HN user
Last night some neighbors set off some illegal fireworks a few blocks from our house. My husband was out on a walk when the paramedics arrived because one of them had burned off half his face and another his arm.
Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1053/
Churning out the blog posts isn't a bad idea if it's true. Repetition isn't inherently bad.
Amen to childhood leukemia rates improving being awe-inspiring. I had a friend I rode the bus with around 2001 who was diagnosed with leukemia and didn't make it. They let us know over the PA system at school. I suspect these days she would have survived.
It's misleading because a single murder in this case is not statistically significant, but phrasing it using probabilistic terminology (i.e. percentages) obscures that fact and implies that you have enough data for the probabilistic language to be relevant.
Choosing to use percentages when there is a countable or small amount of data is typically misleading, even though it is "technically" true. In fact, a misleading statement is almost always something that is technically a fact.
It would be good (especially with the replication crisis), but historically to earn a PhD, especially at a top-tier institution, the criteria is conducting original research that produces new knowledge or unique insights.
Replicating existing results doesn't meet that criteria so unknowingly repeating someone's work is an existential crisis for PhD students. It can mean that you worked for 4-6 years on something that the committee then can't/won't grant a doctorate for and effectively forcing you to start over.
Theoretically, your advisor is supposed to help prevent this as well by guiding you in good directions, but not all advisors are created equal.
This is an excellent point! People often forget that something uncommon out of a much larger pool is still larger than anything that comes from a smaller pool (base rate neglect).
https://www.simplypsychology.org/base-rate-fallacy.html
For example, given a choice of the two categories, people might categorize a woman as a politician rather than a banker if they heard that she enjoyed social activism at school—even if they knew that she was drawn from a population consisting of 90% bankers and 10% politicians (APA).
The general population is much larger than the population of child prodigies.
I think many people in the Bay Area also see careers as a game.
I think this was meant in jest, but Florida is not that wide on the peninsula. You can drive from Clearwater to Cocoa Beach (the entire width from west to east) in about 2.5-3 hours. So if you live in the middle like near Orlando or Gainesville, you just...drive an hour to go surfing.
The funny part of this is, you just described not only travel, but all of life prior to about 2003ish (at least in the United States). This is when, in my social circles, we transitioned to most people having cell phone access and the ability to "let people know if you would be late." Still a long time before smart phones became ubiquitous.
So this was "just life" in the 90s and beforehand. The upside you describe was also sometimes the downside. E.g. my mother was traveling for work when one of my brothers was injured in a way that required a trip to the ER for stitches (he's fine). My dad was getting us all (4 kids under 7) into the car as she called from her hotel and he basically had to answer and say that we were on the way to the hospital, and she just had to wait for an update once we got home many hours later.
And yet, I would still agree that "Life felt slower, but somehow more real?" and that we haven't yet found the right equilibrium for always being connected in a way humans were never able to be before. I'm glad experiences like this are still possible.
On the one hand, this seems nuts. On the other hand, the mechanism compared to all the other things biology can and has done doesn't seem that crazy.
Create egg, remove nucleus of egg, replace nucleus of egg with one or two nuclei from stored sperm that initiate replication and growth of the other species from there (depending on the exact mechanism which it sounds like they're still figuring out).
Compared with fungus that creates zombie ants (this is a real thing - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps_unilateralis) and birds that change their eggs to match those of other species (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brood_parasitism) it almost seems tame.
+1 to the other comments recommending Zulip over Mattermost. The threading model is fantastic.
Also, for a non-profit teaching coding note that they regularly have interns under the Google Summer of Code program and it's open source, so the students can even help with it.
https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/programs/2025/organizati...
I would recommend trying it anyway. The really poor reviews are from 5-8 years ago when it was legitimately difficult to use. They recently rolled out an overhaul that's significantly improved.
We used Zulip at a company I was at (about a decade ago) and everyone on the engineering team refused to switch from it to Slack, even when it looked like Dropbox might end the product because it was so loved (it's completely independent now so that's not been a concern for a long time).
What I would love to see happen from a safety perspective and which I think might happen (but zero timeline on when) is that a human driving a car will be relegated to something people do purely for enjoyment and only in areas designated for human drivers, similar to how you don't see horseback riding anymore except in designated areas or for specific use cases.
Exactly what "late-comers" do you mean here? Epic was founded in 1979.
