> While an extensive scientific literature now exists on the use of online dating services, there are very few studies on user satisfaction with dating apps and with the resulting offline dates. This study aimed to assess the level of satisfaction with Tinder use (STU) and the level of satisfaction with Tinder offline dates (STOD) in a sample of adult users of the app. The study also aimed to examine, among 28 variables, those that are the most important in predicting STU and STOD. Overall, 1,387 Tinder users completed an online questionnaire. A machine learning model was used to rank order predictors from most to least important. On a 4-point scale, participants' mean STU score was 2.39, and, on a 5-point scale, mean STOD score was 3.05. The results indicate that satisfaction with dating apps and with resulting offline dates is strongly predicted by participants' age and by their motives for using Tinder (enhancement, emotional coping, socialization, finding “true love,” or casual sexual partners), whereas the variables negatively associated with satisfaction were those related to psychopathology. Interestingly, 65.3 percent of app users were married or “in a relationship,” and only 50.3 percent of app users were using it to meet someone offline. Generally, participants who engage with the app to cope with personal difficulties seem more likely to report higher levels of dissatisfaction, suggesting that dating apps are a poor coping mechanism and highlighting the need to address underlying problems or pathologies that may be driving their use.
> Well, the first truth about what people look for in romantic partners, like so many important truths about life, was expressed by a rock star before the scientists figured it out. As Adam Duritz of the Counting Crows told us in his 1993 masterpiece “Mr. Jones”: We are all looking for “something beautiful.” The conventional attractiveness of a mate is the number one predictor of how many messages someone gets, for both men and women. We are also looking for:
> someone tall (if a man),
someone of a desired race (even though most never admit it),
someone rich,
someone in an enforcement profession (like lawyer or firefighter) if a man,
someone with a sexy name (such as Jacob or Emma),
and someone just like ourselves (people are 11.3 percent more likely to match with someone who shares their initials)
(I should probably just write a blog post putting all of this together and post that here, my apologies for the wall of text to build up context for this; there are no simple explanations for complex topics)
If you are employed you are trading stability for upside.
When you work for yourself and specially if you work on products that are not capital intensive and have insane economies of scale (as in Software) the upside is gigantic.
I'm employed and I regret every minute of it. The only reason why I'm still employed is because I'm the sole provider for my family and haven't been able to take time off because I realized the mistake way way too late in life.
I was in grad school, 77-83. The first year was part time at NYU, and then I went back full time elsewhere, for a PhD.
In that one year at NYU, I took two compiler courses, from RBK Dewar, of Spitbol and Ada fame. My specialty is not languages or compilers, but those courses were incredibly fascinating, and the exposure to the topics I learned has been useful throughout my career.
- I learned about lexing and parsing. I no longer remember the details of LALR, for example. But I understand the basic ideas well enough to construct lexing/parsing software whenever I need it, often using parser generator tools, but also rolling my own on occasion.
- I learned about code optimization, which is a fascinating topic. At the time, Dewar was working on SETL, a set-oriented language. And I remember the power of having sets as a builtin type, and how powerful that was for expressing flow analysis, for example. Those ideas combined nicely with what I later learned about relational algebra, and query optimization. (Codd's paper on the relational model was only seven years old when I started grad school!)
- Exposure to the ideas of interpreters and code generators, and even more fundamentally, the idea of code as a thing that can be manipulated programatically, has been useful throughout my career.
* https://overthewire.org Similar to HTS, but you don't need an account. The subject matter covered is also slightly different.
* https://0x00sec.org/ A forum dedicated to security. There's a lot of script kiddies, but also some gold.
* https://www.hackerone.com/ What better way to learn then practice on live targets? That being said, I would do some of the others first.
...
I do a lot of learning through reading, so books:
* Network Security Assessment by Chris McNab. I have second edition, which is a good and instructive read, but quite outdated.
* Real-World Bug Hunting by Peter Yaworski. Web security 101. Good read, and fairly useful.
* Advanced Penetration Testing by Wil Allsop. Outdated, but interesting. You will never use flash again after reading this.
* Social Engineering, The Science of Human Hacking by Christopher Hadnagy. This is a very interesting read. Also, one of the few that can't go out of date.
...
This should be enough to get you started. There's a couple more books I can think of, but they tend to be more specialized into certain fields of security and less approachable/generally applicable. If you want these recommendations as well, feel free to email me, my email's in my bio.
