedom.in/
No, more like denying something on the tail end of an entire essay in favor of it, followed by literally in the next sentence saying that there might not be another option rather than the abhorrent one is a way of minimizing and gaining acceptance of the abhorrent argument.
Oh, i assumed "Tiberian phylosophy" meant the teachings of Kane:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kane_(Command_%26_Conquer)
ReCaptcha is about the only google product that I still have to use... some 15% of websites I use eventually make me reCaptcha.

Everything else is blocked with pihole/uMatrix/pf. Been this way for about six months now. Occasionally I still youtube-dl from a server and scp the file locally.
Life-hacking democracy:

Hofeller had manually entered "%18_ap_blk" into nearly every draft of his mapping software when he mapped North Carolina's districts; "%18_ap_blk" is a formula that shows the number of African American citizens of voting age in each district

He made a custom software program already in the 1970s to disenfranchise blacks.

(From Wikipedia.)
Workers working for FANG in the USA also have much better quality of life than Americans in general.
I've heard this criticism a lot, but I don't really understand it. In comparison to Lisps, Haskell, and other languages I love, of course Go is inexpressive, but that's part of the point. In comparison to languages with which Go actually competes, e.g. Java, C++, etc, (uncharitably, various flavors of Blub) I don't see it as particularly inexpressive. In particular, although Rust ostensibly has some very high-level features like macros, in practice they are only used in particular very narrow domains and are discouraged elsewhere, so I consider Rust to be a less expressive language than Go overall. My measure for expressiveness is simply amount of code divided by functionality. Go seems to hit the sweet spot for expressiveness for languages in this class, without requiring programmers to learn a totally new paradigm. In short, "blub done right". Whereas Rust seems to be aiming very specifically at C++, trying to design a C successor as we would do it today.
Antony Beevor mentions this story his book about Stalingrad. It's in reference to Hitler's stategy on the Eastern front.
Games Done Quick 2020 Livestream
I read about a blind guy who had a camera hooked up to an array of electrodes on his back and eventually was able to 'see' using it. That was a long time ago, but it looks like it's still a thing nowadays, see 'Brainport' [1] and 'Visual Prosthesis' [2] (aka 'bionic eye'). It's amazing how plastic brains and nervous systems seem to be!

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/device-lets-blind...

[2]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_prosthesis
Ling scars!
Extremists attack military base used by US forces in Kenya, 3 Americans killed
When it comes to Safari, given their widely known non-compliance with W3C standards, I'd wager this to be a bug/non-compliance within Safari.
Most IDEs today should really drop the "I" as they tend to be a collection of loosely connected tools rather than a truly integrated environment. In some cases that's not a bad thing, but the "I" is vestigial.
While I see what you're getting at, and don't disagree, I have also noticed that the people that stay put while everyone else jumps ship provide a line of consistency that can get them promoted up. They say the stupid ones stay, and the smart ones leave.... but it isn't always intelligence that gets one promoted in such cases.
Everyone spends their whole lives trying to answer that.
Practicing corporate attorney (entering third year at a big law firm) interested in moving into product, BD or biz ops. Used to advise crypto clients, work with some startup clients now.

Location: SF
Full-time
UW-Madison BA / UCLA JD
Resume & refs available on request
Looking for some advice here. I am generally happy with KeePassXC (switching from browser-remembered passwords was a big step forward for me), but I have a feeling that it might not be a perfect solution for me.

I have four devices that are being used on almost-daily basis:
- work PC
- home PC,
- laptop,
- smartphone

work and home PCs are often on at the same time leading to a situation where I have KeePassXC database open - it happens I just leave home/work without closing / locking the database (or it prompts database modified - save?) which might lead to some desync scenarios (it already happened to me).

So I think I need something that will not keep local database as KeePassXC does, but will use online store. I am not a big cloud fan, so would prefer to host in on my own infra.