And this reminds me of a wonderful parody blog post - https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdo...
Related (and hilarious): https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/thenightwatc...
What is despair? I have known it—hear my song. Despair is when you’re debugging a kernel driver and you look at a memory dump and you see that a pointer has a value of 7. THERE IS NO HARDWARE ARCHITECTURE THAT IS ALIGNED ON 7. Furthermore, 7 IS TOO SMALL AND ONLY EVIL CODE WOULD TRY TO ACCESS SMALL NUMBER MEMORY. Misaligned, small-number memory accesses have stolen decades from my life.
All James Mickens' USENIX articles are fun (for a very specific subset of computer scientist - the kind that would comment on this thread). https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens
YouTube was also one of the easiest ways to share family videos back then (the files were too large to be emailed, Google Photos didn't exist yet, pretty sure Facebook could share videos but the quality wasn't as good, etc).
Warning - some of these can be reasonably graphic. I came across this which is live footage of a hammerhead shark being caught and killed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isHEsOPIr28
Also got some cute things like a dad giving a piggyback ride, some weightlifting, an amazing dance rehearsal - so very human.
That might also be because you're not in the office every day, people use those days to talk more (scarcity bias). I'm in-office 5 days per week and because we don't have this scarcity of time, there are lots of periods of quiet. When I wasn't in person all the time at this and other jobs it was exactly as you described.
The biggest advantage of being primarily in person is actually that we have fewer meetings. I don't have to schedule 30 minutes on Zoom with someone and if I pop over for a question (when I see the person isn't in deep focus and can contextually grab them which is fantastic as well). If it takes 5 minutes to come to a decision, great - if we need to go over to the whiteboard and take 2 hours to flesh something out; also works.
Currency in the real world has many, many backups. For example, if I forgot the PIN number to a very old bank account that I later find a long lost relative recently put hundreds of thousands of dollars into when they passed away, I have other avenues to recover access. They might be annoying or require work (getting an affidavit, multiple forms of ID, etc) but it's not irrevocable in the way that a strict definition of bitcoin is.
Second this: https://regex101.com/
Super intuitive and great definitions / descriptions of everything.
Also the dinosaur and squid-shaped distribution graphs made me smile.
I needed this laugh so much. Thank you.
I don't know about Type II but Type I can be extremely limiting. A friend's spouse was diagnosed somewhere between 9 and 12 and it completely ended their dream of becoming a military aviator (also hoped to be an astronaut).
They now work at NASA but have had to fight tooth and nail to go on longer expeditions related to search and rescue and it's really only the advent of CGM that have made it possible, to be honest.
Found this as well after a quick Google search; the first medical approval of someone with Type 1 Diabetes by the FAA was 2020: https://beyondtype1.org/commercial-pilot-diabetes/
Yes, the fact that this is an extremely hard problem seems to be part of our mythology. Obtaining forbidden knowledge are part of many early creation stories (Garden of Eden - Tree of Knowledge, Prometheus and fire, etc.).
The Night Watch: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1311_05-08_mickens.pdf
Even as we speak, systems programmers are doing pointer arithmetic so that children and artists can pretend that their x86 chips do not expose an architecture designed by Sauron.
You might ask, “Why would someone write code in a grotesque language that exposes raw memory addresses? Why not use a modern language with garbage collection and functional programming and free massages after lunch?” Here’s the answer: Pointers are real. They’re what the hardware understands. Somebody has to deal with them. You can’t just place a LISP book on top of an x86 chip and hope that the hardware learns about lambda calculus by osmosis.
Really, I recommend everything by James Mickens every chance I get: https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens
I love the Python web framework community and how friendly it is. The first two replies are congratulations from major Django contributors (Jeff Triplett and Andrew Godwin).
We could consider doing the labeling in the other direction where we keep calling calculus, real analysis, algebra, etc. mathematics but treat arithmetic more like we do learning the alphabet (a necessary stepping stone but certainly not the end goal). We could also more typically refer to arithmetic as arithmetic and not math(s), then.
I think you may be referring to the Roseto effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roseto_effect
This community had unusually low rates of heart disease despite a large range of traditional risk factors. The general consensus was that this was due to the community-oriented nature of the town. Later they did follow-ups and found that as the town became more stereotypically "American" the mortality rates due to heart disease increased, especially among younger men.