skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Hydroxychloroquine is a bust (snake oil is about what you can expect from a snake oil salesman).

Several studies have now confirmed it's beneficial:

https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/25658/20200512/hydroxy...

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/07/02/health/hydroxychloroquine...

and the studies "debunking" it's benefits or claiming it's evenbad have been retracted by their publishers as bad science.

https://bgr.com/2020/06/05/coronavirus-drug-update-massive-h...

https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...

Why is this so controversial? Hydroxychloroquine's been used for years as a treatment for Malaria and high altitude sickness, since both of those cause a decrease in blood oxygen and it helps increase the body's hemoglobin production.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7175905/

He's so desperate to Tuck Frump that he's now throwing out good science that disagrees with his politics? No one, not even Trump said hydroxychloroquine was a panacea or vaccine, just something that could potentially help that we were "looking into", and everyone on the left lost their minds.

Edit: To everyone downvoting me, link to proof (e.g. peer reviewed study that hasn't been retracted) that Hydroxychloroquine has absolutely zero benefits, and I'll promise to vote Biden. I'll hold my breath...
Should I buy refurbished laptop from Amazon?
Uh... Have you not been paying attention to the Fed recently?

I assure you, it may not be written down, but the level of protection of the stock market the government engages in Dr facto establishes the government is in the business of protecting long term private investment after a particular inflection point.
It's really hard to beat speed, robustness and flexibility of general purpose editors like Vim and Sublime Text, that's why I don't see myself using something like this for markdown notes.
>"The rat is always right." Green explained: "If you set up an experiment and the rat doesn’t do what you want it to do, it’s not because the rat is stupid, but because you set up the experiment wrong. It’s the same with humans."

I think this is important to remember in our field too. Too often I hear about a user story breaking down because "the user wasn't doing it right".. blaming the user is the wrong way to go -- you just set it up wrong.
From the article:

> It's not so amazing, the λ calculus is equivalent to a Turing machine.

It seems meta3 is a very basic implementation of the lambda calculus. But I believe the equivalence of Turing machines and the lambda calculus is proven. The church Turing thesis is a bit more. My understanding is that it conjectures that there is nothing that can be computed that can't be computed by a Turing machine or the lambda calculus. So nothing more powerful than the lambda calculus exists. I'm not sure this article shows that.
I think the concept I mentioned, apparent uncertainty, can be formalized by referencing efficient algorithms. Something like "no efficient algorithm can tell apparent uncertainty and actual uncertainty apart".
It's a predictive blog entry, not a predictive blog overall. He's not some genius super forecaster like Dom Cummings :-)

He is though successful Sci-Fi author Charles Stross in case you didn't pick that up from the page, and he's penned some pretty insightful posts in his time blogging too.
Ah, yeah, that's not at all as bad as I was thinking.

Though still a bit... off, to be honest.
Idk, Donald Trump's "I have over 300 confirmed bankruptcies" did it for me.
Most of the U.S. Democratic party (all but the Bernie Sanders wing, really) is to the right of the Tories. Britain has nationalized health care (which isn't really up for debate in Britain the way the much more conservative Obamacare is starkly divisive in American politics), Tories supported LGBTQ marriage before it was legalized in the U.S, and Boris Johnson endorsed Barack Obama.
Not to ask the dumb question, but one of the challenges discussed in the lay video is that it's hard to study when the medium is consistently prone to fail (pop)

What's stopping this test from being attempted on a frozen bubble? My guess is that the crystalline structure of ice is different enough to change the behavior of light, but at the same time, a lot of the variances in the thickness of the bubble would be preserved, no?
>Although Hayek and Friedman may have been intellectually very interesting, I have a hard time believing they had much influence on the trajectory of public policy

Friedman was literally the economics advisor to Ronald Reagan, both in campaign and during the entire administration. All the "Reaganomics" policies of the 80s were greatly influenced by his theories. That's as much influence an economist could have on public policy besides actually being the president.
> There’s also ad agencies not backed by Facebook or Google, but they’re not in the title either.

Yes, and this is why the reporting is dishonest - it's feels like it's there to smear one company in the title instead of actually disclosing to us who the people are.
Org-roam: Emacs org file based personal knowledge base system
> my heart might beat out of my chest because of all the horror stories my friends tell me. However, the data seems to indicate that 57%[0] of university degrees in the U.S. are awarded to women, and that this proportion is increasing

Both of these are true; women face substantial gendered barriers in academia, and numerically women are doing well. You can't say "you weren't sexually assaulted because some other women got degrees".

It is also fair to ask "are men facing structural barriers in access to university?" Or are they choosing not to, or experiencing barriers further down the pipeline, and so on.

