After using TypeScript for the past couple of years, I've come to see it as simply another "embrace and extend" maneuver by Microsoft carve off a chunk of JavaScript mindshare, preying upon the naïveté of less-experienced developers who've fallen for the "static typing is safer" myth. TypeScript's decision to disallow JSDoc within .ts files [1] for example doesn't contribute anything positive to my impression of this syntactic pocket-protector. While the type hinting it provides is useful, the tradeoffs of added complexity, tool dependencies, and cross-compiling phase have made it more trouble than its worth in my opinion, particularly since tooling to provide code introspection and type hinting has already existed for a long time [2]. For new projects, I've begun using straight JSDoc, which is working beautifully with minimal setup [3] and provides all of the benefits I ever found useful about TypeScript, while remaining completely unobtrusive otherwise[4].
It matters a bunch. All kinds of noise can get picked up over cables and bleed into your audio path on a digital rig. It happens all the time just with power cables which is why every musician carries a handful of "ground lifts" even though they're technically illegal in a lot of places. That said, MIDI over USB is kind of necessary in this day and age. Hopefully instrument manufacturers will be rigorous about isolating any interference it could pick up.
From experience, and supported by the Sqlite docs, I can tell you that trying to run sqlite on files on an NFS mounted filesystem will not work. See section 2.1 of this document [1] and the related discussion HN discussion [2]
That's basically, well, not true. When trees break down they contribute to soil organic matter. Approx 58% of SOM is carbon (SOC) making soil one of the largest carbon sinks on the planet. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soil_organic_matter
Lack of soil accumulation does not mean the soil evaporates into thin air; it is taken up by the watershed and redistributed downstream. The same carbon cycle is in effect; accumulation in any particular terrain has really nothing to do with it.
Literally survivor bias. The old growth forests that survived loggers were the ones they couldn’t get to for a profit. Those will be in or near geographic barriers like swamps or rocky terrain.
I've rarely hiked in harvested and replanted forests; these are boring. I did most of my hiking in central/northern BC and Alberta, Canada. These are some of the largest tracts of old-growth timber in the world.
The many old-growth forests I've hiked (sample: >1,000km, mostly dominated by conifers), with last burn times ranging from decades to centuries, have rarely boasted deep soil levels. This hypothesis is supported by existing research: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/225314103_Soil_Carb...
Old-growth coniferous forests are great -- but they're not a big "carbon store".
If you want land-use based carbon storage, I'd recommend investigating where the continent-wide, massive, deep, healthy carbon-rich store of topsoil and humous came from -- grazed grasslands and scrub brush.
Oh, North Canada? That's some tricky terrain. Bedrock is very near the surface, and you're right, it's hard to build up. Short growing season, for one.
The article you link mentions softwood forests being problematic for carbon accumulation. Not hardwood forests. Old growth temperate hardwood forests are quite rare now, and some of the apex tree species in those forests have very serious pathogens keeping them from re-establishing, more's the pity.
Does soil continue to break down over time or does it permanently sequester into peat/coal/oil? As far as I knew, basically all of the tree's cellulose eventually gets released over time into CO_2 via biological activity.
There is an upper limit to the amount of CO2 that soil absorbs - it's clearly not infinite. There is an equilibrium in the Earth's natural Carbon cycle.
Once a soil matures (a process that might take many decades), the amount of CO2 retained vs emitted reaches equilibrium.
Some thoughts on finite CO2-absorbing capacity:
- If these forests are sustainably logged, we can take some of the carbon out and sequester it in buildings (or even just bury it), allowing the forest to regrow and absorb more carbon.
- I have a theory that presently discussed global climate change solution only needs to buy us a maximum of 100 years, and by then our tech for dealing with silly problems like excess carbon will have almost surely advanced beyond recognition. Given rates of progress in chemistry, physics, and materials science over the last two centuries, this isn't crazy.
