skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is literally no evidence at all that masks affect development. Never mind significant evidence. None.

That study is a survey of people that work with children who have visual impairments to see what they think. Not only does this have nothing to do with masks, it doesn't even claim there is a link! It just says that we should probably look into seeing if there is a link.

About that study, there are many reasons why they would see this correlation, ones that have nothing to do with anything sensational. Not the least of which is that they don't correct for multiple comparisons and have very weak statistical evidence for a correlation (tables 4 and 5; you give me 20 tries, I'll eventually see something significant if I don't correct for multiple comparisons). That there can easily be simple explanations for their data (the folks being studied who have visual impairments may have them due to genetic causes which are correlated with speech). That their data is biased toward seeing an effect (many children have undiagnosed language deficits or delays, of course if you have a population where experts are paying more attention you will see more deficits when you compare those statistics to the wider population).

This Scientific American article is just shameless propaganda by a scientist who wants to promote his research above the well being of people and society.
I don't necessarily disagree, but the American people and government obviously do. He is not a hero in the US, for 99% of the population he will be at best a martyr, at worst a traitor.
> but bad decisions usually stem from incorrectly answering one of these questions.

Then change your answers. For me, this kind of method of assigning numbers to aspects of a choice and combining them in some way is there not to be an oracle, but to direct your thoughts or discussions within a group.

For example, if you gut tells you a feature is definitely worth it, but a tool like this says it’s only borderline useful, that shouldn’t make you immediately discard the feature, but make you consider

- whether the list of aspects is complete

- whether you judged the existing ones correctly

- whether your gut was right (e.g. if your gut says its worth it, but you also think its hard to implement and only moderately useful. Clearly, something is wrong or missing there)

When making a group decision, a big advantage is that this moves you from exchanging opinions “I think we should do A; you think we should do B” to more concrete discussion “I think it’s worth a lot and easy to implement; you think its worth something but too hard to support for what it’s worth. Let’s discuss those two separately”.

Items about which there’s strong disagreement even after discussion may even trigger postponement “let’s get a better idea about how hard/useful this is first”

The only way to make an informed decision is by thresholding on some number scale, but as you say, it also is impossible to assign numbers to aspects of a solution.
Very good point. Often developers talk in cargo-cult terminology like "beautiful" or "nice" or "elegant" code, but there is no definition of what that even means or whether it empirically leads to better (or worse) outcomes. We know people like it more, but that doesn't mean we should be doing it. A true science would provide hypothesis, experiment, repeated evidence, rather than anecdotes.

(from the downvotes it seems like some people don't want software to be a science)
I didn't. I just directed it in different directions. Same with everything: self-destructive tendencies, doomlooping internal thoughts or shame / guilt. Just redirect it, stop letting others control you.
As a former Operations (now architecture) person - completely agree.

The developers that are surprised at every turn of deployment (or really the lifetime of the code/service) got there by focusing purely on the code and none [or to be fair, very little] on the environment in which it operates.

This is how the "works on my machine" meme was started. We don't run the product or maintain SLAs on 'your machine', so it doesn't matter.

It gives us an idea for what it should look like under normal operations, but that's as far as it goes.

So many developers have told me crazy things like chmod 777, 'replace python2 with 3 for everything, not just me', and so on. The epitome of cutting off your nose to spite your face.
I am not worried about a kid being where they are theoretically best off, I'm worried about moving kids out of situations that are "below the line" of tolerability. The goal of having these adopted children thrive is secondary to the goal of raising them to the age of 18 with the highest chance of avoiding problematic damage.

Your idea of moving children from home to home in a search for their "best" home is not a viable one, and you know that. The fact that you continue to argue is a product of your inability to discuss this rationally, not due to some genuine concern for doing what is, overall, best for these children.
Nickel Spikes 60%: Here’s Why That Matters and Who Will Be Hit
No, a "special military operation" is violence. Shooting people, bombing towns, destroying hospitals.

Refusing to trade is not violent.

> Lack of food security and access to basic medicines will kill people here

Then get out and protest, or go on strike, or paint slogans on buildings.

You may find actual violence from the Russian police, but nothing compared to what your country is forcing on Ukraine, funded by your taxes and endorsed by your inaction.
That's not a number-of-nukes problem, though. That's a threat credibility problem.

If France won't launch their 300 warheads, they wouldn't launch if they had 3,000 either.
Come up with? This has been a solved issue since the discovery of U-235 emitting 4 neutrons when struck with a single neutron, an absolute dream to the physicists theory crafting about unknown materials with only a 1 neutron generating 2 neutron scenario. A little under 100 years ago now.

Nuclear energy is and always will be the solution. It was 100 years ago, when the physics understood it. It was 80 years ago, when the devastation of nuclear bombs were understood. It was 30 years ago when Gen III+ reactors were proposed and began building, with passive safety features.