The problem with using aggregate statistics on humans is that they tell you nothing about whether a particular case was dealt with justly or unjustly. (In fairness, there's also a problem going the other way, of over-extrapolating from a single example).

Then you encounter the problem that there are no average humans: https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...

> Why would the intellectual tools that build homes, bridges, hydroelectric dams, energy grids, the internet; that find surgical methods, discover medicines, design microchips, and so on, be somehow less effective than lived experience in the social realm?

This is Le Corbusier style high modernism, the idea that living should be mechanised and human life subjected to statistical process control.
A squirrel will spend energy to collect nuts and bury them together in the ground, rather than having them scatter and roll and blow willy-nilly. A person is constantly sweeping up the dust inside their house, painting and repainting the trim of their windows, and organizing the cables in their desk drawers.

Life can most certainly be viewed as a counterforce to entropy. Certainly at the philosophical level, but why not at the genetic level too, reproduction being the repeated organization and duplications of chemical bonds from smaller constituents.

I certainly see my life as a constant battle against entropy, an adult's life consists pretty much 80% of putting things in things.
My guess is WiFi-triangulation by WA. Just a guess, though.
The current leading theories on how the brain works are that yes, they are essentially very impressive prediction machines, which obviously rely on all sorts of pattern matching to make said predictions. You can look up Karl Friston's free energy principle or check this book for more details

https://www.amazon.com/Surfing-Uncertainty-Prediction-Action...
Make it yours. Don't copy others, in style or content. Be passionate about it. If you left one thing behind on this earth make it your website. It's your digital personality. Fill it full of fun stuff that gives you joy. Don't make it for other people, don't go chasing [waterfalls] visitors.
I interpreted the parent to that assume his hypothetical individual is advocating for the murder of some people for what they believes to be good reasons, since nobody short of the mentally ill will actually ask for random people to be killed for literally no reason.

I can list 10 people that the world would be better without — the likes of Kim Jong-un and Ayman al-Zawahiri. That's not too different from wishing for their death. Plausibly we can discuss whether it's a good idea for them to be assassinated, and whether the power vacuum would just cause another worse despot to replace them.

So it seems quite conceivable to me that a discussion could be had about the reasons, feasibility, ethics or geopolitical implications, or about why they believe that someone does or does not deserve killing.
I think the idea is that humans, despite being essentially no more than chemical reactions themselves, have developed the power to cause nuclear reactions (through technology).
The risks of falling in love (for product designers)
Imagine a situation where somebody manages to inject own script into bank's page not through employee's negligence, but through some exploit.

You would still have an issue where there is simply no functionality to killswitch all those novel APIs of arguable safety, and tell the browser to shut down any script not explicitly listed as allowed on the site.
I see a resurgence in marketing similar to Mad Men: where firms don’t have access to highly personalized data, and eventually, will actually have to be creative, instead of just using algorithms parameterized with user tracking/profile data
Also known as randomized control group. That said, it should be equivalent to treatment group.
Which is exactly what I said.

That's the reason why in RCTs treatment and control groups are split from the same pool - less need to make sure they are.
Serverless PHP Using Bref with Matthieu Napoli
Don't Listen to the ‘China Covered Up the Coronavirus’ Narrative
I am still confused by the notion of entropy being unorder. I think there was an article about this being a common misunderstanding.
Denominators are important. Statistics are important. A raw count without other supporting data (how many tests have been given, what is the population in areas where cases are increasing) has absolutely no meaning.

There have been ≈3.5M cases in the US. That sounds awful! That’s out of 35M people tested. At its peak the infection rate for people tested in the US was around 12%. The current infection rate is 9%. The rate is falling, not rising. As more people are tested the numerator increases - it’s a tautology. It’s meaningless without understanding the context.

Media outlets Are going to drown out any rational discussion (and search results) with their hyperbole.
That's a dangerous way of thinking, and is in contradiction of the article. It implies that people get hit by trains because they are stupid, and it'll never happen to me because I'm not stupid. I would imagine that most of the people who do get hit by trains don't think they are stupid.

There's a physiological reason why people have a tendency to underestimate risk in certain situations, or miss obvious pending collisions. The usual comment from someone who has had such a collision is "They just came out of nowhere". See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23024275

Airplane pilots (particularly military fast jet), and ship captains are taught specific techniques to deliberately and systematically overcome these physiological limitations. Some of the techniques are taught in some driving schools (for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18157090 ) and to be frank I think driving education should go all-out on it.
Nautical miles
Either WhatsApp or Instagram.. all FB properties share a common user graph. Or your friends searched for you on FB.
It isn't even usefull for advertising.

