News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

jaggednad

Re:Show HN: Your Expensive Lawyer Is Making Mistakes on Friday February 27, 2026 @04:59PM (#47186258)
good point
Re:Show HN: Open-source A/B testing framework on Friday August 06, 2021 @05:52PM (#28093186)
I think you guys really did a good job with something that's hard to do well. Kudos
Re:Poll: Will you take the Covid vaccine? on Friday December 11, 2020 @08:43PM (#25394410)
Yes
Re:Voters rejecting the war on drugs is a win for public health on Saturday November 07, 2020 @01:07PM (#25016970)
What business is it of yours if your neighbor is doing heroin? We could get people off the streets if we gave them treatment. A drug addicts are sick; Locking them in jail shouldn’t be the answer
Re:‘We Are Not Essential. We Are Sacrificial.’ on Thursday May 07, 2020 @10:37AM (#23103430)
Yep, as it stands we are just pulling off the band aid in the slowest and most painful possible way. The handling of the crisis by the Trump administration has been so far beyond stupid that there isn’t even a word for it
What is this? A plane for ants?!
Re:Turing-NLG: A 17B-parameter language model on Tuesday February 11, 2020 @02:01AM (#22296651)
I think you’re right that we are on the cusp or real natural language understanding. It’s an incredible moment. But we are also kinda far from these huge models being in every home because of the enormous amount of compute they require. Even running inference with these things is kinda expensive
Re:Haute Baroque Capitalism (2017) on Sunday January 05, 2020 @11:30AM (#21961994)
A lot of truth in this article, but I disagree that trump has anything to do with this trend. As other commenters have pointed out, this trend predates trump’s ascension. The author admits vapor wave predates trump, as does Burner art and certain Japanese styles which I think played a major part in producing and popularizing this aesthetic. Trump’s aesthetic bears superficial similarities with this aesthetic, but I think in the same way that a stopped clock is right twice a day.
The article talks of journals rejecting papers because the author had already been rejected by other journals or because the author’s prior papers were in less-prestigious journals. This method of selecting papers is the perfect recipe for groupthink. The names of the authors should be removed while a paper is being reviewed—the reviewers shouldn’t know who wrote it so that they’ll be forced to evaluate the paper on its intrinsic merits rather than the reputation of its author. That might not solve this beta amyloid orthodoxy problem, but it’d help at least
Re:The SpaceX Starship is a big deal on Wednesday October 30, 2019 @09:10PM (#21404747)
While halting warming is important, a Solar shade is an absolutely terrible way to do that. Shading out 2% of the light has obvious implications for global crop yields and for non crop plants that all rely on solar energy. It would also obviously reduce efficiency of solar electric power collectors, impeding their ability to replace fossil fuels. Global warming is a big problem, but a global food crisis is an even bigger one. A solar shade would buy time on the global warming problem while also creating a much bigger problem.
Re:Cloudflare S-1/Amendment on Thursday September 12, 2019 @10:50PM (#20958744)
Former lawyer who worked on IPOs. Can confirm, amendments to S1s are common af. Basically always see them
I read the headline as “cannon rush” at first lol
Wow, I remember doing this as a kid and thinking to myself that I was being stupid because surely wiggling the mouse would make the computer have to process more input and actually slow down whatever I was impatiently waiting for. I still did it though, because I _felt_ like it made things go faster. Turns out that intuition was right. Funny how we can learn to do things that actually work even when our conscious mind doesn’t believe they do.
While I agree with you re trump’s motivations, it’s also true that the leading democrats are making similar statements about regulating/breaking up big tech (for better reasons). It seems that, in this time of hyper partisan polarization, one of the few things the two major parties agree on is a hatred of big tech. That’s a bad place for big tech to be in. While agree big tech, especially Facebook, are no angels, it’s tragic that big tech is catching so much flack while the big banks and hedge funds, whose crimes are far, far worse, seem to be forgotten.
From a purely self-interested perspective, this is the dumbest thing the US could possibly do. There are talented people who want to leave China and come study and work in the US. We are basically stealing China’s best minds. Now we’re telling them they can’t come and shipping them back? I don’t think we should have conflict with China, but, if you are looking for conflict with China, sending brilliant minds back to them is so stupid that it’s almost unimaginable
