justtologin

What I took from the thread was:

Bad news is reported more, if bad things happen, you need to act fast so it's good to pay close attention to bad news, that's what news organizations want you to think.

And then you commented that as an educated scientist, you also think we should pay close attention to bad news. At least that's how I took it.

This is a good argument against technocracy. I want expert's views to be taken into consideration when making decisions that affect other people. I don't want them telling people what to do using the lens of their narrow technical expertise.

Wishing something was open source and committing to build it are pretty far apart. There are examples everywhere where people have built open source alternatives for things. Understandably, there are way more people who'd like an open source version of a given program, so that sentiment is encountered more frequently.

Personally I don't believe in the business model of charging for the priviledge of running code on your own infrastructure. I also don't get involved in "pirated" software. So I would expend "I wish it was open source" to "I wish it was open source or SaaS with some compelling features".

For example I don't care that 1password is closed source because I pay them to store and let me access my passwords. I do care that Windows has a model where I would have to buy a license to run it on my own computer, so I'm happy there are open source operating systems that serve my needs. (Amongst other reasons, in today's climate I'd be highly suspicious of a "free" closed source OS)

I'd find a few people that have been at startups of a similar size and stage and talk to them about this.

First, there is no single "startup" definition. Are you the third employee, did they just raise series A, are they nearing IPO or acquisition?

From my own experience - hire during scaling post series A, expect more disorganization than you're used to at an established company, more decisions and direction based on how well you can argue them instead of actual evidence from the market, more changes in direction, overall more chaos. It can be a lot of fun, but if you are not in the company's inner circle, you have to go with the flow a lot more and accept things will change all the time for reasons you have no control over, and product features or deals you worked on can often get scrapped after you put a lot of effort into them.

That was a bit of a rant, I liked working at a startup, but it was much more chaotic with literally nobody knowing what they were doing than I expected. On the other hand, if you're there in a high growth phase, there is lots of optimism, lots of fun, lots of learning and social connection

I think the point of the headline is to show how shockingly low the cost would be compared to the economic cost of covid.

At the same time, it's a bit disingenuous. What does "vaccinate the world" mean now? Two shots, three, ongoing six-monthly boosters? Even that ignores the fact that the vaccine doesn't work that well on new variants. It would be nice if it was that simple to just spend a "trivial" amount of money and end this, but I don't see anything actionable here

Thinking more about this, it's a bit the same as the thing with Elon Musk and the world food program, in that proponents have put a price tag on something that's not too high, but when you dig into it, that something doesn't really get you as far as it's proponents make it out. It would be great to see Elon or someone of similar means say they will put up the $50 Bn if they are given a sound proposal of how it would end covid restrictions

My car was stolen recently, and the day it happened I was told it's most probably already in a shipping container on the way to Haiti or something, and not to expect to get it back. The role of the police seems to be completely administrative rather than actually spending time trying to solve the crime. I expect insurance is the biggest difference between cars and bikes, and if one had theft insurance on the bike, the procedure and interaction with the police would be virtually identical for a bike vs a car

No I wasnt clear, I used the api at ipinfo.io to get the information about the ip address the parent had posted. That info pertains to the "problem" ip he is encountering, its not generated by some service at that address

So yeah

  # curl ipinfo.io/34.66.115.47
  {
  "ip": "34.66.115.47",
  "hostname": "47.115.66.34.bc.googleusercontent.com",
  "city": "Council Bluffs",
  "region": "Iowa",
  "country": "US",
  "loc": "41.2619,-95.8608",
  "org": "AS396982 Google LLC",
  "postal": "51502",
  "timezone": "America/Chicago",
  "readme": "https://ipinfo.io/missingauth"}

What kind of url is that? This cant be someone using a browser as normal on their own machine can it? Could they be trying to build a google form or document or something that embeds part of the sign up form?

Edit: unsubstantiated source [0] says that domain relates to Google app engine, so could be the person is working on a project that includes some form submission capability and somehow is using your site for testing

https://superuser.com/questions/892437/what-do-you-do-if-you...

HN is still a decent news aggregator as long as you turn on "showdead" and browse through new submissions a bit. Upvoted stories and comments are more often one-sided, but there is lots of diversity in what gets submitted, and even discussed at the margins, including some crazy stuff but also some interesting stuff you definitely would not find discussed in mainstream news.

They do have a loss function, that is analogous to human desire.