Google keeps giving me french ads even when I speak dutch, live in the dutch half of Belgium, and have a http request header saying i speak dutch or english. I get ads for all kinds of stuff I don't care about. In fact, I get ads for things I can't even buy in my country or continent if I wanted it. If google would tune their ads to the language i ask them, based on the query I entered, the results would be a lot better.

I presume the real value of all this tracking is they can companies to buy ads with them, even if the actual ad delivery mostly fails.

Now I bought a rubber mat on ali express, for opening all kinds of electronics. For weeks they tried to sell me rubber ... stuff ... and latex ... stuff ... and other related ... stuff .... until my wife started mocking me enough to stay of their site for a few months. That's another cost of relevant advertising ;-)
We didn't really understand a whole lot about flus and pandemics back then, and the majority of the world was much poorer, leading to a global response like we're seeing in Brazil, for instance.

Additionally, there was a war on for a bunch of it, which impacted things.

Like, I actually think that lockdowns are a reasonable approach as a pandemic control strategy. I think it's a reasonable tradeoff against the potential deaths.

Note that this is completely conditional on the existence of a proper social security network, which supports all the people who can't work from home.
Installation and setup of simple Kubernetes Cluster with CentOS8
I remember a time in which Google could do no wrong in the public eye, times sure have changed. THough equally back then, Microsoft was the baddie everybody loved to hate and today, well - I do wonder if public perception of Microsoft has surpassed Google. My gut feeling says it kinda has. Quick google(ironic I know) shows that is also the case.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/amazon-samsung-microsoft-top-t...
https://theharrispoll.com/axios-harrispoll-100/
> Roads in rural areas are a HUGE problem

*in the US - it's a TIGER-specific thing (and certainly not exclusive to OSM). It doesn't affect the rest of the world.

Interested to learn what you're doing with cycling routes - I've been working on improving cycling directions in the US (for my site, cycle.travel) for a few years.
That's quite a sweeping statement! I'm sure there are many ambitious projects that weren't mad but were cut for, say, funding reasons, and many projects that fail for reasons other than being impossible.
No, the poster above genuinely hit upon something with respect to killing child processes. Speaking from experience with a past colleague, some women that have had miscarriages bear a silent emotional burden of grief.
> For those down-voting me, my guess is you were not reading papers back in early February from China and South Korea as I was about early drugs worth trialing. If your expectations of a given drug's efficacy was informed by political tweets you weren't paying attention to the trial pipeline.

This is, kind of exactly how snake oil works? It's not even the typical South Park / "2. ????" plan.

It's "1. Take a treatment that people are already credulous towards." "2. Sell it for lots of money while pretending it's a sure thing." "3. Run away with lots of money before anyone catches on that it's not actually worthwhile."

The thing with snake oil and real science based medicine is that they both start with that first step, of grabbing a bunch of things that seem plausible. The difference is that science based medicine first tests to see if it works before selling it for lots of money to lots of people as a cure, instead of after (or never). The initial ideas and plausibility are only occasionally different; science is a tool for finding a lot of things that don't work, and a very few that do.
The research paper[1] contains a list of the 16 apps on page 11.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.15794.pdf
Brexit??? It's going to have massive effects for a long time.
The 70mn is approx 1% fatality rate, which is what I've been basing my arguments for responses on.
What makes you confident that you aren't overestimating the importance that we "experience anything"
> So, unless some new mitigation measures are going to be introduced _right now_,

You will be able to claim that any changes made by local and state governments in the next few days/weeks “did the trick”. Nevertheless, this is a fair escape hatch when the following prediction does not come true:

> this record-breaking growth will continue for quite more than a few weeks, followed by the corresponding growth of deaths a month later. We are far away from the saturation point and any resemblance of "population immunity".

You will be proven wrong, both about the coming “wave of death”, and about how far we are from the saturation point. I’m quoting this and publicly disagreeing today, so that you might remember later on, and maybe even acknowledge that you got it wrong.
Yes, as I wrote, the final size of the image is limited by the browser. See [1] for more details. The highest resolution version can only be downloaded by dezoomify-rs [2], not dezoomify.

[1] https://github.com/lovasoa/dezoomify/issues/296

[2] https://lovasoa.github.io/dezoomify-rs/
It’s crazy to think how much of a negative effect social media and advertising have had on the world ...
> I still find it odd that we call this "artificial intelligence" when it's advanced mimicry at best.

GPT-3's amazing ability to pick up what we want from prompts lift it above mimicry. Intelligence is about fast solving of novel tasks (with little supervision). GPT-3 does this more than any other language model.
> Since when has zoning ever had anything to do with the Feds short of Department of the Interior/Bureau of Land Management?

What is it with this thread and not reading the article?

"The first of many ironies, of course, is that single-family zoning became the standard for American suburbs during the New Deal when the Roosevelt administration, through various programs such as the Home Owners Loan Corporation, required it for home refinancing assistance.

