mikemotherwell's comments

What are the frameworks used in scientific endeavours? Given that scaling is not an issue, something like Rails for science seems like it could potentially return many $(B/M)illions of dollars for humanity.

I wonder under what circumstances this ban is acceptable. I'm no expert on international law, but even if the charges are Trumped up (pun intended), espionage / security concerns are very likely on the list.

And being home you heat the place by existing, running things, and opening windows to the heat. If you leave a house locked, it heats up pretty slowly, and if you get back towards dark, it will cool off faster from a lower temperature.

It's just a really weird year all around.

That implies Google will change what Australians see vs other countries. No more. No less.

Some possibile outcomes:

Imagine a page with only foreign results. Plenty of news entities cover Australian news, and a result like this: https://www.google.com.au/search?q=victoria+australia+covid could very easily nix the news box, and any and all Australian news results and content.

Google could take the attitude that all Australian news sites that require payment have a robots.txt with:

Disallow: /

I can't imagine any law that both demands Google crawl sites AND demands payment for it will survive being contested in the courts. You can't both compel and enforce - it is one or tother, and if it costs Google to crawl your site, why should Google crawl your site?

I can see a news site, like The Guardian, agreeing to give Google their news for free, and getting all the SERP links as a consequence. I can imagine Google doing deals with all manner of sites for nothing, where the value of 100% of News traffic from Google is likely millions.

I have no idea what the proposal of the ACCC is (and I'm Australian) but this seems a really weird case, where the unintended consequences could be almost anything, and the likely outcome is more likely to be bad for Australian sites than beneficial.

Other way around. It was invented to stop crawling. Indexing is still technically allowed even when blocked by robots.txt from crawling.

>In older systems

If only it were older systems!

I get data from a variety of undocumented sources, and I started logging what I actually receive next to the normalised data, e.g. I either put raw JSON into the database next to the actual data it contains, or I put all downloaded data into a git repo and update the repo after every query.

Why raw JSON? I've had data come back as JSON that did not validate like not escaping quotes, blank fields that were missing a value e.g. {"dog": , "cat": "yes"}, just plain wrong data (a number field that was "no number at present"). Putting it into the DB lets me fix the errors and reprocess.

With non-JSON, I've had a raft of other errors/problems, and I find git works well here to show what changed and caused the errors.

When dealing with anyone else's data, not just validating but also logging in a structured way that makes discovering errors easier is vital.

What I think society needs is an rspec of government spending (I'm using rspec as it is clear, or should be, what that implies). Test driven government, in essence.

Society is varied across county, city, state and country lines, and we are in our infancy in understanding what policies work, when, where and why. Combine that with no overt expected outcome, i.e. do we expect this policy to have an absolute outcome (assert(absolute_wealth > X)) or if we want a comparative outcome (assert(relative_income > 0.77)), and we end up with arguments about spending that are judged by rhetoric rather than success or failure on what should be a knowable scale.

Being more overt in how society judges government spending, especially when the goal is a social good, gives us the best shot at spending more on effective interventions, and less on ineffective ones. I think it also helps mitigate the circus nature of politics, where politicians gain kudos simply for with their spending decisions, and are rarely held accountable to actual outcomes. Like TDD, it would by no means be a panacea, but it would be a step in the right direction.

While it true that a policy can be fantastic for society, but exacerbate inequalities (i.e. get better at extracted value from smart people), or be terrible for society but reduce inequality (just make sure everyone has nothing and job done), if we at least tested the policy along some overt lines, and threw out the very worst policies, I can't imagine social spending would have worse outcomes, if only until the loopholes are worked out.

Depends how big you plan on getting. Be infinitely easier to hire someone who knows how to use GA to make decisions, and historical data will be useful at that point.

For antibodies or the disease?

No it's exactly the sort of thought process people have.

Another scenario is someone does what you suggest after finding a real vulnerability, to waste the teams time while they exploit the real vulnerability.

Thankfully, that's both not how democracy works - we don't ask a biased sample - and exactly how it works - we ask everyone what they think of the government's performance and they vote for or against.