Re:‘Limbic Capitalism’ Preys on Our Addicted Brains on Saturday June 01, 2019 @02:13PM (#20070554)
You’re presenting a false choice here. Either we live with free market limbic capitalism, or we live with a totalitarian PRC like state. There are other options that mitigate some of the issues with limbic capitalism without being totalitarian
So did vernor vinge in his sci fi book A Fire Upon the Deep, which is worth a read regardless
It’s different because Facebook has massive power to influence the National conversation by choosing which content to block or not block. Your local neighborhood store does not have such power, ergo, it’s reasonable to treat Facebook differently from the way we might treat a store.
Re:$35,000 Tesla Model 3 Available Now on Thursday February 28, 2019 @09:57PM (#19277587)
So good to see Elon making it happen despite a full court press against him in the media, likely financed by the saudis and other oil interests, and hedge funds who betting against him
Re:Estimating Value of Facebook by Paying Users to Stop Using It on Wednesday December 19, 2018 @05:36PM (#18720531)
“ our results show that the benefits these services provide for their users are large.” What someone is willing to pay and “benefits” they receive are not the same thing. Someone already touched on it—people are willing to pay a lot for heroin, but few would claim heroin is beneficial.
Re:The Octopus Is Smart as Heck, But Why? on Saturday December 01, 2018 @10:09PM (#18580572)
One theory why primates evolved big brains is because they had hands. Big brains for an animal like a gazelle don’t pay off because, without hands, there isn’t much a gazelle can do with that big brain. Better it use that energy for bigger leg muscles. Primates evolves hands so they could better grasp branches, but, once they had hands, there was a lot more they could do with them, like make tools. A bigger brain for a creature with hands is an evolutionary advantage, because that bigger brain allows complex behaviors that can be carried out with hands. I bet octopuses are intelligent for a similar reason. Its body is like one big hand, and there are lots of complex behaviors it can carry out with those tentacles. Similar for its color changing skin. There are many complex and useful ways that skin can be used, so it pays to have a big brain. The important point is that the bodily appendages came first, and those appendages made it actually useful to have a big brain. I find it more surprising that dolphins became intelligent, but the article is right that living in groups capable of communication and cooperation can similarly make big brains pay off, because the animal can engage in complex group behaviors.
Re:Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression on Saturday November 10, 2018 @10:54AM (#18421818)
It shouldn’t be the point, but Facebook wants it to be, because the more eyeballs looking at their site, the more money they get. In order to maximize eyeballs, they make their site as addictive as possible.
Re:AI winter is well on its way on Wednesday May 30, 2018 @10:40AM (#17187992)
Yes, they have a test set. They don’t check every video, but they do check every video in a sample that is of statistically significant size.
Re:Keynesian Economics Is Hot Again on Sunday December 31, 2017 @03:48PM (#16042869)
I dont think you understand what Keynesianism is. Keynesianism doesn’t say anything about money giving the 0.1 percent. You should read up in what Keynes actually said
Spending a year in the top x% isn’t what most people have in mind with their false optimism. They expect to make it to that bracket and stay there. One-time windfalls that put you in a certain bracket temporarily don’t make low taxes on that bracket net benefit you. You’re still getting screwed all the other years in your life
You’re right. I think we need further legislation to bring out the “true meaning of our creed”, as we did in generations past.
I don't think anyone's saying that the solution to poverty is for landlords et al to start losing money. That's a ridiculous straw-man. The article points out that many people profit by keeping others in a powerless state and exploiting them. It doesn't posit a specific solution
Re:Ask HN: Which book have you re-read recently? on Saturday February 04, 2017 @12:30PM (#13567876)
Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. I highly recommend it. Takes only 4-5 hours cover to cover
Re:Why Peter Thiel Fears Star Trek on Friday January 20, 2017 @12:46PM (#13445460)
Also, there's this in in episode 26 of Season 1 of the Next Generation, in which a group of people who were frozen and kept alive in the 20th century are found and unthawed on the Enterprise:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQQYbKT_rMg

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