> "there will probably be incredible opportunity down the road to combat this,"
I am curious to hear more about what you mean by this.
I crave living in a high trust society. I've attempted to act as though I do (though not with complete success), but reality often rebuffs me. I am discouraged by the high (and seemingly increasing) "capacity to benefit from dishonesty," especially as I feel powerless to meaningfully affect this trend/condition.
It sounds like you see ways in which society can shift to be higher trust. Can you elaborate?
"They’ve been shown to be anti-androgenic—in other words, they decrease testosterone. In studies with rats, it’s been shown that if you dose the pregnant mother, the offspring have defects of the male reproductive tract. There have also been studies in humans that have found anti-androgenic effects on development of the male reproductive tract."
"There was also a dose–response relationship between MBzP (the primary hydrolytic metabolite of BBzP) and below WHO reference value sperm concentration. In a recent follow-up study including these 168 men, plus an additional 295 men newly recruited into the study, Hauser et al. (2006) confirmed the associations between MBP and increased odds of below-reference sperm concentration and motility. "
He's been on HN under a large number of accounts, in particular giving people advice on obtaining alternate identification papers (Romania was mentioned in particular).
Unfortunately, that is stochastic and will not be reproducible or result in yields anywhere close to acceptable to industry. There are methods to grow materials of the same class(TMDC) with CVD and the like, but apparently they don’t reach the quality of flakes that the tape method results in.
Veteran doc and health services executive here. Three recommendations to improve your overall healthcare experience as a patient.
Number one recommendation: spend $$$ on a concierge primary care doc. Depending on your market can be anywhere from $1,500 to $15,000 per year. Why? Concierge doc will help you triage your problems, give you great access, keep you out of the hospital/ER, and help you cut through red tape if you need to engage the system.
Number two recommendation: seek care in facilities in high-income communities with relatively small general hospitals (i.e. Greenwich Hospital in CT) UNLESS you need tertiary/quarternary care. Why? Much better staffing. Much less riff-raff common people stuff (i.e. like homelessness) and much higher patient expectations about quality of care.
Number three recommendation: pay up for/seek out a cadillac insurance plan from a high quality insurer like Aetna or United with a low deductible (not high) and low copays. Why? Makes the patient experience much better on the back end with much less paperwork if you do engage the system.
Yes, I understand that I'm saying "be rich", but if you can afford any of the three recommendations above your healthcare experience will be MUCH better.
> Maybe I'll visit a makerspace? Ah, but every one in my area appears to have gone defunct since Covid year zero.
Yes. I miss TechShop, where I did CNC machining. It's not all that difficult. Maybe 100-200 hours to minimal competence.
What's left of the maker movement seems to have been taken over by little old ladies into crafting. Gluing construction paper and macrame, not machining and welding. Activities classes for middle schoolers where they assemble kits, not original work. In the early days of TechShop, it was people making rocket engine nozzles for the X-Prize, and people who commuted to Shenzhen to get their stuff made in volume. Four Bridgeport mills, all going at once.
I am not off-grid, but many of my neighbors and close friends are and I can speak intimately about their experience.
For one, many of the examples in the comments below are really quite extreme! By homesteading folks seem to be implying that you're looking to live in the middle of literal nowhere, alone and surviving off your wits and the grace of god. You can do the homesteading thing in lots of different contexts.
The town I live in is ~1k people on the west coast US, about 2 hours away from a major city and about 10 miles from a small 12k pop city. We've got a nice grocery store about 5 minutes away from where we live, and a few restaurants here and there. It's a very rural farming town, but there are a lot of young people around that live interesting lives. Musicians, artists, etc. Nobody makes a lot of money, but its not a community of dire poverty by any stretch. People just get by with very little, and are conscious of that in a deliberate sort of way.
My next door neighbor (a family of three) catches water via a collection tank that they then filter into a cabin, and during dry spells order extra in. Generally speaking, its more than enough to do dishes, wash laundry, drink and whatever else you might need to do. Electricity-wise they live 95% percent of the time off of three fairly small battery packs that run low-power LED lights that feel as cosy as you could imagine for a small cabin. They have more than enough lighting than they could need. Obviously, no TV or anything like that, but they don't want that. When one of the batteries gets low, they charge it up at work. They live pretty normal lives all said, and you would never guess that they get by on next to nothing.
