skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was unaware of the origin story for this phrase. I've mostly seen it used to duck actually arguing with people, a la this paragraph:

More generally, “strong opinions weakly held” is often a useful default perspective to adopt in the face of any issue fraught with high levels of uncertainty, whether one is venturing a forecast or not. Try it at a cocktail party the next time a controversial topic comes up; it is an elegant way to discover new insights — and duck that tedious bore who loudly knows nothing but won’t change their mind!

I think the original intent of "strong opinion" is make a decisive conclusion without hemming and hawing. In other words, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, say "Well, I believe it's a duck" but allow for the possibility that you are wrong and be willing to admit that if evidence comes forth showing you are wrong.

I don't operate that way. I have a high tolerance for ambiguity and I am more comfortable with the answer "I don't know" than most people seem to be. Most people seem to have a tremendous need to categorize things and I think this is useful for such people: Go ahead, categorize it. Just don't be overly committed to categorizing it. Be willing to change your mind about it.

Most people fail at the "Be willing to change your mind about it" part.

Most people seem to use this phrase not as a rule of thumb for how to think their way through something -- which can take work and it helps if you go ahead and deal with whatever is in front of you and then take the next step -- but simply to deflect fightiness in online forums.

I'm happy to debate with people, but a lot of argumentation on the internet isn't really intellectual debate trying to tease out the merits of an idea. It gets personal. It gets ugly. It is actually fighting, not debating, and we call both "argument" and do a poor job of distinguishing the two things.

So I have seen this phrase, but it was consistently used to basically say "Don't @ me!" In other words, "I want to go ahead and speak my mind in public to satisfy some need of mine, but I don't really want to deal with other people not agreeing and all that. I just want to say a thing and that's it."

I think the original idea has some merit -- go ahead and state firmly what you think it is but be willing to change your mind -- but that's not what most people seem to use the phrase to mean. Not at all. And what it has come to mean is pretty lame.
> 100 random apps or app that have to handle pandemic in country?

The contract tracing apps are really basic... a step above torch apps.
If you want a mathematically treatment, The Pleasures of Counting is an excellent book about this and sundry other marvelous topics.
I prefer "weak opinions, strongly held", as in, "I don't know. And I am pretty sure you don't either."

Won't sell me any books, but it's been my experience.
> No AC and wood heating are going to be a hard sell.

(I am the author) Sorry I don't make it super clear in Part 1: I have a 500 gallon propane tank and a propane furnace as backup heat. I leave downstairs at 58F so it can't go below that at night. (I have no idea why I decided on that number). It rarely does unless I let the fire die around 7-8pm.

From October to Feb I averaged 1.8 gallons/day of propane use, which I suspect was 90% hot water and propane cooking (we bake bread 2x a week and cook for 1-2 hours almost every single day because we're somewhat obsessed with food. This is also why the downstairs is very kicthen oriented)

> No closets? If that's what you're into...but its going to be hard to sell.

Why? People can easily frame in closets on any of the bedrooms if they wanted to. They all have 2 walls they could do it against. Or if they want bigger bedrooms, they can keep them big.

The counterfactual in "hard to sell" is that there are 900000 houses out there unlike this one, and they all compete against each other. This competes with historic houses. The historic houses here (without AC, with terrible insulation, damp crawlspace basements, etc) command a huge premium. I don't think a traditional-looking house with none of the accumulated problems of real historic houses would be difficult to sell at all.
Actually you can use the whole attribute name as selector, like data-test-user-name-input, and if you need a dynamic id, you can add as a value: data-test-product-item="book" ;)
If interested check out https://goodereader.com/blog/ for more info on what's coming out for e-ink.

Not affiliated, just a fan.
I really hope this vaccine happens. It would so amazing if we got a vaccine out so fast.
Mostly, yes. Though for perspective: when engaged in a hot war you tend not to care too much about what your opponent can figure out in a few decades.

Even enigma would have been mostly good enough, if the allies had taken a few weeks to decrypt each message.

In peace time learning old secrets is comparatively more useful.
Now demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt, with vast supporting evidence, that most of those people shouldn't have been in prison for the crimes in question.

The NY Times and Washington Post routinely rail against our prison population and sentencing laws. Morally they're right, our sentences are too long. They never substantiate the premise that a large share of people in prison were wrongly convincted. In fact, to date, nobody has ever proven such an outlandish thing: because it's not true. The critics don't even attempt to prove that premise (at worst they'll point to a few select prominent cases). The problem with the US incarceration rate isn't that the US wrongly puts millions of people into prison, it's that the US puts people into prison with sentences that are too long.
I am pretty new to all of this but I get the impression that Stan and PyMC3 are the leaders in this area and I don't see them as having great meta-programming support. Maybe I am wrong? Are they currently hitting limitations in that regard? Or is this in a particular area of PPL such as non-parametrics?
Yes, you can calculate the number of levels, but with a dynamic size that isn't going to let you avoid a branch. Say you calculate there are 10 levels in the search. What do you do now?
This is a great way to put it. It’s a position I end up taking a lot—there are so many situations where no one involved has enough information to justify strong beliefs.
My favourite feature of Pharo (which I believe it inherited from Squeak) from my very limited experience with Smalltalk environments is the ability to search for methods via example.

