eloff

That matters little.

The point is people on HN missed the potential of Dropbox because for them it was a problem they already had a half solution for. For regular people who don’t know what an rsync is, Dropbox seemed like magic.

The moral of the story is that if a solution is only available to a technicaly savvy minority, the market opportunity is still wide open.

I stand corrected!

There's a important lesson about using nuclear power as an energy source in there. Contrast that with Germany which is shuttering their nuclear power plants in favor of renewables.

Don't be pedantic. From Oxford dictionary: "advance or development toward a better, more complete, or more modern condition"

Then you get a revolution and the whole system is torn down and rebuilt in a different form. That's highly undesirable, and as I mentioned, is a real tail risk to consider.

"progress is inevitable": It's not actually. Progress is only made if people take the risk and effort to advance progress. That does require rewarding them appropriately for the risk taken. I'm not saying we get that balance exactly right currently, but it is necessary.

In general just taxing the winners (wealthy) period is well tolerated politcally, but it also requires a goverment that's somewhat fiscally responsible and not spending $800B a year on their military instead of social programs. The US hasn't had a fiscally responsible government since Clinton, and the pigeons are currently coming home to roost in the form of inflation and loss of confidence in the US dollar as the reserve currency.

How that is handled really comes down to how your society has agreed to establish a social safety net.

In Northern Europe it’s handled quite well. In the U.S. it’s handled with a “callous lack of empathy” as you phrased it.

My point is disruption is the engine of progress, but it also causes temporary pain (that might not be temporary on the scale of human lifetimes.) It’s the wrong reaction to want to stop or slow progress. You can actually prove that through the lens of game theory and the fact that we have multiple human societies. The right thing to do is ensure your society doesn’t leave the losers of that process behind.

I agree, I said as much about winners and losers being created.

It’s still a good thing for society - the alternative is halting or slowing progress.

That cycle has gone on since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Jobs are destroyed, people complain and protest, new jobs are created and the total economic pie and the absolute size of the average person’s slice increases.

A valid question is are there inventions for which this would not be true? I think yes for general AI, but also yes for people who are unable to migrate between a job lost and any of the new jobs created due to lack of education or willingness to reinvent themselves or relocate to where the new jobs are. Innovation can definitely create winners and losers. That’s bad for the losers, but not necessarily for society as a whole. Unless so many losers are created that they rise up and overthrow the system. That’s a real long tail risk if the pace of change sufficiently outpaces our ability to adapt to it.

It’s both really if you look at IQ tests. It’s part of the reason immigrants will often score lower, they lack the culture or language specific knowledge being tested.

IQ is a proxy for intelligence. People often use them interchangeably, but they’re not the same thing. Your statement is more valid for intelligence than IQ.

Indeed, why would anyone use DropBox when rsync is free?

Classic HN blindspot.

Is there something like this for the command line in general? I'd love to have a ? command that takes an optional prompt and feeds my current shell history to chat gpt and gets a recommendation for the last command that failed.

Something like https://github.com/nvbn/thefuck but with some intelligence instead of hard-coded rules.

That's somewhat problematic if you have secrets in there, but you could just not use it if you know you have sensitive things in your shell history. You still need to be aware of that without ChatGPT since most systems save your shell history to the file system where it could remain accessible for much longer than you'd think. IIRC they don't use things from the API for training, but I wouldn't depend on that being safe.

I use gbd so rarely that I often forget the commands between sessions. Then I use print debugging when it’s not the best tool just because I don’t want to lookup the commands. I could see the use for this kind of thing.

Same problem when coding shell scripts. It’s like they tried to invent the hardest to remember language. I often use python instead of bash just because I can remember it and read it.

Even the plants are trying to kill you in Australia. That continent seems to have a bonanza of deadly critters.

Still, when you look at the statistics, any urban area in the U.S. is more dangerous than Australian wildlife. Both the roads and the people.

I’m just a computer guy, but I also see that as likely. When it comes down to it there’s less than 100 elements, made of a handful of forces and subatomic particles that make up the incredible universe that we live in. It seems somehow to get simpler as you go down.

Until you hit all the quantum weirdness and then it’s all wave functions and probabilities. That maybe comes out of something simple as well.

That’s a fair point, but of the over twenty programming languages I’ve used in my career, only C uses null terminated strings. All the others store the length. There’s good reasons for that. I think C strings are objectively bad and error prone.

Ah you mean why is it on HN, not why was the study performed. That's fair.

HN is wider than just technical things of course, and often includes major breaking news as well as some things of general interest. Given how common alcohol consumption is, that's probably how it ends up on the front page.

Would it be better to stock your head in the sand?

I’m honestly baffled by your comment.

We have a clear understanding of why the difference matters here, see my other comment in this thread.

Two main things. One is that women are smaller and body mass matters a lot to alcohol metabolism. The second thing is many women lack an enzyme that helps metabolize alcohol, which makes them even slower to metabolize it.

Thanks, that makes sense now.

Yes, but the point is the danger from the warming contribution is less than the danger from an ozone hole, so why focus on the warming? Unless the ozone depletion is below the recovery rate.

If they’re that incompetent that they need to fake their database and think it’s a good idea, there’s little surprise that they’re also too incompetent to realize that task is only a couple hours of coding.

He doesn’t give any numbers there. I may well be completely out to lunch, but that source doesn’t modify my opinion.

Here's the results of the first large randomized clinical trial - the gold standard in medicine. The study involved over 80,000 participants in Nordic countries.

"colonoscopy reduced cancer incidence but not death"

https://www.statnews.com/2022/10/09/in-gold-standard-trial-c...

The free version is still on 3.5.

I still use it, it’s faster and I can’t use the plus version that my company pays for for personal stuff.

chat.openai.com, create an account and upgrade it to plus ($20/mo). There’s currently limits on how many messages you can send. There’s also an API.

Thank you, my source was probably wrong, or my memory.

However, I wouldn’t be quick to say it invalidates the conclusion, without more careful analysis.

Your should assume your odds are 1 in 1000, without reason to believe otherwise. Your actual odds are obviously going to be different, but that is unknown to you and shouldn’t affect your reasoning about the risks.

There seems to be some solid data that mammograms, colonoscopies, and treating prostate cancer (with many caveats on that last one) is actually mostly not beneficial in reducing overall mortality.

The reasons are likely complex and nuanced, but do your research carefully if your doctor is trying to talk you into one of those. You probably will only benefit their next car payment, not your health.

For a mammogram, it doesn’t increase survival over a manual exam.

For colonoscopies, you have one in 1400 chances of saving a life and one in 1000 chances of perforating a bowel and dying here and now instead of in 30 years. There’s another exam with lower risks and most of the benefits.

For prostate cancer, if you have the aggressive kind, intervention has almost no effect. You’re dead either way.

If you have the slow growing kind, you’ll likely die of something else. The risks of treatment are mostly balanced against the benefit. But treatment will nuke your quality of life.

I don’t have time too dig up sources right now, so don’t take my word for it. Look for the studies, they’re quite approachable.

Probably not the best example, you get the idea though.