And it is today, when in the midst of climate oblivion, people are still rolling around debating base-load energy sources that physicists 100 years ago solved.

In regards to cost overruns and politics? You’d think we’d figure it out in the face of destruction. Optimize every aspect of it. A neutron reaction will always have orders of magnitude higher energy than photons on a solar panel. End of the day, we either use physics to our advantage or get gobbled up by it.
The point isn't that malloc is available, rather that it is impossible to write in ISO C, other than mapping a global memory segment.
Yes. I ordered over a year ago and just want to know where I am in line.
Ok maybe not a bike. Maybe a jar of strawberry jam filled from a large pot :)

You won’t care as much about the theft since you still have an almost full pot of strawberry jam, but you care a little since that pot will eventually end.

Analogs in the order of appearance:

- jar of jam: copy of Lunar
- large pot of jam: my willingness to keep updating the app in a world where everyone sees theft as “meh whatever, I wouldn’t have paid anyway”
It just seems weird to me to still be seeing RTFM more than a decade after I last received an actual FM for me to R.

A well-designed, general-audience technology product doesn't require one to be initiated into the mysteries before using it. The phone in my pocket is literally a million times more complicated than my first computer and I haven't read a bit of documentation. It works fine.

If btrfs wants to be something people use, its promoters need to stop blaming users for bad outcomes and start making it so that the default setup is what people need to get results at least as good as the competition. I have never read an extfs manual, but when I've had problems nobody has ever blamed bad outcomes on me not reading an extfs manual.
Pigeon-Controlled Guided Bomb
YouTube offers popular podcasts $50K in cash to pivot to video
> People are just skeptical of government especially in rural areas.

I would be more convinced of this if rural and conservative areas weren't net takers of federal funds. In the US at least, urban areas subsidize rural ones by quite a lot of money.

In addition, take a look at the federal deficit under each partie's leadership for the last 100 years. It's quite a coup that Republicans get to pretend that they are the party for small government and fiscal responsibility.
I just don't have time for it anymore. Too much other stuff, and I try to restrict how much I work (i.e. not work on weekends). Given that, something has to give and it's usually perfectionism.
Play the Game from Californication Video from Red Hot Chili Peppers
I think you may be confusing the existence of Somali pirates to mean the US Navy doesn’t depress pirates. There would be many more than that without the Navy.

Privacy still exists [0] with more in the Straits of Malacca than off Somalia.

This piracy is much less due to the actions of the US Navy. I’m not sure why you think it would increase 10x if Russia endorsed privateering.

I think Russia’s position is moot since their fleet would never stop this in the first place. So their privateering position doesn’t seem to matter. While there’s lots more US (and US-bound) ships, I don’t think Russia’s navy is preventing any piracy.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracy_in_the_21st_century
Reproducibility is of course a valid concern, but I never had issues with that thanks to Rocker and MRAN.

I do sympathize with long from-source build times; as a Linux user I don't think I had binaries available until I stopped using R, so I've spent days, perhaps weeks, waiting for dplyr to install over the course of my R usage.

> different image for different sets of R packages because they might have different build dependencies

Is this not true of all software in all languages?
When you say "wrong decision" do you really mean "bad outcome"? Be careful not to confound the two. (See "outcome bias")
I never took this back when I was at the Media Lab and that’s one of my main regrets from that time. This class is very famous, but I’m not sure how useful this is as an online class because as a normal person you won’t have access to the water jet cutters, plastic mould injection machines, etc.

Covid aside, hacker spaces were already dying out in SF. I wish there was more push for ordinary people to become makers rather than just consumers.
> C is the most mature and proven language out there

You mean, aside from Fortran, COBOL, and Lisp?
> There is no indication Ukraine has had much success with anything beyond MANPADS.

You just aren’t following closely enough.
sanction countries based on CO2/carbon emissions, allow for selling carbon allowances to nuclear powers.
>> This kind of thinking is not that unusual in the US either...

Right! They just passed the "Stop the woke" bill in Florida that has anti-LGBT parts all over it. I guess it's also based on religious beliefs of whose who support right-wing lunatics in the USA.
France 1939. Continental pop is about the same as 2022 Ukraine pop estimate, with colonies over double.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_populatio...
Interesting! I don't think I noticed that before. I got used to just doing Cmd+Ctrl+F to do full screen, or manually resize windows. Probably not ideal, but it felt consistent at least.
N-FT: Non-Functioning Tower
You mean...that the new iMac is more aesthetically interesting / pleasing than the G4?

