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Interesting to see the top comments in this thread.

* "This attack on Richard Stallman feels much like a witch hunt to me."

The "attack" in question is an appendix to a blog post. The original one said, in substance, "I do not know much about the accused, and he certainly didn't say what many press accounts accuse him of, but his recent words deserve punishment." The appendix blog post says, in brief, "oh my, this is all goes way back."

Does that sound like The Crucible or "she turned me into a newt?" Although the rest of the HN comment is more honest, calling what RMS said "questioning the status quo [about the victim status of, well, child rape victims.]"

* "These activists are just power hungry evil people."

Reacting to a blog post written by a person who is (weakly) hiding her full identity, who works in a tech/robotics company rather than in an activist organization, who recently deactivated her WordPress website, and who is not pointing to any means of activism. All very consistent steps to ambitious activism, certainly.

* "These stories are so opposite of horrifying"

Sentence followed by a complete rewrite of the said stories, using deliberately misleading edulcoration (Stories 1 and 2), or showing the same kind of argumentation as in "oh because autism," which is well argued against in the main thread [1], instead of realizing that being that being "awful at asking women out" involves clumsiness rather than suicide blackmail (Story 3).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20993532

(Add.) I find it hard to read threads such as this one and not feel that tropes about computer people hold some truth, despite myself feeling close to that group for various reasons.

I already talked about how bloated Medium articles are. That one-sentence essay is easily over a megabyte.

https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

I cannot find a fix either, and am getting bored of having to fix Chrome UI.

Indeed; sorry for that. I have no idea whether I can correct my submission.

The speed issue is even more pervasive -- compose, but also labels (if you use L to label emails a lot, you have noticed it).

Two questions, if you do not mind --

(1) Does FastMail offer threaded email conversations? I cannot stand the left/right pane display of email UIs like Outlook (or Apple Mail).

(2) Does FastMail offer labels and filters that come close to those in Google Mail?

That menu item will vanish soon. Several users have reported it elsewhere in this thread (it has vanished for me too).

it really lacks empathy (or realism) to assume that the same exact UI will be useful/pleasant to literally 1 billion users

You nailed it, but large private sector companies like Google (or Apple) have no genuine feedback loops: they do not care, because (1) vocal dissenters will never represent more than a rounding error of the user base, and because (2) there are no obvious exit options.

It's Fordism ("you can have it any colour, as long as it's black"), only with 21st century tech.

Skipping the "UX Pro" creds, I trust that the rest of your post is correct: Google has well-paid UX engineers from the best places.

That's precisely what I find scary about those UX changes: they to run counter-current of everything I value in UX (clean and compact vs. bloated and spread out).

Now redirects to a page titled "Do you really want to use HTML Gmail?" -- which speaks volumes about the new UI is being much more coercitive on the user than previous ones.

That won't be of any comfort, but I'm exactly the same as you.

My Twitter history is just a long litany of complaints to companies that updated by their products by downgrading them, usually by:

- breaking the product entirely (Apple Preview.app) - removing useful keyboard shortcuts (Excel) - changing the UI with no going back option (Gmail)

… and the UI changes usually boil down to: more whitespace, because those products are getting influenced by their mobile phone versions.

the heart rate data they have isn't very good

Not too many people seem to care on the reading end, so I guess that's fine.

As another user (kaustyap) posted further below:

It kind of sounds like marketing pitch by fitbit to let potential clients in health industry know that they have so much of data to sell.

Sounds right to me -- it's a marketing ploy.

In an academic or industrial setting, the data might still be useful, but it would have to get re-crunched with many, many more controls, plus sample corrections, cross-validation against other data, etc. -- than what the linked article does.

I honestly feel like I've broken the mental spell that Apple had over my mind.

Same here. For me, it was the lack of updates on the MacBook Air, and the horrendous mess that is the OS since 10.10 (10.13 is the worst Mac OS I have ever used. I started with 7.5.3).

I'm not a religious person but for me paper books are sacred.

Most of my French friends are genuinely revolted by how I treat the books that I use for work.

