rectangletangle

"Practicality beats purity"

Orange juice isn't actually all that healthy. Many "natural" sugars are bound up with fiber, diluting them lowering their glycemic index. Also IIRC there was some research a few years back that asserted the ratio of different sugar types actually had a significant impact on the metabolism.

I actually attempted to do this.

I used ML techniques to help smooth over some of the difficult parts (there are many difficult parts). The hardest cases are ambiguous names, for instance delineating Hispanic vs. Puerto Rican naming conventions (they're different). The fundamental approach involved pushing all ambiguity up to the end user, so they always have the option to correct the system.

https://www.alphanym.com/demo/?jm2

I actually wrote an API for handling personal names, because software mangling people's names irked my pedanticism. The fundamental takeaway is that names are ridiculously complex, equivalent to any other part of natural language. For every rule you could contrive there are exceptions, and many more legitimately ambiguous cases.

You shouldn't ever use first/last name fields, because they force users to adapt around your system (many names don't follow this structure). A long unstructured text fields is best, because it can accommodate nearly anyone who's name can be spelled with unicode. Finally always check your interpretation of a name with the person in question, seeing as they're the end authority.

https://www.alphanym.com/demo/?jm1

  >>> wiki_list = []
  >>> wiki_list.append(wiki_list)
  >>> print(wiki_list)
  [[...]]

Transposing a matrix in Python is pretty neat.

  >>>list(zip(*[(1, 2, 3), (4, 5, 6), (7, 8, 9)]))
  [(1, 4, 7), (2, 5, 8), (3, 6, 9)]

It exists in California too at least.

These exist in the US, but they're called black and white cookies. According to Wikipedia they may have been created in New York by Bavarian immigrants. But it's unclear if the confection's origin is German or American.

Not quite, I'm referring to american fritessaus, which is more like mayonaise, and distinct from thousand island dressing (which is popular in the US, In-N-Out calls it "spread").

Digging a little deeper it appears like McDonalds may have actually invented the sauce to appeal to the Dutch market, where fritessaus is popular (instead of tomato ketchup). Because McDonalds is American, their take on fritessaus grew into it's own thing called "American Fritessaus," or simply "American Saus."

https://www.hollandsupermarket.eu/remia-fritessaus-american-...

https://www.hollandsupermarket.eu/remia-fritessaus-american-...

http://www.typicaldutchstuff.com/ahamericanfritessaus-pi-364...

https://cf.geekdo-images.com/camo/271763ae14b82c0f612b6b9f61...

This is what I'm referring to.

Digging a little deeper it appears like McDonalds may have actually invented the sauce to appeal to the Dutch market, where fritessaus is popular (instead of tomato ketchup). Because McDonalds is American, their take on fritessaus grew into it's own thing called "American Fritessaus," or simply "American Saus."

Lol reminds me of Hawaiian pizza (pizza topped with pineapples and thinly sliced ham). Hawaiian pizza is actually a Canadian dish, though it's now popular in most of the US, including Hawaii.

On the west coast of the US people sometimes jokingly refer to Oregon as "God's Country," because it has lots of churches.

Not exactly the same thing. It's like mayo but thinner and sweeter, and has little green fleks in it.

For those who are curious it's basically mayonnaise, but not quite. There is no direct equivalent in US cuisine to my knowledge.

Kind of curious what the counterpart to this would be. What things are typically ascribed to Americans, that Americans are often unaware of?

American Sauce in the Netherlands comes to mind.

You're certainly correct. But in this case it might bolster human specific pathogens. I know there is some overlap between human an animal pathogens, but unfettered access to antibiotics might accelerate the problem for humans specifically (which is probably worse than the current prescription only policy in the US).

What's your stance on antibiotics? Or did you only mean "recreational" drugs?

The reason why I bring this up is that antimicrobial resistance is an externality of widespread antibiotic usage. Unfettered access to all drugs would probably accelerate antimicrobial resistance, because people tend to overuse/abuse antibiotics when they have the freedom to.

(Not trying to be mean/inflammatory/pedantic, I'm genuinely curious how HN would reconcile these stances.)

I would honestly be surprised if this kind of link didn't have at least some measurable impact, physiology is hardly decoupled (in the coding sense). It's been well established that poor mental health (loss of will to live) correlates strongly with early mortality, even when controlling for obvious variables. Though establishing the causality on that is challenging.

