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aqsalose commented on I fought in Ukraine and here's why FPV drones kind of suck   warontherocks.com/2025/06... · Posted by u/_tk_
aqsalose · 9 months ago
Many of the issues sound like issues coming from using improvised civilian hobbyist tech and doctrine being in its infancy.

If current FPV drones are bit lackluster, it doesn't preclude 'next generation' that are purposefully developed for military use won't be useful. Also it sounds like the designation of "FPV drone" is specific to particular family of drones specific in current day and time, which may be something quite else next year. Like, obviously the next stage is a FPV drone with some capabilities of "reusable" drone or loitering munition author complains of (capability to hover easily)? Or "reusable" drone with FPV camera?

aqsalose commented on The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE   wired.com/story/elon-musk... · Posted by u/medler
markus_zhang · a year ago
Well from a foreigner's perspective, US is finally getting its own version of Cultural Revolution.
aqsalose · a year ago
I think Third Republic France is a more apt comparison. Political fights about religion and content of education, check. Diverging media landscape aligned with party political identity and ideology, check. Major changes to civil service personnel after consequential elections (1879-1884), check.
aqsalose commented on The legacy of lies in Alzheimer's science   nytimes.com/2025/01/24/op... · Posted by u/apsec112
dumbfounder · a year ago
How else would it work? The onus needs to be on someone to make sure we are doing worthwhile things. Like anything else in life, you need to prove you deserve the money before you get it. Often that means you need to refine your ideas and pitches to match what the world thinks it needs. Then once you get a track record it lowers your risk profile and money comes more easily.
aqsalose · a year ago
Sounds sensible, bu the major unasked question it avoids is, was the current funding and organization structure of science in place when the past scientific achievements were achieved.

the impression I get from anecdotes and remarks is that pre-1990s, university departments used to be the major scientific social institution, providing organization where the science was done, with feedback cycle measured in careers. Faculty members would socialize and collaborate or compete with other members. Most of the scientific norms were social, possible because the stakes were low (measured in citations, influence and prestige only).

It is quite unlike current system centered on research groups formed around PIs and their research groups, an machine optimized for gathering temporary funding for non-tenured staff so that they can produce publications and 'network', using all that to gather more funding before the previous runs out. No wonder the social norms like "don't falsify evidence; publish when you have true and correct results; write and publish your true opinions; don't participate in citation laundering circles" can't last. Possibility of failure is much frequent (every grant cycle), environment is highly competitive in a way that you get only few shots at scientific career or you are out.

aqsalose commented on Stepwise selection of variables in regression is Evil   freerangestats.info/blog/... · Posted by u/Bostonian
jonathan_landy · a year ago
>> Some of the problems don’t matter as much if your goal for the model is just prediction, not interpretation of the model and its coefficients. But most of the time that I see the method used (including recent examples being distributed by so-called experts as part of their online teaching), the end model is indeed used for interpretation, and I have no doubt this is also the case with much published science. Further, even when the goal is only prediction, there are better methods like the Lasso, of dealing with a problem of a high number of variables.

I use this method often for prediction applications. First, it’s a sort of hyper parameter selection, so you should obviously use a holdout and test set to help you make a good choice.

Second, I often see the method dogmatically shut down like this, in favor of lasso. Yet every time I have compared the two they give similar selections — so how can one be “evil” and the other so glorified? I prefer the stepwise method though as you can visualize the benefit of adding in each additional feature. That can help to guide further feature development — a point that I’ve seen significantly lift the bottom line of enterprise scale companies.

aqsalose · a year ago
Yeah, the title is a bit hyperbolic. I have not used selection methods that much, but not too surprising they would have similar results to LASSO as selection or predictive method for people who think of it in terms of "feature development".

The distaste for step-wise selection comes from its typical use. If one reads Harrell's complaints quoted in the blog post carefully, quite many of them are less about the selection method but what analyst does with it, namely, interpretation of inferential statistics. When you see step-wise in the wild, practitioner often has used step-wise or other selection method and then reports the usual test-statistics and p-values for the final fitted model ... that are derived with assumptions that don't usually take into account the selection steps. It is quite unfortunate in fields where people put lot of faith in coefficient estimates, p-values and Wald confidence intervals when writing conclusions of their paper.

With LASSO and its cousins, the standard packages and literature strongly encourage the user to focus on predictions and run cross-validation right from the beginning.

aqsalose commented on The Marshmallow Test does not reliably predict adult functioning   srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.... · Posted by u/superposeur
aqsalose · 2 years ago
From abstract (article is paywalled)

>Although modest bivariate associations were detected with educational attainment (r = .17) and body mass index (r = −.17), almost all regression-adjusted coefficients were nonsignificant. No clear pattern of moderation was detected between delay of gratification and either socioeconomic status or sex. Results indicate that Marshmallow Test performance does not reliably predict adult outcomes.

I guess the question is whether the covariates that were adjusted for in the regression are true confounders and not, say, something caused by ability to delay gratification.

aqsalose commented on How Lego builds a new Lego set   theverge.com/c/23991049/l... · Posted by u/sohkamyung
robertlagrant · 2 years ago
> Well yeah, you gotta grow the business, as any good visitor of this site knows

Well. You have to exist, which means you compete, which might mean you grow.

aqsalose · 2 years ago
>Well. You have to exist, which means you compete, which might mean you grow.

Why growth? At some point you would eventually hit perfect saturation anyway, the steady state where everyone already is buying your product to the extent anyone can buy it. I get that losing business is bad, and it's better to "overcorrect" to growth, but as long as you compete enough to keep approximately same market share against other competitors, selling inflation adjusted $30 buckets of bricks to each generation of kids with profit sounds like perfectly good business. Owner of the business would receive steady income selling the inflation adjusted $30 buckets.

