kendallpark

>> the concept of "human dignity", which, however useful or beautiful, has no roots in Catholic tradition: it's a purely secular idea.

> I'm not a philosopher or theologian, but this just seems wrong to me

Agreed, it's an ahistorical take. The Western secular concept of "human dignity" has roots in the Abrahamic religions. Not the other way around.

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-009-1590-9_...

"Mystery" is a theological concept that is translated from the Greek word "mustérion." [1] Mysterious, mystical, secret, divine, not fully revealed. This sort of ineffable, irreducible truth you can touch but cannot fully grasp.

The reaction of astronauts to seeing Earth from space -- the mystery of creation. Parents seeing pieces of themselves echoed in their children who are nonetheless distinct and surprising -- the mystery of the person.

Much of the meditations in the encyclical are related to human dignity and fraternity. An example:

> Finitude, when truly accepted, does not diminish us but opens us to recognizing the face of God and others. Indeed, precisely because we experience limits — vulnerability, suffering and failure — we can recognize the inviolable dignity of every person, both our own and that of others.

[1] https://biblehub.com/greek/3466.htm

I would love a legal policy that requires developers to allow users to opt out of algorithm-generated feeds. A "right to control consumption" or something that like.

Would really like some kind of legal policy that requires developers to allow users to opt out of algorithm generated feeds.

> Is this true?

Yup! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allergy#Pathophysiology

The issue is not cold, but whether you can get a highly competitive position at the South Pole Station. In order to see the sun set, you have to be part of the skeleton crew which maintains the station during the winter-over. There are no flights going in and out during the winter. If you see the sun set over the South Pole... you'll also be stuck seeing the sun rise as well. In the months between you'll be working in perpetual night.

> I don’t personally see a reason to treat cadavers any differently than any other object in a lab

Even from a purely consequentialist point of view: if behavior around the cadavers gets out to the public, and the public deems it disrespectful, the public stops donating cadavers, which negatively impacts medical education. Even if you don't personally believe in treating human remains with respect, a huge part of society does, and you have to at least respect that.

> From another angle, I would argue that the eyes and face are part of what makes a human, as are the hands.

I also agree with this take, though in the moment at the lab I didn't interject with a critique of mind-body dualism. Either way, it seems the brain has some sort of primacy over other organs, in terms of contributing to personhood. Pretty much everything else could be lost or transplanted, yet we'd still consider someone the same person. The brain however seems essential in making you you.

Speaking from first-hand, I can't remember any disrespectful behavior. Acting disrespectful toward the donor (what we called the cadavers) would get you kicked out of anatomy lab. There is even a "gift of body" ceremony commemorating the donations every year that family members can attend. Med students will speak about how the donors impacted their medical education and how much they appreciate them.

I would hope that tales of inappropriate jokes of posing with body parts are relegated to a bygone era.

Fwiw I would have no issue donating my body to my institution for dissection. I certainly benefited from the donation. Some notable memories:

- The brittleness and crunchiness of an atherosclerotic artery compared to the pliable rubber hose of a healthy artery

- How incredibly soft lungs are -- like a tempur-pedic pillow. Unless the donor had been a smoker. Then the lungs were hard and black-spotted like a pumice stone.

- The muscular atrophy of old age. There were some donors whose abdominal muscles were as thin as paper.

- Holding a donors brain in one's hand (it's smaller than one would expect). In the words of a lab partner, "I can't believe we are holding everything that made this person a person, all their personality, everything."

Try a run that is much longer (eg, 3 hours), then see how your 1.5 hour run feels. Usually you need a larger-than-normal stimulus to elicit adaptation. In my experience, the mind adapts to these things and will essentially learn to shut off.

I had a conversation with a cyclist who grew up in one of those "high crime neighborhoods" in St. Louis. He said that he received strange looks and comments when he visited his old neighborhood with a road bike attached to his car. He belonged; the bike did not. I suspect that more-than-casual cycling is a cultural oddity in some areas. I'm not sure that walking would garner the same reaction.

I've gained an appreciation for walking through very roundabout means.

