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mygo

Re:My students cheated... a lot on Friday June 03, 2022 @12:11PM (#31610301)
random sampling is an effective method for inferring the same information about the larger population that is being measured in the smaller sample, to a certain degree of confidence based on the sample size and known distribution of what is being measured. These concepts are fundamental to statistics.
> Isnt that just a url shortener with more steps?

URL shorteners came later, and solved the problem of people needing to deal with “more steps” in order to have short memorable urls. Achieving memorable urls in “less steps” is one of the major selling points of url shorteners.

However, url shorteners did not solve short memorable urls — DNS had already solved that. But, as you’ve pointed out, acquiring a domain and setting up DNS records takes more work than simply using a url shortener service.

Re:Georgia to mandate personal finance education on Friday April 29, 2022 @10:42PM (#31212893)
They should cover everything one needs to know to be a fully independent adult, such as:

- personal and family finance

- woodworking (cabinetry, furniture, carpentry)

- nutrition and food preparation

For the course title, they should name it “personal economics”, or perhaps “home economics”

DNS solved vanity memorable URLs, and continues to do so if someone is not looking for a .com

URL shorteners offering vanity urls solved people not needing to deal with the hassle of purchasing a vanity domain via a registrar, setting up DNS records, and waiting for propagation.

your local news. Like local elections, the stories covered by local journalists are more likely to make an impact in your daily life. And they’d certainly value (and even need) your support more than the NYT would.
Re:Facebook Stole Our Name and Livelihood on Monday November 01, 2021 @10:07PM (#29076021)
> Regardless of what they are working on, if it doesn't exist, the value of it is presently zero.

That’s not true. Do you know how many multi-million-dollar companies have nothing more than an idea on a paper napkin that they managed to sell to investors? You didn’t even bring up the matter of whether they have investors who have placed a valuation on their business. Or even if they have paid into their own business’ equity, which is then of monetary value.

In fact a business’ monetary valuation has nothing to do with whether it has a product. Some high-value businesses have zero products. If we’re speaking valuation, what matters is the value of the assets they have listed under the business, their liabilities, their owner’s equity, etc.

Re:TikTok overtakes Facebook as most downloaded app on Thursday August 12, 2021 @05:45PM (#28161938)
I'd love to hear your long list of reasons why. This is coming from someone who has heard of Tik Tok but has never used it. I'm a late adopter to social platforms, joining Twitter in 2014 and not really using it until last year.
> Imagine if someone could white out a section of a book and apply the changes instantaneously to every printed copy of that book in existence.

Considering a fifteen year old YouTube video can resurface and the millions of votes can change the vote-ratio, digital media isn't necessarily the same as a permanent historical record.

Re:Ask HN: Cheapest/easiest way to host a static site? on Friday March 26, 2021 @11:06PM (#26599557)
Re: Github Pages

- I've got several sites on gh-pages with custom domains and pay exactly $0

- I don't use Jekyll, I literally just `git push` a static repo

let me know how it turns out! Do you have a link to your fork?
agreed. on it =)
yep the upper fence for the vertical scale is derived from the vote totals statistics. If the set of vote totals is now in votes per square mile, then there would likely be a different upper fence. Might be worth the number crunching to figure out what that number is.

BTW just to double-check, I'm assuming that in this given fillOpacity formula, that a fillOpacity > 1 just resolves to 1. So like fillOpacity : min(votesPerSquareMile/upperFence, 1).

Since electoral college votes are dispersed at a state level, it doesn't matter if those blue votes come from blue counties, so long as they go from a blue state to a red state.

Unless you're talking about the displacement that would be required for every county to be colored blue?

It’s kind of like the exposure on a photograph where there are some extremely bright spots, as bright as the sun. If you set the exposure to not clip those bright spots, you won’t be able to see the rest of the photo. Due to not being able to find a scale that faithfully reproduced the entire dynamic range (without visually equating population mountains to population plains), some clipping had to occur; a compromise. We could clip the few outliers using a standard statistical convention and retain the highs, mids, and lows that make up the rest of the image, or keep the statistical outliers and end up clipping pretty much everything else as a result. I included both renditions.

You’re correct that I didn’t say the overexposed graph is misleading. Neither graph is wrong, they both tell truths.

An article could probably be written about the one you’re inquiring about, that discusses how Los Angeles County, Cook County, and ~eight other counties are unlike any other county in the US in terms of population. Completely in a league of their own. As distant as they are, they may be more alike with each other than the counties surrounding them.

