Storrar asked a question about Scott Morrison’s budget measures. “I’ve got a disability and a low education, that means I’ve spent my whole life working for minimum wage. You’re gonna lift the tax-free threshold for rich people,” he pointed out to Assistant Treasurer Kelly O’Dwyer.
“If you lift my tax-free threshold, that changes my life,” Storrar continued. “That means that I get to say to my little girls, ‘Daddy’s not broke this weekend. We can go to the pictures’. Rich people don’t even notice their tax-free threshold lift.”
“Why don’t I get it?” Storrar asked. “Why do they get it?” --- The Pursuit Of Duncan Storrar Reveals The Savagery Of Australia’s Class Warfare - New Matilda 
I often meet people who think that because computer tech is improving exponentially, its social impact must also be exponential. So as soon as we see any substantial social impact, watch out, because a tsunami is about to hit. But it is quite plausible to have exponential tech gains translate into only linear social impact. All we need is a lognormal distribution, as in this diagram:
Imagine that each kind of jobs that humans do requires a particular level of computing power in order for computers to replace humans on that job. And imagine that these job power levels are distributed lognormally.
In this case an exponential growth in computing power will translate into a linear rate at which computers displace humans on jobs. --- Overcoming Bias : Lognormal Jobs
It’s hard to imagine that anyone in the world finds giant, gas-powered robots boring. But last year, to hype the future sport, MegaBots challenged Japan-based Suidobashi Heavy Industries to a duel.
--- MegaBots raises $2.4 million to create league of human-piloted, giant fighting robots | TechCrunch
If you are a philosophy professor then your family members who watch Fox News routinely treat you like your more rednecky family members treat Cousin Ernie’s black girlfriend at the Christmas party. --- Why are Tenured Philosophy Professors Unhappy? - Philosophical Percolations
TL;DR: short URLs produced by bit.ly, goo.gl, and similar services are so short that they can be scanned by brute force. Our scan discovered a large number of Microsoft OneDrive accounts with private documents. Many of these accounts are unlocked and allow anyone to inject malware that will be automatically downloaded to users’ devices. We also discovered many driving directions that reveal sensitive information for identifiable individuals, including their visits to specialized medical facilities, prisons, and adult establishments.
--- Gone In Six Characters: Short URLs Considered Harmful for Cloud Services
How does a shy ex-model make her way from Slovenia to, just maybe, the White House? To Melania Trump—and to the people who know her back home—her journey to marrying The Donald is like a fairy tale, or a too-crazy-to-believe rom-com. It’s a story full of naked ambition, stunning beauty, a shockingly Trump-like dad, and even some family secrets. Maybe she’s made for Washington after all. --- Melania Trump Interview: Marriage to Donald Trump, a Secret Half-Brother, and Plastic Surgery Rumors | GQ
I then made one final effort. I wrote an 8088 simulator on which to run MINIX, so when it crashed I could get a proper dump and stack trace. To my horror, MINIX would run flawlessly for days, even weeks, at a time on the simulator. It never once crashed. I was totally flummoxed --- Lessons Learned from 30 Years of MINIX | March 2016 | Communications of the ACM
Last week James Wood blasted modern fiction, calling for a return to feeling from self-conscious cleverness in the wake of the terrorist attacks. Zadie Smith, one of the novelists he cited, replies
--- This is how it feels to me | Books | The Guardian
Time for my last article. I could probably write more, yet there are times for everything and after this, my attention will be focused on the most comfortable position for my bed, the schedule for pain killers, and the people around me.
--- A Protocol for Dying - Hintjens.com
Datasets Over Algorithms
Perhaps the most important news of our day is that datasets—not algorithms—might be the key limiting factor to development of human-level artificial intelligence.
--- Edge.org
I think it’s false – false that everyone stories themselves, and false that it’s always a good thing. These are not universal human truths – even when we confine our attention to human beings who count as psychologically normal, as I will here. They’re not universal human truths even if they’re true of some people, or even many, or most. The narrativists are, at best, generalising from their own case, in an all-too-human way. At best: I doubt that what they say is an accurate description even of themselves.
--- Let’s ditch the dangerous idea that life is a story | Aeon Essays
The disappearance of Richey Edwards - co-lyricist, rhythm guitarist and scar-bearing ideologue of the Manic Street Preachers - has become one of the great modern musical legends of our times.
--- BBC Wales - Music - Manic Street Preachers - Richey Edwards
Paine was for strong, effective government, but also for a government limited in scope and strictly accountable to its citizens. He supported unbridled freedom of public assembly and expression, though not its licentious abuse. He favoured private property and market competition, but fought for the principle of a guaranteed citizens’ basic income and other tax-funded public measures to prevent society’s cruel division into rich and poor.
Agrarian Justice (first published in French in 1795) amplifies these themes; it is among his most powerful trumpet blasts against misery. Written in reply to a sermon by the good Bishop of Llandaff praising the division between rich and poor as a sign of God’s wisdom, Paine’s remarkable tract targeted the class of nouveaux riches then emerging as the ruling element in post-Jacobin France. --- Paine and misery | Books and Essays | spiked
Global investigators now believe much of the money to make the movie about a stock scam was diverted from a state fund 9,000 miles away in Malaysia, a fund that had been established to spur local economic development.
The investigators, said people familiar with their work, believe this financing was part of a wider scandal at the Malaysian fund, which has been detailed in Wall Street Journal articles over the past year.
The fund, 1Malaysia Development Bhd., or 1MDB, was set up seven years ago by the prime minister of Malaysia, Najib Razak. His stepson, Riza Aziz, is the chairman of Red Granite Pictures.