Jesus, I guess tastes vary hugely. The new iMac is the same bloody design it's been since the iMac G5, basically...not sure how it's 'impressive'? It's got colours? Other than that... o.o

The iMac G4 is a feat of design engineering and still an astonishingly beautiful sight that somehow manages to look insanely futuristic nearly 20 years after its initial release.
So Russians are afraid of the countries joining NATO because they won't be able to invade them, got it. I mean, that's actually true as far as public Russian opinion goes but it also means that the NATO expansion is the most ethical thing to possibly do in the international politics.
I've the impression that most maintainers and project founders care about the project and the source. Contrary to what in industry happens often, where other things are more important {sales, features, marketing, blingbling}.

One of the prevailing features of well driven open-sources project is - you're encouraged to improve the code i.e. make it better {readable, maintainable, faster, hard}. You're not encouraged to change it for the sake of change i.e impress people.

I've the feeling it is the first case because it reduced the number of lines and kept source readable. Aside from that, I don't think good developers want to impress others.
If you are on the market for Russian weapons they are really cheap right now.
> yet putin has been a man of his word from the start

No he has not.

From Wikipedia:

> On 12 November 2021, Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that "Russia doesn't threaten anyone", and on 12 December, he said that attempts were being made to "demonise Russia and cast it as a potential aggressor". On 19 January 2022, Russian deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov said that Russia does "not want and will not take any action of aggressive character. We will not attack, strike, invade, quote unquote, whatever Ukraine." On 12 February, Kremlin foreign affairs adviser Yuri Ushakov described warnings of an invasion as "hysteria". On 20 February, Russia's ambassador to the US Anatoly Antonov said that Russian forces "don't threaten anyone. ... There is no invasion. There is [sic] no such plans."

Putin himself also said "Ukraine never had a tradition of genuine statehood", and that it was a mistake for the soviet union to spin it out as its own country. Those have nothing to do with NATO.
Only because they want to fix all the bugs that Samsung refuses to work on
Yes. Yes! A.k.a. the door-in-the-face sales technique. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Door-in-the-face_technique
It's not very high, obviously: energy is conserved and humans are not particularly efficient in converting food into energy. It's also not very effective: the article itself mentions that boiling the water for a single cup of tea took almost an hour at 60 Watts. Imagine how long you'd need to pedal to power a microwave with this, or a clothes dryer. Each of those would need at least 10x more power, so you'd be looking at 10 hours of pedaling for a single load of laundry. At that rate it's quicker to just do away with electricity entirely and wash your clothes by hand.

It could be useful in an emergency situation where you have more food than electricity though, or if you really really need something small that can only work on electricity like a HAM radio.
staffing is backend engineers (myself one of them) already overworked, budget is 1K/month right now
China-Russia trade has surged as countries grow closer
have they tried sealing the spirit inside of a newborn baby yet?
the fingerprint disables the camera (or puts it into some sort of crappy mode)

if you want a real world example of this in practice: search for the EURIon constellation
For this and other cases, I use this extension: https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/
No. At the time I got the email my GWBasic manual was 3000 miles away.

But it was one of those cases of someone not having good internet etiquette. There was no reference to "GW-Basic" on my home page, other than metadata in the HTML. I should have responded with a link to let me google that for you.
I'll take a stab at this. Remember that linear transformations satisfy:
1. T(ax) = aT(x)
2. T(u + v) = T(u) + T(v)

Consider a linear transformation from Rn to Rm. i.e. T[x1,...,xm] = [y1,...,yn].

Let's simplify the left-hand side with what we know about linear transformations:
T[x1,...,xn] = T[x1,0,...0] + ... + T[0,...0,xn] (by 1). And
T[x1,...,xn] = x1T[1,0,...,0] + ... + xnT[0,...,0,1] (by 2)

We don't know what T[1,0,...,0],...,T[0,...,0,1] will be (cause we're generalizing for any linear transformation) so let's just assume the values will be [c11,c12,...,c1n],...,[cm1,cm2,...,cmn].

So now we have:
[y1,...,yn] = x1[c11,c12,...,c1n] + ... + xn[cm1,cm2,...,cmn]

And using the properties of linear transformations we can revert it back to the original form:
[y1, ..., yn] = [x1c11 + x2c12 + ... + xnc1n, ..., x1cm1 + x2cm2 + ... + xncmn]

So no matter the linear transformation, all entries yi of the vector you output will be equal to a linear combination of x1,...,xn. So if all linear transformations satisfy this condition, what makes a linear transformation different from the others? It will be the set of coefficients [c11,c12,...,c1n],...,[cm1,cm2,...,cmn] that multiply with the x values.

This set of coefficients is unique to every linear transformation from m to n (it's what defines it), this means that we can set up a one-to-one correspondence between these coefficients [c11,c12,...,c1n],...,[cm1,cm2,...,cmn] and any linear transformation (from m to n)!

So let's make it easier for ourselves to describe every single linear transformation from m to n by setting up a rectangular array of the coefficients with m rows and n columns: [[c11,c12,...,c1n],...,[cm1,cm2,...,cmn]].

