noxToken (u/noxToken)

noxToken commented on Bird song sonographs show distinct drawing patterns soundshader.github.io/hss... · Posted by u/algui91

wombatmobile · 4 years ago

Um, I'd like to be able to parse this article. but I don't know what it is saying. Can anyone explain the gist of it to me in simple terms?

What does this mean?

"These sonograms are remarkably different from other sounds, as if birds “draw” with sound something that’s flying backwards in time."

noxToken · 4 years ago

Andrew Huang does a good job of explaining harmonics and overtones[0]. You only need to watch until about the 4 minute mark (from the timestamp) to get an explanation of harmonics and what the sonograms represent.

The short of it is that most natural sounds product a root tone plus a varying amount of related tones above it. Our ears hear the root tone, and the other tones above it are what give the sound its uniqueness. That's why a guitar, a clarinet and 3 singers can produce the same note while sounding distinct.

Birds seem to produce a natural sound without a lot of the related tones above it. Their sound is, relatively speaking, much purer than most other natural sounds. That's very unique.

[0]: https://youtu.be/Wx_kugSemfY?t=95

noxToken commented on Analytics suggest 96% of users leave app tracking disabled in iOS 14.5 macrumors.com/2021/05/07/... · Posted by u/Tomte

arielm · 4 years ago

Another thing to keep in mind is how often these will be seen. Right now ~10K apps ask (or, try to ask).

So the odds of seeing the prompt in the wild aren’t too high unless you’re a Facebook user.

But as more apps show the prompt and it’ll become very common all you need is to agree once and you’ll then be more likely to opt in more than opt out, in my opinion.

I expect that 10k to 10x before the end of the year. Even then, 100k apps out of ~2M isn’t all that many, so it might take a long time for advertisers to regain the kind of access they had pre ATT.

noxToken · 4 years ago

10k out of 2M isn't a good metric, because there will be a long tail of niche, unpopular clone (AKA a student's first to do list app), shovelware or spyware apps that most people will never encounter. If the list of apps is sorted by users, I'm sure the top 50 will have a massive reach.

ESPN, Hulu and Cruncyroll issue thepop up. Consider the reach of those 3 apps alone compared to the bottom 500k.

noxToken commented on HN: The Good Parts (2016) danluu.com/hn-comments/... · Posted by u/ra00l

dang · 4 years ago

HN has been growing at the same rate since shortly after it began over a dozen years ago: basically linear, with a lot of swings (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).

We want the community to grow—it would be concerning if it didn't. But the engagement tactics you mention aren't necessary for the kind of growth we want. In fact we consciously avoid them. Certain kinds of engagement—probably just the sort that engagement tactics would juice—would harm what we're trying to optimize HN for (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).

The interesting aspect of this, I think, is that HN doesn't need to pursue growth at all costs, the way that a startup would. It's not a startup, nor a business per se, but it's not noncommercial either—it's funded by a business that understands that it's more valuable with HN than it would be without it, and is smart enough not to try to squeeze profit out of it beyond that. YC's business interests are in having HN be as good as possible, not as big as possible. That's odd, and oddly satisfying. It seems to be a historical accident that HN ended up in that sweet spot. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

noxToken · 4 years ago

Late reply, but I was speaking in generalities. HN doesn't quite fit the bill for a general forum that would improve from those tactics. There is a somewhat focused expectation of submissions, and the comments typically need a certain caliber of quality. Forums like this that deviate from those core tenets converge on being a Reddit clone with fewer users and features.

