stdbrouw · HackerTrans

stdbrouw

4,892 karmajoined 16 jaar geleden

Developer and data scientist in the news industry. I blog over at http://debrouwere.org

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/debrouwere; my proof: https://keybase.io/debrouwere/sigs/Cnr9GaJGcojfjdLSHpSlDuKmoGDIspELZlN-7yq1pVY ]

Submissions

Unlearning descriptive statistics

debrouwere.org

343 pointsby stdbrouw9 jaar geleden92 comments

An ode to the bar chart

debrouwere.org

2 pointsby stdbrouw10 jaar geleden0 comments

The marginal revenue productivity theory of wages

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2 pointsby stdbrouw13 jaar geleden0 comments

Why professional standards are not always a good thing

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1 pointsby stdbrouw14 jaar geleden0 comments

Show HN: draughtsman, a webserver for front-end devs

github.com

45 pointsby stdbrouw15 jaar geleden19 comments

Designers need engineers

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75 pointsby stdbrouw15 jaar geleden18 comments

Wikipedia is a wild success and an utter failure

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62 pointsby stdbrouw15 jaar geleden34 comments

Philosophy for the information age

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1 pointsby stdbrouw15 jaar geleden0 comments

Macho Programming

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2 pointsby stdbrouw15 jaar geleden0 comments

Machine Learning Fairy Dust

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86 pointsby stdbrouw15 jaar geleden34 comments

comments

3 dagen geledendiscuss

Same thing with beer and wine awards, some are good but most are just a paid promotion lottery.

26 dagen geledendiscuss

One aspect is perhaps that simple things aren't necessarily cheap. One Laptop per Child struggled to get costs down, whereas a mass market solar panel is not self-serviceable but at their current cost, who cares. Even in the developed world, you get noticeably more bang for your buck if you buy a cheap, basic car than if you buy a cargo bike that could replace it, because of the fierce competition and huge economies of scale for cars. Touch screens are cheaper than seven segment displays. And so on. (Not a snub on the Open Source Low Tech community, their designs look great!)

vorige maanddiscuss

Yes, ggplot2 is lovely to work with for complex graphs. Whereas a classic plotting library will have one function to create a bar graph, another to create a line graph, etc., in ggplot instead you can stack layers, each with different properties, variables, shapes, data-dependent colors, scales, whatever you want. It also makes it easy to create grids of similar graphs.

vorige maanddiscuss

OTOH, motion sickness is often called "car sickness" for a reason, people who suffer from it only sometimes suffer on a bus, and rarely if ever on a train or a plane, so I'm not sure I would agree that "all transportation and tourism related businesses" are impacted. Also, doesn't dimenhydrinate work for your wife or kids?

vorige maanddiscuss

... yet you still conclude "AI translation has gotten so good", so which is it?

2 maanden geledendiscuss

Phenomenal author indeed. "Capital", a novel about the financial crisis and bankers on the hedonic treadmill, is wonderful too. Too bad either Lanchester or his publisher has beef with Amazon, most of his work is not available as an ebook.

2 maanden geledendiscuss

Side note: what a stunning art deco (?) building! (There's a photo on the front page of the site.)

3 maanden geledendiscuss

"The boy who cried wolf" is a story about false positives, so if that's what you want to avoid then you want to get close to 100% specificity, and accept that there are many things that the tool will not catch. If, as you propose, the tool would mainly be used to create a low confidence list of potential problems that will be further reviewed by a human, then casting a wide net and calibrating for high sensitivity instead does make sense.

3 maanden geledendiscuss

Before Netflix was a thing, I sometimes tried to have conversations with people about "gee, it's a bit annoying that my only options to watch a movie is to buy an expensive dvd that I will watch once, or to pirate it" and the most common response was complete befuddlement, they simply could not comprehend that someone might not want to pirate things if they could, they could not comprehend that besides being illegal it was also just... wrong. Not absolutely evil, for sure, but still something that maybe you might want to avoid doing. Now that you can just pay 10-20 euro for a streaming service, most of them have switched over, so, yeah, service does matter, but a lack of risk or consequences on the one hand and vague notions about actors and directors (and soccer players) already being rich enough as it is, were enough to convince very many people that piracy was a victimless crime.

4 maanden geledendiscuss

You just have to go along with the idea that skin provides no indication of meatiness and that the two aliens are Ford Prefect types, then the short film lands just fine.