The 1MDB fund is now the focus of numerous investigations at home and abroad, which grew out of $11 billion of debt it ran up and questions raised in Malaysia about how some of its money was used. --- The Secret Money Behind ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ - WSJ
There are two distinct schools of thought for determining the qibla: the commonly used Great Circle method, and the less common rhumb-line method. Looking at a flat map using any standard projection shows that a rhumb line (a line that cuts equal angles across all lines of longitude) drawn from, say, the Johnson Space Center in Houston to Mecca runs east-southeast. The numbers also bear this out — the space center is to the north and west of the Ka'aba, so any travel to the holy city should naturally be to the southeast.
Lay a string across a globe, however, and everything changes. A great circle — the shortest distance between two points on a sphere — between Houston and Mecca initially arcs to the northeast, then curves southward to the Saudi peninsula. Islamic scientists knew as early as the ninth century CE that the great circle route provided the shortest path to Mecca from anywhere in the world, even though it may in some places seem counterintuitive (Muslims in Alaska, for example, pray facing almost due north). Great circle formulae are at the root of nearly every online qibla compass. --- A Muslim Astronaut’s Dilemma: How to Face Mecca From Space | WIRED
Worse, startups scale into big companies, and transform into bureaucracies when they do. Harvard Business Review just came out with some advice on how to stop being a startup. Even startups can’t stay startups. --- Go Corporate or Go Home
This is modern liberalism in action: an unregulated virtue exchange in which representatives of one class of humanity ritually forgive the sins of another class, all of it convened and facilitated by a vast army of well-credentialed American technocrats, while the objects of their high and noble compassion sink slowly back into a preindustrial state. --- [Politics | Nor a Lender Be, by Thomas Frank | Harper's Magazine - Part 6]
“This algo guy just discovered a new market and he’s running his own show because there’s not enough competition, but it will come,” Okte said. “We are in the very early stages, but we know from developed markets that machines always win this game.”
--- Mystery 'Dude' Rattles Turkish Stock Traders With Massive Bets - Bloomberg Business
The right to free speech is America's most important right because it's how we identify and defend all rights. But you can't defend a right you don't understand or can't define. Distorting or blurring the definition of a right undermines it. In short: free speech legalism matters. --- #FreeStacy — But From What? In Defense of Free Speech Legalism | Popehat
Buses are much safer than cars, by about a factor of 67 [1] but they're not very popular. If you look at situations where people who can afford private transit take mass transit instead, speed is the main factor (ex: airplanes, subways). So we should look at ways to make buses faster so more people will ride them, even if this means making them somewhat more dangerous. --- Make Buses Dangerous
The Silicon Valley ideology thinks about government as an investor rather than as a protector, arguing that the government's role is to invest in making people as awesome as possible. Silicon Valley Democrats want to make people in general educated and entrepreneurial, rather than singling out disadvantaged groups and regulating capitalism to protect them. It's pro-government and pro-capitalism. It is not a small-government ideology, but it tends to be a local-government ideology. --- "Libertarian but very pro-government": the distinctive ideology of Silicon Valley - Vox
With the recent buzz around HTTP/2 and its benefits, it is time to upgrade the infrastructure. This article shows how to install and configure HAProxy (with SSL termination) with Nginx. To ease the process even more, I supply you with ready to use Docker images. --- The complete guide to HTTP/2 with HAProxy and Nginx - MILLION12 - web applications, TYPO3 Neos, DevOps
41. #263. More of Forge's background is revealed, but still missing
major details. What is his name? And how did he lose his hand and
leg?
I think he lost it in the air raid that he called in Vietnam
in issue #227, trying to kill off the demon hordes that he
had summoned. By the way, isn't that a rather crude way to
kill supernatural entities? --- and Information/Marvel Comics/X-Men/Danglers FAQ/X-Men Danglers FAQ - Part 2/
JetBrains (the people behind IntelliJ IDEA) have recently announced the first RC for version 1.0 of Kotlin, a new programming language for the JVM. I say ‘new’, but Kotlin has been in the making for a few years now, and has been used by JetBrains to develop several of their products, including Intellij IDEA. The company open-sourced Kotlin in 2011, and have worked with the community since then to make the language what it is today. --- Kotlin: a new JVM language you should try - OpenCredo
All this makes data a toxic asset, and it continues to be toxic as long as it sits in a company's computers and networks. The data is vulnerable, and the company is vulnerable. It's vulnerable to hackers and governments. It's vulnerable to employee error. And when there's a toxic data spill, millions of people can be affected. --- Data Is a Toxic Asset - Schneier on Security
The problem is in the design. Traditionally we build complex systems like buildings and aircraft with a safety first principle. Time is spent in the design phase making sure that breakages are unlikely, and if things do go wrong then the effects are somewhat mitigated.
But software isn't like that. Instead you code fast and hard and then fix things when problems crop up. The merging of these two design styles poses almost insurmountable security problems for all of us.
--- Bruce Schneier: We're sleepwalking towards digital disaster and are too dumb to stop • The Register
This represents the first empirical investigation of bullshit, as far as I know. However, this is only the tip of a very big iceberg. We come across scores of bullshit every day. Advertising, politics, tabloids, television – bullshit seems to pop up everywhere once you start looking for it. Our findings are amusing, but bullshit is no laughing matter. Chopra waxing poetic on Twitter might not be overly problematic, but the lack of regard for truth that characterises bullshit has serious consequences.
--- Why bullshit is no laughing matter — Aeon Opinions
His Meetup was also cool, and in particular he posted a bunch of his code on github, and explained what he’d done as well.
For example, the raw data was more than half the size of his personal computer’s storage, so he used an external hard drive to hold the raw data and convert it to a SQL database on his personal computer for later use (he used PostgreSQL).