And so if we find a matrix [[A,B],[C,D]] then we immediately know it corresponds to the linear transformation [y1, y2] = [Ax + By, Cx + Dy]

Note: You won't find a one-to-one correspondence between a matrix and a non-linear transformation with this method because non-linear transformations could have terms like xy, x^a, sin(x), etc... that can't be captured by a linear combination.
I was responding to a comment that said "[i]f it's used to wipe the data...". If you read my original comment, I was specifically avoiding that particular topic because I knew it wasn't what you were discussing. It's pretty frustrating how all of these replies are acting like I introduced duress passwords to the conversation.
Covers the same as:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30576238
It is no defense to burglary that the homeowner left their front door unlocked.
thank you, i'm going to copy/paste this to my colleague to see if it can help with him and his team.

Edit

> purchasing food etc and delivering it (in my local area) to the most vulnerable.

is there more information here? a way to do this over the inet that can be verified as legit and not a scam? If so, i can see this being very useful. I've been seeing people rent AirBnbs in Ukraine all of social media to get money in people's hands. I'm wary of fraud though, it's a situation ripe for fraudsters to take advantage.
Coinbase prohibits transactions with Russian-owned wallets
Yep, that's the symptom. It's easy to quit doing it, I've done it a hundreds of times already to only succumb to it at a later point.

The truth is that if I'm busy with something that I have interest in I can easily avoid any of these types of procrastinations.
I’m Romanian myself, not Russian, sitting at the middle (ideologically and geographically) of all this madness. This being HN I was trying to “debug” the whole situation as an arm-chair geostrategist, and that entailed, imo, making sense of what drives one side of the conflict, the Russians.

As I said, I don’t think they’re irrational, very, very few international conflicts are irrational on the face of it, nobody goes to war because “they felt like it” or because it “was written in the stars”, that would be trully irrational. I do think though that part of the reason Russia started this war is because they want to fight a war against some aspects of Westernization. They most certainly like Western cars and Western-designed iPhones but it looks like they don’t like certain Western ideologies, like the type of democracy that the West now professes. Again, I don’t see anything irrational in all this.
> just by doing the inefficient thing and sending them to the wrong post.

Not the case most of the times. In each recruitment process, a central list is created based on test score and other criteria.

And candidates give choices. Most want to live in megacities like Chennai or Kolkata. Many want to be close to their homes.

Choices are awarded (or disregarded) first-come-first-serve basis on that merit list.

A few get desired postings due to their scores. Most of them end up in godforsaken places where your future children will get shitty schools and a worse environment. And very bad healthcare facilities.

So these people are eager to shell out a lot of money to get desired posting.

Indian companies and government institutions always had unions. Most of them leftist, and many apolitical (in white collar places, obviously). Nowadays unions are hijacked overnight by whichever party comes to power.

They work as a center of power. And they are the intermediaries in corruption.

Most unions have stopped caring about their ideals, and the people. They are just power brokers hungry for the fulfilment of the few.

This is how corruption becomes universal in India. There are taxicab unions, actors' unions, teachers' unions, farm-workers' union- all rules over by the ruling party. They don't give a rat's ass about the members.

They just care about a few. And they can stay in power because they are supported by the ruling party and give them huge cuts.
It's not safe to say that open source software is safer or less safe than proprietary software. You can't look at the source code of Microsoft Windows to know it doesn't have obvious back doors, but it's also unrealistic that you're going to audit 400 npm packages that your Javascript program uses every time they change.

It's hard to prove that hardware wasn't tampered with at the factory and in fact it is absolutely routine for hardware to come with "backdoors" such as boundary scan implementations, unexpected ways to read out firmware, etc.
At that point, the attacker will re-aim the wrench at your head instead of your body.
All of the above, but consider if you are going international. Be aware of rules regarding exports from the US, ITAR, and EU regulations.
The CDC and the American Academy of Pediatricians has both said very clearly that there is no evidence linking masks with developmental delays or language deficits.

https://www.healthychildren.org/English/health-issues/condit...

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br... "The limited available data indicate no clear evidence that masking impairs emotional or language development in children."

But if you're asking if I'm ashamed of the CDC's pandemic response? A lot of scientists and medical professionals have complained about the CDC. Yes. They have completely botched the messaging on both masks and vaccines. There should have been a simple statement in March 2020: wear a mask. That's it. Instead, they made the issue so incredibly complicated and polarized that almost a million people died.
Code Review How To: Brevity and Repetition
The Lamp was great but nothing can beat the Cube. Still using mine with a Sonnet and SSD upgrade for plain text work.
Interesting! Can I filter all non-VIP mail into something other than my inbox? :)
Interesting twitter thread about it and what it now means: https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1500495309595725831

First time I remember a symbol going from nothing to transnational sign of allegiance in ¬10 days.