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> M y cynical ass would not be surprised at all if oil/gas companies were lobbying against ASCT because idling cars are buying more fuel

This is a bizarre conspiracy theory that you just invented. Stop making up things to get angry about.


I didn't say I think it's happening, just that it wouldn't surprise me if it was.

The “next generation” gets trained by adjuncts and grad students. “Top scientists, engineers, and thinkers” are too busy with grant proposals to be bothered with teaching.

Sometimes. Other times you get the Feynman Lectures.

Reminder that the “Dunning-Kruger effect” is not real. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49160437

Please re-read the first sentence of my previous comment.

Are you really sure you read the discussion on this?

That reminds me of the old saying " who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?"


I mean I got into it because I loved it as a kid in the 80s and 90s. And I still loved it in college. Turning it into a job quickly crushed any love I had though.

Can we add “I think it sounds like AI writing” to the list of off topic tangential annoyances? Clicking into an HN thread and having the top comment being about em dashes or something is obnoxious.

> It's still bad when mega-corporations attack small guy.

No, actually, we decide things based on the law, not based on which side you like more.


No, the way we as a society react informs what laws should exist, not the other way around.

“political” has a meaning, and it’s not “everything”.

Words mean things.


Totally, but I didn't say political means everything I said everything is political, which means anything a human does to any extent, tacitly or otherwise, is embedded in a power structure.

99% of people put their iPhone in a case that covers up the color. This is not something anybody actually thinks.

Sometimes I tell my teenage daughter “stop inventing things to be mad about”. Good advice for HN commenters, too.


I don’t know, in both the USA and Vietnam I see a massively disproportionate amount of people with the orange iPhone 17 Pro. Personally I like the orange color, but based on how ubiquitous the color choice seems to be, is does look a lot like conspicuous consumption to me.

And even in a case now that they have those huge camera plateaus you can still definitely tell what color iPhone someone has.


Oh my god, I think you might be on to something. If you follow the evidence, it does in fact seem like people like color. Of course Apple would exploit this by offering colored phones!

Yeah I had a pink iPhone 13 for ages when my 15 pro got stolen.

Wow, bet they never thought of that. If only the researchers had thought to ask HN first.


Would you prefer that people accept claims uncritically? It’s a valid critique of the results.


If the commenter read the study and found that they did not, in fact, account for that then it would be valid to point it out here.

Otherwise, it's just a waste of our time.


By its fundamental design, an observational study cannot account for everything. That is the critique and it is a valid one.


That's true, and it's also one of those factoids that everybody already knows but certain people can't help themselves from bringing up every time it's even tenuously relevant.


It might be common sense if you work with statistics, but most people don’t, and the only way they would know these things is if someone says them.

Regardless, it was the top comment so people clearly think it was valuable enough to vote for.


The fact that it was the top comment only shows that people agreed or liked it, not that it was actually valuable, accurate, or useful. Popularity and value aren't the same thing, correlation is not causation, etc, etc...


Most observational studies do in fact account for the first thing a random HN poster can come up with 5 seconds after reading the title. So there is very little value in such a comment.


This was published in Nature, I'm pretty sure the reviewers understand and account for that. HN and reasonably educated people always think this is some huge gotcha, second only to "CORRELATION != CAUSATION!!!!"


Nature isn't an arbiter of truth, it's a publisher of papers. It's also meant to be read critically by people who see a paper like this and and think "interesting, but this is just an observational study, I'd like to see more research, maybe something with more controls before I believe this".

Say what you want about the "correlation doesn't imply causation", but many people do not understand why that is. As a shorthand for "hey, you don't know the statistics behind this, so don't take the pretty picture at face value", it's pretty good.


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