charlesarthur

You need to read up about XY 5-ARD (the condition Caster Semenya has and Khelif surely has). Being XY with active SRY means you're male. Khelif has admitted having the SRY gene (in an interview with L'Equipe). Males have very significant advantages (50% plus) in power sports such as weightlifting and, yes, boxing.

Sex isn't "more fluid". It's entirely binary, but DSDs (differences of sexual development) can make appearances deceptive - so an XY male can be wrongly recorded as female at birth, especially in countries with inexperienced medics and midwives.

Phelps's records have all been broken. By other males, of course - no female is getting close to his numbers. That's male advantage in action.

Not that I've seen (I've read a lot of chess books, and a lot of Go books). Go is a bigger game - you can't teach it in the way you can chess.

The problem of deciding what the biggest move is in Go goes way beyond the challenge in chess, where you have sets of potential lines that are completely decided by what's on the board. So you can't say "be aggressive, go after this or that".

Absolutely agree about Open. It's without a doubt the very best tennis autobiography (written with an NYT writer) I've ever seen, and I've seen a ton of them. (Jack Kramer's The Game is pretty good too.) "Shot and a Ghost" by James Wilstrop, a top pro squash player (they make about as much money as the No.200 tennis player), is pretty good too about the mental struggle.

"the fact that I can get better interest on US dollars by depositing stablecoins on some defi platform"..

There was this guy called Madoff. He was able to get better interest than the markets for quite a while too. Those stablecoins are not contributing to the productive economy. They're not being invested in machines that make new cars, clear carbon from the air, produce cheaper food. Nothing about cryptocurrency will solve housing or free time, because those are political problems which require humans to come together with a common aim - not, in the complete opposite example, people just wanting more for themselves by "depositing stablecoins on some defi platform".

"the basic testing infrastructure is more-or-less world class as far as I can tell"

No, it isn't. There's a significant backlog on providing tests and significant backlog on analysing tests. The BBC's More Or Less radio program (available on BBC Sounds) has been explaining for weeks how the test numbers aren't reliable and aren't as impressive as people think.

I don't know who "They" who "keep pushing stupid narratives" about SK-like testing are (perhaps a link would help?). I haven't seen suggestions to that effect.

Not quite accurate. It's not "basically identical". The "moonshot" proposal is that you'd be able to walk up to, say, a cinema entrance and get a PCR test right there which would instantly tell you whether you're +ve for Covid. (Not antibody-positive, but infected/infective-positive.)

That's very different from what has been suggested for both the US and UK, which is to have widespread and easy access to PCR testing that could be turned round in, say, 24 hours so that you'd go to a testing station and then be contacted the next day to be told your status.

Given the biotech capacity of the UK and US, that sort of testing capacity should have been well within reach in about April. (However because the US decided not to go with the WHO recommendation on what RNA elements to test for, they ran into problems. I can't find out whether this is the same for the UK.) Germany was able to ramp up its testing capacity that quickly and thus didn't get the sort of criticism that the UK and US governments did.

The gap between the moonshot proposal and the suggested solution is gigantic. Speed, accuracy, availability - all of them come into it. Plus you also have to ask: why do it, when you have alternatives which could come on stream well before the moonshot tech is developed, in the form of multiple vaccine programs? And why suggest you're going to spend that amount? (£100bn sounds made up, if I'm honest. Why not 10? 50? Because 100 sounds big and round.)

So this isn't about media coverage somehow being "partisan horseshit". It really is about a proposal which, given the multiple missed targets and continual lying (about testing capacity, testing times, test facility availability and contact tracing success - all are worse than ministers admit in public statements, but are revealed in data from government departments) from the UK government, simply can't be taken seriously.

There's absolutely no evidence that the NYT intended to publish Carlson's home address. You only need to think for a moment to realise it's completely not what it does - what do you think the reporters are, walking around wearing Vendetta masks and shouting "EXPECT US"? You should also be able to consider the logical possibility that Carlson was talking bollocks. And then weigh the two possibilities against each other: NYT doing something that it never does (please cite last time you saw it give someone's full home address, rather than "tidy suburb in Pensacola") v Carlson spouting bollocks.