I think we are fundamentally missing something, that there is an irreconcilable difference between a mathematical expression and actual conscious desire, and until we figure out what they is, we won't crack AGI

War deaths are typically young men in the prime of life. Covid deaths are mostly old people. Not to say they should be ignored, buy what people must have experienced seeing a generation of young men die in WWII is nothing like what is happening now.

I think there is a "social construct" aspect of beauty, typically a variation on very skinny women, maybe plus big breasts. Those are basically what as a young man (and probably woman, I'm a man) you are conditioned to be interested in. And I've seen some guys basically parrot that. But for me and lots of men I talk to, there is, in my view, an instinctive view of attractiveness, basically a combination of health and good nature, or more simply curvy and smiling. I don't think that's a "social construct" in the way that term gets used, I think that's evolution.

Thinking about this reminded me about how Kirstie Allsop (a British TV presenter that would not be considered a traditional model) beat out lots of models in a world sexiest women ranking, for, in my opinion, exactly the reason I describe.

https://www.marieclaire.co.uk/news/celebrity-news/kirstie-al...

Amazon textract, I think there is a free tier. I also heard that excel now has an image to table input capability but I've not tried it. You may need to screenshot the pdf first, I'm not sure over the input formats that work.

If you google "table extraction" or similar there will be others

I'm 40, I feel like I've had a good, relatively free life, and I largely accept that is over and mostly feel bad for younger people who have to grow up in the fallout of the over reaction we've had.

Imagine dating, going to university, getting married, celebrating things with your family, all under masks and restrictions, having to show a vaccine pass wherever you go, and hysteria from all sides about whatever the covid news of the week is. Or worse, living and working over video chat.

Personally, I'm done, but it's like we've all collectively said fuck you to the younger generation.

That, and I've lost any respect or feeling of civic responsibility towards the government. The pandemic has been handled so badly, oscillating between absurd overreaction and trying to talk away poor response (for example where I am we had huge delays in vaccine availability), all while trying to exert a completely inappropriate level of control over what people do. I no longer feel like a part of society and feel like the government and my countrymen have broken any social compact we have and I don't owe them anything.

Our stuff isn't worth endangering their lives, but in many people's calculus, a paycheck is. That's one reason we have workplace safety laws, because a pure market solution would lead to people doing unsafe things.

> "the delivery service partner's dispatcher didn't follow the standard safety practice."

Amazon, not uniquely, has a business model based around devolving blame and recourse in a way that insulates them from the normal downside risk a business would have. I don't know if this is a consequence of how risk averse the world has become, but I believe it's a source of competitive advantage.

You call amazon about a problem, the only feedback they ask for is about the call center agent, who almost certainly has the least agency or autonomy of anyone in the process but is subject to all the blame. Uber is the same, any problem you have or recourse you want is directed at the driver or restaurant, when both are basically cogs in a machine. But it could never be the company's fault.

Here it's the same thing. It was the "delivery service partner" that was the problem. I'd believe that legally this could be true, but the root cause is still amazon offloading responsibility for any downside onto the "delivery service partner".

I don't know what the answer is, but I think there is some gaming of the system going on where these companies have found a way to offload risk that is not really fair.

I'm not sure if you're saying this is a good thing or bad thing. I've worked closely with police and military and the front line folks of these and similar "operational" departments should be the least of people's concerns with respect to government spending imo. Like much of the rest of government and the broader public sector, its the growth of the administrative layers that's where the real waste is occurring. Money that could provide more front line services that could be valuable is instead going in to administrating them.

I just checked because I'm more familiar with Canada, eg [0] where senior military officers have grown in number while number of members have fallen, and I see that the US actually has caps on number of generals that have prevented the same growth.

[0] https://ottawacitizen.com/news/national/defence-watch/canadi...

It could be interesting- the challenge would be to incentivize quality and participation. And at least IMO it's much more interesting to see different perspectives argued on a topic, rather than actual rebuttal in most cases, or even "yes, and" confirmation. Certainly I don't enjoy the sort of quoting line by line and picking each apart that sometimes seems to happen on forums.

In order to incentivize good essays, something that was paid like substack, with different perspectives lined up on different topics could be interesting. Maybe with authors aware of their opponent's central arguments so they could address the same thing instead of talk past each other.

Part of the support YC companies get is the ability to periodically post ads on the HN front page. Part of the point of this forum is to promote YC companies and encourage people to apply for YC. The post would have been deliberately put there by the moderators.