Also, in order to load various types of data into R, (which he uses instead of python but I forgive him because he’s so smart about it), he reduced the granularity of the geocoded events, and worked with them via the database as weights on square blocks of NYC (I think about 10 meters by 10 meters) before turning them into graphics. So if he wanted to map “taxicab pickups”, he first split the goegraphic area into little boxes, then counted how many pickups were in each box, then graphed that result instead. It reduced the number of rows of data by a factor larger than 10.
Todd calls this “medium data” because, after some amount of work, you can do it on a personal computer. I dig it.
--- Todd Schneider’s “medium data” | mathbabe
Stack fallacy has caused many companies to attempt to capture new markets and fail spectacularly. When you see a database company thinking apps are easy, or a VM company thinking big data is easy — they are suffering from stack fallacy.
Stack fallacy is the mistaken belief that it is trivial to build the layer above yours. --- Why Big Companies Keep Failing: The Stack Fallacy | TechCrunch
The origin of the term and idea can be traced to Albert Goldman and a 1964 article he had written in The New Republic titled "Lindy's Law'.[2] In it he stated that "the future career expectations of a television comedian is proportional to the total amount of his past exposure on the medium". The term Lindy refers to the NY Deli Lindy's where comedians "foregather every night at Lindy's, where... they conduct post-mortems on recent show biz "action".[3] Benoit Mandelbrot formally coined the term Lindy Effect in his 1984 Book The Fractal Geometry of Nature.[4] Mandelbrot expressed mathematically that for certain things bounded by the life of the producer, like human promise, future life expectancy is proportional to the past. He references Lindy's Law and a parable of the young poets’ cemetery and then applies to researchers and their publications: “However long a person’s past collected works, it will on the average continue for an equal additional amount. When it eventually stops, it breaks off at precisely half of its promise.“ --- Lindy effect - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
relaimpo --- Feature Selection - r-statistics.co
Both R and distributed programming rank highly on my list of “good things”, so imagine my delight when two new packages, ddR (https://github.com/vertica/ddR) and multidplyr (https://github.com/hadley/multidplyr), used for distributed programming in R were released in November last year.
--- The Evolution of Distributed Programming in R | Mango Solutions
JSR 94 provides guidelines for the rule administration and rule runtime APIs, but it defines no guidelines for what language to use to define the rules and actions. Efforts are under way to standardize a common rule language, including the Rule Markup Language (RuleML). --- Getting Started With the Java Rule Engine API (JSR 94)
So what is the magic that separates deep learning from the rest, and can crack problems for which no group of humans has ever been able to program a solution? The first ingredient, from the early days of neural nets, is a timeless algorithm, rediscovered again and again, known in this field as "back-propagation". It's really just the chain rule—a simple calculus trick—applied in a very elegant way. It's a deep integration of continuous and discrete math, enabling complex families of potential solutions to be autonomously improved with vector calculus.
The key is to organize the template of potential solutions as a directed graph (e.g., from a photo to a generated caption, with many nodes in between). Traversing this graph in reverse enables the algorithm to automatically compute a "gradient vector," which directs the search for increasingly better solutions. You have to squint at most modern deep learning techniques to see any structural similarity to traditional neural networks, but behind the scenes, this back-propagation algorithm is crucial to both old and new architectures.
But the original neural networks that used back-propagation fall far short of newer deep learning techniques, even using today's hardware and datasets. The other key piece of magic in every modern architecture is another deceptively simple idea: components of a network can be used in more than one place at the same time. As the network is optimized, every copy of each component is forced to stay identical (this idea is called "weight-tying"). This enforces an additional requirement on weight-tied components: they must learn to be useful in many places all at once, and not specialize to a particular location. Weight-tying causes the network to learn a more generally useful function, since a word might appear at any location in a block of text, or a physical object might appear at any place in an image.
--- Edge.org
But of course that’s only one side of it, and the less interesting one; how about how many people the policeman has shot or injured? As far as I know, that data isn’t analyzed, if it’s even formally collected.
--- We could use some tools of social control to use on police | mathbabe
We present a computational model that captures these human learning abilities for a large class of simple visual concepts: handwritten characters from the world’s alphabets. The model represents concepts as simple programs that best explain observed examples under a Bayesian criterion. We also present several “visual Turing tests” probing the model’s creative generalization abilities, which in many cases are indistinguishable from human behavior.
--- Human-level concept learning through probabilistic program induction | GitXiv
The point being, of course, that the ergonomics of smartphones as reading devices are not only kind of rad, but historically so.