Dismaying that there are people who would lack so little logical capability to be found on what I thought was a site for coders.

The NBER paper that you point to in a subsequent comment doesn't have any detail on the popularity of social media; we explicitly can't make any determination on whether social media is having an effect there because the data is missing. If, say, Facebook were to provide external researchers with data about the growth in Facebook use - users, median time spent on site, average time spent, SD of time spent - for a number of years, that would help to identify whether social media has a role in such polarisation.

Although it's trivial to say "I see a lot of polarisation on social media, therefore it's worse than it was", a satellite-view paper like that NBER one gives zero insight into the role of social media, partly because the data isn't provided, but also because it doesn't examine what effects there might be on smaller groups within the population who are, say, heavy social media users.

I think the most useful thing Facebook could do would be to make more information available to researchers, rather than pointing to research which hasn't been able to use data and claim that helps exonerate Facebook.

You need to cite your good authority because I know WGA screenwriters and it is definitely not anything like 30%. On a $10m film (tiny) that would be $3m. On a $100m film (pretty blockbuster-y) it would be $30m. Stop a minute and think about it: that's Tom Cruise's sort of per-film salary.

Screenwriters are great and all that, but they're eminently fungible, whereas folk like Cruise are not.

I'd suggest it's more like 5%-10% upfront. What they get on residuals may be a lot higher, but that assumes the film covers its costs, which in Hollywood can mean anything.

Hello, article author here. You wrote: "There's lot of focus in this article on failure. I enjoy Apple bashing as much as the next guy, but one has to assume in the same 20 years Apple's head of design would have had as many, if not more successes?"

I point out in the article that Ive (plus Jobs) undoubtedly saved Apple. Without Ive, and the inspirational design of the first iMac, Apple would now be a footnote in history. The Apple Watch is a good design. The "sunflower" iMac was a good design. The unibody MacBook Pro is a good design. The 2001 Titanium laptop was a fantastic design. The iPhone 5 was a delightful design. There's a long, long list of good products. There's also a list of less good products, and I cited some of them.

I use and enjoy Apple products every day. But nothing and nobody should be above careful critique. My motivation was to point out that Ive leaving isn't necessarily a disaster, because he didn't always get it right, and to cite some examples to back that up.

(edited to replace attempt at blockquote HTML with "".)

If the Galaxy Tabs are considered "mid-range", who's making the high-end ones, and what are they? I thought Samsung was meant to be the contender here.

Android users can get adblockers by sideloading, and Chrome users on iOS are a tiny minority.

The reason why the mobile web version is less sucky on your battery life is because it doesn't get the chance to break out of the browser to monitor your position, play silent audio so that it can stay "active" and push notifications at you, and generally push to the front of the queue.

"Last time I used it, it still didn't have a media library and dumped tens of thousands of songs into a flat list."

In the "Advanced" tab, which I'd expect any self-respecting HN denizen to go to first, there's a checkbox for "Keep iTunes Media folder organized" which explains that it will "[place] files into album and artist folders, and [name] the files based on the disc number, track number and song title". Mine is a very hierarchical structure - and I've had it for a decade. No flat list here.

"You have to have that garbage installed on your machine if you own an iPhone. Not interested."

Not true, either - hasn't been true since the advent of iCloud in 2011.

As to the codecs - it does do MP3 and AAC, which probably covers 95% of available content, though it doesn't do Ogg Vorbis, Quo Vadis, or various others. For that sort of thing there's VLC.

You install WhatsApp, like a billion other people.

"I attribute that mostly to the quality of Google Maps severely degrading in recent years."

Seriously? I can't see how that would happen unless you're living somewhere prone to dramatic road rebuilding. Or do you mean the quality of the Google Maps interface?

Apologies if this sounds rude, because that's not the intent. How can you be sure that people whose screens you've replaced don't then get an "error 53" when they later come to do a software upgrade? Because that's the only time it shows up. Would they know to come back to you about it (possibly shaking fist)?