All I can say is he must be a really good programmer if he needed to deliberately install logic bombs to make his software malfunction after a period of time. I've got my hands full just making things work properly in the first place!
Still, I think the point remains having the time to even do this is astounding.. can't even keep up getting all my code to work properly in the first place as a mostly single developer!
Maybe that's where he purposely introduces the bug, he keeps the broken version and times the working version. But yeah I agree with you, it's interesting altogether. I didn't mean to sound dismissive / against your viewpoint, just adding on possibilities.
No doubt pollution will make you sick, but I'm inclined to think that depression has a lot to do with just living in an over-crowded, unattractive, big industrial city environment, having little contact with the natural world.
Why imagine what is true when you can take a second and find out what is true? The truth is external to you, look for it.
I don't want to be a jerk, but you have generated a hypothesis(great), why not test it against the facts available to you? Maybe you owe it to yourself.
Let me know if you have better data. (I am aware that Indian Reservation tilt the scales big time toward rural areas, but do not think that removing them as outliers changes the balance)
That seems like it's likely mostly just conflated with one of the well known causes of suicide, financial instability and generally being poor. The better data would be studies that try to compare similar socioeconomic classes, age ranges, etc.
I wish it took only a second to find out what is true, but data is complicated and has lots of confounding variables, and it's too easy to not account for them and get totally untrue information out of the data.
Why insist on causality depending on a single variable? This is very strange to me. Of course the trust is confounded, the truth is multi-variable.
The algorithm to pursue truth:
1. Find out how you personally differ from happy and healthy people.
2. Reduce those differences however you can.
3. Watch yourself become happier and healthier.
4. That's the whole thing.
Does being poor suck? Yes. Reduce it's likelihood and it's impact.
Don't demand that information conform to your assumption before you can take action. Take action and document your assumptions and challenge them along your journey to improvement.
A neural network does not make demands of its data set. It changes itself to better match the limited truth that it does see.
Uncertainty and doubt are your enemies. Challenge them with data don't reduce yourself to paralysis. Look up "Epistemic learned helplessness".
An example:
Will flossing improve my health? Be the kind of person that wants to improve their health and tries to improve their health. Try flossing as matter of character, not based on whether it does independent of the social class of other flossers. If successful people think that other successful people floss, then they will too. There is no isolation among the variables. Don't demand that of reality.
That's a fair and valid point. I should have expanded on the list of possible factors to include living in a "bad" environment in general, where "bad" can be defined by a huge number of things, including poverty, hopelessness, and a million other things to numerous to mention... other than the one single factor of "air pollution" that this article suggests is the reason for depression and suicide. That was, after all, the point of my comment, in case you missed it; that idea which the article seems to promote - that air pollution causes suicide - is highly questionable.
Our brains spent millions of years evolving in nature, makes sense that cramming into cities with unnatural lights and disrupting biological rhythm would make them go haywire
"Our bodies spent millions of years evolving in nature, makes sense that taking showers with unnatural temperatures and disrupting biological skin bacteria would make them go haywire"
"Our teeth spent millions of years evolving in nature, makes sense that scrubbing them with unnatural mint-flavored pastes and plastic bristles would make them go haywire"
"Our eyes spent millions of years evolving in nature, makes sense that covering them with unnatural lenses would make them go haywire"
I appreciate your pedantry - the scientific community understands the mechanical physiological body (skin, eyes, hair) on a cause-and-affect level, but hardly understands the mind and mood because mental health is such a subjective experience, it's nearly impossible to fit into modern a scientific paradigm
Mental health isn't a strictly subjective experience though. You can measure days called-in-sick. You can measure suicide count.
Cause and effect isn't necessary to reduce harm. You with me?
It's nice to have certainly, but it is not required.
Imagine that I am a friend of yours. I tell you that my child is depressed and the doctor suggests pill1, it makes my child more lethargic. We try pill2 and the depression is gone.
I tell you that I am happy with the results of pill2 and that while I am interested in how it works and potential long-term consequences, I'm happy staying on pill2.