These small formats from days of yore also help explain the stupendous productivity of many historic authors. I’ll often be reading about a nonfiction essayist from the 17th or 18th or 19th century and the bio will mention he or she wrote 56 books or some other ungodly number, and I’ll freak out: Man alive! How can anyone generate so much? --- collision detection: Why 18th century books looked like smartphone screens
Finally, I want to make it clear, that I am not suggesting that P-values alone are a good way to summarise results, nor am I suggesting that Bayesian analysis is necessarily bad. I am suggesting, however, that Bayes is hard and pointing the finger at P-values ducks the issue. Bayesians (quite rightly so according to the theory) have every right to disagree with each other. This is the origin of the problem and to therefore dismiss P-values
‘…would require that a procedure is dismissed because, when combined with information which it doesn’t require and which may not exist, it disagrees with a procedure that disagrees with itself.’[2] (p 195) --- Stephen Senn: The pathetic P-value (Guest Post) [3 | Error Statistics Philosophy]
Richard Dawkins, in his early book The Extended Phenotype, describes what he means when he says "statistically, X occurs". His original motivation was addressing a comment about gender, but it applies more generally:
<blockquote>If, then, it were true that the possession of a Y chromosome had a causal influence on, say, musical ability or fondness for knitting, what would this mean? It would mean that, in some specified population and in some specified environment, an observer in possession of information about an individual's sex would be able to make a statistically more accurate prediction as to the person's musical ability than an observer ignorant of the person's sex. The emphasis is on the word “statistically”, and let us throw in an “other things being equal” for good measure. The observer might be provided with some additional information, say on the person's education or upbringing, which would lead him to revise, or even reverse, his prediction based on sex. If females are statistically more likely than males to enjoy knitting, this does not mean that all females enjoy knitting, nor even that a majority do. [emphasis added]</blockquote> --- Dawkins on Saying "statistically, ... " – DataOrigami
I’ve always thought that The Breakfast Club, for all its flaws, is a remarkably perceptive account of the dynamics of teenage society. Its resemblance to the jury makes me wonder if we ever really grow out of the roles we adopt, or are imposed on us, as teenagers. The way I remember high school is that only a few people stood out of the pack — the cool kids on top, the outsiders on the margins. Everyone else just kind of drifted along with the tide.
--- Jury Duty — Medium
Postel's law states that one should be conservative in what one does, but liberal in what one accepts from others; this is great advice for life, but terrible advice for writing software. When it comes to software security, it's better to be conservative in what one does and paranoid in what one accepts from others — and prone to freeze when surprised.
--- The HTTP 500 Solution
Estimating grouped data models with a binary dependent variable and fixed effects: What are the issues?
--- The Society for Political Methodology - Detail
This wasn’t the result of a new, long-term study, but a meta-analysis of $60 million worth of basic research written off as useless 20 years ago by a team of neuroscientists and statisticians led by the University of California San Francisco and partnering with the software firm Ayasdi, using mathematical and machine learning techniques that hadn’t been invented yet when the trials took place. The process was outlined in a paper published today in Nature Communications, and hints at the possibility of medical breakthroughs lurking in the data of failed experiments.
--- The Latest Medical Breakthrough In Spinal Cord Injuries Was Made By A Computer Program | Co.Exist | ideas impact
A General Manager of a professional NBA basketball team described to me this strategy for escaping over-storytelling in postgame analysis. When coaches watched the video of a game, they would often simply reinforce their prior story: "When we kicked the ball out of bounds twice in the first minute, that was the beginning of the end, we lost all momentum and never caught up...blah blah." To overcome premature storytelling, the team did postgame reviews with the plays of the game in random order. This initially was intellectually taxing to viewers with preconceived narratives. In economics, autocorrelation is regarded as a plague. In sports, it is the main explanatory variable.
--- Edward Tufte forum: Sparkline theory and practice Edward Tufte
A quick definition: Denominator blindness is the failure to put big, scary numbers into context. I am reminded of this every time I see one of these headlines: ABC Fund Loses $879 million; XYZ Corp. Cuts 3,000 Jobs; Stocks Drop 100 Points.
--- Don’t Suffer From Denominator Blindness | The Big Picture
It’s also really powerful to realize you don’t *want* to be one of them, you don’t want to live like a hamster in a really fancy hamster cage. --- Interview With Julie Ann Horvath by Julie Ann Horvath | Model View Culture
Most notably, as Robert Skidelsky writes, elites were unprepared for the economic catastrophes of the past decade, because “when the world economy collapsed in 2008–’09 the only thing most younger economists, policy-makers and businessmen knew about Keynes was that one did not need to know anything about him. He had vanished from their textbooks, briefings and indeed from their consciousness.” --- Mathematician, Statesman, Philosopher: The Life of John Maynard Keynes - The Los Angeles Review of Books
How acceptable is a black-white pay gap versus a black-white test score gap? You hear that schools can’t be held responsible for fixing this, but I’m guessing most who say that wouldn’t accept a firm who tried to say it’s not their problem to fix.
--- Judging Businesses, Judging Schools - Forbes
This is a Japanese word that describes a pile of unread books. --- The Tsundoku Support Club - Safari Blog
While there was no real solution to this problem for a long time, there is now good news for you! A group of researchers at the University of Amsterdam are developing JASP, a free open-source statistics package that includes both standard and more advanced techniques and puts major emphasis on providing an intuitive user interface.
--- Introducing JASP: A free and intuitive statistics software that might finally replace SPSS – JEPS Bulletin
the recently proposed Bezos’ Law—the observation that the cost of a unit of computing power in the cloud is reduced by 50 percent every three years—predicts that the cost of computing will eventually be non-limiting for most organizations. --- » Why Skills Matter More than Ever in Our Data-Driven Economy
Bragging to coworkers about a recent promotion, or posting a photo of your brand new car on Facebook, may seem like harmless ways to share good news. But new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, shows that self-promotion or a “humblebrag” often backfires. --- Self-Promoters Tend to Misjudge How Annoying They Are to Others - Association for Psychological Science
The best advice I can see for ensuring Perl 6's success is for Perl developers to start writing code in Perl 6. I mean now; it's definitely stable enough. Every module available within a year of release is going to be a major argument for people to try the new version. Getting Shit Done can win a lot of arguments.
