skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> but we shouldn't forget survivor bias here

Hi HN, entrepreneurial scientist here. You have just given me an idea. Maybe I shouldn't be posting this buried in the comments but can always be reposted elsewhere.

"survivor bias"

This is a constant talking point in HN. It allows anyone to plausibly dismiss absolutely any advice from a successful entrepreneur (no offence to the poster here intended, they may be right - it's just that it can be used anywhere).

It's so powerful, in fact, that the only plausible retort is to look to serial successful entrepreneurs - Jobs, Musk etc. - as evidence that it's at least not entirely luck that leads to success. And even that counterargument is on shaky ground.

So what we need to do is to get more scientific. We need to know how many other startups were formed in that area, or with that idea, or just in general. I think this is totally doable. What we need is a bad ass business scientist in some university to take on this challenge. Actually, hell - this is a startup idea in itself. So it probably exists somewhere.

I would begin by monitoring all new company registrations in my home country (UK) and keeping a look out for tech startups. You can check their websites at regular intervals, look at Companies House metadata, and scrape news to classify them correctly. Monitor accounts returns to see when/if they trade, and fold. Although it'd take time to build the database, after a year I think you'd already have interesting observations.

You could also do phone interviews with (a sample of?) founders. The goal would be to get them to almost "register" themselves in the same way as a medical trial might be registered. You'll definitely have a problem with confidentiality, so you may need to delay the release of data by 10 years, or to release only aggregate data, or else to rely only on aggregating public domain information to infer activity and talk in general terms to founders.

Other sources of data: incubator batches, demo days, product hunt, advertisements placed by the startups, job adverts. I'd also do "exit interviews" with founders that are no longer registered as directors at Companies House, or when their companies cease trading.

If we can do this, we can start to get absolutely solid numbers on whether survivor bias is really a thing. Like, are their explanatory factors as to why Company A did well and not B, or was it just A was lucky? Because if B won because they took VC or because they launched earlier or whatever it is, then we can start to say - survivor bias isn't really a thing, because the best funded or quickest company wins. And here's the best strategy.

This data would seem so valuable to VCs and founders that you'd think you could make money from it.

And then we could put an end to "survivor bias" as an argument - which presumably would be the outcome (ah confirmation bias! i can't be that scientist) because otherwise it's disproportionately luck and we can all go home now.
Not to mention that you also lose the error context. That boolean "is_valid" flag is not really informative of what happened.

For example, if the image to load doesn't exist, you may want to print/log such path.

The goto looks like a better approach.
On Android, if you go into Permissions, your Google Maps app will probably have 'Physical Activity' as an allowed permission. You can change it to 'Deny'. In fact you can do the same for 'Google Maps' and 'Google'.

Weather that permission denying actually blocks accelerometer access to the app or simply stops it being associated with your profile is beyond me.

At least on Pixel I cannot deny 'Google Play Services' from access Physical Activity so it seems like a feel good permission and they still grab whatever data they want.

Perhaps someone working in Maps can answer that?
And what about those over 40? It seems like an arbitrary cut-off.

There's just as much risk of taking that vaccine regardless of age, so what I'm hearing is over 40s are disposable.

The alternatives should be offered to everyone regardless of age, and the AstraZenca vaccine be discontinued indefinitely.
Knowledge Graphs with Inductive Logic Programming
probably because on most linux distros provide an image (iso) that can simply be written on any media and boots.

like: cat ubuntu.iso >/dev/sdd

or

dd if=./ubuntu.iso of=/dev/sdd
Man, that's so sad. I don't even know what to say, but hope you can find happiness somewhere.
>You might be surprised how much of modern tech was developed by racists and other bad apples

William Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor. See section “Views on Race and Eugenics”.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shockley
Isn't it what Synology is or was doing with ExtJS ?
I keep repeating this since it seems like folks ignore this quite crucial piece of data which completely changes the whole Wuhan covid narrative - Covid was backdated in blood samples in September 2019 in Italy. They didn't have earlier samples still kept on ice, so its entirely possible it would be there earlier.

Since its rather trivial to compare viruses and I haven't seen mention about it being a different variant, I assume its still the same virus as original Wuhan ones.