But there is also a lot of information to be gleaned from the photograph with the upper fence that leaves the non-outliers within gamut.

I kind of see where an_opabinia is coming from. Being able to tell which candidate won more counties could be accomplished via a 2x2 table.

But it would miss out on other information, which I think people are interested in exploring as well. The geospatial relationships are better presented in a map, and are preserved in a choropleth map in a way that hex maps and cartogram maps would distort.

I've got just the thing. An Ohio State economics student made this adaptation: https://tuttlepower.github.io/VotingMap/?fbclid=IwAR0McVXHOI...
something like votes per square mile may address this. Looks like there are some follow-up maps to be made =)
Thanks for the comment. Yep Alaska was a tough one. Although Alaska is separated by boroughs, their voting data is not. Researchers come up estimates for how each borough likely voted, but there can be different estimates depending on the methods used. Because of this, it felt more accurate to go with the concrete data that we had, even if it was not at the borough level. Although, I think there is merit to the argument that borough estimates should be used, even if they may not be accurate down to the last recorded vote.
Yeah, I'm on the same page. An idea for a follow-up map has been to do votes per thousand. I'm curious to find out what that resulting map would look like
thank you =)
Re:Ask HN: How many of you are employed, self-taught SWEs? on Monday August 31, 2020 @01:09PM (#24333538)
I am projected to break 6 figures in revenue by December as an independent consultant.

I was interested in web design as a kid. Built my first website when I was 11. Back then, there was no facebook or myspace — those wouldn’t be created until 2 years before I learned the basics of HTML and CSS. There really wasn’t a well-fleshed our career path in the web either — e-commerce hadn’t really blown up back then either. So I was just genuinely interested in the ability to publish for the web.

I learned by going to the library and borrowing books that teach you by you following along. But still, it was mostly just HTML and CSS, no JS or any real programming yet.

It wouldn’t be until college that I’d pick up programming. Not that I majored in CS or SWE or anything — I majored in Biological Science and Studio Art, wanting you become a medical illustrator.

Nobody that I was around ever told me that “hey, you should check out CS”. It was always presented as this complicated and difficult subject. Something that was for others, but not for me. Much harder than Biology =p (they were wrong, lol, Biology is harder IMO, but I am genuinely interested in the topic and continue to learn more about it too)

During college I got involved in organizations outside of the classroom, and this was right around the time when facebook was a few years old and social media was emerging as a tool that can be used to market a cause and actually raise funds. The first viral video campaign came out this year, for the Ora Brush. So I ended up making a website for one of our events, linking it with google payments etc, promoting it on facebook via a video shared among local groups, and it registered people, kind of like what eventbrite does now. We were able to raise a couple thousand dollars the first year, and ~$20K total by junior year. So that experience exposed me to some of the cool things I could do with my web skills and I focused more intensively on learning to program more.

That landed me my first software engineering internship my Junior year, where although I had no experience with the backend programming language that they used I was able to pick it up and ship a finished admin client by the end of the internship. I was offered a full-time position as a software engineer at the completion of the internship, although I did not have a CS / SWE degree. However, one thing that I discovered about myself during the internship was that working a desk job all day made me very depressed. Aside from QA sessions and design briefings with management I hardly interacted with people during my internship, due to the nature of the engineering job. And it felt like taking the job would be me sitting behind a desk in front of a computer all day for the rest of my life, not really interacting with many people... and for some reason that was very depressing and unsettling to me, personally. So instead of seeking employment I decided to go the freelance / consultant route, and try to build my own clientele.

It took ~4 years to actually get any real consulting traction though. Partly due to some false starts in startup land... So I’m not sure if I would recommend it. I think for many people, the happy ending would have been getting a full time offer before graduating college. And the advice there for someone in their early 20’s would just be to network, get involved in things, build a portfolio, and seek out internships. An internship is basically an extended interview with a potential full time job offer on the other end... But unfortunately my particulars made that somehow undesirable, and so I decided to go the hard way.

Today I consult with business owners and partner with design agencies, helping businesses in e-commerce bring their business requirements to life. Sometimes it’s just giving general advice on how to build stuff, what they should be considering during the design process, and the rest of the time it’s programming. It’s all remote. Although many people have given remote work a thumbs down during the pandemic, I’m happy with the flexibility.

Re:Lights and Shadows on Thursday July 02, 2020 @03:44PM (#23717197)
It seems as though it’s a developing trend in web design.

https://english.elpais.com/spanish_news/2020-06-17/an-analys...

Can you share the other presentation forms? I may have some examples for each found out in the wild.

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