Viewing profile — xenocyon

Impenetrable bureaucracies are actually the central theme of two out of three of his full-length novels. (Incidentally, at least in my opinion his three novels are his finest work,…

Is this simply an argument in favor of genetic algorithms or is there more to it than that?

Considering that lawmakers in Texas and other places have recently been trying to make it legal for car drivers to mow down pedestrian protesters, I don't think they are worried ab…

IMHO, the bad nature of much of the UX we see around us is in the gray area between incompetence and malice. It's hard to sincerely concern oneself with usability when the main obj…

> Life is too short to spend babying a pan. Strangely enough, this is a good reason for preferring cast iron over Teflon! Cast iron is close to indestructible, whereas with PTFE or…

Another factoid to add to your list: Indian Railways is a state owned enterprise - a very large one. Until recently, India's central government released two annual financial statem…

Not exactly spaces, but I have been bitten by something like this at my work quite recently. A Confluence page with special characters in the page title was working fine for a whil…

The ebikes I am familiar with have a governor such that the power assist turns off entirely above 20 mph.

Where do you find well-made batteries? OEM batteries for my X230 are no longer available, and I've had a hard time understanding which third party batteries are safe.

For me at least, this xkcd graphic really made clear how anthropogenic climate change is truly unprecedented in the planet's history - it's the massive rate of change. And it's goi…

For one thing, your own source shows that tomatoes are a rich source of many different vitamins, minerals, and fiber. But furthermore, this treatment of nutrition is a little reduc…

"By the end of this century we'll have the technology to make carbon capture" We have this technology already. It's called "trees". Whether we choose to use it is a different matte…

I'm paying close attention to the direction that (my native) India takes w.r.t. GM food crops, which have so far been illegal. Background: India went from colonialism-induced massi…

"Even" HN? HN is massively prone to conspiracy theories and misinformation. Just to pick one example of many, I have seen more Covid denialism on HN than any other milieu I'm part …

Regarding Simpson's paradox, you can see a good treatment here [0] describing whether splitting a group is correct or not (based on causality); see Section 2.2 specifically. [0] ht…

"The more dimensions you analyze, the close to 'truth' you can get." Data scientist here. The above is not the correct takeaway from Simpson's paradox. It is not generally correct …

As a consumer, I can see both sides of this. On the one hand, I like energetic spam blocking without fear of legal liability, even if there are occasionally a few false positives. …

> But the U.S. murder rate is not all that remarkable, really. The data appear to disagree with you: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2010_homicide_rates_...

* India: the Partition led to massive loss of life, displacement in the tens of millions, traumatized communities, and deadly polarization between peoples to this day. * Palestine:…

Another way to drill down into the question is to start with smart kids and then, if people more or less agree with that, to talk about all kids. Think about it: if smart kids bene…

In that case, depending on your hardware, you might be able to simply disable wireless transmission (on my CPAP machine, this is called "Airplane Mode").