When we all look back in 5 years, then 10, then 15, there will be different "obvious" conclusions drawn. Right now, anyone who sides with any action as correct should have a confidence level that is extremely small.

The more varied the responses, the more we learn as a species, and I am glad that not everywhere assumes they are NYC or Lombardy, and acts in varying ways so that in 5, 10, and 15 years the coming studies have different data points of comparison.

>An ad model that favors something like the NY Times can't be the better model.

It absolutely can, let me count the ways:

1. You are never, ever on a bad site - no matter how good Google et al are, bad things happen. If avoiding that matters, NY Times is a smart move.

2. You don't pay for the AdTech - everyone know who the NY Times readers are - is spending 40%-60% to overcome the problems of mass advertising better than splitting the difference with NY Times?

3. AdFraud - NY Times can charge rates and using methods that are more fraud resistant (e.g. get rid of CPM).

Does anyone have any inkling of what he was offered? Gimlet got hundreds of millions for a barely breakeven business - what is the Howard Stern of Podcasting worth on an exclusive deal?

For a site like the NY Times, pricing the ad space based on a user's historical data is a mug's game. NY Times has a reputation and value beyond the value of a user's browser history. Why would they want to compete with small nothing sites, giving a large percentage to adtech companies, when they can sell the premium service of being associated with the NY Times?

"We are the NY Times. If you want to advertise on our site you have to pay a premium."

"But we want to target ..."

"We are the NY Times. We have half a billion ARR. Take it or leave it."

That used to be how ads worked, and I think it is a better model - for both sides in many cases.

> Do you have any source for that?

Found where I got it from: https://www.seattleweekly.com/news/seattle-is-getting-an-obj... I'm not American so no idea if this is accurate or not.

Is that article accurate? My understanding was that Seattle commissioned a multi-year study, and then when the results didn't go their way, quickly rushed a study out the door that said what they wanted. I got this from Marginal Revolution, and I can't find the article, but here is the actual study https://evans.uw.edu/policy-impact/minimum-wage-study and here is an MR article summarising the report: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/06/se...

The first two points from MR:

> – The numbers of hours worked by low-wage workers fell by 3.5 million hours per quarter. This was reflected both in thousands of job losses and reductions in hours worked by those who retained their jobs.

> – The losses were so dramatic that this increase “reduced income paid to low-wage employees of single-location Seattle businesses by roughly $120 million on an annual basis.”

So you think this policy was in place starting with Trump? Or was it with a Bush, but Obama chose NOT to repeal it? Or has it all started with Republican governors very recently?

This partisanship seems crazy to me, especially given that the bureaucratic system seems plain broken. Not broken based on Republican or Democratic ideology, just plain broken.

I'm not American, and it doesn't seem like in my country Australia these supply issues have been as bad, despite almost all of our supply coming from China.

Masks may be 100% irrelevant for healthy people, but we have asymptomatic people. There is no way to ascertain who is healthy, ergo "healthy people don't need masks" is practically redundant. What am I missing?

Oh, and you want citations, sorry, my bad:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HLrm0pqBN_5bdyysOeoOBX4p... - 30 some citations on masks.

Let's assume healthy people do not need a mask. In fact, let's take it as Gospel, and the statement "Healthy people have no use for a mask" as absolutely true.

Given we know there are people with COVID-19 who are asymptomatic, any "Healthy people have no use for a mask" can simultaneously be true, and be practically irrelevant, as any definition of "healthy people" is necessarily impossible to prove. You simply can not know you are free of Corona Virus, short of having recovered from the virus.

If the standard was EVERYONE wears a mask, asymptomatic people would be a non-issue. Any advice contrary to the 100% mask usage argument has to explain how we deal with asymptomatic people. Short of testing everyone all the time, what would that even be?

TL;DR In a world with asymptomatic COVID-19 people, a 100% mask policy seems the sane default position.

That's not the point being made. Panic was not what was done or suggested, it was the dismissive tone that such concerns were met with by Critics. GP's point was that the claims it was panic were wrong and harmful, not the quote unquote "panic".