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The American allergy to welfare and social safety has caused _global_ fertility to collapse?

"Police bad" doesn't account for differences in performance between SF police and others. "DA bad" at least tries to do this (although as you note, is in some tension with the facts).

Your statement about Dugin is false---I (in the U.S., to be clear) was able to buy a copy of one book on BooksAMillion, and it looks like most/all of them are still available.

Of course, it is true that his books are unavailable on Amazon and Amazon-owned sites. I wish I knew what caused this, or how to find out.

It seems likely that this is the cartoon, but I can't figure out what the original source is: https://www.jokejive.com/images/jokejive/23/23a74af0b0d51ee4...

You and I have very different experiences. At the places where I've been a student and worked, it was possible and permitted to enter the vast majority of buildings (I think all academic buildings, but I'm hedging with "vast majority"), during working hours (something like 8am to 6pm), without any identification or permission. Importantly, this always includes libraries.

I know people who, when considering faculty job offers from universities, use "are libraries open to the public" as a proxy for other valuable properties of the university. It seems like a pretty good heuristic to me.

I've been asked for ID exactly once on a university campus---I needed security to let me into my office building in the middle of the night because I'd forgotten my wallet in there, and they needed to record my name for some record. The officer didn't seem interested in _checking_ the ID so much as copying down the name.

I don't understand the relevance of this. The claim is about what "half of Russia thinks". Why would propaganda in Africa have a strong effect on the thought of those in Russia?

This is a bit of a non-sequitur (not to mention silly), but I'm curious about the details. Do you have any links to this story of Rabi refusing to let Bader study part-time?

The problem, of course, it that the timing doesn't make sense at all. You say this happened in the early 50's. That can't be the early 1850's, since Bader wasn't born yet. But by the 1950s, Feynman was already long gone from high school. Indeed, he'd already devised path integrals, and so he certainly knew about the principle of least action!

Perhaps you meant 30's?

I'm baffled. Is there some broader context that makes this make sense? From what I can tell, this fellow (the one sending the email) is being paid money to develop priorities for updating the FreeBSD handbook. His response is to send an email to the /announcement/ mailing list, with a list of all the relevant bug reports he could find, asking others to do his job for him?

A reasonable survey to send around might be "how often do you use the FreeBSD docs?" "How often do you notice errors in section 1? Section 2? Section 3?" That's not what this is. It's "here's a specific error, and I'm gonna run a /poll/ to figure out what the priority on fixing it is".

Even ignoring the "that's why we hired /you/" component---this must be a singularly ineffective way to gain reliable information. Very few people are going to reply (because each of the ~100 questions is rather technical!). The responses are therefore going to be self-selected to... I don't know, whoever has the time and will to waste on this.

This should have a (2005) --- I was very surprised to see that the competition deadline was 17 years in the past!

In any case, here's the follow-up with the winners: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=42

Please don't post this low-effort nonsense. If you cared about the object-level question, you can check easily enough: https://www.whois.com/whois/orwell.ru. (Spoiler: no, not using namecheap.)

Really, this is a transparent attempt to bring that topic into unrelated threads. Let the namecheap-bashing stay in the namecheap-bashing threads.

The way you frame it is only a problem if civil servants are not part of society and that people don't have an influence about what the government spends money on, that is: you don't live in some form a representative democracy.

I mean, we don't live in a representative democracy. Not in the sense you're describing.

(Assuming you, like me, live in the U.S.) Civil servants are not elected, are not directly accountable to elected officials, and are certainly not drawn from a representative cross section of the public. You may feel like they represent you, but that is (to be frank) little more than an expression of your own place in society. Civil servants form a discrete and powerful class, with their own interests, unions, and lobbying groups. Ignoring this is, optimistically, naive.

For instance Lat goes 0-180 but Lon goes -90 to 90

Surely this is several typos? Longitude, which marks east-west, must span 360 degrees (-180 to 180, perhaps? although 0 to 360 is just as reasonable). Latitude, marking north-south, spans only 180 degrees, and therefore is presumably -90 to 90 (so that 0 is the equator).

Moreover, I've used minute-by-minute forecasts myself, and (at least where I lived at the time) they were quite accurate. My use case was "where is a 30 minute gap when I can walk home without getting soaked", and I never once got soaked. So much of the OP falls into the category of things-I-know-to-be-false-from-experience.

The article really has a strong vibe of "algorithms are faulty, we need humans in the loop to make sure they're behaving well!", with a hidden assumption of "humans are less faulty than algorithms". That's an empirical assertion to be determined on a domain-by-domain basis. It's certainly true that having a human in the loop leads to worse outcomes in chess (unless the human has enough modesty to just not do anything). The same is increasingly true of other domains as well.

