ordinaryperson

Your revised theory is that Ars is actually a Condé company because of the logo in the footer? Not sure that’s how corporate law works.

Take a minute and do some research. Advance owns Ars and the terms of the acquisition allow it to have total independence.

But again, I recommend you contact the Ars editors directly and share your theory that the Condé logo at the bottom of the page proves that they are in fact Condé stooges and have no editorial independence. See what they say. Their DMs are open.

Very insightful piece of analysis. Why don’t you email the Ars editors your theory that they are corporate Condé stooges and see what they say? As I mentioned in a sibling comment it’s actually Advance that owns Ars, not Condé, and it’s a different leadership group.

No. It’s run as a separate company inside the company.

And technically Condé does not own Ars, Advance does. Different leadership group.

The terms of the Conde's acquisition state they are not allowed to interfere with the operation of the site.

The depth of articles or the decision to pull in Wired content is strictly an editorial decision made by Ars editorial leadership.

Targeted advertising is not similar to selling internal organs.

Comment · 3 years ago

Databricks' core value proposition is Apache Spark in the cloud, optimized with their special sauce (eg Proton engine).

Running your own Spark, especially on prem, is a lot of work. Most companies would prefer to just provide their data and let someone else handle the query engine.

The parent is right however that Databricks has a feature store (tokenization) but it's not simple to set up and just getting content in and out of it is a major pain point right now.

Comment · 4 years ago

I'd encourage everyone to read Emily Shaw's research on this topic: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED563202.pdf

"Validity of the SAT for Predicting First-Year College Grade Point Average"

TL;DR: High School GPA + SAT score produce correlation coefficient values between 0.44 and 0.62, depending on the population. How strong are those values?

> A general rule of thumb for interpreting correlation coefficients is offered by Cohen (1988): a small correlation has an absolute value of approximately 0.1; a medium correlation has an absolute value of approximately 0.3; and a large correlation has an absolute value of approximately 0.5 or higher.

From Dr. Shaw's paper on page 7, linked above.

In other words it's very strong, the strongest correlation coefficient that has been found for any signal associated with first year GPA at college.

This has been well understood in the academic community for decades, it's only outside of professional education circles that the validity of the SAT and ACT (when combined with high school GPA) as a predictor of future performance at college is even questioned.

Sometimes yes, sometimes no.

Counter-example: Jenkins. It does what you ask of it, its base install is "naked" and only contains the minimum functionality in the core.

Everything then becomes a plugin. Git. GitHub. Branch for multi-branch pipelines. Credentials management. And on and on and on.

Now you have stay on top of maintaining the plugins in addition to the core. Also, many plugins require other plugins so just to do some basic stuff like set up a multi-branch pipeline from a GitHub repo you're suddenly staring down the barrel of dozens and dozens of bespoke plugins with varying levels of quality and support.

A monolithic application like curl is a dream to me by comparison. Everything is tested in every release. Sub-components are kept up to date by the maintainer. No plugins fighting each other's plugins.

From afar it's easy to see the praise simplicity and modularization but honestly monoliths can be undervalued too.

The good news is we can already test this hypothesis by looking at the countries that already enforce compulsory voting [1]:

  Argentina
  Australia
  Belgium
  Bolivia
  Brazil
  Ecuador
  Liechtenstein
  Luxembourg
  Nauru
  North Korea
  Peru
  Pitcairn Islands
  Samoa
  Singapore
  Swiss canton of Schaffhausen
  Uruguay

Which one of these is a democratic paradise that the author would like to emulate?

Australia is probably the best of the bunch but it's demography and geography are not comparable to the US, a lot of things that work there don't translate here and vice versa.

The author theorizes:

> When the only question voters face is whose ideas they prefer, politicians will naturally focus on developing and debating real world ideas rather than fantasies, and democracy can live up to its moral and practical potential.

O RLY? Is that the situation in Argentina, Bolivia and Ecuador? TL;DR: No.

This article also presumes the bedrock of democracy is elections, but in fact that's just one dimension and not necessarily the most important one -- rule of law, civil institutions, a functioning state are all equally if not more important than the selection of specific leaders.

Good book on this topic: https://www.amazon.com/Wars-Guns-Votes-Democracy-Dangerous/d...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_voting#:~:text=15)%...

So cynical. I hope you're never in debilitating physical pain, only to have other people dismiss the effect of surgical intervention as a figment of your imagination.

It's not just about the sample size, I could get into the anatomy of my injuries but I don't want to divulge more of my medical privacy than I already have.

Suffice to say that when certain things are torn or detached surgical intervention is often the only way to re-attach or restore function to the affected joints. No mount of wishing it way mentally is going to change that.

Without specifics this article is not helpful.

I've had 5 orthopedic surgeries and they were transformative -- and this article is written by an orthopedist!

There's some data [1] against these operations:

- Arthoscopic knee surgery

- Subacromial shoulder decompression

- Acromioplasty for rotator cuffs

- Vertebroplasty for the spine

That's 4 techniques out of...how many exactly?

It's just an n=1 anecdote but my surgeries absolutely changed my life for the better. I don't want to get into the gory details but I feel incredibly grateful to have had such talented surgeons.

You can argue placebo but my years of ineffective physical therapy suggest otherwise.

Instead of saying "Surgery, the Ultimate Placebo" this article should say "A handful of specific surgeries shown to be no better than a placebo" -- generically describing all surgeries as a placebo is clickbait, in my non-medical-professional opinion.

[1] https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2020/11/07/some_surger...

> I couldn't believe my eyes – so many people in NYC (Manhattan specifically, the place I always wanted to live in) live like rats, an order magnitude worse than what you can get in Odessa for $300-400.

Odessa is a city of less than a million people while 8 million are crammed into New York. The more apples-to-apples comparison would be Moscow (12 million).

Plenty of people are willing to trade space for location. They want to be in the center of all the action.

And prices are dropping rapidly as the city empties out because of Covid: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/12/big-drop-in-manhattan-rental...

Silver's 2012 book "The Signal and the Noise" discusses our inability to rationally process probability, pointing out that commercial weather forecasts (e.g. Accuweather) never list a probably of rain under 20-25%. A 5% chance of rain is a mathematical possibility but people "feel" like 5% = "will never happen" and get angry if it rains.

Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman's life's work is about this, what he calls "System 1" and "System 2" of our brain, where System 1 is a fast responder that provides insta-feedback but is largely incapable of processing mathematical inputs. His 2011 book "Thinking Fast and Slow" summarizes his work well.

I'm not sure popular media can be trained to frame statistical probabilities in a way that doesn't provide people with the certainty they crave. But who knows?

But the media is not Nate Silver. He said Trump had about as much chance of winning as the Cubs had that year of wining the World Series, and obviously both happened.

Silver did a nice writeup of the whole experience: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-real-story-of-2016/