Thanks for making that website. I used examples from it in the first day of my statistics course ("by the end of this course you won't make these kinds of mistakes").
Glad to hear it! The use in stats courses is the main reason I keep it alive.
Readit NewsTwo years ago I re-vamped my "Spurious Correlations" side project, which is mostly just a bunch of charts. However, I couldn't find a charting software I liked that would display clean, simple visuals with the constraints I wanted. (I had used pCharts and HighCharts in the past, but didn't like charting in Javascript or PHP.)
I decided to "roll my own" and write Python scripts that outputted SVG markup. I was worried this would go about as well as every other "roll your own" project does, but was pleasantly surprised. It is surprisingly easy to output reliable, good-looking SVG graphics using Python. If you are making a chart, everything is just math.
The infinite scalability is almost just a happy upside to the simplicity of creating the visualizations, which is annoying in raster format. It made me like SVG even more.
> Google Maps Is Not a Directory. It’s a Market Maker.
I understand the author's meaning, but this isn't what the term "market maker" means. To "make a market" is to stand ready to buy and sell, usually a security, in order to create liquidity in a market. Usually this resolves the issue of timing, because it is unlikely that someone wants to buy at the exact moment someone else wants to sell.
So to "make a market" in London restaurants, Google could buy food during the day and sell it at night when the shops are closed but people are hungry. (This would be silly.)
Perhaps a more precise term is "algorithmic gatekeeper."
tylervigen commented on Pebble Watch software is now open source ericmigi.com/blog/pebble-... · Posted by u/Larrikin
This is awesome. What a way to do a relaunch. I was a Pebble user in 2013 on first release and saddened when it all broke down. I was so turned off from that experience that I swore off smart watches (I wear a Casio now).
This could get me back, though I’ll admit the appeal has gone down since I’ve realized how nice it is to create separation between me and my notifications.
tylervigen commented on First kiss dates back 21M years bbc.com/news/articles/cr4... · Posted by u/1659447091
Kissing is so weird. You can make up a thousand just-so stories. You can imagine it meant totally different things through time and across cultures.
For me it just seems like yet another culturally-defined signal of intimacy. Like showing ankles or chests or saying this or that. Seems to me trying to make everything some hard wired evolutionary thing is a dead end.
The researchers found a common ancestor of many different species that all conduct non-functional kissing. The surprising thing about the research is that it specifically implies kissing is not cultural!
I'm struggling with deciphering the punctuation symbol between the £ and the |. Any help? (Possibly the @ symbol but my reading of the text suggests there isn't a glyph for it, but maybe I'm wrong there)
I think it is @ given the context of the next paragraph, where they complain that @ doesn't work well in the grid.
The MVTA in Minnesota operates with 90% subsidies, so only 10% of revenue is from fares.
It feels like there could be some societal benefit to similarly reducing the number of busses and just making them free. (Today most busses are only at 10-30% capacity). This seems to support that idea.
tylervigen commented on Cognitive and mental health correlates of short-form video use psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/... · Posted by u/smartmic
Couldn't be further from my experience. I enjoy it, watch for a bit, or even for an hour+, and then put it down. No noticable impact to my ability to focus at all: 5 hours flies by while coding still.
Idk if I'm built different, but I generally doubt it. I find these statements about brain rot to be either hyperbolic or at very least reminiscent of the "violent video games make you kill people IRL" conversations of the 90s/00s
Your experience is at odds with the statistical results of the linked studies covering nearly 100,000 participants.
tylervigen commented on Show HN: Forty.News – Daily news, but on a 40-year delay forty.news... · Posted by u/foxbarrington
It's funny that this site's tagline is "Exactly 40 years back, these felt huge. See how they landed with time." but so many of these stories are still just as alarming. If anything it often feels like we should've cared more. At the very least done more
Indeed, and I think this is a diredt result of OP's pipeline. Part of the workflow involves asking an LLM to prioritize articles that readers in 2025 will find interesting in hindsight.
If it's a stable 24x7 load it would be ideal for nuclear energy, low carbon, but slow to adapt to changes in demand.