These onerous regulations were further mandated for new construction by the Federal Housing Administration as well as the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac."
Of course it does, it mentions Amazon, and that's quite offensive.
> Would it be correct to say that most of these tools are identical to Wiki software...

It would be correct to say that a personal Wiki is a modern way to implement a Zettelkasten system [1]. Zettelkasten (Slip-Box is the literal translation from the German) is a paper-and-pen system where personal notes are written on index cards and stored in a box (like the library card catalogs of yesteryear). The trick to building the knowledge graph is giving each card a unique identifier and having a convention for referencing other cards.

Apple Notes and other similar products are simply missing the ability make links to other notes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten
But that can't be true! Big tech is super competent and government is broken! /s
> the Python3 variants are unfinished and are missing support.

I stand corrected:

https://asciidoc.org/CHANGELOG.html (Version 9.0.0 (2020-06-02))
Some are better than others and sometimes you want something really quick and simple.
UK NRPF: More than a quick fix needed for immigration rules
I’m not saying the US has the best outcomes. I’m saying European high-trust culture has nothing to do with the results. European countries have done much better and much worse.
Which tools do you use to deploy stored procedures and to run tests?

I mean, plain SQL files and any languages that can interface the FB would do, but is there anything purposely made for that?
You make a good point on the costs but the Iraq war did more to alienate the US's key allies. So much of the geopolitical strength of the US is from its web of alliances. So I would argue that Iraq did more to weaken the US.
I just see two pictures of a disassembled camera. Is there more info?
The problem seems to be that people are very bad at what the stoics prescribed: do what you can and accept the rest.

I mean there's a very steep diminishing returns curve for most kinds of activism. You can't protest 0-24, because eventually you will run out of food, water, money, etc. Of course social networks and the constant breaking news media pours napalm on everything continuously, just because. (And yes, Trump is going to be Trump every day, just as China will be run by a paranoid oppressive power-hungry regime for the foreseeable future.)

And this kind of overdoing things, not backing down, not compromising, not accepting incremental change even if it costs people a lot what seems to be the problem. (Eg. see how some people unironically think that a big collapse is an acceptable way to get to whatever next glorious stage the world will get to. See also how most far-anything ideologies all operate as very simple recipes and try to derive "solutions" - or maybe they are better called proposals - for every problem they see. And this ideological purism is what SP seems to ridicule with contrived situations, that are allegorical - usually to an almost direct correspondence - to the complexities of reality. )
> The group of European marketing firms said the pop-up warning and the limited ability to customize it still carries “a high risk of user refusal.”

Translation: we used to be able to use dark patterns to get users to consent, now we can’t.
Your data doesn't show testing rate. Maybe it could be true, but your data doesn't come anywhere close to showing it... And in fact, when we actually find the data that would prove it, the data shows the opposite. [1]

If you check Florida, you'll see that they actually decreased testing by 22%, and still had an increase in positive cases (over 300%!). Testing less, and getting more sick people is basically the definition of it being out of control.

[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/state-coronavirus-data-do...

The Governor of Florida is even quoted in this article as disagreeing with you, and admitting that testing doesn't account for the increase. While he might not be an expert, it should make you take another look, as this is politically damaging for him to say his party leader is wrong.
I won't claim the author is mathematically illiterate. I don't know. But this is where math shines. Show the equation and how it it models the phenomenon. Match it against measurements. If it doesn't match, make another model. Without that, talking about entropy as if it isn't a useful way of conceptualizing phenomena is just word soup.
This has been kind of a content-free thread. Could you explain more? Critical theory itself is almost a century old, in terms of who originally talked about it, and today the idea of critical thinking and critical reading is not just mainstream, but part of public education; meanwhile, nothing bad seems to have actually happened as a result of critical theory.

Edit: I don't like the phrasing I used in this first paragraph. To be more clear: The fact that the government publically funds an effort to teach children to examine the government's official declarations, question their authorities, and study the power structures which control them, is a surprising success of critical theory.

Phrenology is roundly countered by basic genetics; pedigree collapse directly implies that humanity forms one single race. Similarly, we have studied skulls enough to be confident that phrenology has no predictive power. What sorts of similar "showstopper" evidence do you have against critical theory?

The best criticisms against critical theory are listed on Wikipedia [0], but I don't think that you are talking about either of them. (Those criticisms are that critical theory is insufficiently Marxist, and that it lacks praxis.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_theory#Criticism
> where's the frontier between "pattern matching" and "intelligence"?

I recently saw this great video related to your very question.

Yannic Kilcher: Paper review "On the Measure of Intelligence by François Chollet"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuyM63ugsxI