I highlight, write in the margins (often with a pen, not even with a pencil), then scan passages for students, who in turn, are often revolted by what they see.

Why and what are unmanned mussel trucks to you?

The autocorrect feature (on your mobile phone, I presume) made my day: I love the idea of an unmanned mussel truck.

That's a correct description of 'data science' as it is understood around me, among social scientists.

Gelman, Tufte and Wickham are in the pantheon, sometimes followed by dataviz fellows like Cairo.

Never heard of Warden.

Silver would likely be described as a 'data journalist' rather than (or at least as often as) a data scientist.

Many cafés do not serve coffee à emporter and do not have paper cups.

Apologies for contradicting you on the sole basis of personal experience, but you are, again, in my own experience, very wrong: you really have to find yourself in the poshest streets of Paris (with only salons de thé in them) not to find at least one café that serves coffee to go (in paper cups), hence my surprise at your point about restroom access.

I do not know enough of the USA to compare, but basically, you can get coffee and pee every 500m or less in Paris (for various prices going from more-than-reasonable to perfectly-obscene).

If I stop to buy a cup of vin chaud or something, chances are the [kiosk] vendor won't even have a toilet for customers.

Will it be proof of my own defensiveness if I mention that kiosks in the US are also unlikely to have restrooms? (Unless those I saw in Phillie and NYC this winter are outliers.)

My view of life in Paris compared to life in the U.S. comes from living in both places. It may not match your experience, but you are unqualified to tell me whether my description is "very off" from my experience.

Apologies if you felt that I was denying your experience of whatever country or city. You are absolutely correct: your Parisian experience does not match mine, which is what "seems very off" meant in my original comment.

If people can pee in any café they stop in at for a cuppa, what's the point of these uritrottoirs? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

As mentioned in the article, the uritrottoirs is to stop people peeing on the sidewalk. What those people will be peeing is not coffee but beer from cans bought in grocery shops or supermarkets.

If you have lived in Paris and been to Canal Saint-Martin, bords de Seine or equivalent places, you know exactly who those uritrottoirs are aimed at. That target population does not intersect much with the clientele of cafés.

Apologies for the long post and sorry again if my wording offended you.

I failed to see much fascism in the links above, unless one equates fascism with a plagiarism dispute.

I stand corrected, indeed: the OED avoids defining 'to be convinced' as 'to hold a conviction' -- which is what I read in your post: absolute but fundamentally baseless certainty.

since the drug has been outlawed, all you have left are anecdotes

That's what I meant: apologies if my wording led you to read me differently.

I am convinced that there are more people who would begin to benefit from unprescribed private self-medication with MDMA than who would begin to suffer suffer harm.

conviction |kənˈvɪkʃ(ə)n| 2 a firmly held belief or opinion

belief |bɪˈliːf| an acceptance that something exists or is true, especially one without proof

opinion |əˈpɪnjən| 1 a view or judgement formed about something, not necessarily based on fact or knowledge

depression, anxiety, introversion, etc.

That's a whole array of pathologies and symptoms, for which there is no single pharmacological solution.

Many comments in this thread are over-standardising mental illness as well as the (supervised administration) therapy presented in the linked article, which is about much more than dosage and frequency. On top of that, the patient in the article expresses many specificities that are unlikely to be matched by most patients.

This is, to me, the first negative aspect of banning a drug -- it suppressed 99% of the potential evidence base and replaces it with poor 'SWIM-based' anecdotes.

Parisian culture leans toward leisurely café sipping, which means there aren't a lot of Starbucks-type places where one can stop quickly to pee and grab a drink or snack.

Wait, what?

There are restrooms in every single café in my (northern Parisian) neighbourhood. If you are sipping café there, or buying it to go, then you are a customer and are allowed access to the restroom.

I have no idea what 'renting a table for an hour' means in relation to going to a café, but your view of how life in Paris works seems very seriously off.

It might just be me, though -- I am unable to understand how other grown adults in this thread (not parent comment, other posts) can think that they are entitled to bladder release for free outside of their homes.

What's the startup scene in Paris like?

There is a lively scene, at least for someone with my interests (data science, aka. applied statistics and machine learning), with lots of 'incubators' and related places where startups seem to congregate.

