boron1006 (u/boron1006)

boron1006 commented on Cities Aren't Loud: Cars Are Loud (2021) [video] youtube.com/watch?v=CTV-w... · Posted by u/CHB0403085482

phpisthebest · 2 years ago

Yes here we are, Here we are were the majority have self selected to live in the way I prefer, but people want to use government violence (i.e regulation) to force people to live in a manner they did not self select.

I have no problems if people want to create something voluntarily that is walkable, I have massive problems with using government to do it.

boron1006 · 2 years ago

What are you talking about? We are in this position precisely because of government regulation prioritizing cars. Most of American cities are still only zoned for SFH within the city limits. It’s nearly impossible to build in any other way because of regulation. Not to mention the many many subsidies for the auto industry.

The thing that frustrates me most about libertarians is how everything they don’t want is regulation or government spending, but everything they do want is provided by the grace of god or something.

boron1006 commented on Everyone loves e-bikes – except some who have to share roads with them washingtonpost.com/lifest... · Posted by u/pseudolus

peoplefromibiza · 3 years ago

> But cars kills pedestrians they hit.

So do bikes.

see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32376016

> And I mean, really a lot, the amount of people cars kill is staggering.

The amount of kilometers cars run is also staggering.

Nobody is saying cars are good, but at least cars don't run on sidewalks, they stay on the roads and pedestrians don't walk in the middle of the road "just because they can".

Rules are rules, unless someone thinks that bikers are special and aren't subject to the same laws the rest of us have to follow.

Unfortunately it's much easier to encounter bikes going the wrong way, biking on pedestrian only zones, zig-zagging between people walking in a park, jumping on the sidewalk or skipping the red light, than cars (in proportion to the number of vehicles circulating)

boron1006 · 3 years ago

> So do bikes.

The comment that you cite doesn’t actually have any supporting citations…

> Rules are rules, unless someone thinks that bikers are special and aren't subject to the same laws the rest of us have to follow.

I would love for enforcement of cyclists who break the law to increase. But that would require actually providing working infrastructure for bikes.

You can’t write someone a ticket for not riding in a bike lane when literally every single block someone has parked in the bike lane. If there was a place where every single day on every block, someone parked in the only road for cars in a major city and on a major road artery, this would be a national news story. But this is what happens on weekdays at ~8:45am where I am in LA.

Every city also has completely different rules about cycling, which very few people bother to know about. In many cities it’s fine to ride on the sidewalk.

boron1006 commented on 'Anonymised' data can never be totally anonymous, says study theguardian.com/technolog... · Posted by u/stmw

AnthonyMouse · 6 years ago

I mean, yes, some people are factually incorrect. But I think the general idea is more like, if you have a massively over-determined system of linear equations, you can omit many of the values and still be able to recover them all from the remaining values and knowledge of the equations.

And it's not intuitively obvious which combinations of values allow you to recover which other ones.

boron1006 · 6 years ago

For context, this was when ISPs were planning on selling data, and someone was collecting donations saying they'd reidentify senators internet history. I said that people shouldn't donate to them, because it wasn't even clear what the ISPs would release. Their point was it doesn't matter what the ISPs release, they could reidentify anyone with deep learning.

> And it's not intuitively obvious which combinations of values allow you to recover which other ones.

I think it's pretty intuitive that Zip Code and DOB are identifiers. That's why they count as such in HIPAA, and are used to demonstrate identity by governments, credit cards, etc.

Personally I think this stuff just poisons the well when it comes to discussions of privacy. I think the goal is to remove the expectation of anonymity by claiming that it's never possible.

boron1006 commented on 'Anonymised' data can never be totally anonymous, says study theguardian.com/technolog... · Posted by u/stmw

boron1006 · 6 years ago

Absolutely idiotic article and title. Obviously it's possible to reidentify a person if you have 15 demographic attributes if you don't specify which attributes you use. I can do even better, I can reidentify 100% of people, with only their name, DOB, fingerprints and SSN. The fact that DOB and zip code are in the dataset make this result completely trivial.

A couple years ago, I got into an argument on reddit where someone claimed that any mapping could be recovered "using deep learning techniques" (e.g. if you take 3*0 = 0, you can get back that the original value was 3 with no other information except for the value "0"), and that obviously I was just too stupid to understand deep learning if I couldn't see that.

boron1006 commented on How to support open-source software and stay sane nature.com/articles/d4158... · Posted by u/sohkamyung

bluGill · 6 years ago

Why hire an engineer? Why not walk over to the CS (might have a different name) and talk to a professor there. They can set you up with plenty of undergrads who need this experience, and they should be able to guide them into something that is maintainable long term.

Note that I said should there. How to write maintainable programs seems to be lacking in research area.

boron1006 · 6 years ago

This would be a good solution, but from what I've seen with psychologists and statisticians, it's unlikely to happen for reasons I don't fully understand. Another thing is that undergraduates often learn by adopting the norms of the institution that they're in (e.g. using version control, linters, etc) but when they're brought in as the technical person, they don't have that opportunity to improve (This is my personal anecdote as that cs undergrad at one time).

boron1006 commented on How to support open-source software and stay sane nature.com/articles/d4158... · Posted by u/sohkamyung

ylem · 6 years ago

Two other points to consider--equipment is a one-off expense and staffing is a continuous expense. The other is that the pots of money for equipment and staff may be different....

boron1006 · 6 years ago

Completely right, I've been trying to hype up the "Github sponsorships" program as a way of changing the thinking around software (e.g. tacking OSS onto grants as required equipment), but haven't found much support.

boron1006 commented on How to support open-source software and stay sane nature.com/articles/d4158... · Posted by u/sohkamyung

chrisseaton · 6 years ago

> Non-technical scientists

How can you have a ‘non-technical scientist’? All science is inherently technical.

