pacbard

8 ms·

1.
by pacbard 2mo ago
Usually, a crushed soda can is good enough to prevent the kickstand to sync in the pavement. You can usually find a can in a random parking lot. That, or find a strip of concrete. That's why sometimes motorcycle park on the sidewalk in
2.
by pacbard 3mo ago
My first reaction is that it depends on who you read. The linked article talks about Wilhelm von Humboldt's philosophy of education. While I haven't read much into 19th-century German literature, the article seems to suggest that
3.
by pacbard 3mo ago
This fits a need I had when working with DuckDB: running statistical analyses directly within the database without having to spin up external tools (like R/Stata/Python). I really appreciate the API for calling stats functions and
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by pacbard 3mo ago
The figure-8 central design makes this roundabout not a real roundabout. The challenge is that the entry and exit points are at the tightest part of the curve, making ingress and egress kind of weird. It looks like they did it because of sp
5.
by pacbard 5mo ago
It seems to be a textbook example of the Simpson's paradox.
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by pacbard 6mo ago
This seems to be a problem with the Stata code. Disappointing but not really surprising. Stata isn't an easy language to debug and problems like this happen a lot. I wonder how much coding was done by the original author versus being c
7.
by pacbard 6mo ago
Regarding public comments, I don't believe a good politician will make a snap decision at the dais following public comments. Most of them will have received the meeting agenda in advance and formed an opinion about how they are going
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by pacbard 8mo ago
The ironic part about these hallucinations is that a research paper includes a literature review because the goal of the research is to be in dialogue with prior work, to show a gap in the existing literature, and to further the knowledge t
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by pacbard 10mo ago
When you think about a data science pipeline, you really have three separate steps: [Data Preparation] --> [Data Analysis] --> [Result Preparation] Neither Python or R does a good job at all of these. The original article seems to foc
10.
by pacbard 11mo ago
I set up something similar at work. But it was before the DuckLake format was available, so it just uses manually generated Parquet files saved to a bucket and a light DuckDB catalog that uses views to expose the parquet files. This lets us
11.
by pacbard 11mo ago
Because applying for a visa takes money, time, and a visit to the embassy. ESTA/ETIAS gets automatically approved within a few minutes of paying for the fee (I guess this is true for 99.999% of applicants). Very few countries allow peo
12.
by pacbard 11mo ago
The hunter-gatherers in the study lived in the "Late Holocene (~4000 to 250 BP)", meaning between 2000 BCE to 1825 CE. These people are separated from us by less than 150 generations. I don't believe that humans evolve that f
13.
by pacbard 1y ago
Without knowing what happened, it's difficult to make the comparison between the Italian Years of Lead and what happened earlier today at Utah Valley University. My understanding of the Italian political climate of the 60s, 70s, and 80
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by pacbard 1y ago
This was my take as well. At least microeconomics has moved away from large-scale observational studies and has moved into experimental and quasi-experimental studies. While the methods alone cannot fix it all ("You can’t fix by analys
15.
by pacbard 1y ago
Not all null results are created equal. There are interesting null results that get published and are well known. For example, Card & Kruger (1994) was a null result paper showing that increasing the minimum wage has a null effect on em
16.
by pacbard 1y ago
Even if Career Technical Education (CTE) classes are offered, there is a large variation in their quality. For me, the question would be whether a graduate from a CTE program is more likely to be hired and receives higher wages (initially)
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by pacbard 1y ago
The most likely explanation for this phenomenon is that there isn't a change in the population average for variable X, but that the decrease in college students' average X is due to an increase in population college going rates. L
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by pacbard 1y ago
Apache Iceberg builds an additional layer on top of Parquet files that let's you do ACID transactions, rollbacks, and schema evolution. A Parquet file is a static file that has the whole data associated with a table. You can't ins
19.
by pacbard 2y ago
What's interesting to me is that these budget cuts are coming at a time when the VA is also trying to implement a new Electronic Health Record (EHR) system (Oracle CERNER) which is having substantial issues with rollouts (see the Googl
20.
by pacbard 2y ago
I'll take the bait. It seems to me that going from "F1 and F2 generations of mice respond differently to the smell of acetophenone if their parents were exposed to it" to "well, human trauma is inherited and there isn&#x
21.
by pacbard 2y ago
You could assign ELO at the group level. It will increase the number of possible groups by C(N, g) where N is the number of players and g is the group size. It could work if the groups are stable enough. If you have individual ELOs, you cou
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by pacbard 2y ago
My guess is that they had prior experience with asking students not to use cellphones and they observed students start using wearables to skirt the ban, which led them to just ban all of them. An interesting consequence about the wearable b
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by pacbard 2y ago
Local mapping is surprisingly difficult. I believe that the commercial products (i.e., Google Maps) are viable only because there are strong incentives for people (e.g., business owners, property owners) to submit edits as they are the main
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by pacbard 2y ago
If you want to take this a step further, quantitative methods are about efficient data reduction. As part of this data reduction, the model’s assumptions and mathematical form take center stage in describing how you got to your “number”. Th
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by pacbard 2y ago
No, it's a coding error that lead to a wacky subsample being used for their treatment variable. The blog post list this as the original Stata code: > replace event`i’ = 1 if delta_mct`i’ != 0 | spouse_delta_mct`i’ != 0 and this as
26.
by pacbard 2y ago
I wonder how much the loyalty of the "good old days" was due to a smaller local labor market for skilled jobs. Let's say that you are a doctor and you live in a town of 20,000 people with one hospital. You are stuck being &qu
27.
by pacbard 2y ago
Agree 100% with the cost analysis. Let’s say you want to purchase a math tutoring platform. The cost is $30 per student per year. CA schools get about $5 per student per year in lottery funds to purchase instructional materials (shared acro
28.
by pacbard 2y ago
To your second point, I alway go back to this quote: "You can't fix by analysis what you bungled by design" (Light, Singer and Willett, 1990). If a paper is broken by design, there isn't much to do after the fact. It&#x2
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by pacbard 3y ago
> It always irks me that discussion of space debris invariably talks about their high velocity relative to the ground, which is completely meaningless. It's obviously an issue with point of view, but considering only relative veloci
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by pacbard 3y ago
Probably not. A pasta tube is the easiest shape to make by extrusion (and difficult to make by hand) and it was likely the first thing they tried after thinking of using extrusion to make pasta.

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