Is this imagined parent strictly better than a parent that refuses to try any pill until convinced of its mechanism and success? I would say yes.
Observation is the workhorse of the scientific paradigm, not idealized experimentation. The quantity, and thus value, of Inductive evidence is greater than that of Deductive evidence.
I suppose I'm advocating for prevention instead of treatment and what the ideal conditions would be for good mental health so that treatment could be avoided in the first place.
C'mon. The comment you're replying to with "makes sense" is about city living vs rural. You weren't commenting that it's unknowable. You stated that "unnatural lights" and "disrupting biological rhythm" (whatever that means) probably cause one's brain to go "haywire" (implication being: and commit suicide).
As if there aren't uncountable other variables that have changed dramatically over millions of years. Or hell, do you even know if suicide rates are higher today than they were millions of years ago? No. You came here to try to suggest city living was inferior to rural living, and used "millions of years of evolution", and some implication that modern rural life is somehow more similar to those millions of years than urban life.
"...makes sense that cramming into cities with unnatural lights and disrupting biological rhythm would make them go haywire"
Then what does this suggest? Why does "unnatural light" (ignoring that humans have built "unnatural light" fires for ~1.7 million years) make a brain go haywire, but not, say, clipping one's toenails? Or reading books, or sitting on chairs, or being blasted by radio waves, or running on treadmills, or traveling over 15mph, or wearing clothes, or flying in airplanes, etc. What are you saying?
As far as I know, rural and suburban dwellers do have lightbulbs, computers, televisions, cell phones, and this time of year, brightly lit christmas trees. Is your position that there are more light bulbs in cities than the countryside? Do you have any evidence that that's meaningful? Seems like a bit of a stretch to me, that the external lights—easily blocked by window curtains—have any meaningful impact on health beyond the artificial light sources we all deliberately use.
I made no implication that contemporary rural life is superior or in any way comparable to historical rural life.
Edit: I guess I'm being pedantic at this point. My personal position is industrial agriculture is failing rapidly and that the modern world will reconcile with the fact that either we will all starve, or learn how to farm again. I spend half the year working on an organic farm, and my life is immeasurably better than when I'm in the city (which is of course, only my personal subjective datum which and I realize how much HN hates anecdote as evidence)
Don't confuse a US-centric view of medical technology development, western medical journals, US trials etc with something developed in Japan. This is Toshiba, working with the (Japanese) National Cancer Center Research Institute and you can be sure there's extensive research behind it, even if it's in Japanese.
"Planned for details of the technology will be announced at the "42nd Japan Annual Meeting of the Molecular Biology Society[5]" to be held in Fukuoka on December 3 to 8 days."[0][1]
Thanks. None of these are peer-reviewed articles or scientific conference presentations (although it will be great to see what comes out of the meeting).
The original poster was pointing out that this is, so far, vaporware because Toshiba has not presented any actual scientific results, unlike Grail, Guardiant and others. Everything seen on this so far is just marketing (all of the scientific literature links on Toshiba's website are to cancer epidemiology surveys, not articles about this technology). The parent poster has yet to back up their assertion that there is "extensive research" behind it. I've been unable to find any publications or patent applications on this, so I'm very interested if someone has links.
This would be way better in a format where I didn't have to click over and over. One page with the text going down, even.
Yours was a decent example. I've seen one for weather conditions on a golf course and people's inclination to play used to predict how busy you'd be based on the weather that was really good.
They're slides intended for a live presentation. You can use space bar or arrow keys to flip through as well. We've found this format to work well for our 2000+ member meetup group, but I might follow your suggestion to write it out long-form sometime. The more technical documentation is at: https://github.com/73rhodes/dclassify
1. https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/issues/20774
2. https://ternjs.net/
3. https://medium.com/@trukrs/type-safe-javascript-with-jsdoc-7...
4. https://fettblog.eu/typescript-jsdoc-superpowers/