There are lots of strange physiological links that aren't necessarily logical, due to the imperfect nature of natural selection (it strives for the local optima and "good enough," over the global optima). For instance it's well documented that consciously smiling improves mood, even though the causality is "backwards."

I did some interesting work in this space. With several thousand seasons of data I used an MLP network to visualize phenotypic plasticity (how plants react to a range of environmental conditions).

Accurately cleaning the input data proved to be extremely important, because there's a tremendous amount of "noise" at the individual level when dealing with living organisms, so lots of high-quality data is necessary to tease out relationships. Establishing causality was also important, considering the potential for confounding variables.

It also gave me a chance to brush up on my React/front end skills, but that was more ancillary.

https://sproutling.ai/blog/harvest-simulations?jm2

https://sproutling.ai/blog/growth-simulations?jm2

I'm a huge fan of Django, but I always felt that this was true. I wish there was more of a push to decouple parts of the framework. Keep the magic, but allow usage without it.

Dynamic typing vs. static typing is on a different axis than strong vs. weak typing. Python is a strong dynamically typed language, with some "static lite" features introduced in Python 3.

Dynamic typing means that types can be changed arbitrarily at runtime, compared to statically typed languages which define all types at compile time.

Strong/weak means that type coercions rarely/never happen automatically. For instance JS has some interesting behavior enabled by weak typing `[] + [] -> ""`. Whereas Python rarely coerces things for you. The division operator in Python 2 was strongly typed, while they changed it to weak typing in Python 3 (inline with the practicality vs. purity convention).

It is an interesting approach, though I feel like this could introduce some nasty unintended consequences given how dynamic and introspective Python can be (admittedly I haven't studied this particular implementation).

I always treated this a bit like single underscore private functions/methods, i.e., follow a convention that produces code that's easy to reason about, even if it's not strictly enforced by the language/compiler. So in practice this equates to separating out modules that mutate global state, and placing the majority of logic in "strict" modules that only declare a bunch of "pure" classes/routines. So the "non strict" code is really just a thin layer of wiring gluing everything together. For instance my Celery task files tend to be very thin.

In web development, losing a connection is a failure case.

That's changing with the advent of progressive web apps. It's possible to write web apps now that are robust in the face of network problems, e.g., the web app renders and is functional even without a connection.

Well you can add that to my list of horrifying potential outcomes of being human.

Pretty much, fortunately it's very rare. However you shouldn't eat sport caught shellfish without first checking for local warnings regarding harmful algal blooms.

At least in the US/Canada all store bought Seafood is thoroughly screened for this specific problem, because ASP was discovered in Canada after a mass poisoning event in the late 1980s.

Alfred Hitchcock's film The Birds was loosely based on an invasion of tens of thousands of delirious seabirds thought to be suffering with ASP in Santa Cruz in 1961.

Although it's not quite the same thing, this reminds me a bit of amnesic shellfish poisoning. In addition to all the terrible gastric problems ASP has the curious side-effect of severe permanent anterograde amnesia, where all memories before the incident are retrained, but the poisoned individual can't create new long term memories. So they're limited to working memory which only lasts a few seconds.

However research has shown that some specific types of long term memories can be still be made. For instance if an amnesiac individual is asked to draw the same image repeatedly, they may still improve in speed and efficiency without any apparent conscious memory of having drawn the image before.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amnesic_shellfish_poisoning

Both?

The New Caledonian crested gecko was thought to be extinct for over 100 years until they were rediscovered in 1994. Now they're common place in the pet trade because they're so hardy.

Rediscovery of "extinct" species is common place, because of the inherent difficulty in proving that all individuals of a given species are dead. Combine this with the robustness of biology, allowing species to quickly boom under favorable conditions, and then false extinction ends up happening more often than you would probably suspect. It's normal for many healthy populations to fluctuate wildly around a given carrying capacity. r-selected organisms are particularly notorious for having like 95% of the population die off regularly, and then bouncing back in a few years.

In the case of the thylacine, it's a macro organism so it probably has a higher profile when compared to a small gecko. So the likelihood that they're still extant probably isn't quite as high, unfortunately.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crested_gecko

Had issues dragging the rotary bit on my iPhone in landscape mode. I noticed that it didn't entirely fit on the screen, so perhaps that's causing the issue. However it works great in portrait mode.

I'm pretty sure there's more than a few options out there.

Just a quick google search found these:

https://www.floydhub.com/

https://algorithmia.com/product

(I'm not affiliated with them in any way, and haven't ever used their services.)

Binary search.