I have been to many events organised or sponsored by the Big Ones (Apple, Microsoft, Google), plus a myriad of smaller meetups and events sponsored by all sorts of companies and public sector organisations.

How good does my French need to be?

Okay (B-) spoken French is enough to interact with most people, but you will need to understand spoken French much better (A, A+) than you speak it -- it will make your day _much_ less tiresome.

Note that I would say the same about, say, German if you were to move to Germany or Austria. There are only few countries in Europe where English is spoken by such a large fraction of the population that you can almost do without the local language.

Are there any languages/platforms/etc. […]

I do not know.

Re: other posts ---

Re: wages, it depends on how much you decide to spend on rent. If both you and your wife are working, you will be fine, and will be able to afford a well-above-median lifestyle, assuming that you are not currently in debt and that the IRS won't strip you of all your assets if you return home.

Re: pollution, again, it depends on where you will settle. I would never, ever raise a child in Paris. As for myself, I tend to worry more about noise than pollution, and noise can be awful depending on your street + windows.

(The other significant environmental issue is urban density and parks, or lack thereof.)

Re: food, I was in the USA earlier this year (near Phillie), spending $40 on every trip to the organic food supermarket nearby. The cheapest grocery store in my street has better stuff for at least 4 times less.

Bio note -- I live and work in Paris as well as in Lille (Northern France, near Belgium). I work in a French/English bilingual environment, which is rather exceptional in my sector (higher ed).

Meta-note -- Some comments in this thread speak with comically high confidence of a country that their authors have very obviously not visited, except perhaps for the few square miles in central Paris that exist almost only for Chinese and US/UK tourists.

Fivefilters.org is very good at cherry-picking

Correct, and if I recall correctly, former threads discussing pages on that website had highlighted that. It does not seem to be the be the case in this thread.

Apologies for bluntness, but you clearly have no idea of what you are talking about.

The false dichotomy between "self-induced" and "non-self-inflicted [sic]" is something that your "shrink" would have dismissed in the first minutes of honest conversation, before turning to your list of lifestyle adjustments and pointing out that there is a wide range of responses to them.

The kind of baseless speculation that you offer, followed by the obligatory confirmation-bias sequence, is precisely how some people end up treating psychiatric illness in highly neglectful and harmful ways.

If the statistical significance of your results is algorithm-dependent, shouldn't they be regarded as suspect?

It's a fair question.

Here's a possible recipe to get such variations in estimates: (1) an estimator that does not really match the distribution of the dependent variable; (2) small sample sizes with insufficiently well-handled influential observations; (3) (robust) standard error corrections leading to disproportionate confidence intervals; and (4) limited work on diagnostics, which is another way to make all of the previous points.

The points above can be used to 'take down' many papers published in journals like the one in which the incident happened, but you can also take a more charitable view and rescue most of those papers by claiming, for instance, that statistical significance should not govern (and even less govern alone) over the identification of the data generation process.

My conclusion is therefore: yes, algorithmic variation makes those results suspect, but on a single dimension that should probably not stand as the most important one in assessing those results in the first place.

Edited: syntax.

I'd love to see a NeoR arise at some point that fixes the strange historical inconsistencies […] in non-backward compatible ways.

Microsoft (or perhaps the Apache Foundation) could pull such a trick, and win a huge user base by doing so.

My guess is that several top R developers must have also thought of doing so, esp. those who write C code for R.

I use FetchRSS to generate feeds for the odd ones [1].

[1] http://fetchrss.com/

... the biggest FUD of all is this notion that the EU even has some sort of legal enforcement mechanisms independent of a Member State.

In that case, I'm not sure how to interpret Microsoft v. Commission (triggered by EC, ruled by ECJ), or how to make sense of the fact that the EU, IIRC, has its own (non-state) representative at the WTO, which in turn has its own (state-independent) dispute resolution system, with capacity to inflict trade sanctions.

The 'cops' analogy might be very misleading here, right?

200+ links to books, conferences, courses, journals, research groups, software, tutorials and more. /shameless-plug