In the Finder window, you can type an example of an input and the result that you want, for instance `2. -2`, and the system will search for a method to do that operation for you. In this case you'd see the "negated" method which given `2` spits out `-2`.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awAB4zHrlHI
Using TikTok for promotion with my own content
I decided to create my own content to promote my own game on Tiktok.

It's a game about animals so I decided to dress up as an animal and show a sign asking people to please download it on the streets, record myself and put it into Tiktok.

I hope this works.
> On the other hand ... the state which owned it went out of existence.

The current German government sees itself as the successor to the previous German governments.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_Germany for more detail than you ever wanted to know.
What is the value of deleting a test once it's written, though?
I learned patience reading Moby Dick at 14, after trying and failing at 12. I am now a very patient person. And I treasure the concept of the end of a sentence.
Thank you.

That's probably a great example of one of the benefits of these rovers running for so long. They'd never have scheduled something so non-science-oriented if they only got the few weeks they expected, but when your mission exceeds expectations by several thousand percent, you have time for such things.
Primes are pretty dense. So any random amount will be close to a prime number.
Building a Developer Cult
This only goes by years not in 10 min increments but it animates

https://earthengine.google.com/timelapse
The article you are responding to itself describes detention with out evidence or charges
Datasets and Evaluation Metrics for NLP (True Open Source GPT Alternative)
> In my experience, ‘strong opinions, weakly held’ is difficult to put into practice

I 100% agree when interacting with other people, but I think it's still valuable for your personal growth if you're intellectually honest with yourself.

"How much are you willing to bet on that?" is definitely a smart question to ask other people though.
And what they don’t mention is a group within the protestors tried to fire bomb a federal building. All bets are off when anarchy hits federal buildings like that. Wait for the details of this to come out in the coming weeks.
It might be worth filing an ADA compliance notice against cloudflare. This is seriously disturbing.

As someone that works in ed tech - anyone that supports higher education is required to support screen readers etc. If any of those sites are using cloudflare that would block them from being compliant pretty seriously.
Pulses, yes.

Making a neutrino beam is remarkably convoluted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerator_neutrino

>The process of the muon neutrino or muon antineutrino beam production consists of the following steps[1][2]:

>Acceleration of a primary proton beam in a particle accelerator.

>Proton beam collision with a fixed target. In such a collision secondary particles, mainly pions and kaons, are produced.

>Focusing, by a set of magnetic horns, the secondary particles with a selected charge: positive to produce the muon neutrino beam, negative to produce the muon anti-neutrino beam.

>Decay of the secondary particles in flight in a long (of the order of hundreds meters) decay tunnel. Charged pions decay[3] in more than 99.98% into a muon and the corresponding neutrino according to the principle of preserving electric charge and lepton number...

There's several different places in this chain where you could modulate the beam by turning various magnets on or off. Probably not in the proton accelerator.

Unfortunately, "long string of expensive experimental equipment" means "not efficient". From the paper:

>A neutrino source delivering muons at a rate of 10^14 s^−1 with an energy of 150 GeV would require about 4 MW in proton beam power and 2.4 MW acceleration power, which for a 10% electrical efficiency translates into a total power consumption of roughly 65 MW.

Yow. Something like ten times more power than the NuMI neutrino beam. He concludes this transmitter could do something like 100 bits/s to a stationary detector string anchored at the ocean bed. Deeper the better, for shielding against cosmic rays and solar radiation. Would be tough to put a neutrino detector close enough to a financial hub and still get useful bandwidth.
The secret to concrete is drainage. If it’s well drained, it will outlive you.

Of course that’s a lot of work. But in most climates it’s worth it — a deck (or asphalt driveway) has to be sealed every few years — you save a lot of maintenance expense and hassle.
TL;DR: Strong opinions, weakly held doesn't work because of Anchoring Bias[1].