--- Irregular Expression: Three Tales of Second System Syndrome
That's from "False-Positive Psychology: Undisclosed Flexibility in Data Collection and Analysis Allows Presenting Anything as Significant," which runs simulations of a version of Shalizi's "neutral model of inquiry," with random (null) experimental results, augmented with a handful of choices in the setup and analysis of an experiment. Even before accounting for publication bias, these few choices produced a desired result "significant at the 5% level" 60.7% of the time, and at the 1% level 21.5% at the time. --- Using degrees of freedom to change the past for fun and profit - Less Wrong
What Your Culture Really Says: Don’t bring up potential issues in the software unless you personally know how to AND have the time, energy and desire to fix them… for free. --- What Your Open Source Culture Really Says, Part One by Shanley Kane | Model View Culture
We cannot afford to have our success breed a new pseudoscience around pivots, MVPs, and the like. This was the fate of scientific management, and in the end, I believe, that set back its cause by decades. Science came to stand for the victory of routine work over creative work, mechanization over humanity, and plans over agility. Later movements had to be spawned to correct those deficiencies.
–Eric Ries, The Lean Startup --- kadavy.net | A/A Testing: How I increased conversions 300% by doing absolutely nothing
This model can also be seen as a server-side implementation of the popular Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern. --- Understanding JavaServer Pages Model 2 architecture | JavaWorld
In a 2008 article, which again, no-one seems to have read ('Powers of the Facsimile: A Turing Test on Science and Literature', written for an edited collection on the novelist Richard Powers) - Bruno Latour makes this strategic point about the ambivalent qualities of Turing's 1950 article. For him, Turing's text contains not clear analytic rigour, but "metaphors, tropes, anecdotes, asides and self description"; features of what he calls "matters of concern". Turing considered the idea of machines having intelligence through the "most bizarre, kitschy, baroque text ever submitted to a scholarly journal". Latour even jokes that Alan Sokal would no doubt have interpreted it as a hoax. It's no wonder that Turing's friend and logician Robin Gandy said of the essay that, "it was intended not so much as a penetrating contribution to philosophy but as propaganda […] He wrote this paper - unlike his mathematical papers - quickly and with enjoyment. I can remember him reading aloud to me some of the passages - always with a smile, sometimes with a giggle." --- Why Aren't We Reading Turing? | www.furtherfield.org
Cordless drills are interesting pieces of tech that can be easily repurposed; there are huge battery packs in them, big, beefy motors, and enough hardware to build an Automatic Cat Feeder or a motorized bicycle. --- Hacklet 39: Battery Power | Hackaday
I was talking to a buggy maker and he was building a new one for someone who had their buggy hit by a car (horse was killed, no people injured). He was telling me about “the man in the suit” who was going to settle the bill for the loss of the buggy. The buggy maker couldn’t understand why the man wouldn’t reimburse the full cost of a new buggy and he kept asking the buggy maker how old the buggy was that got destroyed. The Amish man just felt the only right thing to do was replace the buggy, and not just a percentage of it. I realized it was an insurance agent and he was talking about depreciation. I guess the agent and the buggy maker were getting pretty exasperated with each other, but finally the agent asked how long one could expect a buggy to last, and the buggy maker told him thirty or forty years. At that the agent gave up and paid the full claim (which was only $1,500 for a brand new buggy!). But it was sobering to hear, on the one hand the straightforward, simple, innocent sensibilities of the Amish buggy maker versus the calculating, reductive logic of the insurance agent. As an Amish furniture maker once told me, “I don’t want any part of some money-making scheme.” Words to live by. --- Avidly / On Amish Time
Both languages are great for different reasons
I’m a huge fan of doing exploratory data analysis/visualization in R using ggplot2 and dplyr. Using these tools, I find it straightforward to translate my ideas from English into code and visualizations. The analogous process in Python is usually more convoluted, and the results are not nearly as pleasing to the eye or as informative. I’ve found that the ease of working in R greatly enhances my creativity and general happiness.
That being said, R also has some pretty huge drawbacks relative to Python. The language is byzantine and weird, and anytime I leave the magical world of dplyr and ggplot I start to feel the pain. Furthermore, I find it hard to automate workflows, or build reusable code. My current strategy is to leverage the best of both worlds — do early stage data analysis in R, then switch to Python when it’s time to get serious, be a team player, and ship some real code and data products. --- Stitch Fix Technology
This class pattern says that to print a Plus node, you first print arg1, then you print a plus sign, then you print arg2. So it looks like a nice formatting language, but where do we specify the parser? The answer is that we don’t specify a parser; Classp will invert the formatter to generate a parser for us. Since formatters are typically much easier to write and maintain than parsers, it almost feels like magic. --- Google Open Source Blog: Classp: a “classier” way to parse
The uncomfortable answer to why this happens is that a significant amount of programming in the real world is done partly through what I'll call superstition and mythology. --- Chris's Wiki :: blog/programming/ProgrammingViaSuperstition
The Kelly criterion is a well known formula used to determine the optimal size of a series of bets. The size of the bet is a proportion of current bankroll determined to optimize the growth rate over sequential bets. It is a function of both the probability of winning each bet (call it p) and the odds being given (call it b). --- Welcome to Epstein's Blog
Newton's Principia, when it appeared in 1687, was received with the greatest admiration, not only by the foremost mathematicians and astronomers in Europe, but also by philosophers like Voltaire and Locke and by members of the educated public. In this account I describe some of the controversies that it provoked, and the impact it had during the next century on the development of celestial mechanics, and the theory of gravitation. --- The Reception of Newton's Principia
That file sat there, in memory when the person took their lunch break, responded to other emails, and worked with dozen other attachments. And that’s quite scary. It is putting a lot of faith in a piece of software…
Which is something I have noticed people do. As a software engineer, the best advice I can probably give you is to never assume any software you use is reliable. It isn’t. --- Terminally Incoherent | I will not fix your computer.