Another friend lives (mostly) off grid in a small house he built. Put solar in along with a huge battery bank and runs all kinds of appliances from TV to washing machine, to all kinds of power-tools and lights for their house and barn, etc. Water comes from a combination of catchment and a well that his neighbor generously offered to share with him in exchange for some excavator work. He runs a very successful landscaping / earthworks company and again, wouldn't guess for a moment that him and his partner are homesteading.
Yet another completely off-grid friend (with 2 kids, partner) lives in basically the most beautiful house you could imagine, like something straight out of a magazine. He's been working on it (and reworking it) for about 15 years. You walk inside and there's a fancy kitchen, beautiful bathrooms (with composting toilets), three floors, four bedrooms all fully wired, etc, etc. Whole thing is powered by a solar kit purchased from Backwoods Solar for about 15k. He told them what he wanted and they designed it up and shipped it to him for him to assemble, which he did with no specialized knowledge. It was all pretty effortless. He catches water, filters it. Has got a garden with all kinds of fruit trees, a greenhouse, chickens, rabbits for fertilizer. All the basics are covered without too much work required. He owns a happening restaurant in town, kids go to a nice private school, and so on. Again, would never guess they were "homesteaders".
The above examples aren't to say that this kind of living is easy. Each of these friends have serious building skills and were fortunate and wise with their time / money. And in each case they bought bare land (5 to 15 acres) and built things from scratch. So its like, you've got to go into it prepared. But assuming all of the requisites are met, or you're the type of person who is prepared to learn what's necessary, being a homesteader does not mean that you _have_ to live this crazy rugged life. None of the people I listed above do. They put in a lot of upfront work to set their lives up by their design using the skills they had. And now just about every cent that comes into their bank account goes right into savings or other projects / hobbies / businesses that they want to work on. It's remarkable, and I reflect on this every month when I pay my mortgage bill.
If you like such systems, backend systems in investment banks is where its at. Most of my experience was at Goldman, but similar systems exist in Morgan, Deutsche, Citi, UBS, Bloomberg or old PE firms. Look for C programmer careers in trade publications like efinancialcareers.com, or work with Huxley, Selby Jennings etc. Combination of C/C++ and certification in Q/kdb - will keep you employed pretty much into your 60s. Those languages are intrinsically hard & imo a real pleasure to code in. Well, I liked it.
Oof - that article brings back a lot of memories of Slashdot and being a geek back in the day.
This is possibly one of the most infamous of all Slashdot threads - it was a collection of emails detailing how it was to be an outsider in the days after Columbine.
Love the intro and overview — looking forward to more!
These weren't mentioned in the post but have been very helpful in my journey as a C beginner so far:
- Effective C by Robert C. Seacord. It covers a lot of the footguns and gotchas without assuming too much systems or comp-sci background knowledge. https://nostarch.com/Effective_C (Also, how can you not buy a book on C with Cthulhu on the cover written by a guy with _three_ “C”s in his name?)
- Computer Systems, A Programmer's Perspective by Randal E. Bryant and David R. O'Hallaron for a deeper dive into memory, caches, networking, concurrency and more using C, with plenty of practice problems: https://csapp.cs.cmu.edu/
If you have the slightest interest in the history of operating systems, I strongly recommend reading Joe Armstrong's thesis. While it is mostly about Erlang, he also goes into detail about many of the experimental systems of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, which gave him his ideas:
What is a fault-tolerant system and how can we program it? This question is central to this thesis and to our understanding of how to build fault-tolerant systems. In this chapter we define what we mean by “fault-tolerance” and present a specific method for programing fault-tolerant systems. We start with a couple of quotations:
We say a system is fault-tolerant if its programs can be properly executed despite the occurrence of logic faults. — [16]
...
To design and build a fault-tolerant system, you must under- stand how the system should work, how it might fail, and what kinds of errors can occur. Error detection is an essential com- ponent of fault tolerance. That is, if you know an error has occurred, you might be able to tolerate it by replacing the ocending component, using an alternative means of compu- tation, or raising an exception. However, you want to avoid adding unnecessary complexity to enable fault tolerance be- cause that complexity could result in a less reliable system. — Dugan quoted in Voas [67].
The presentation here follows Dugan’s advice, I explain exactly what happens when an abnormal condition is detected and how we can make a sodware structure which detects and corrects errors.