It's natural for users to engage less and less over time. However, holding the community to a certain standard keeps users from outgrowing the submissions and discussions. No one is too old, too mature, or too "smart" for earnest discussion.

noxToken commented on HN: The Good Parts (2016) danluu.com/hn-comments/... · Posted by u/ra00l

alexbouchard · 4 years ago

It definitely does and I wonder if there is a larger lesson for other forum / software. We can't seem to be able help ourself and not change things in the name of "improvements" and appart from OSS I can't think of many other example then HN that just held to it's roots.

noxToken · 4 years ago

Sites like HN tend to plateau unless there are added features to get new sign ups. Full-length profiles, social features like chat, reply notifications and following/subscribing to users are engagement tactics to keep the community engaged with each other. These are site improvements if the goal is to grow beyond the core audience.

noxToken commented on Request for comments regarding topics to be discussed at Dark Patterns workshop regulations.gov/document/... · Posted by u/sincerely

thraway123412 · 4 years ago

That was not intended to be read as a literal quote or an attempt to make it appear as if you said something you didn't. That's a fairly common way of picking a message apart to make a point, on some parts of the internet. Sometimes people paraphrase instead of literally copying words (esp. if there's no good short sequence of words to borrow), but quote marks are still used. I wish we had a better notation for this. I'm sorry to have caused confusion.

Anyway, the point was just to express my disappointment in that people keep supporting a company even after complaining about their horrible dark patterns. And I don't really mean to single you out personally, it's everywhere: people complain and then keep using and rewarding the service(s) they complain about. IME this rarely leads to them becoming better over time, they just get worse over time because they can get away with it. Abuse users until the very end. It seems to work, we have so many users and more are rolling in!

Of course if you're actually giving them feedback, all the power to you. I respect your opinion too.

To give you an idea where I stand, a few days ago I was thinking of buying a keyboard for my workshop PC. I have a couple Planck EZs and they're decent keyboards. So I went over to the ZSA site, started reading about their new keyboard (Moonlander), and... MODAL POPUP ADVERTISING A MAGAZINE[1]! Now I remember the time when browsers started adding popup blockers built-in, and everyone (except scummy advertisers) rejoiced. So I find it disturbing, disgusting, and extremely disrespectful to bring back popups in the form of modals. I kinda try to put my money where my mouth is, so my reaction was to unsubscribe their magazine (the way they presented it when I bought my plancks wasn't so bad) and take my shopping elsewhere.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/9bCDNMl.png

noxToken · 4 years ago

For the record, there is a way to highlight changes. An ellipses denotes that material was left out. Brackets denote that something was changed. In either case, the intent should never be to alter what was said. Using yours as an example:

> That was not intended to be read as a literal quote...[It was intended to] paraphrase instead of literally copying words (esp. if there's no good short sequence of words to borrow), but quote marks are still used. I wish we had a better notation for this. I'm sorry to have caused confusion.

[0]: https://writingcommons.org/article/inserting-or-altering-wor...

noxToken commented on The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets it wrong (2009) stackoverflow.blog/2009/0... · Posted by u/yellowyacht

elhudy · 4 years ago

The glaring issue in this article (which I couldn't bring myself to finish) is that he equates downvoting to "evil or incorrect post(s)". Which would be true in an ideal world, but the reality becomes downvotes are equivalent to "I disagree with you".

If plentiful downvoting is allowed, discourse becomes a popularity contest. Fortunately most of the experienced users here seem to understand this and reserve their downvotes for appropriate situations.

noxToken · 4 years ago

Downvoting can also have a snowball effect. If someone disagrees with you, especially in a contested topic where it's opinion or unclear who is correct, downvotes signal other people to also downvote. You can see the effect on Reddit.

Comments that hit -1 can still recover. Comments rarely recover after -3 or so. The only counter is for the commenter to edit and call out readers for frivolous downvoting.

noxToken commented on Overnight Pizza and the Consistent Unreliability of Expert Guidelines residentcontrarian.substa... · Posted by u/OpsManager

exmadscientist · 4 years ago

Though the article reasonably paints the "conservative" (in the small-c/non-political usage) position as driven by "science" or at least fear of being "anti-science", there is in fact nothing scientific about it. It's just a plain appeal to authority.