From the FAQ under Can I post a job ad:

  Another kind of job ad is reserved for YC-funded startups. These appear on the front page, but are not stories: they have no vote arrows, points, or comments. They begin part-way down and fall steadily. Only one is on the front page at a time. The rest are listed at jobs.

Interesting take. So if i can restate it, automating people's agency - basically their decision making or judgement - creates a "disposable" class that there is (from management perspective) almost no point in investing in their growth, meaning they have little mobility because there is no demand for a better person who has built on their experience.

Alternatively put, we've commodified human hand eye coordination and basic speech recognition and intent resolution. This view is definitely supported by the current state of the gig economy.

> blue collar or back office labor jobs like mailroom processors could work hard and rise to the top

I'd guess a factor in ending this has been the rise or at least growth of an administrative or managerial class in most businesses.

An apprenticeship model lets people grow, and to some extent a similar model used to apply in business, where the executives and managers were all career industry people who started on the shop floor.

The current system is closer to (closer, not the same as) a feudal system where there is a group of nobility that manages a group of serfs, and there is not much movement between the groups, at least at the same company. Admission into the nobility is based on education and other pedigree, and can never really be had by work experience.

I think a shorter way to summarize this could be "intellectual property is not property".

The arguments he makes work because IP is essentially an imaginary concept and so doesn't have the same concerns about freeloaders and exploitation that real property does.

I think this has been reflected in the real market, even if people still cling to the concept of IP. Business models for most companies now are not "pay me money for the privilege of running code or listening to music" but "pay me for wide accessibility to the code or music or whatever". I have a spotify subscription because it let's me access all that music anywhere and the value is in not having to lug mp3s around with me. I have an office 365 subscription because I can access my email and share my documents in a bunch of ways. I could use libreoffice if I just wanted an editor.

There is no IP involved in these services, and as time goes on I think the concept will become increasingly rare, because the world has figured out what DHH is saying, IP is not a real concept and not worth paying for in and of itself

Not the parent.

I think it's the standard social media stuff - pseudo anonymity, lack of nuance or easy clarification, lack of private conversations meaning everything is exposed to the lowest common denominator.

Not saying HN is particularly bad as social media goes, but there is a big difference between having a chat at a bar where you adapt to your conversation partners and have a mutually interesting discussion while being mostly diplomatic, vs posting something for posterity where everyone that passes by can give a hot take or "what about", "source please", "explain what you mean by"...

Your comment is actually a (very benign) example - I don't mean offence, just saying that the gp put a comment out there and now it's available for anyone to come by and jump on, where the dynamic would be different in a pub convo

A simple one is to do the exercises in the book, if it has them. With textbooks especially, I find that it's easy to tune out when trying to read them. In school, it was doing assignments that gave me the motivation to go in and actively search for information. If you are reading it with trying to answer a question in mind, it may be easier to stay engaged

Yes! There is "reproducibility" in the sense that you can run the code and get the same answer, and this can be very useful. But I don't see that as the core domain of the research paper, which is to describe a new discovery. The papers job should be to explain the discovery and give appropriate supporting evidence. This leads to a stronger form or reproducibility, like you say, which is "I understand the discovery and I can do it too". That's not the same as generating the exact result the authors' show. And a paper that is reproducible in the first sense but not in the second is of limited scientific value.

If anything, I'd like to see more focus on giving evidence of generality of a result, vs just sharing everything needed to get back the same specific result

Yes I agree - run 100k a week and your diet matters a lot less than if you do 3 x 5k runs a week, even though most would consider the latter to be a runner and regular exerciser.

But, run 100k a week for 10 years, and you may not need many more calories to keep it up than the 3x weekly jogger, because your body has adapted. I guess that is what the study in the article is observing.

Anecdotally, people adapt to do whatever they are doing efficiently. At some point I started exercising (distance running) a lot and I lost weight despite eating constantly. That phase lasted a few months, at which point my hypothesis is I got efficient at running and no longer burned huge calories doing it. I started gaining weight and had to adjust my diet.

Seems to me the example of the hunter gatherers is the same. Their bodies have adapted to do their everyday tasks efficiently. This is a logical evolutionary adaptation. It also leaves room for exercise to play a role in weight loss, by doing things you're not well adapted for. Diet of course is also important, however both have a role.