There is a British joke to the effect that when imperial units are abolished an exception will be made for the "British Standard measure of excess", namely the firkin, which will be retained but only used in twos as in "two firkin big", "two firkin small", etc.; and with "not" in technical terms relating to statistical significance such as "not firkin likely". This is playing off the fact that "two" and "too" are homophones, and in certain British accents, "firkin" sounds very similar to "fucking", thus "two firkin big" sounds like "too fucking big". --- FFF system - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Yet in preparing his book, Dr. Ford deeply mined this shadowy world of public information. For instance, the federal agency wanted him to strike a reference to the size of the first hydrogen test device — its base was seven feet wide and 20 feet high. Dr. Ford responded that public photographs of the device, with men, jeeps and a forklift nearby, gave a scale of comparison that clearly revealed its overall dimensions. --- Hydrogen Bomb Physicist’s Book Runs Afoul of Energy Department - NYTimes.com
Vik Paruchuri --- Dataquest Blog - Writings about data science, from the makers of <a href="https://www.dataquest.io">Dataquest</a>
That may change soon. At least one U.S. generics company is working on FDA approval for its own insulin. But as the diabetes website dLife argued in 2013, it would be a mistake to wait for the whole drug-approval system to work on its own. After all, over the last 90-plus years, it hasn't.
--- Where's the Generic Insulin? - Pacific Standard
dllup is a lightweight markup language designed for creating simple websites. It is a way to write an easily readable text file which the dllup parser turns into a static HTML page, or a LaTeX document. --- dllu
if you see things that don’t make sense to you, you have to investigate them later, because that’s a sign towards a thing that will mess you up --- Yeller - Incuriosity Will Kill Your Infrastructure
To demonstrate this, Echodyne installed a prototype metamaterials radar antenna—which looks like a stack of printed circuit boards, about the size of a shoebox top—on an off-the-shelf quad copter. It’s capable of lifting a little more than six pounds, though the prototype unit weighs only about 2.6 pounds. The company modified the flight controls so that the drone could autonomously follow a target, using the radar antenna to guide it. Frankenberg and Driscoll say the drone—which they showed off on a conference table, but did not allow me to photograph—followed them around a field.
--- Echodyne Targets Drones, Self-Driving Cars with Metamaterials Radar | Xconomy
FasteR is a graphical user interface and integrated development environment for R statistical language that can be used as stand-alone desktop application or as Add-in in MS Excel. --- Home Page - FasterStat.com
The workflow is simple: An R programmer develops an R script (using their standard R tools) and publishes that script to the DeployR server. Once published, R scripts can be executed by any authorized application using the DeployR API. We provide native client libraries in Java, JavaScript and .NET to simplify making calls to the server. The R results returned on these calls can be embedded, displayed or processed in any way your application needs. --- Integrate R into applications with DeployR Open
I watched the same thing happen at the Jules Stein Eye Institute at UCLA. I asked at one point, why are you treating cataracts only with a totally obsolete cataract operation? And the man said to me, “Charlie, it’s such a wonderful operation to teach.” (Laughter). When he stopped using that operation, it was because almost all the patients had voted with their feet. Again, appeal to interest and not to reason if you want to change conclusions. --- Academic Economics: Strengths and Weaknesses by Munger
Researchers at Nottingham Trent University in the U.K. are working to develop new technology that would do just that: monitor the surface of roads for underlying damage that may develop into a pothole if left unattended.
--- Researchers Are Developing Software to Predict Potholes Before They Form - CityLab
"It is not hyperbole to call the Department of Commerce, 'America's Data Agency,'" Pritzker said at the Esri International User's Conference in July. "No other department can rival the reach, depth, and breadth of our data programs: Our data efforts are rooted in the Constitution, which laid the groundwork for the creation of the Census Bureau and the Patent and Trademark Office, two key data agencies housed at the Commerce Department."
--- Commerce Department names Ian Kalin first chief data officer
2014-04-28 Uniform random floats: How to generate a double-precision floating-point number in [0, 1] uniformly at random given a uniform random source of bits ---
Many recent algorithms in computational statistics are variations on a common theme. In this book we discuss four such classes of algorithms. Or, more precisely, we discuss a single large class of algorithms, and we show how various well-known classes of statistical algorithms fit into this common framework. --- Block Relaxation Algorithms in Statistics - GitBook
Mr. Foster, 45, says he uses a smartphone, but the plan offers only 100 megabytes of wireless data a month—a pittance compared with most of the plans offered by national carriers. Mr. Foster says he gets by relying on Wi-Fi hot spots around Boston and only turning on his cellular data when he needs to check his email. It takes more work, but He says he isn't likely to go back to a costly contract plan. --- Living Without a Cellphone - WSJ
Airlines pay at most $10 per booking regardless of complexity and this fact alone killed most of the travel agency business. Of course if your flight is simple booking online at an OTA or an airline website is easy. Try doing something more complicated and you are basically screwed.
I have to fly back and forth to London and within that stay fly back and forth to Germany plus either drive or take a train to a small town where my family came from. Complicating that fact is my size, as I need to find seats which can fit my lanky 2 meter (6'5") frame. Planes, trains and automobiles is a fine movie title but a nightmare planning scenario.
Most airline and OTA sites do not like multi-destination trips such as 3 sided (ABCA) or anything like mine (AB-CBA); these are simply not worth their effort. Building a simple flight itinerary (ABA) is hard enough given the enormous number of potential matches (as I've talked about in my flight articles, Part 1 and Part2 ); the more complex the pattern the more impossible to get any decent performance on building a list becomes.
I know there are travel agents who specialize in certain combinations who often know better deals than any online system can generate but they are not easy to find.