The remainder of this chapter describes:
• A strategy for programming fault-tolerance — the strategy is to fail immediately if you cannot correct an error and then try to do some- thing that is simpler to achieve.
• Supervision hierarchies — these are hierarchical organisations of tasks.
• Well-behaved functions — are functions which are supposed to work correctly. The generation of an exception in a well-behaved function is interpreted as a failure.
Off grid is getting so much closer to plug and play, and I think it will dovetail with RV-EVs and (highway) self-driving.
Your RV will be likely a PHEV with a big honking battery and some compact generator (those inside-out rotaries look promising, or a fuel cell, even though I'm a major hydrogen skeptic).
It'll have solar on the RV roof, plus a fold-out solar array when parked (doubles as a canopy) that will provide ample power for an off-grid level of lifestyle. The EV battery doubles as a battery backup for the solar, and the PHEV hybrid range extender doubles as a backup generator.
You could even do some sort of fifth wheel + enhanced battery. Big problem with towing in an EV pickup is the range, but that's because we don't typically think about the possibility of the trailer RV having a big battery, and that can be linked to the Pickup truck's battery for enhanced all-electric range.
Communication? Starlink. In the area in the article, you don't even have trees that would intermittently block the satellite tracking.
For longer term offgrid, water collection and sanitation are the big challenges, well, and emergency services.
It's a shame the industry didn't go all-in on PHEVs when hybrids appeared ... TWENTY FIVE YEARS AGO. Five years after the Insight/Prius there should have been a plug in hybrid in every consumer segment, with subsidies to make them cheaper than pure ICE drivetrains. We would have likely electrified 60-90% of daily drive trips.
I still think an aggressive PHEV policy should complement policies for EV adoption, but I doubt automakers will invest in new hybrid drivetrains, given the choice of the massive engineering switch to EV drivetrain and a new hybrid drivetrain, most will just go EV and limp along with whatever legacy ICE drivetrains they have in the meantime.
Especially CEOs get fired if they don't adopt EV drivetrains. Hell they get fired if they don't switch over fast enough (see: VW).
MIT's openness is a huge wedge issue in the Harvard-MIT culture wars. That sounds like stupid elitist junk, but makes since historically. MIT wasn't always... "MIT". Not too long ago, it was just another college. Its open culture combined with proximity to austere academic/government/private institutions is one of the two reasons that it grew to be the behemoth is it now. The literal openness to the public has long been a huge source of "soft power" for MIT.
(The other reason for MIT's rise being WW2 and the military-industrial-academic complex ofc)
Even with this topic set aside, MIT has been turning into just another Harvard, which is a real shame. MIT alum used to be very proud of the fact that any and all were welcome to participate in many aspects of campus life.
It beats every kind of "system" and "rational" framework.
Think of the people you love. Think of how your project will help them
in some small way, even if that is just making you a happier,
wealthier person who can give more to them.
Think of the people you dislike, whose values you detest, who will
gain and triumph in some way by your failure.
Picture a fantasy vision of a better world, where your contribution,
however small, brings value to many.
If none of that stirs anything in you, and gives you a burst of energy
to redouble your efforts, then two unfortunate things may be the case:
You may be incapable of emotion. About 5% of us are, in which case
ignore all of the above and find a system. Stop looking for ways to
"motivate yourself" because "motive" is connected to "emotion" (same
root).
What you're doing may not be at all worthwhile. That isn't a reason to
give up. The road to a project that's genuinely fulfilling and is
"emotionally self-powered" passes through many mediocre and failed
"learning" projects along the way. Completing it many be all you need
to do to move on.
I'm a diesel mechanic by trade. for anyone curious to disable your cars data collection the OnStar systems easiest.
under your passenger dash is a black metal box, usually documented. unplugging the harness and removing it, you can open it to expose a baseboard and a riser. the baseboard is for things like infotainment usually but the riser is your cellular modem. pull it and you'll get a warning light on the dash, but no more data collection. older cars will have a Sim in the riser you can pull if thats less invasive to you.
note: OnStar is also disabled and will not dial 911/999 on collision.
Check out Get Your Shit Together [0]. It was started by a woman who lost her husband in an accident, suddenly becoming a widow and single mom to two young children.