Obviously if you fall prey to anchoring bias, you're doing the "weakly held" part wrong, but I think that almost everybody does this wrong, even people who know about anchoring bias and do their best to guard against it. I've known about anchoring bias for maybe a decade, recognized it in my own beliefs, taken steps to attempt to address it (i.e. meditation and reading opposing opinions to my own) and while I'll give myself the credit that maybe I'm a bit better than an average person at changing my own beliefs now, I'm still objectively very bad at it, frequently coming across places where it's clear looking back that I was wrong for years due to anchoring bias. It's much easier, I think, to permeate everything in my own belief system with a fundamental level of doubt, and only form really strong opinions with overwhelming evidence. But even that is only somewhat effective. Anchoring bias is a pretty powerful foe.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring_(cognitive_bias)
Since the fine article mentioned displaying a cosine wave as the goal, I would also suggest that people in a similar situation might consider the Minsky algorithm for circle drawing, which generates points around the circle. You can then take one of the coordinates and use it as the amplitude of a sine wave. Minsky's algorithm is discussed on this site [1] and in great detail, as one of the members of the family of DDA algorithms here [2] The two citations converge in that the HN discussion discusses the circle as a solution of a differential equation, e.g. this comment [3]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15266331

[2] https://www.hindawi.com/journals/mse/2014/916539/

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15268477
Waiting for this to exist in an Abus lock so my storage unit can stop being broken into my tweakers.
Yeah, I don’t get all these people criticizing the cost. Also, when a government is dealing with a flagship corporation of their country, cost is a secondary or tertiary concern anyways. It’s a subsidy in part, and it’s also just that $10m for a nation state government to get it right the first time is just so so so inexpensive. I think SAP let them off easy this time, if anything.
Eventually, they'll be going house-to-house.
Yes there are subset of people with visual problems who also have auditory problems, that does not mean you should not support the ones with vision only problems.

Are there not "ML techniques" for visual captchas too ?

With more and more powerful models like GPT-3 coming along every few months, Even if the accuracy levels are less for visual over audio today how long do you think that is going to last ?
Semshi [1] does it for Python and I find it very useful for identifying errors such as missing imports, misspelled variables, etc.

[1] https://github.com/numirias/semshi
When you realize the laser level and plum bobs aren't really very useful because anything made square looks off. As in reframing a closet door plumb and finding the floor isn't level. So now it looks crooked.
Select the top 3 ideas. Put out landing pages for each with mock demos. Don't write code yet. Gently engage people online (ex: twitter) to gauge for concrete interest. You'll naturally start focusing on the idea with the most excitement and engagement.

Bonus point if you get people to commit to the idea with money.
Where are the bones of Hans Holbein?
There are already plenty of stories of empty ERs - people with chest and abdominal pain aren’t coming in.

You cant lump all excess mortality into the Covid bucket.
you can warn people, but they don't listen...
In Switzerland they have a separate recycling receptacle for pod waste.
I cannot believe apple decided to roll that out in the middle of COVID. I got hit pretty hard with it and am finally rolling out a fix for my own stuff.

(posted in case others are hit by this)
using `requestStorageAccess()` on a user click event seems to work and that's what we're rolling out :/
https://gist.github.com/iansltx/18caf551baaa60b79206
Will this work as armor?
This is the mentality that needs to be checked. All those people trade huge money they don't care about some tiny trader moving $100k per trade. So yes you can do better as you have less capital to invest.
I've thought along these lines recently and I think a better formulation for clear communication of opinions is:

1) State a complete argument with premises, reasoning, and conclusion

2) State whether you believe the argument to be true

3) Check your stated reasoning to the point that you believe it to be logically valid

4) Check your stated premises to the point that you believe them to be true.

I believe that by sharing our premises and our reasoning, we are not only offering some humility, but we're also inviting respectful engagement. We express accountability by stating our beliefs. That way, if any of those are challenged, it means they're being challenged on the merits and it helps us update our own point of view.

By stating an argument in that manner, that can be compared to stating it "strongly", even if you are also welcoming input on the truth of your premises or the validity of your reasoning, which can be compared to "weakly held".
> why the investors didn’t do any diligence like requiring an audit

This is an unusual ask. Founders forging bank statements simply isn’t common enough to merit it.
I used to feel and think this way. But recent events, and the trajectory of the internet over the last decade has changed my mind completely.

We must stop giving excuses to the massive centralization, to the enormous companies that step in and rent-seek what is supposed to be a distributed system.

The most powerful tool we could have to get a proper internet back is the simple concept of accountability. If I was a bakery and I made a cake with poison because I was specifically asked to do so by a customer, I would still be accountable for the dangerous thing I made.

Stop making excuses for these companies with basically infinite money. They are the last ones who need it. What we all need from them is accountability.

This also goes for section 230 protections. We do not need Twitters and Facebooks and Hacker Newses and other such companies that would supposedly not exist without section 230 protection. It's clear now, in retrospect, that accountability is far more important than the license to grow enormous without any responsibility for the toxicity your giant bloated corpse of a business unleashes onto the world.

Anyone making a captcha product can and should be expected to make it work for anyone. And if there is basis for lawsuit, it should be the maker of the broken thing that faces it.

