151–160 of 321 posts
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You are thinking of Abraham Wald: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Wald
Note that the Wald story may not have actually happened: http://www.ams.org/publicoutreach/feature-column/fc-2016-06 (But yes, Abraham Wald is the statistician that the story is about.)
> British soldiers in World War I were equipped with a Brodie helmet, a steel hat designed to protect its wearer from overhead blasts and shrapnel while conducting trench warfare. After its deployment, field hospitals saw an uptick in soldiers with severe head injuries. > Because of the rise in injuries, British command considered going back to the drawing board with the helmet’s design. Fortunately, a statistician p…
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That's like 10% of the comment - I feel like some point was trying to be made with the dialup caching product but it went over my head. Also back then, Macs weren't so much a luxury like they are today (this is pre Jobs) -- they were just defacto standard in the creative fields. DTP and Photoshop were strictly better on the Mac up until about that point and it would be a number of years for PCs to erode the entrenche…
Thats the same point. When everyone professional is using 8000$ Macs or PC workstations but you customers are on C64s and Amigas, you would like to run some tests on those machines as well.
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You are thinking of Abraham Wald: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Wald
Note that the Wald story may not have actually happened: http://www.ams.org/publicoutreach/feature-column/fc-2016-06 (But yes, Abraham Wald is the statistician that the story is about.)
"My indignation at how the internet dealt with Wald's work was overblown. Stephen Stigler (son of George, and a statistician at the University of Chicago) called my attention to a note by W. Allen Wallis himself in which he mentions Wald's work explicitly in connection with survivorship bias. Wallis' original article in the Journal of the American Statistical Association was followed by two very brief comments and then by a further 'rejoinder' of a bit more than one page. Towards the end of it he says, "The military was inclined to provide protection for those parts that on returning planes showed the most hits. Wald assumed, on good evidence, that hits in combat were uniformly distributed over the planes. It follows that hits on the more vulnerable parts were less likely to be found on returning planes than hits on the less vulnerable parts, since planes receiving hits on the more vulnerable parts were less likely to return to provide data. From these premises, he devised methods for estimating vulnerability of various parts."
Amazing article btw. Thanks. This is what makes HN so unique.
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Explain Gmail.
I don't understand this comment. Google clearly cares about the performance of that product, since it's the fastest webmail I've used by a long shot. Or maybe you care more about performance than almost everyone, and use Mutt or something else which can be configured to be faster with a few days' worth of effort.
When I return back to my personal email using FastMail the difference is like night and day it loads fast and 99% of the time it works on the first try. I also occasionally use Outlook's webmail for work (as I work across different systems with some on Google and some on O365) and even Outlook webmail is generally faster than Gmail despite my main Outlook mailbox being much larger than my less-used Gmail mailboxes (although it is nowhere as fast as FastMail).
I remember the early days of Gmail -- it was a fantastic product in its heyday better than any other webmail client at the time. The quality has sadly dropped a huge amount especially in recent years to the point there are now viable alternatives. FastMail is one such alternative I have been very impressed with. Even Outlook's webmail is worth a look although the UX could do with some work.
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1. Please consider using a proper mail client: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_email_clients 2. Please consider avoiding Google (and Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple) as your email provider, due to their mass surveillance practices, both for commercial ad targeting and for US government political policing. There are several other reasonable webmail providers, if you really can't give up the web interface.
Basically no desktop client works as well as the gmail web app (especially when it comes to search). I use the mail client on iOS out of principle but still end up opening the gmail app when I actually need to find something. A state actor will have less trouble breaking into a mail server I run, and I don’t really believe too much in the idea that other countries apart from the US are immune to police overreach. Sig…
There are lots of good options for sub-$200 laptops at Wal Mart right now. ChromeBooks or little Windows machines. Every web dev should use one. I am fascinated by the low end options, you learn a lot about a system when it's pushed to its limits. Or maybe you learn even more about your pain threshold... I've heard it said that it's more difficult to make a $10,000 car than it is to make a $1,000,000 car. I don't rec…
I have been fascinated by this question ever since seeing an all apple school employ macbooks as a minimum bar. using Samsung dex, and now budget arm chromebooks I have found most websites do work on even mediatek and qualcomm chips, and design my own experiences to work there accordingly. The lenovo Duet is an incredible device, its sad how poorly optimized some of the heavier websites are and you can't do anything…
There are three kinds of web developers: - Those who don't care about performance, as long as it loads within a few seconds on their own beefed up system on the LAN. This article is for them, and we can only hope they will listen. - Those who care about performance, and work for people who care. They are already doing great work (or are about to), producing those rare low-friction, high-speed, content-is-king sites w…
Explain Gmail.
Moreover, when the developer in question demoed his work, the reaction from Brin (famously) was something akin to "there's 400msec delay, fix it". Which puts us clearly in the realm of the second scenario.
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This. 2 rules: - Always indicate that your application is performing a network action (like showing a spinner, disable forms/buttons while submitting, etc) - Always catch errors (including timeouts) and give some form of feedback to the user when something went wrong. Try letting your local development backend return a 500, timeout or a 4xx error every now and then, and check if your frontend handles this in a gracef…
> Always catch errors (including timeouts) and give some form of feedback to the user when something went wrong. The worst offender I hit regularly is Google Meet. I use ADSL most of the day because it works just fine for most I do. Which is either local or ssh or looking up technical resources on the net. Even Google Meet works fine (I don't use a cam). Until I share my screen, which contains nothing but text in ful…
Meet = glitchy low-res videos, freezing screen sharing, etc even on high quality fibre connections Zoom = smooth high-res video and generally usable screen sharing (with minor glitches that usually sorts itself out in seconds) even on low quality connections
The difference is like night and day, no joke...
Gmail has nearly 50mb of JavaScript that thrashes I/O so hard that clicking the search bar and typing too soon will cause it to skip letters (because the search bar is probably some Angular-powered abomination). It is and was a regression from the previous design which was fast even on 3G connections. It's driven by Google engineers running their bloatware on i9 MBPs with 64gb of RAM. Oh Gmail is slow? Have you tried…