She has abridged [1] and long checklists [2] that everyone should complete. Most of us probably don't even think about these things:
https://www.mcmaster.com/ is fast. I've never been to Georgia, I don't live in the US, I don't even need hardware. But I still enjoy just clicking on random links and seeing a swift response.
Here's a query for a rough reproduction of what's asked in the title:
WITH whoishiring_threads AS (
SELECT id FROM `bigquery-public-data.hacker_news.full`
WHERE `by` = "whoishiring"
AND REGEXP_CONTAINS(title, "Ask HN: Who is hiring?")
)
SELECT FORMAT_TIMESTAMP("%Y-%m", `timestamp`) as year_month,
COUNT(*) as num_toplevel_posts
FROM `bigquery-public-data.hacker_news.full`
WHERE parent IN (SELECT id FROM whoishiring_threads)
GROUP BY 1
ORDER BY 1
One of the best things about Eigen is that it is the only linear algebra package that I know of that easily supports using the same code for low, high, and arbitrary precision floating point numbers. I had some linear system of equations that I need to solve in grad school where the condition number was small enough that double precision was not sufficient to solve the problem. I was able to very easily use double double, quad double [1], and arbitrary precision floating [2] point number implementations to solve these problems. The matrices I used were not especially large, but I couldn't find any other existing packages that fit this use case.
As others have pointed out, FamilySearch will be indexing the records and making them available for free. It's a massive effort involving hundreds of thousands of volunteers plus a large investment in technology and other resources:
By comparison, Ancestry (now owned by Blackstone Inc.) will charge money to access these public records ... and this comes on heels of jacking up subscription prices across the board, up to 25% (https://www.ancestry.com/corporate/blog/were-increasing-our-...)
MyHeritage is also indexing 1950 records, but these will be paywalled like Ancestry.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/02/02/key-findi... ("Pew Research: Key findings about online dating in the U.S.")
https://www.marketplace.org/2023/09/07/singles-speed-dating-... ("APM Marketplace: Some singles are done with dating apps")
https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/cyber.2022.0367?j... ("Finding Intimacy Online: A Machine Learning Analysis of Predictors of Success")
> While an extensive scientific literature now exists on the use of online dating services, there are very few studies on user satisfaction with dating apps and with the resulting offline dates. This study aimed to assess the level of satisfaction with Tinder use (STU) and the level of satisfaction with Tinder offline dates (STOD) in a sample of adult users of the app. The study also aimed to examine, among 28 variables, those that are the most important in predicting STU and STOD. Overall, 1,387 Tinder users completed an online questionnaire. A machine learning model was used to rank order predictors from most to least important. On a 4-point scale, participants' mean STU score was 2.39, and, on a 5-point scale, mean STOD score was 3.05. The results indicate that satisfaction with dating apps and with resulting offline dates is strongly predicted by participants' age and by their motives for using Tinder (enhancement, emotional coping, socialization, finding “true love,” or casual sexual partners), whereas the variables negatively associated with satisfaction were those related to psychopathology. Interestingly, 65.3 percent of app users were married or “in a relationship,” and only 50.3 percent of app users were using it to meet someone offline. Generally, participants who engage with the app to cope with personal difficulties seem more likely to report higher levels of dissatisfaction, suggesting that dating apps are a poor coping mechanism and highlighting the need to address underlying problems or pathologies that may be driving their use.
https://www.wired.com/story/data-marriage-behavior-love-psyc... | https://archive.today/4nHbU ("Wired: People Are Dating All Wrong, According to Data Science")
> Well, the first truth about what people look for in romantic partners, like so many important truths about life, was expressed by a rock star before the scientists figured it out. As Adam Duritz of the Counting Crows told us in his 1993 masterpiece “Mr. Jones”: We are all looking for “something beautiful.” The conventional attractiveness of a mate is the number one predictor of how many messages someone gets, for both men and women. We are also looking for:
> someone tall (if a man), someone of a desired race (even though most never admit it), someone rich, someone in an enforcement profession (like lawyer or firefighter) if a man, someone with a sexy name (such as Jacob or Emma), and someone just like ourselves (people are 11.3 percent more likely to match with someone who shares their initials)
Additional citations wrt dating market place dynamics: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29581620 (Dec 16, 2021) | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12710536 (Oct 14, 2016)
(I should probably just write a blog post putting all of this together and post that here, my apologies for the wall of text to build up context for this; there are no simple explanations for complex topics)