For the longest time I found walking even short distances insufferably slow and boring. I ride my bike--a lot. The distances and durations I cover have grown each year to the point that centuries (metric or imperial) are a regular weekend event. Boredom is always an issue when you're out for 5+ hours, but you'd be surprised at how much your sense of time can change if you normalize riding long distances. Interestingly, my mind's time-condensation for cycling never translated to walking.

This year I branched out into winter ultra fat biking, which, as it turns out, can involve a significant amount of walking. In bad snow conditions one can end up pushing a heavy bike for hours at a time. The two races I did this winter had their respective all time worst course conditions. So, I did a lot of walking.

This spring I've found myself opting walk to the gym and office, leaving the bike at home. My mind doesn't count the minutes the way it used to. I actually have no sense of how long it takes me to get to these places. I suspect the exaggerated stimulus of pushing a bike for hours through snow drifts has adapted my perception of everyday walking. I would hypothesize that the author's 20-mile weekend walks makes their long daily walks more doable. If you want to enjoy short regular walks, perhaps it would help to go out for a very long and hard walk from time to time.

I had not seen it yet, excited to read it! Thanks!

Two cents as an MD-(CS)PhD student studying what I've heard referred to as "the last mile problem."

My stack trace of investigation:

- The model is good, we just need to get the doctors to trust the model.

- The model is good, we need to figure out how to build an informed trust in the model (so as to avoid automation bias).

- The model is good, we need informed trust, but we can't tackle the trust issue without first figuring out a realistic deployment scenario.

- The model is good, we need informed trust, we need a realistic deployment scenario, but there are some infrastructural issues that make deployment incredibly difficult.

After painstaking work with real-life EHR system, sanity-check model inference against realistic deployment scenario.

- Holy crap, the model is bad and not at all suitable for deployment. 0.95 AUC, subject of a previous publication, and fails on really obvious cases.

My summary so far of "why?": assumptions going into model training are wildly out of sync with the assumptions of deployment. It's "Hidden Tech Debt in ML" [1] on steroids.

[1] https://papers.nips.cc/paper/2015/file/86df7dcfd896fcaf2674f...

HN discourages the sort of clever-yet-unsubstantial one-liner jokes that earn a lot of karma on Reddit. It reserves the space for thoughtful discussions. Getting rid of the memes simply doesn't fly in other online communities.

I'd also put money on the average age of HN commenter being higher than that of other internet communities.

I know of other rich and healthy online communities, but they are fairly niche.

> I come from Minneapolis, and before that I lived in Seattle and Boston — three of the bluest, most left-leaning cities in the United States. I was an urban woman and couldn’t imagine living anywhere other than a city. My husband concurred. Then our 28-year-old son died in late 2016.

> Suddenly the traffic and noise and confusion became too much. John and I took off on a year’s driving tour of gentler parts — both of us working from the road, a computer security consultant and a writer. We grew nearly silent in grief.

> We considered Asheville, N.C., and Santa Fe, N.M. But on a chilly, silver January day, we drove into the Ozarks of Northwest Arkansas. Though neither of us could put our finger on exactly why, this felt like our place. People back home were flummoxed: I heard them say a lot about white, rural Christians who reject outsiders and “cling to their guns.”

> But what city folk don’t know is how beautiful it is here, and by that I mean way more than you imagine. We’re surrounded by low mountains, bony shale bluffs, forest, shining lakes and mysterious twisting roads. The wide-open sky brings every bird formation and low-hanging planet into relief.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2018/09/14/i-was-yan...

There are a lot of different philosophical positions with regard to the mind-body problem, but very few attempts at a testable scientific theory about how consciousness works. Integrated Information Theory (IIT) is such an attempt.

Nature Opinion article: https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn.2016.44

Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory

Reminds me of:

https://xkcd.com/1338/

A while back I worked for a team that had wired up Jenkins to a speaker in the office. Each type of event would trigger a different Zelda sound effect. Victory music for successful deployments, game over music for breaking the build, etc. Notably, dev server exceptions were connected to sword clashing sounds.

It led to debugging situations like this:

"Okay, so that's two clanks when we click on this button, but if we do it on this other page it's only one clank. Hm."

Turns out, there are some bugs that are easier to detect this way. Looking at timestamps doesn't really give a "sense" of whether two events are in a tight causal link. With sound, you can immediately "hear" that two adverse events are occuring at identical intervals every time. What's great is that the sound information doesn't take up any additional attention. It just fades into the background if you don't need it. When there is a pattern, it stands out.

iirc, my med school class had an above-30 social group that dubbed themselves "The Council of Elders."

