How does this pass as science?? There is no actual data on people. They simulated from a multivariate normal and then reported the frequency of observations where all three dimensions were one or more standard deviations above the mean. This has no bearing on the actual number of exceptional people, the results follow only from the assumed correlations and the assumption of normality (which is probably wrong).
It's interesting to compare with the result without covariance. The probability of > 2 sigma positive in 0.0228. The probability to get > 2 sigma in 3 variables is 0.0228^3=0.0000118=0.00118% or 118 per million. With the correlation they get 85, that is unsurprising.
Calculating the exact number looks like a nightmare. I'd try with Wolfram Alpha and hope it can integrate it numerically. Otherwise, I'd use the Montecarlo method, that is equivalent to their method, but they use "N = 20 million" that is pretty small, I think with a x1000 the calculation still takes less than a second and the error would be like 30 smaller.
I think there is hidden gold in the linked research paper. In the second to last paragraph, it says if you are willing to discard the trivial partition (each point on its own) from Richness, then you *can* have Scale-Invariance and Refinement-Consistency as well. To me this suggests an optimal (in some sense) class of algorithms, perhaps to be chosen from based on computational complexity, cross-validation, etc.
Yeah, sorry, Hacker News has successfully made my server chug a lot :)
I'm working on it right now and hopefully will be working better soon! In the meantime I've increased timeouts so loading will be longer but it should work better.
Should work a little better now! It's still chugging, but I made the rest of the article load (although now it's a bit janky when you have JS disabled, but not much I can do)
> Rational numbers are numbers that we can have in our hand while irrational numbers are ones which we can never have. It is important to have a setup that respects that difference.
Do you mean physically? Basic shapes like circles, squares and triangles allow us to hold irrational numbers in our hands as distances. Children playing with blocks can sense that root 2 does not conform nicely with other (rational) distances.
I did not mean physically. I meant, having it explicitly written out in a way that rational numbers can be. If I write 3/4 + 1/2, I can compute out 5/4 and that is infinitely accurate.
If I want to compute pi + e, an infinitely accurate version is pi + e. That's about it. So what we are actually looking for in this computation is an estimation algorithm, one which can be made as accurate as we wish, but finitely so. The natural way to express this is with rational intervals as rationals are precise and intervals give a containment of the numbers.
For arithmetic, we can have a mechanism for figuring out how precise the input approximations need to be in order to get a given precision for the final computation. The perspective presented here naturally leads to that as a matter of defining and establishing the arithmetic of oracles.
As for playing around with physical representations of irrational numbers, keep in mind that there is no way to prove that, say, something that looks like a unit square to us is really a perfect square down to infinite precision. And without that, we can easily have that the unit square is only very close to such a figure, but is actually a rational rectangle with a rational diagonal that very closely approximates the square root of 2.
This is irrelevant to your point, just change the numbers used as example, but we do not know whether pi+e is irrational! (Even though nobody believes it to be rational)
I think it just means taking the input as an integer and then separating out the “ones place”and “tens place” using integer division and modulo operator. E.g.,
ones = number % 10
tens = number // 10
do_print = (ones + tens) == 10
This study would be a lot more credible if they asked about cell phone use on follow up and then differenced everyone against their prior reporting, to determine if *changes* in cell phone use (and other control factors that might change over time) increased risk of hypertension. Still not perfect because of the long time lag to follow up, but much better. Either they didn’t know to do this or they did but then didn’t find the desired results… either way, not a good look.
I've seen much recent discussion on HN about robocalls not being resolved by the new STIR/SHAKEN protocol arising from the TRACED Act. I found this on https://regulations.gov and thought it would be of interest.
The big US providers have implemented the STIR/SHAKEN caller ID authentication framework as of mid-2021 but there was a 2-year extension to mid-2023 for small providers. The implementation appears to have been ineffective at stopping robocalls because of origination via the exempt small providers. The FCC has now passed a rule that a subset of small providers (those most likely to be originating illegal robocalls) must be in compliance by mid-2022.
TLDR - if this works there should finally be a dropoff in robocalls this summer.