4 maanden geledendiscuss

The AITA comparison seems apt insofar as chatbots function as a second opinion. You're consciously or subconsciously looking for an outside perspective that might differ from that of your friends, provided to you by a computer that doesn't need to care about your feelings, unlike a friend. If the chatbot ends up mimicking what (not very close) friends do, you might falsely conclude that two very different kinds of sources have converged on the same answer, whereas you are really just getting two flavors of the same diplomatic interaction.

4 maanden geledendiscuss

My subjective impression is that 5 years ago AITA was actually quite wholesome and the top comments tended to be insightful. The shift towards "set boundaries, always choose yourself, you don't owe anybody anything" seems fairly recent.

4 maanden geledendiscuss

I read the Norwegian article that was linked, and it isn't actually similar: you would only have to pay taxes on food you've grown on your balcony (and mean to consume yourself) if you are a farmer, are growing it during regular working hours, and have an insanely huge balcony.

Another thing that makes home construction a bit different in this regard is that you could claim to build a house for yourself, live in it for a bit, and then sell it on a couple of years later. That'd be an easy way to avoid or evade taxes. Not so easy with lettuce -- once you've eaten it, you've eaten it.

4 maanden geledendiscuss

I get the impression that most desktop users enable zram or zswap to get a little bit more out of their RAM but there is never any real worry about OOM, not regularly anyway, so then (according to the principles laid out in the article) it shouldn't matter much.

On my workstation, I run statistical simulations in R which can be wasteful with memory and cause a lot of transient memory pressure, and for that scenario I do like that zswap works alongside regular swap. Especially when combined with the advice from https://makedebianfunagainandlearnhowtodoothercoolstufftoo.c... to wake up kswapd early, it really does seem to make a difference.

4 maanden geledendiscuss

It doesn't really need any config on most distros, no.

That said, if you want it to behave at its best when OOM, it does help to tweak vm.swappiness, vm.watermark_scale_factor, vm.min_free_kbytes, vm.page-cluster and a couple of other parameters.

See e.g.

https://makedebianfunagainandlearnhowtodoothercoolstufftoo.c...

https://documentation.suse.com/sles/15-SP7/html/SLES-all/cha...

I don't know of any good statistics script for zswap, I use the script below as a custom waybar module:

  #!/bin/bash
  stored_pages="$(cat /sys/kernel/debug/zswap/stored_pages)"
  pool_total_size="$(cat /sys/kernel/debug/zswap/pool_total_size)"
  compressed_size_mib="$((pool_total_size / 1024 / 1024))"
  compressed_size_gib="$((pool_total_size / 1024 / 1024 / 1024))"
  compressed_size_mib_remainder="$((compressed_size_mib * 10 / 1024 - compressed_size_gib * 10))"
  uncompressed_size="$((stored_pages * 4096))"
  uncompressed_size_mib="$((uncompressed_size / 1024 / 1024))"
  uncompressed_size_gib="$((uncompressed_size / 1024 / 1024 / 1024))"
  uncompressed_size_mib_remainder="$((uncompressed_size_mib * 10 / 1024 - uncompressed_size_gib * 10))"
  ratio="$((100 * uncompressed_size / (pool_total_size + 1)))"
  echo "$compressed_size_gib.$compressed_size_mib_remainder"

4 maanden geledendiscuss

You don’t get more income, but you do get more disposable income.

4 maanden geledendiscuss

You don't have to pay VAT on things you fix for yourself, because you don't pay yourself at all. This is in fact a kind of (legal) tax avoidance, but not (illegal) tax evasion. Given the cost of housing, being able to build your own house or even just doing small fixes here and there, leads to a big increase in perceived income. The tradies I know can afford whatever kind of car they want, whatever kind of holiday experience, and they live in a nice home. Mind you, they typically work 50h+ a week so there's that.

Of course, the parent may also have been referring to getting clients to pay in cash and not putting anything on the books, at the expense of getting barely any pension in the end, but that's not how I read it. This is getting somewhat less common because people are more likely than 20 years ago to get a loan from a bank to pay for renovation work, and the bank will want to see invoices.

5 maanden geledendiscuss

Well, it implies that the "grassroots" element of it is fake, the message itself being false is optional.

5 maanden geledendiscuss

Doesn't this argument hinge on equivocating between two different definitions of aversion, though? I'm averse to bananas, but that doesn't mean I think it's immoral to eat them. The moral dimension kicks in if somebody else had to ride that stationary bike for you, because then you'd be wasting their time on frivolities.

5 maanden geledendiscuss

So if I send an email that lacks a feature that MUST be there, will the email police come get me? At a certain point, looking for an analogy stops making sense I think.