My requirements:
- self-hosted
- online (some API-based),
- cross-platform (at least Windows/Android but with Linux in mind)
- browser-aware completion (similar to KeePassXC) - Firefox + maybe chrome,

Is bitwarden a way to go? Or is there something better?
Donald Trump’s Favorite Attack on Robert Mueller, Explained
It's pretty hilarious how many people are coming out to say both "Thiel isn't a fascist, and also democracy was a mistake" in the same comment.
The real marketing geniuses are the fishmongers then.
Wow what level or how did you manage this?
I don't understand how Oracle's position here about how the Apache license covering code covers the API and their position in Oracle vs. Google.
How did you get sourcemaps working? My limited search of solutions just points to a lot of issues where a maintainer says “could not reproduce the issue” and closes it.
Discussion from 2018:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17433487

And 2015:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9632751
I think people overestimate the proportion of equally talented engineers that don't apply to the FAANGs of the world for personal (geographic) reasons.
Why was this voted down? I'm fairly certain that radio is just as low-effort and low-cost as TV, and it's been around for longer. If you have poor eyesight, as a lot of old people do, radio could be a lot less effort than TV, particularly if you choose a station in which professional speakers speak standard English (you may also have poor hearing).

I think a comparison with radio would be instructive.
Hmm... 40% of irreproducibility is due to fraud? Who in their right mind would put in all the effort that science requires if they think everyone else's work is commonly malicious bullshit?

Obviously this survey is biased towards people with a certain outlook.
I exported all my Google photos with takeout recently. After around 70 hours I got a dump of 59 50GiB tgz files (format and size was my choice). I decided to have them sent to drive so I could sync them to a computer. It was a pretty pleasant experience, they even export metadata as json.
How to fix?
The only reason why I had my HBO subscription was for Game of Thrones. Now that is over, I'm keeping it around for WestWorld season 3, but may axe it completely if it sucks.

I have AppleTV+ (worst name ever, it is so utterly confusing) from my phone and there is nothing I want to watch. Nothing. The shows may be okay, but from my initial viewing, they are nowhere near as good as Game of Thrones. Unless they pick up the quality very soon, it's going to be a complete failure.

The only one worth keeping is Netflix and only because my kids watch some TV shows, and there are a lot of good standup comics on Netflix that I can watch.

But mostly these days I will BT movies or buy them on iTunes, which is by far the most convenient way to watch movies. I have bought about 100 movies on iTunes so far. If they sold their movies for $5 each, I would buy them constantly.
Making the model more complicated doesn't add external validity. It seems like the problem often comes from trying to make do with collecting a minimum amount of data, collected in the most convenient way. (For example, doing experiments on local college students.)

It seems like a practice of at least collecting the data at two different colleges might help? But this would require more coordination.
> There aren't tons of competitors,

Cloudflare, being the Internet security company that it is, I believe, should roll out its own captcha or equivalent solution, even if only for the traffic it fronts. They kind of have got all the tools in the bag to make a splash with such an offering.
I wonder what it would take for a Roomba to detect such a condition and automatically avoid it. Some ideas:

- An internal sensor (photodiode) that would stop the Roomba if it got covered with some foreign material that interrupted a light source.

- A rear-facing camera that could detect if the Roomba was creating a trail of something behind it and stop the device. (Might not work very well on striped or patterned carpeting.)

- A forward-facing sensor that could detect objects such as dog poop in its path and initiate evasive action.
If you have a server that is connected via 100Mbps link to the entire network, yea, it's not enough. When multiple clients are hitting it e.g. during login, downloading updates from wsus etc. it will be painfully slow
No, Sublime Text was one of the apps in mind when I said a custom-framwork based cross-platform (or homemade might been a better phrase).