Are you using ‘technical’ as a short-hand for ‘can program’? Stop doing that - programming is not the only technology.

boron1006 · 6 years ago

I'm using technical in a broad sense. One effect of scientific research becoming bigger is that roles are becoming more specialized. Often the people leading the research have primarily spend time writing grants or papers, and less senior professors and post-docs will carry out the actual tasks. When I first started I was a bit shocked at how many of the big names knew basically nothing about the process of how their own research is carried out.

The effects are more pronounced depending on what field we're talking about. For example, in physics, I'd imagine most people have at least the fundamentals of programming down, even if software design may be lacking. In the field I work in (Neuroimaging), a lot of PI's are doctors or neuropsychologists, and might barely even know how to use a computer.

boron1006 commented on How to support open-source software and stay sane nature.com/articles/d4158... · Posted by u/sohkamyung

opportune · 6 years ago

A lot of the points you bring up re related to cost. Here's the thing about cost, let's say it costs $100k/year to hire a good software engineer capable of writing scientific code (able to program and test complex algorithms, write HPC code, turn whitepapers into code), which might even be an underestimate depending on how benefits are paid out and the area. You can also fund 3 more grad students for that kind of money. The grad students will directly convert a PI's money into authorships while the software engineer's contribution will be only indirect, and likely take years to pay off.

Plus, with only a single software engineer, there's a good chance you get unlucky and end up with someone clueless/lazy. You would probably need 3-4 software engineers to make a functioning team with best practices and hedge your bets against accidentally hiring someone who sucks. So now we're talking 10+ grad students.

Open source software is a bit different because many labs can band together to fund things they find useful. But again there are still issues with cost-effectiveness. I'm guessing most lab contributors to OSS would want some sort of quid-pro-quo which may not be realistic for all OSS projects. And by funding OSS you are also funding competing labs' abilities to use the same features you use, which is good for science in general but not good for people's careers sometimes

boron1006 · 6 years ago

You're right, and more generally all of the issues are related to the fact that scientific incentives don't typically align with good development. At the end of the day, over a period of 3+ years, I'd rather have the results of 3-4 software engineers compared to 10-12 grad students. However, for <3 years, I'd choose the grad students. Pretty much every incentive in science (e.g. grants, awards) prioritizes being prolific over a short period of time.

boron1006 commented on How to support open-source software and stay sane nature.com/articles/d4158... · Posted by u/sohkamyung

boron1006 · 6 years ago

Great article, and fantastic to see a spotlight on an issue that I've thought a lot about.

The sad part is that to a lot of scientists and researchers, software/software engineers isn't something worth paying for. It's not uncommon to see "programmer" jobs that are looking for 3+ years of experience that offer <$15 dollars an hour in the US. Sometimes they're "volunteer intern" positions. Of course the people who end up filling these positions aren't usually actual developers, so the software gets built poorly, eventually gets scrapped, and the cycle continues.

Management also hasn't really evolved past the 90's. Non-technical scientists often want 100% of control and to make each decision, but don't want to spend any time on it. This means developers often have little to no specs to work with, but spend all of their time guessing about what the scientists want, and having to go back and fix everything after.

>“That’s really the tragedy of the funding agencies in general,” says Carpenter. “They’ll fund 50 different groups to make 50 different algorithms, but they won’t pay for one software engineer.”

This is the crux of my frustration. It's not even 50 different algorithms often. A lot of the time, 50 different research groups will be working on very similar programs, and none will be able to deliver a working version.

Though the article mentions that research funding does exist, clicking on one of those funding pages and looking through their examples reveals that only ~1/10 of their websites are actually still active, and they aren't old sites. Again this goes back to the whole "scientists don't value software thing". I've seen scientists happily sign off on spending $20,000+ on hardware components that would usually cost <$100 to make, but balk at contributing $50 yearly to support open source.

I got lucky that I managed to find a place where I get paid fairly, and my boss is actually technical and can manage tech projects well, but these places are few and far between.

boron1006 commented on Everyone’s Income Taxes Should Be Public nytimes.com/2019/04/13/op... · Posted by u/pseudolus

bko · 6 years ago

NYT: Government should protect the privacy of its citizens

Also NYT: Everyone's income taxes should be public

What a bizarre half-baked (obviously political) response to something in the news. It's really sad that the bar for what gets published in a major newspaper is so low.

boron1006 · 6 years ago

The term "privacy" has become a hollow word that people use to criticise anything they don't like.

Generally, I see the concept of "you shouldn't be able to know anything about me, but I should be able to know everything about you" everywhere.

Notably in tech circles, this is prevalent in how we see hacking.

People who hack into other people's computers, IT people who snoop onto employee accounts, and people who support personal data breaches like the Fappening (saying stuff like "if they don't want to have their images become public, they shouldn't have taken them"), and publishing of personal emails (e.g. Wikileaks), all have had conversations with me complaining that Facebook is violating their privacy rights. None have recognized that what they are involved in is way, way worse than anything that Facebook has done.