Possibly you're stretching for Hanlon's Razor, except you've got the wrong end of it. Hanlon's is the one that says "never assign to malice what can be assigned to stupidity". This feels like a screwup. The reason why it happens is consistent with security. But the effects are maddening.

I see (and get) lots of apps which are free, with limitations so that you can decide whether to buy the in-app purchase - which is effectively "the app". And I see full-featured ad-supported apps with an IAP to end the ads too.

True, those aren't time-limited trials; they're in effect feature-limited trials and pleasure-limited (annoyance-added) trials.

"Android dominate iOS by a huge margin, and I think it is ahead even in the high end segment."

Every piece of data I've seen on this - for phones >$400, which is generally reckoned "high end" - suggests that's not correct. Most of Samsung's phones are not Galaxy S(n)[Edge][Plus]; instead they're much cheaper products.

Premium Android sales have pretty much stalled since the introduction of the large-screen iPhones over a year ago; hence LG, Sony and HTC seeing falls in sales and profit.

"Another alternative is that it is just that the app market is catching up more slowly than the hardware market"

The gap in revenue between the two platforms is getting wider by year, even while the download gap seems to be growing. So that doesn't seem a sufficient explanation.

"This is why people have to ask "do you serve coke or pepsi?" at restaurants."

OT, but this is why news anchors have to say "the obesity rate in the US has risen to its highest level ever, scientists reported today."

The fact that you disagree with someone doesn't per se make them wrong.

Ooops, left out the link to Gartner. It's this: http://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/windows-10-does-no...

The figure given came from Google's Amit Singhal in October 2015.

"The author needs to clarify what portion of total revenue Google derives from ads, and then to break those ads out by service (Youtube, Gmail, Sponsored search), platform (desktop vs. mobile), and geography."

The author (me) would love to, but Google makes very little data available. The only geographic data is total revenues broken down by US/UK/Rest of World. There's also revenue from "Google [search]", "platforms" and "other". Estimates about YouTube etc revenue tend to be calculations based on various private metrics.

"I'd wager… that Google never planned to make much money from mobile search in the first place"

Possible. As the article says, and has been repeated multiple times, Android was a defensive move to stop Microsoft cornering the mobile search field.

"People don't explore on their smartphones: they consume."

I must introduce you to some networks called "Instagram" and "Snapchat" and "Line" and "Weibo" and "WhatsApp".

"I know _ad hominem_ is generally uncalled for, but"

Thus neatly showing how comment threads turn "pretty toxic". If you have better analysis of the data, that would be great to see.

I've responded to your comment there. Obviously, the data is open to lots of interpretations. I tried to use models that seem reasonable and reflect what we know about internet behaviour - particularly the Pareto distribution of most activities.

"In other words, he's saying that half of all users don't do ANY searches at all, whereas all that he can say is that on some days, some users don't do any Google searches on their mobile device."

From the article: "who does what searches isn’t fixed; so someone who did zero searches yesterday might do 10 tomorrow. But equally, the 10-searcher yesterday does none or one or four today. And so on."

So yes. But on any given day, half of people don't do a mobile search. And the numbers from Google suggest that the average across a 30-day period is less than 30. If you think there should be a different model for how many people do how many searches than a Pareto distribution, please offer it.

Thanks for your comments. #1 Android tablets are an interesting one. Do we think people are more active in terms of Google searches on Android tablets than on Android phones or desktop? I'd suggest they're less active (in searching terms) than on desktop. Than mobile - well, the received wisdom is that Android tablets are largely used for consuming video, particularly in Asia, which is where a lot of them are. It's an oversight on my part, I agree, but I'm not sure they make a big difference.

#2 Gartner revised its calculation for the PC base earlier this year - if you followed my linkblog you'd have seen the reference to its latest calculation [1] which puts the number at 1.48bn in 2015, falling constantly towards 1.38bn in 2019. That might get revised, of course, but the 2015 figure is probably accurate.

Yes, the interviews clearly come from prebriefings. What parts of the article do you think aren't independent or neutral?

D'oh. Proof that it's always good to have someone else read. Thank you - updated.