I evaluated Sublime for my editor, and found that it’s OS integration was too bad; for one it’s tabs is custom-based and it’s text fields aren’t Cocoa (or at least it doesn’t feel like one). It’s primarily built as a cross-platform, so it really doesn’t consider OS integrations IMO.
At least you weren't born like say during the Hundred Years War... :)
Yeah, I agree here. I can't imagine going on autopilot even decades and decades from now as I hit 80. The point is to drive to learn AND create always gives you opportunity.
That's not quite what I argued though - I said if you're at Google then you're certainly extraordinarily talented and you're going to be a leader in your field. You may be that elsewhere of course, but you'd certainly be that at Google. I didn't say that if you weren't at Google you wouldn't be talented.
Glad I'm not the only one with Catch-22. A great book but could have been 1/3 the length; after a while it's all the same thing over and over and I only finished it because I had nothing else to read and just wanted to see if it had any ending (not happy about it either). I get that the repetition may have been done on purpose as literary artifice to reflect war or whatever, just found it too long and stretching the gimmicks.
Today we have different systems for different needs. You can use an interpreted language like Python to get simplicity or you can use something like Rust where a program essentially doubles as proof of correctness. Strong typing is really about managing complexity as the program grows. This was never an issue on 8-bit micros because there just wasn't that much room to grow anyways.
Sensationalist headline. The article makes clear it was TV presenters who said if each of Iran’s 80 million inhabitants pledged $1, they could raise an $80m bounty.
bpftrace is coming in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and knowing it will make bards sing epic tales of your heroics.
> Representative democracy has largely failed

[citation needed]

Also I love how all the people here arguibg that Thiel isn't a fascist, are simultaneously agreeeing that democracy was a mistake.
Blink, blink! Where is the link?
Kinda-OT but: During my studies I've read papers from everything to organisational theory (MBA stuff) to pretty "pure" CS (like compiler construction etc), and have in that process read so many papers in many different fields that just don't provide any insight or are barely comprehensible.

Of course, sometimes it can probably be blamed on the reader (me) for not having enough insight, but many times the papers are just crap.

My naive imagination of academic papers before university was that they were like those I now read in the __top__ journals / conferences in each field: concise understandable writing with actual insights and clear methodology that can be repeated. But papers like these are probably something like less than 1% of everything published. Many papers seem to be almost approaching levels of the Bogdanov thesis's [0].

To relate to the topic: I'm wondering if we'll see a shift in the academic culture and system, where the pressure to publish is lowered (somehow), and where focus is on quality and actually providing insight and reproducibility.

The worst possible thing is that bad science gets influential on false grounds, which needs to be avoided. But increasing the signal-to-noise-ratio is probably not a bad idea either. And I suspect that they will both turn out to be improved by fixing the underlying incentive problems.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair
Fastmail is great, but as this list is supposed to be "privacy focused", Fastmail (company from Australia) is not a good alternative. https://www.wired.com/story/australia-encryption-law-global-...
Do you think this is true in Google’s European sites too? I have a hunch this is more of a Google thing than a US thing. I can assure you that plenty of engineers in the US grind away too.
This can't be good, there's a scan of a persons passport in there, pictures of abuse and so on..
I'm curious how much you prepared for the interviews? I feel like after so many tries, you should have made it in (if just because you managed to get a set of questions you were familiar with). I think the reality is you need to dedicate serious time. I had one friend who got in pretty easily, he was a college dropout even, but he had been doing competitive coding for a couple years so pretty much knew every possible question.
Maybe someone will make an abridged version someday. I would read an abridged version that is 1/3 the length.
The problem is not being reproducible is not necessarily a failure and does not necessarily indicate a bad actor, it may be bunk but it may show a worthwhile direction for others to investigate further. The problems come when an non-reproducible study gains some authority, citations in other studies or published in the media without proper vetting.

It's probably worth punishing people that consistently publish UN-reproducible work, but it shouldn't a rare career destroying event like you are suggesting.
All that would do is make accountants more money. Wealthy people will find a way to pass that along to their children.

If there's a 100% estate tax, you can bet that they won't have a penny to their name when they die, since the money will be in a trust in their kids' names or something, or perhaps in a corporation whose CEO position is passed down. You would have to significantly change how everything works to eliminate options for the wealthy.

And why would you want to? Most extremely wealthy people seem to be self-made [1][2] (not the best sources, but that's what I found with a quick search). Wealth tends to disappear after 3-5 generations (this article[3] claims 10-15), so that money will likely return to "society" relatively quickly anyway.

Solving the "problem" seems likely to discourage the types of activities that lead to massive wealth accumulation, like innovation and investment in innovation, which is a healthy activity for society. Wealth taxes seem a bit like throwing the baby out with the bath water.