> 'I am just one of those people who was very fortunate, where things worked out, and where I could do not just do one thing I really enjoyed in life, but two'

I relate to all of the gratitude in the above quote. It seems almost gratuitous to be able to pursue more than one major career pathway. I feel lucky to have the opportunity and lucky to have realized that I didn't have to choose.

Alternatively, the best (worst?) of both worlds:

https://nintendo.fandom.com/wiki/ASCII_Keyboard_Controller

How would having a octagon gate be worse than a round gate for wavedashing?

For shield drops you take it a step further and notch the gate.

Octagon gate also provides good reference point for MSDI.

The Pro Controller is a fine controller and sees a decent amount of competitive use in the Smash scene.

The octagon gate on the GC controller is advantagous for Smash and other games that benefit from precise directional inputs... It's to the point where there are Pro Controller mods to add an octagon gate. The Pro Controller analog seems to wear out faster than that of the GC controller and it's a tricky replacement to perform (on an already expensive controller).

Yup. It is the best controller for Smash (which is why Nintendo keeps re-issuing it).

Ultimate and Melee scenes are still alive and well. And even the 64 scene will cannibalize the analog sticks from GC controllers to replace the N64 controller sticks.

100% agree. The 3rd party imitation controllers are not just not there yet. Best bet for now is to mod the GC controller with a Bluetooth adapter.

Bluetooth adapter mod kit:

https://hackaday.io/project/165060-bluecubemod-bluetooth-gam...

Made my own "SwitchBird" using an 8bitdo gbros adapter:

https://imgur.com/a/e3OwU3I

Gamecube controllers.

Three console generations later, Nintendo keeps re-releasing them.

I'm not sure why they don't lean in harder and embrace the design as the standard Nintendo controller. It is the most ergonomic and intuitive game controller I've ever used. The asymmetric layout and shape of the A, B, X, and Y buttons make it impossible to forget which is which. All the controller needs for a 2020 refresh is a ZL button, a true analog for the C-Stick, and a slightly larger D-Pad.

The electronics underneath are rock solid--a favorite for modders. Nothing has really changed except the cord length and the omission of metal braces in the triggers.

The more brainless the activity, the easier it is to do parallel flashcards. An elliptical or stationary bike session will be easier than an equal intensity run where you have to worry about your gait. Flashcards are little atomic chunks for you to process independent from one another. When you do flashcards the only thing you need to concern yourself with is the short prompt on that particular card in front of you. So even if you are working out pretty hard, you can still work your way through a deck, it's just going to be at a slower rate. This differs from reading a textbook or journal article, where you have to keep a certain amount of the previous passages in memory to understand the current line. You will hit a point where flashcards stop working but the ceiling is higher than with other types of learning activities. This will differ per exercise type, per intensity, and the subject you're learning.

Was just taking a break from my Anki session to check HN.

I'm a regular user, though I'm terrible at consistent, daily reviews. I somehow manage to keep on top of it, even after skipping weekends or entire weeks. You can tweak the settings to make it easier for less-than-perfect users.

Lifehack: Anki + exercise. Combining Anki with an elliptical or stationary bike improves both my review and exercise frequency and duration.

I've made my peace with the terrible UI/UX. Like many folks here I tried to roll my own SRS app at one point. But my review sessions would always get derailed with brainstorming new features or dealing with bugs. Personally, I'm not sure that the productivity gains from improving the UI/UX are worth the development time (especially when the whole point of using Anki is efficiency).

> As such, men don't face an ultimatum on this, the way that women do.

But at late 40's do these men feel like they have to choose between children and early retirement?

Furthermore, most men don't just wait around until their late 40's to find a young woman to reproduce with. Human relationships aren't this calculated. You don't get to plan when you end up meeting the right person. Life happens. There are plenty of men in their 30's in committed relationships with women in their 30's. Just because he can delay reproducing doesn't mean they can. Usually this is a decision that a couple makes together. And I haven't heard a man say that he had to choose between his career and having kids because his wife's biological clock was ticking.