You would think with all the awesome computing power we have today we could solve this type of arbitrary reservation search but the issue is that most of today's reservation data is still maintained in 50 year old mainframe systems (mostly SABRE and Amadeus) which are pathetically incapable of anything more than what they were designed to do. Virtually all airlines still use these dinosaurs as their back end, as building a flight engine is a major pain and it's cheaper to just keep using them than to build a new one --- The Codist: Really Complex Travel Software Doesn't Exist For A Reason
When I came home for the holidays, Dad shared The Ten Commandments of Egoless Programming with me. He printed them and we discussed each point. It was one of the few programming related things we were able to discuss before he unexpectedly passed; perhaps that’s why it sticks with me. --- Dad and The Ten Commandments of Egoless Programming - Stephen Wyatt Bush's Blog
“Hey,” he said gently. “Be safe. And if you ever need anything, what’s mine is yours.”
“Likewise,” I replied, overwhelmed at his kindness.
I never saw him again—we must have hiked at different speeds—but that sentiment was pervasive on the trail. If something went wrong, you knew someone would be there to lend a hand or a mental boost. --- A 500-mile solo hike cured my loneliness - Quartz
Chainable action perimeters
--- Lisp in 3 words
Many examples in functional programming assume that you are always on the "happy path". But to create a robust real world application you must deal with validation, logging, network and service errors, and other annoyances. So, how do you handle all this in a clean functional way? --- Railway Oriented Programming | F# for fun and profit
The Torist is a new online journal, planned for a biannual release, which is dedicated to deepening the relationship between technology and the humanities. In particular, we are interested in how electronic communication intersects with communities (artistic, political, and beyond). Working on the premise that all activism is stifled by pervasive surveillance, the Torist is hosted both on the clearnet and as a Tor hidden service. --- The Torist - Editorial Statement
We were only ever able to find one successful method of recruiting new micronationalists: wait for random people around the world to learn about micronations, start their own projects without any impact or influence from us, integrate those projects into the larger community, and then if those projects failed after a year or two sometimes their members would join us instead. This sort of worked, but never enough to get us more than ten or twenty people. And those other projects, the ones they made, very rarely had more than ten or twenty people either, despite hordes of people who said they thought micronations were interesting and agreed to participate for a few months. It was a weird problem, and one I was never able to solve before I left the hobby. --- A Cascade Of Dunbar Numbers | Slate Star Codex
It's also worth noting that if you were to think of the entirety of Complice as an addition to LWSH... well, it would definitely look like feature creep, but at any rate there would be several other notable improvements:
daily emails prompting you to decide what you're going to do that day
a historical record of what you've done, with guided weekly, monthly, and yearly reviews
optional accountability partner who gets emails with what you've done every day (the LWSH might be a great place to find partners!)
So, if you haven't clicked the link already, check out: complice.co/room/lesswrong
(This article posted to Main because that's where the rest of the LWSH posts are, and this represents a substantial update.) --- Announcing the Complice Less Wrong Study Hall - Less Wrong
SonarQube is an open platform to manage code quality. As such, it covers the 7 axes of code quality: --- SonarQube™
“In the distant future, if human civilization survives and spreads through the cosmos, humanity must create technological marvels at ultra-grand scales,” Liu wrote to me.
I believe science and technology can bring us a bright future, but the journey to achieve it will be filled with difficulties and exact a price from us. Some of these obstacles and costs will be quite terrible, but in the end we will land on the sunlit further shore. Let me quote the Chinese poet Xu Zhimo from the beginning of the last century, who, after a trip to the Soviet Union, said, “Over there, they believe in the existence of Heaven, but there is a sea of blood that lies between Heaven and Hell, and they’ve decided to cross the sea.” --- Liu Cixin Is China’s Answer to Arthur C. Clarke - The New Yorker
Well after the initial calls to shut down Head Start, long-term results started coming in from the Perry preschool study. As adults, people in the experimental (preschool) group were less likely to have been arrested, less likely to have spent time in prison, and more likely to have graduated from high school. Unfortunately, due to methodological problems in the study design, it’s not 100% clear where these effects come from. Although the goal was to do a randomized trial, the experimental design necessitated home visits for the experimental group. As a result, children in the experimental group whose mothers were employed were swapped with children in the control group whose mothers were unemployed. The positive effects on the preschool group could somehow be caused by having at-home mothers. Since the Head Start studies weren’t randomized and using instrumental variables (IVs) to tease out causation in “natural experiments” didn’t become trendy until relatively recently, it took a long time to get plausible causal results from Head Start. --- The dangers of intermediate targets: IQ, cholesterol, and 99%-ile latency
There was this liberal fantasy in the 19th century that government would dissolve away and be replaced by contractual market relationships; that government itself is just a feudal holdover that would eventually wither away. In fact, exactly the opposite happened. [Government has] kept growing and growing with more and more bureaucrats. The more free-market we get, the more bureaucrats we end up with, too.
So I kind of looked around for a counter-example: Is there an example of a place where they did market reforms and it didn’t increase the total number of bureaucrats … I couldn’t find any. It always goes up. It went up under Reagan. --- “I found myself turning into an idiot!”: David Graeber explains the life-sapping reality of bureaucratic life - Salon.com
“Gen. Petraeus violated the law to impress a girlfriend,” he says. “Edward Snowden released confidential information in order to bring attention to overwhelming and pervasive constitutional violations.” --- Edward Snowden Deserves David Petraeus-Like Deal, Backers Say - US News
The painting shows a scene from August 1765, when the young Mughal emperor Shah Alam, exiled from Delhi and defeated by East India Company troops, was forced into what we would now call an act of involuntary privatisation. The scroll is an order to dismiss his own Mughal revenue officials in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, and replace them with a set of English traders appointed by Robert Clive – the new governor of Bengal – and the directors of the EIC, who the document describes as “the high and mighty, the noblest of exalted nobles, the chief of illustrious warriors, our faithful servants and sincere well-wishers, worthy of our royal favours, the English Company”. The collecting of Mughal taxes was henceforth subcontracted to a powerful multinational corporation – whose revenue-collecting operations were protected by its own private army. --- The East India Company: The original corporate raiders | William Dalrymple | World news | The Guardian
"netsh trace" is your friend. And yes, it does exactly what it sounds like it does. --- Wireshark? No TCPDump? No Problem!/19409 InfoSec Handlers Diary Blog - No Wireshark? No TCPDump? No Problem!