- [1] https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/2871-how-most-millionaires...
- [2] https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/269593
- [3] https://newrepublic.com/article/116462/family-wealth-lasts-t...
Quick feedback, the video on the landing page doesn't have a full screen button, or double click support, so the text can't be read (I'm using Firefox on desktop). It's pretty self explanatory so the text isn't super important but I think it takes away from the video unnecessarily.
I wouldn’t call myself an “experienced MC tinkerer” but I liked this series on MC using Python https://towardsdatascience.com/monte-carlo-simulations-with-...
And yet started it 2008, and its heyday in the years after, which postdates the 2000 cutoff date in the article.
Academics thinking little of other academics is not surprising.
https://qntm.org/person is filed under 'fiction'. Recent comment by the author way down on the page

"
2020-01-02 13:30:51 by qntm:
Many thanks to everybody who participated, and extra special thanks to everybody who bought it.
"
I encourage people to learn the language and avoid the ecosystem. You don't need frameworks or build systems to write good, clean, performant web apps. Unfortunately, arguments for simplicity often fall on deaf ears.
His whole argument is spent looking back at a time when certain folk couldn't vote with a positive light.
Take 6 months and hire a coach or go to therapy to figure out what you really want.
Besides what the sibling pointed out: choices and subsidies, determine consumer prices. Coal subsidies still are vastly larger than renewable subsidies world wide. Compare the price of new wind and new nuclear stations.

That admittedly doesn't give you total system cost, but you need solid models for that anyways, as electrification of mobility and heating will completely change demand structure in the electricity secto.

The consumer price of electricity in Germany and France tells you absolutely nothing about any of that.
> But when published his work fell on fertile ground.

I'm not sure how fertile that ground was. It was still 3 years after the year he basically laid the foundations of modern physics before he was able to get an academic job.
Ah the Bubka trick, thanks for pointing it out :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Bubka
Sounds a bit like another attempt of Boeing to blame pilots (reacting not fast enough). Pilots cannot react correctly to a system they have no knowledge of. NYT could have done a better job in pointing out that the observed failure mode of MCAS did not look like a trim runaway and sent out other alerts caused by the defective angel of attack sensor (unreliable airspeed).
Will this finally mean companies can no longer defend the blatant falsehood that open-plan layouts are cheaper than dedicating private offices per knowledge worker?
So the question is, will they go for it?
I doubt it, but damn Iran is pissed.

Who thought this was a good idea?
Science shouldn't be funded this way
Isn't this just Crossing the Chasm seen from a different angle?
"These are matters that concern the people and their franchise and their access to resources. This is, therefore, the property of the people".

Is this true?
There is definitely an argument to be made for increased negative (reputational) effects. However, many unreproducable results are only discovered years, if not decades, after initial publication. This makes the discovery less impactfull for the original researchers. In that timespan, many have left academia; others have more recent "shiny" publications to point to instead. It's sad, but in addition to the publish-or-perish, there's also a publish-and-forget mentality in (some) academia, in which your project is finished and you move on to the next "hot" topic. Therefore, my concern is with the efficacy of such measures. What are your thoughts on how to implement such a reputational effect? Public shaming? Should we register fraudulentprofessor.com?

> Professors aren't doing any favors by rubberstamping weak papers, or giving weak students PhD's

Agreed. However, I think this is a sort of tragedy of the commons, in which "good" behavior of some professors will not stop the onslaught of "bad" behavior of others. Certainly the good ones will be outnumbered in terms of graduates and since university performance reviews rely mostly on sheer numbers (students, papers..), there is an argument to be made that universities self-select for the rubber-stamp professor over the honest ones.

I feel a fair solution is to re-imagine the universities' performance review system, although I have a hard time coming up with concrete and good measures of how to select the good from the bad professors.
These names are even worse. I know Clojure likes this style, but to me, "conjoin" is just a fancy way of writing "join" if you want another distinct symbol naming the same, very generic concept.

"some" and "every" create nicely readable code. "every-pred" and "some-fn" could be called "satisfies-every" and "satisfies-some", respectively.
Choosing an Open Source License