Perhaps someday, incorrect, largely content-free FUD articles about how algorithms suck will themselves be written entirely by algorithms.

This is pushing way too many of my buttons, so I'll just close by pointing out (on the other side of the apps/humans scale) that a substantial fraction of the time, when I check the weather on NWS, it says something like "Today's high: 56; current temperature: 58". I certainly hope that a human in the loop would fix that problem.

To explain why I thought this was interesting: from what I read, a Tanomoshiko is (mostly "was") an informal mechanism for loans. If one person was in financial hardship, a group of several people would each contribute a small sum of money, thus curing the hardship. Instead of ordinary repayment, the group would now repeat the same act in a few weeks, but choosing another person in the group (perhaps at random) to receive the money. This would repeat until everyone had been payed.

There were and are taboos around loans in many societies (our own included). This seems like it's probably part of a broader family of methods for working around those taboos.

I came across this only from a side remark in Yukichi Fukuzawa's autobiography. I don't know of a good source (the wikipedia article is admittedly not great).

From the Nature medicine paper:

Editors’ note, [30] March 2020: We are aware that this article is being used as the basis for unverified theories that the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 was engineered. There is no evidence that this is true; scientists believe that an animal is the most likely source of the coronavirus.

And from "The Scientist":

Update (March 11, 2020): On social media and news outlets, a theory has circulated that the coronavirus at the root of the COVID-19 outbreak originated in a research lab. Scientists say there is no evidence that the SARS-CoV-2 virus escaped from a lab.

And an obligatory link to SA's recent post on the phrase "no evidence": https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence...

I see the dress as blue and gold, which was never even an option. But, I'm color blind.

I've used https://darksitefinder.com/maps/world.html#4/39.00/-98.00

Okay, I understand that there's some sort of world-wide supply-chain issue. Recently I've heard about fuel shortages of various shorts. It's unclear how related the mess in Lebanon is, since the article states

Prior to the outages, citizens had for months only been given a few hours of electricity per day

and I thought the fuel shortages were a recent phenomenon.

Regardless: does anyone have a link to a decent primer on what's going on (regarding supply chains, fuel, and all the other recent economic disruptions)? I'm not interested in the usual politically motivated "just so" stories, just a list of what's happening, what parts are definitely understood, and what parts are not understood.

Last week, CDC came out showing how the obesity rates in youth has doubled during the pandemic.

Do you have a link to the CDC saying that? I found [0], which claims the rate went from 19% to 22% --- far from doubling.

[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/0...

Compilers don't guarantee (or try to find) the absolute optimal allocation, right?

TFA notes that rustc is not a particular _efficient_ SAT solver, taking something like 10^4 times as long as a commonly used algorithm [1] would on a small example.

So, I'm curious: what's the _strongest_ case one could make for including a more robust SAT solver as part of the exhaustiveness checking? Is there any reasonable place where this could matter? (Extremely autogenerated code?)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DPLL_algorithm

This is only a partial answer, but my understanding is that Lean is really not meant for software verification work. That's very much Coq's alley.

I'm much less certain of this, but I think Lean is better for non-mathematicians trying to learn more about math --- provided, that is, that you're set on playing with a proof assistant. I'm not sure I'd recommend that.

The entirety of the statement:

As we oppose all government intervention in the marketplace, we favor the repeal of intellectual property laws. Disputes between inventors, creators, authors, artists, businesses, and other such entities should be resolved without government intervention.

This is madness. Without a notion of "property", there is no marketplace. Even the more extreme libertarians will generally agree that it is necessary for government to have police powers, partly to ensure that property rights are respected.

Now, one can argue (without being completely incoherent) that intellectual property should not exist as a concept, but that amounts to abolishing a certain marketplace, not preventing "government intervention in the marketplace". Moreover, denying property rights outright for intangible goods is a strong position, and not one I usually associate with libertarians.

Sometimes local third party politics is the only thing less sane than national two-party politics.

OP focuses on extremely contentious issues, but these are (as OP and other commenters note) exactly where our own biases can make it most difficult to accurately decide whether a source is being truly neutral. I think the clearest evidence of distortions in Wikipedia is found in less-contentious (although still politically coded) topics. A couple months back I encountered a striking example: the Wikipedia article on "Balance of trade" [1].

An important object-level question is "are trade deficits bad?". (I have no real opinion on this question, because hey, I'm not an economist --- none of this is about the object-level question!) For those who live under an even larger rock than I do, Trump sided with "yes", causing a predictable sorting of opinions in US politics.

The article leans very strongly in the direction of "no", stating above the fold:

The notion that bilateral trade deficits are bad in and of themselves is overwhelmingly rejected by trade experts and economists.