I'd imagine you'd hit problems when the buckets of bricks you are selling are ~eternal and number of kids is no longer growing, so nobody needs new ones.

aqsalose commented on Attention Is Off By One   evanmiller.org/attention-... · Posted by u/elbasti
doliveira · 3 years ago
Nah, scientific papers are supposed to be precise and technical. This reads like those quite frequent suggestions here of switching all equations in papers to plain English or code: it honestly comes from a place of ignorance, and I say that as basically a layman myself.

What should be encouraged is for academics to blog about their research as well. It would even help when recruiting and onboarding new members. Right now the sociological and economical incentives don't promote this at all.

aqsalose · 3 years ago
"it honestly comes from a place of ignorance, and I say that as basically a layman myself"

Here is an added complication: succinct technical communication can be efficient when communicating to peers who work on the exactly same domain, similar problems as you, and want digest your main ideas quickly.

On the other hand, for any particular paper, the size of the audience to whom it is directly relevant and addressed to can be small. The size of the audience who got to reading it anyway may be vast. (Maybe I am reading your paper because someone cited a method paper that in lieu of a proof or explanation writes just two words and citation to your paper. Maybe I am a freshly minted new student reading it for my first seminar. Maybe I am from a neighboring field and trying to understand what is happening in yours. Maybe I tried to find what people have already done with particular idea I just had and search engine gave your paper. And so on.)

During my (admittedly lackluster) academic career I recall spending much more time trying to read and understand papers that were not addressed to me than papers that were and where I enjoyed the succinct style that avoids details and present the results. (Maybe it is just an idiosyncratic trust issue on my part, because I am often skeptical of stated results and their interpretation, finding the methods more interesting). But that is not all.

I also noticed that genuine misunderstandings coming from "brief" communication of technical "details" were quite common; two different researches would state they "applied method X to avoid Y/seek Z[citation]" in exactly so many and almost exactly same words, where X,Y and Z were complicated technical terms, yet the authors would have quite different opinion what the meaning of those words were and what would be the intended reading and how and why X should be implemented.

In conclusion, I think many a scientific field would benefit from a style where authors were expected to clearly explain what they did and why (as clearly as possible).

aqsalose commented on Git and Jupyter Notebooks Guide   reviewnb.com/git-jupyter-... · Posted by u/sixhobbits
pletnes · 3 years ago
Sometimes I work on software development, and this mindset («the only valuable asset is the code») makes total sense. But if I work on analytics / datascience projects, the analysis including outputs could be time consuming to run, validate, and visualize. In these cases, it might be required to version the outputs.

I’ve never used jupyter for taking notes in a lab setting, but with more and more instruments being computer/network connected, I imagine this would make total sense - put your data and notes with your analytics work.

Many jupyter users are not «software developers», they just use code to perform their work.

aqsalose · 3 years ago
However, I wouldn't then use version control software like Git for versioning analysis objects, as it is designed for text file source control and diffs.

(How one does a diff of a data object look like? If there is a natural text format to save it in, it still is usually quite messy, and Git doesn't really like Gb sized csvs.)

My preferred workflow is to version the source files in Git and store the associated data objects in a separate archive directory with meaningful name and the hash of commit of generating code as metadata attribute.

Now if you had a version control "IDE" software that would render changes in figures and other blobs nicely, then it would make sense to build a workflow around it.

aqsalose commented on IKEA Redesigns Its Bestsellers   wsj.com/articles/ikea-fur... · Posted by u/jbredeche
JonChesterfield · 3 years ago
Most of it really doesn't like being disassembled and reassembled, so moving home every year or so would do that to the lifespan
aqsalose · 3 years ago
In my experience, the trick is to move them without disassembly or with minimal disassembly (removing only moving parts like shelves that are planned to be removed) like any other furniture. Nothing weird with that: Most traditional furniture items made by a carpenter would be equally incompatible with disassembly.
aqsalose commented on Ask HN: Where are all the parties?    · Posted by u/throwaway_party
c7DJTLrn · 3 years ago
Not them but I guess it's referencing the fact that education today is largely about having textbooks shoved in front of you until you're able to recite enough of it. University/college is the place where people go to place responsibility for their education on someone else. It's sold as a one-stop shop for a high paying career. Not much initiative needed besides turning up to class.
aqsalose · 3 years ago
> I guess it's referencing the fact that education today is largely about having textbooks shoved in front of you until you're able to recite enough of it.

I would argue contrariwise, the education today is bad because the textbooks are devoid of content and nobody can recite any of the little they have. For my parents' generation it was not unexceptional for people to cite poems from memory. I have bunch of their middle school books, and it appears they read more and longer texts for middle school than some university students today. During my grandfather's time kids were expected to recite a chapters of textbooks aloud in front of class, and he also remembered good bunch chunks from the Bible.

Compared to that, fill-in textbooks we used when I was in school seem a bit underwhelming -- and I am in my 30s. Kids today use e-learning environment (makes direct comparisons difficult).

Today, very few people appear to read anything, let alone books, even fewer remembers anything. Thus conversations about anything factual seem often pointless. But it is not like one can blame anyone for that, it only makes sense: Why truly should I remember anything when I can flip out a smartphone and hit query to a search engine? But people reading the same Wikipedia article or repeating the same news cycle talking points at each other makes for a boring conversation.

u/aqsalose

KarmaCake day878February 11, 2017
About
Biostatistician. PhD dropout. Curious about various mathematical and other things.

https://aqsalose.fi

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