danepowell
danepowell on Hacker News
Doesn't the precipitating change optimize memory on the DNS server at the expense of additional memory usage across millions of clients that now need to parse an unordered response?
Posted by
danepowell on Saturday June 07, 2025 @03:59PM
from the nathanshobbies.com dept.
I wonder whether the bot hallucinated the wrong information or whether the policy changed and the bot simply wasn't updated / retrained. The latter seems more likely but less interesting, akin to information on a boring HTML page getting overlooked during a site update.
> Surely other patients must have asked about [this traumatic experience]? Or commented on it?
I find myself having this reaction all too frequently after traumatic encounters with the healthcare system.
I honestly don't know the answer.
Do other patients really not communicate when they have a bad experience? Or do they communicate and the system is simply incapable of listening or reacting?
I don't disagree with the article at all, I think it's conclusions are probably largely right.
But it's hard to take seriously when the very first figure has a logarithmic y-axis without any callout in the discussion, exaggerating the appearance of the negative effects.
I fully agree that at least in principle it seems wrong to have insurance for routine care, when most insurance only covers catastrophe.
I think the two practical problems with this view are (a) what's routine to you might be catastrophic (or at least seriously detrimental) to someone else, and (b) missing routine care often leads to catastrophic outcomes.
There's a wide gulf between "some customers may have trouble using Slack" and "most/all customers are completely unable to use Slack". Putting aside formality, I'd say "Slack is down" is in fact more accurate here (assuming that it is true that most users can't use it, which is true for our company at least).
Can someone help me to understand all of the pessimism surrounding plant-based meat?
Of all of the morally-dubious technologies in the world today, this seems like a force of unequivocal good, and yet the criticism is endless: "it's not healthier", "the name sucks", "it'll give you cancer".
All of these just seem to be missing the point that it's _no worse than meat_ in most respects, and _way better_ in others (i.e. ethical and environmental impact).
> The other party would pre-approve you and then you could request location on-demand?
Precisely, and you could set a timeout (5 minutes, 24 hours, whatever) to automatically provide the location unless you intervene to deny the request.
I disagree that ending trials early is solid science, or at least not _as_ solid as running them to completion. It makes it hard to know whether results are due to a treatment effect or just random fluctuations over time. Essentially, it allows for cherry-picking of significant results in a way that bypasses family-wise error correction.
From the email to Trusted Contacts users:
> Since then, we’ve built this functionality directly into Google Maps with Location Sharing
That's simply not true. You can share your location with someone else, but you can't request it from someone else _and_ automatically receive it after a timeout, in case they are incapacitated. This was probably 90% of the reason to use Trusted Contacts.
I understand that companies need to kill some products so others can thrive, but don't gaslight me into thinking that functionality exists where it does not.
> Mostly because I don't like the trend towards optimal laziness personally
It's easy to characterize home automation this way, and certainly "optimal laziness" is part of the appeal for some people, but it's genuinely useful in so many other ways. For instance, hallway lights that automatically turn on and off in response to motion _and_ at a dimmer setting at night, so you don't trip over a dog toy or blind yourself in the middle of the night. That's very hard to replicate in other ways (nightlights waste energy and are still bright enough to keep me awake).
Still a first-world frill to be sure, and maybe not worth it for everyone. But not without value, apart from "laziness".
> This move feels radical
My understanding is that, at least depending on your goal, this isn't nearly radical enough. Some experts think we not only need to stop selling gas-powered cars _immediately_, but also actively remove existing fossil fuel cars/appliance from the economy.
I found this podcast helpful in understanding the level of effort needed to decarbonize in the near future: https://www.vox.com/podcasts/2020/8/27/21403184/saul-griffit...
This is an argument against treating drivers as contractors, but it's not an argument against the OP's point, which is that a contractor relationship might be beneficial for some non-negligible part of the population, even if it's not beneficial more generally. And the fact that articles don't acknowledge this is notable.
Unless you're talking about, say, botulism-contaminated food products that a grocery store discarded and a dumpster diver "recycled" on Amazon. Not saying that exact case has happened, but surely there's a more nuanced take on this than "recycling is good".
Posted by
danepowell on Tuesday November 26, 2019 @10:31PM
from the arstechnica.com dept.
You've been able to get pretty decent Bluetooth in-ear headphones for $20-40 on Amazon for a few years now, can anyone comment on whether AirPods are really 10x better to justify the price? I just have a hard time believing that's possible, but I've never tried them.
You can make that much and more by passively investing in index funds. What's the appeal in day trading then?
Does anyone know how stealth fighter aircraft are able to incorporate radar hardware that doesn't act like a giant retro reflector? Putting a radar array on the front of a stealth fighter just seems like painting a giant bullseye on it, even if it's not emitting.
I wonder if something like this could already be in use, since it becomes invisible to radar as soon as the plasma generator is turned off?
Most comments here point to cherry picking and "p hacking" as being the primary problems with p values. Certainly those are major issues, but I think they miss the real point of the article, which is that null hypothesis testing is fundamentally broken, or at the very least doesn't do what most people think.
A simple example of this can be shown with the following pair of tests:
Testing for a fair coin:
- Null hypothesis is you have a fair coin
- You observe 100 heads in a row
- Given a fair coin, it's extremely unlikely to observe 100 heads
- Therefore it's not a fair coin
Okay, that makes sense, but this is logically the same as:
Testing whether a person "Bill" is an American:
- Null hypothesis is Bill is an American
- You observe *Bill is a US congressman*
- Given Bill is an American, it's extremely unlikely to be a congressman
- Therefore he's not an American
Obviously that's some broken logic, but it's a perfectly valid way to get p < .05
The headline neglects to mention that the system is opt in and per-incident, which I think is a critical detail. It's not like police have 24/7 involuntary access to everyone's video.
I read the whole article expecting the question posed by the title to be answered. It never was, nor was there any appeal to science, data, or statistics on UV skin photography. Pretty disappointing.
Specifically, I wonder how good of an indicator of sun damage or cancer risk a photo like this really is, or if it's just an advertising gimmick.
Price. I worked briefly with teams building self driving cars in the past. Their budget for sensors far exceeded the cost of the car itself.
I think they are referring to autophagy, which is upgregulated during fasting.
Sure autophagy is an important process in cellular "cleansing", if you want to use the pop definition here. But more autophagy != good outcomes, generally speaking. For instance, too much autophagy is associated with reduced cellular division and growth.
It sounds like someone just did a s/cleansing toxins/autophagy/ here to make this sound more science-y.
Note, I am NOT saying that there's no value in fasting. There certainly could be. I'm just saying that the article seems to be playing a bit fast and loose with the science.
Posted by
danepowell on Monday May 06, 2019 @12:04AM
from the support.google.com dept.
Giving the parent the benefit of the doubt, I interpreted "what more do drivers want" as "what more can drivers expect to get", which I think is a reasonable question for what seems to be an as-yet unsustainable company. I don't think it necessarily implies a lack of sympathy for drivers, which I assume is the reason for the downvotes.
Of all the government agencies, I think the IRS actually has one of the best track records for caring deeply about UX. Compare the federal tax forms and instructions to just about any state tax forms, the federal forms are miles ahead in terms of usability. Relative to the complexity of the tax code itself, of course (which the IRS doesn't control).