There follow 5 citations, of which 4 are articles about Trump. (Three mention Trump in the title.)

The claim is repeated in the body of the article; it's the first sentence in the section "Views on Economic Impact". But the very next sentence is

According to the IMF trade deficits can cause a balance of payments problem, which can affect foreign exchange shortages and hurt countries.

The paragraph structure makes it seem like this is a sentence in support of the thesis, but it's really not. And the very next sentence, again, is on negative effects of trade deficits:

On the other hand, Joseph Stiglitz points out that countries running surpluses exert a "negative externality" on trading partners, and pose a threat to global prosperity, far more than those in deficit.

Note that this specific claim of "negative externalities" is very similar to the strongly politically coded claim that this article and its citations are so keen to claim is "overwhelmingly rejected". The following sentence is on negative effects of eurozone imbalances, but I'll stop quoting here.

I've seen similar patterns on other articles, but this is the clearest example. The article actually reads as something that was once a representative hodge-podge of arguments for and against, and then had to be "fixed" in the days of Trump and brexit to avoid confusing hapless readers.

It's relatively petty, but note another sentence above the fold:

The notion of the balance of trade does not mean that exports and imports are "in balance" with each other.

This sort of pre-emptive heading off of common misconceptions is not encyclopedic. There are only seven sentences above the TOC, and one of them is this! (For instance, I checked the article on "quantum superposition", and no similar sentence is included, despite the obvious and common misconceptions.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_trade

Here's the arxiv link: https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0206022

(for anyone who shares my pet hatred for researchgate)

Your first point is closely linked to a theory raised in a past thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20719010). Large, well paying companies tend to require everyone to use spaces, for pretty much exactly the reason you mentioned.

If you read the article closely, you'll see that they made some effort to control for programming language, and in particular they note that this effect occurs within each subpopulation. So, among PHP developers only, it's still the case that spacers make substantially more than tabbers.

This is a huge effect. Implausibly huge? I'm reminded of Gelman et al's piranhas: http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/unpublished/pi.... The "folk theorem" version is that you can't have very many independent variables that all have large effects on salary. Saying that spaces vs tabs has a 10% effect is tantamount to saying that its one of the ten (or fewer) most important things about a developer.

So there must be a confounder. What could it be?

- Do the top schools all instruct students to always use spaces? This should have been partly taken care of when the author controlled for level of education though, right?

- Choice of editor? This seems like a weird one, but editor defaults are definitely linked to tabs vs spaces, and the survey didn't even collect data on this.

- Starting language?

- Total number of languages used? Spaces are tolerable in more languages than tabs are. Of course, I'd expect "both" to beat "spaces" if this was the case.

None of these strikes me as particularly plausible, except maybe the last one. This result is kind of bothersome, because it's big, obviously not a statistical fluke, and hard to understand.

EDIT: a past thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20719010) suggested that some higher paying companies mandate spaces. This also seems plausible.

I think you're underrating heterogeneity.

Not all people will agree that Tao's exposition is unclear. I linked it precisely because I found it more clear than other, "more physical" explanations (as a graduate student in physics, not math). When I was trying to understand gauge symmetry, it was that article that finally made things click for me. And, of course, many people I know would disagree, and point to other expositions as superior. That's the point: different people will not agree on what is well-written and what is incomprehensible.

You state "even pure mathematicians use numerical reasoning while trying to reason about a subject". Yes, some pure mathematicians do. Others use graphical reasoning. Others tend to lean purely on algebraic manipulations. Others tend to "reason" by analogy. And I'm sure there are other modes of thinking with which I'm too poorly acquainted to name. The result is that it's perfectly reasonable for people to disagree, quite strongly, about what is comprehensible and what is not, particularly people coming from different intellectual traditions.

It's a tangential nitpick, but I can't resist:

[...] novella length explanation

As an undergrad I wanted to learn differential geometry, so I went to the library to pick a diff geo textbook. Well, I didn't want a difficult one, so I decided to pick the shortest book I could find --- surely that would be the easiest textbook to read? Haha.

As far as I'm concerned, the length of Tao's explanation is a strong merit.

Yeah... I'd be hesitant to buy a whole book. This is one of the topics where some expositions are really bad, some are really good, and some people just can't agree on which are bad and which are good. I've always had best luck just pulling up 8 different articles and reading them in parallel, hoping it eventually sticks.

(Which I realize is the least helpful possible reply.)

The textbook Peskin&Schroeder is standard in this field. "If" you can find a PDF online, there's a chapter introducing gauge theories (the chapter on yang-mills) that has a reasonably clear explanation near the beginning, I think.