Because of the side projects, I was able to do different things when I was stressed and impoverished from doing again and again the same thing. I could later refocus on Redis, and find again the right motivations to have fun with it, because small projects are cool, but to work for years at a single project can provide more value for others in the long run. --- Side projects - Antirez weblog
Unless we figure out a legal-social regime that will allow this stock of data to grow without it ending up in the corporate silos of Google or Facebook, we won’t get very far. But once we have it, there could be all sorts of social experimentation. With enough data you could start planning beyond the horizon of the individual consumer—at the level of communities, neighbourhoods, cities. That’s the only way to prevent centralization. Unless we change the legal status of data, we’re not going to get very far.
--- New Left Review - Evgeny Morozov: Socialize the Data Centres!
hints --- vimperator cheat sheet
Recently, Adamatzky has turned his attention to a biological medium: the slime mold Physarum polycephalum. Like BZ chemicals, slime molds are experts at spatially explicit problems. Adamatzky adds that they are easier to experiment with than finicky chemicals, and can solve a wider range of problems than chemicals have been able to tackle. --- Moore’s Law Is About to Get Weird - Issue 21: Information - Nautilus
Indonesians surveyed by Galpaya told her that they didn’t use the internet. But in focus groups, they would talk enthusiastically about how much time they spent on Facebook. Galpaya, a researcher (and now CEO) with LIRNEasia, a think tank, called Rohan Samarajiva, her boss at the time, to tell him what she had discovered. “It seemed that in their minds, the Internet did not exist; only Facebook,” he concluded. --- Millions of Facebook users have no idea they’re using the internet - Quartz
In Scotland, a woman ran up bills totalling over £1,000 after adding emoticons to text messages.
Sad face
The issue revolves around how the handset interprets the icons, known as emoticons or emojis.
In some cases, especially on older handsets, the emoticons are converted into MMS (multi-media service) messages, which can cost up to 40p each depending on the network. --- BBC News - Emoticons in texts can rack up huge bills
I can fix this by lowering the confidence level. Because honestly, I don’t need a high confidence in the ranking. I’d rather err on the side of picking up a deservedly obscure book than to miss out on a rare gem. Experimenting with this a bit, I find that a confidence around 80% raises the obscure books enough to give me an interesting mix. For example, a 5*5 book gets a 75% rank, while the Harry Potter one stays at 62%. --- A better reading list with Mathematica - Higher Order
Using punctuation once you’ve gone all caps is like wearing a bikini at a nudist colony. --- This journalist used CAPS LOCK for an entire week. -- Fusion
A couple of months ago, I pitched a feature on the music industry that I was totally qualified to write. But the editor questioned my experience: What exactly had I published about the music industry? By my count, over two thousand blogposts since 2009. But the links to my author pages bounced back because the websites had disappeared. Five of years work apparently evaporated from server racks somewhere in New Jersey, as if I had never written anything at all. Come to think of it, had I?
--- All My Blogs Are Dead - The Awl
With Lob, all you have to do to get started is a quick and free sign up. After creating an account at Lob, you can immediately start sending mail. It's as simple as that. You can mail a single postcard and it will only cost you $0.70 all-in, no strings attached. It is a simple as sending out an email using the SendGrid API. --- How To Send Postcards As Effortlessly As Email
First, I created two files. The first is a regular JPEG without any transparency. You can compress this one as much as you like. The second is an 8-bit PNG (alpha mask). This is just a black and white image that represents the transparent areas of the beer can. Notice how the PNG is only 11KB; that’s because it contains so few colors and no transparency. --- Using SVG to shrink your PNGs | Peter Hrynkow
Linkdump internals:
<script>var text=decodeURIComponent(document.location.search.substring(1));if(text.length > 0) {var item = {"type":"paragraph", id:"19850725" +(Math.random() * 0x7FFFFFFF|0).toString(16), "text":text};var bundle = {type: 'add', id: item.id, item: item, date: (new Date()).getTime()};var url = ["http:/", document.location.host, "page", "linkdump", "action"].join("/");var req = new XMLHttpRequest(); req.onload = function(x) {window.history.pushState("wiki","wiki","/view/linkdump");wiki.doInternalLink("linkdump")}; req.open("PUT", url, true); req.setRequestHeader("Content-type","application/x-www-form-urlencoded"); req.send("action="+JSON.stringify(bundle));} </script> Scriptfu
This page contains embedded Javascript to automatically add links to the top; add the bookmarklet below to your toolbar, then when you are on a page you are one click away from saving a quotation right here.
<div id=marklet><a href="javascript:(function(){S=document.getSelection().toString();U=(S ? S + ' --- ' : '') + '['+location.href+' '+document.title+']'; B='http://%s/view/linkdump?';window.open(B+encodeURIComponent(U),'save-link','height=600,width=200,modal=yes,alwaysRaised=yes')})()"> LinkDump - %s</a> bookmarklet</div> <script> var x = document.getElementById("marklet"); x.innerHTML = x.innerHTML.replace(/%s/g, location.host); </script> to get back to <div class='backref'>Linkdump</div>