Hell, sue them both. Neither entity deserves a free pass. They both had a part to play in the exclusion.
A big obstacle that was born out of the Ross Perot "surprise" was the formation of the Committee on Presidential Debates[1]. A form of manufacturing consent.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_on_Presidential_Deb...
Most of this is beyond my understanding of TLS, but the first time I read about CT my first thought was, “So Google is pushing a technology that would let them know about every new HTTPS domain on the Internet?”

Am I right to be suspicious about Google’s motivations here? It may very well also be the case that CT also improves security, but part of me feels...dirty, knowing that I can’t opt out of this mechanism that sends data straight to Google about any new HTTPS domain I set up, so they can start indexing it. Is this just the cost of improving trust?
For the sake of accuracy: that 2017 was a typo and should have been 2012 or 2013.
>He can do and has done whatever he wants

Do you have some examples of what he's done?
I love Smalltalk but apart from the commercial versions, the UI frameworks are very limited or immature and have very few examples or doc's. Yes, you can build your own 'morphs' etc but that doesn't scale well for anything but one off small/toy applications.

Pharo is probably the best placed open source Smalltalk to get into the enterprise dev market and has a promising UI framework under dev at the moment but until this gets sorted out I think it will remain on the sidelines for a while yet.
I think the idea that a bloomberg terminal is status symbol is not accurate. All it means is that I can save more than $25K in my trades per year by having it, which is a very small hurdle.
Doesn't he have CEO things to do?
That's what I thought of.

Some chat snippets here:

https://www.businessinsider.com/read-the-bloomberg-chats-tha...
750k for 9 months. You need to write the scope to be profitable, just like any other fixed firm contract. If you execute in a need area phase 3 should be high percentage if you build the right relationships during your phase 2.
> You don't sue the contractor because they built to the specification you provided.

In the world of licensed contracting you absolutely do. If you provide a contractor specifications that result in a code violation, they have to tell you no. If they don't tell you no then you, the non expert, are reasonable to assume what you asked for is acceptable. If they actually build the thing, they are liable for the violation of code.

The last thing we need is to hand out more excuses to evade accountability and responsibility for making the world worse.
I think a better headline for the post would have ended with “... doesn’t work that well for me.” The author tried the “strongly held” strategy, found it difficult, and decided to justify another strategy of asking “how much are you willing to bet on that?” instead.

Why not both? After all, deciding “how much to bet” is probably one kind of fairly strong opinion. It’s at least strong enough to bet on. Betting strategy changes as information changes, so maybe you could construe that bet (or strong opinion) as being loosely held.

I agree that pithy phrases shouldn’t be used to justify “strongly held bad opinions” but how are we even deciding what a “bad” opinion looks like?

In the end we probably all want to come to the most correct conclusions and be willing to change when presented with new information. How we get there probably doesn’t matter as much as a majority deciding it’s worth the time and effort to do so in the first place.
I seem to recall hearing similar claims made about Iraq War protests circa 2003. People said mysterious agents rounded up people in vans and released them without explanation. I have no mainstream sources that back that up, just a claim I heard made at the time and later, by partisans. Have no idea if it's true or not.
> The feds in Portland allegedly have the word POLICE on their shirts and that's it. Is that sufficient

Um, yes? That's literally the law. A police officer only has to identify AS an officer. They don't have to identify which branch (police, FBI, etc.) "Police" is enough. Ask any defense attorney.

> It is of unclear legality whether a federal agent can arrest a someone for violating state law

State law? They're literally destroying federal buildings. The federal agents are not enforcing ANY state laws. They are only enforcing federal laws:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EgMijMhS_U
Sally Rooney on the culture of university debate
Most ideas will just happen without me. Those ideas are either not worth doing, because someone else can do the work and I can still reap some of the benefits. Or they might result in more competition.

So the way I pick, is the hardest idea I can carry. The one that is least likely to happen without me. This also tends to be the most valuable, because I wouldn't even be pondering doing it if it weren't worth it. It ends up being the easiest idea to pitch for funding, and the easiest kind of company to sell, if that's the goal. It's the one that some tech giant like Facebook or Tencent can't just come in and throw a million dollars at to do- and as such they might even throw a million dollars at you to buy it. Sometimes current revenue doesn't even really matter; something like YouTube is worthless on its own, but plugged into the behemoth that is Google Ads, the revenue gushes in.

The next step I do is work on it every day. As in actual work, not just planning. This filters out some ideas; I can't reform the education system or work on nuclear fusion one day at a time, but there are things I can do.
Instead of trying to "kill" the Bloomberg Terminal, it seems like a more rational choice, assuming success is the model we are trying to follow, would be to replicate it.

I love Bloomberg Terminal's "UI". Really, I think it is the Bloomberg keyboard that enables such hard-to-replace efficiency. Perhaps one can draw analogy to the APL keyboard. The keyboard is still the most efficient input device we have. That is, I think, what is so difficult to "kill". Keyboard-driven computer use still works more efficently than the alternatives.

Anyone who replies to this comment using a keyboard is proving this point.