In fact the "hick" position is the scientific one. If someone eats unrefrigerated pizza ten times without any Adverse Events, then in fact that's an experiment providing (admittedly crude) scientific data that, in fact, the chance of an Adverse Event is no worse than ~10%. (Pedant note: quick, dirty, wrong calculation because the exact value doesn't matter here.)

Science, the process, really does work. Even if many of those who practice it don't look like TV or press release scientists. And even if many "Real Scientists" aren't really anything of the sort.

noxToken · 4 years ago

What people don't realize is that the USDA and FDA operate on guidelines such that the most basic cook can follow them. J Kenji Lopez-Alt points this out in his book Food Lab. There are graphs that show that there are safe temperatures for foods below the often quoted temperatures. 165 for chicken is quoted as the minimum safe temperature, but that's actually the instant temperature. Holding chicken at 155 is safe as long as it's done for the recommended amount of time.

The USDA just wants to prevent wide-spread food borne illnesses that are easily preventable. Hence why the small scale experiments where someone eats chicken only cooked to 155 turn out successful all the time.

Note that this isn't to discredit what you're saying. I just wanted to point out that there's more to the guidelines than the parroted parts.

noxToken commented on The S in IoT is for Security puri.sm/posts/the-s-in-io... · Posted by u/rauhl

adriancr · 4 years ago

It's difficult to even find non-internet-vendor-locked in sensors/controls/lights... (sensors/controls ideally running on batteries with sane local network API)

So far I've been lucky with cheap zigbee devices but these seem to be getting phased out in favor of locked in items...

and before people suggest - no, I don't have the willingness to build/maintain my own devices with raspberry pis or ESP etc

noxToken · 4 years ago

I hate that this dominates the conversation. I tried some stuff with a pi once. It was a nightmare. I fidgeted around with the installation, and after some slight hiccups, I finally get to install the package for my security system.

Errors. A screen full of errors barfed everywhere. I look at the repository for some basic debugging, and without some serious dedicated time, I can't fix the issue.

This is why people don't want to fiddle with a Pi for these things. Time is dedicated to get the system up, but you're not given any kind of guarantee that it will work out of the box.

noxToken commented on Cookie Consent Speed Running Game cookieconsentspeed.run... · Posted by u/bigdatagirl

Shivetya · 4 years ago

I am not sure much trickery is needed having witnessed the speed at which some friends just click right past the warnings. Training Gerbils could not be easier.

people want their fix and they want it now and many are just apathetic to the idea of privacy on the net to the point we need a better solution.

noxToken · 4 years ago

I think it's less apathy and more that they don't understand the stakes. It's a lot like how laws in the US were written when data collection and processing was a manual task.

Sure, I could tail someone for two weeks, flash their email and SMS data, and flip through publicly available images of them. Or I can get a bunch of digital data points like GPS, wireless APs, and the actual emails and SMS data. Computers and databases make it trivial to sift through this data.

The average person likely doesn't understand how deep digital profiles can go. They think that because they use incognito to look up birthday gifts and porn, everything that's private stays private. What about when screen sharing a work presentation and there's a banner ad for cancer or addiction treatment? What about months of funeral care ads after searching for what to do after a parent or child dies?

People think that advertisers are wasting money since they see ads for the same purchase made a week prior. They'd be devastated if health insurance providers partnered with Visa or a tracking network to extract a "health risk" profile.

noxToken commented on Less screen time and more sleep critical for preventing depression westernsydney.edu.au/news... · Posted by u/rustoo

SonicSoul · 5 years ago

you're commenting on a study with what sounds like an opinion that feels right to you. maybe it's not just about social media vs "positive" activities. some of it may be related to screen addiction and inability to focus due to externals stimuli. any unhealthy habit could have a configuration where its not as unhealthy to some people, but it doesn't mean the study is "confusing people"

noxToken · 5 years ago

This will remain opinion until we can get longitudinal studies that account for this. Current pediatric recommendations are basically no screen time for small children even though there are apps specifically for educational enrichment. It may be that all screen time is bad. Until the educational and informational parts are accounted for, all we can do is speculate.