Even to my rather ignorant eyes this makes Wuhan just a place it got spread to wider public, and not much more. Definitely not some patient-0 situation and most probably not even ground-0 one. Now I don't claim to understand why it didn't explode in those early days like it did afterwards, but this fact can't be ignored when evaluating this topic. I wonder why there isn't a single mention of this in article.
Obviously we’re speaking in generalities, but sometimes people reclaim that power vía speaking up about victimhood.
Posted yesterday.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27054348
New productivity tools to try in 2021
But other countries have acted as though there was an infectious disease outbreak, haven't had the deaths and don't need to "win" because they didn't "loose" in the first place.
in many cases you're probably right that mandatory type annotations would improve readability. Taking the rhetorical question very literally, though, there are some times when having it two keystrokes away is very helpful. I often query the type of a large expression (e.g. a partially applied function to remember what argument comes next) or the signature of some module
I prefer the equivalent but opposite legislation, remove meat and dairy subsidies. I don’t have faith in governments to constantly fine tune subsidies to the right things. Subsidies just become a means for politicians to pass money to their constituents. It took Canada 60 years to stop emphasizing cow milk consumption in their dietary guide, I have very little faith in governments to get things right let alone in a quick iterative fashion.
It's not reassuring to read that our only choices are two different ways for small creators to constantly be robbed
Yeah, considering it's mythical status, I found the material rather thin and uninformative :/
This is actually wrong. Some friends of mine proved that if you drop only S and Z pieces in an irrational ratio, the player is doomed irrespective of the dimensions of the board.
> If your goal is to understand how hardware SIMD works, you're probably better off sticking to C code with intrinsics

Agreed, and we're also using intrinsics in time-critical places. I am confident we will be able to hide both SVE and RVV behind the same C++ interface (https://github.com/google/highway) - works for RVV, just started SVE.
Indeed. I also don't get from the article or the website what the intention is behind targeting webassembly first, instead of an intermediate that can be compiled to anything.
A non-representative, non-ordinary example.

I ran distro upgrade on Fedora and it destroyed my grub. This is unusual, I ran several distro upgrades without issues, but this time it was different.

I am no expert on grub and after spending 20 minutes trying out various solutions from the Internet I gave up and ran a quick reinstall. At least most of it was unattended and I had a clean system as a result.
Thank you for putting it so clearly!

It is disingenuous to claim to care about Science while willfully ignoring the biases inherent in the narrative of presentation.
>"and don't pretend you 'only care about the science'."

I don't. The question was did the virus come out as the result of that research or not. The answer is simple yes or no. No need to dance around.
Yes. Covid continues to behave like any other virus.
IMO the content ID stuff is not the problem but the entire system, like before you take any drastic measure have a person check, also put as input in your stupid algorithm the channel information , a 5 years old channel with many subscribers would cause a lot of noise if your stupid algorithm causes issue so even from a lazy,selfish, stupid Google dev you would put a if(channelReputition> x) ...be more careful.

After working a lot with angular1 I have a really low opinion about Google devs, maybe they have some stars in their team but this does not mean that the products are good OR we can argue the devs are great but they were required intentional to build crap.
I remember seeing one of these very outspoken tech people at a conference. He tweeted a photo of a Mexican woman holding a presentation and saying what a great topic it was. Then he preceded to sit in a corner, ignore the talk, and work on his laptop. Or people who pull in >300k, go on about communism, but buy fast cars.

Full of shit, the lot.
Well have to say Rufus is good. But there is a far better tool: Ventoy.

You will only need to format your thumb drive once and for all. After that, you will simply only need to copy the image file such as .iso, .vhd etc on to the drive and you are all set. Check details from the following sites.

https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html
https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy
Ah, good old Ballmer, I miss that guy...

Steve Ballmer, when CEO of Microsoft, was said to have thrown his chair at an employee announcing they would leave the company to work for Google back in the mid-2000s.

It is a bit of an urban legend. Ballmer himself denies that has ever happened (https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-ballmer-i-didnt-throw-...) - but he was eccentric enough (just google "developer dance") that people considered it plausible.
> You report the incident to who you are directed to report into and are told to, "man up."

Given that you also mention further down a dev getting punched, I think this statement was code for “if you don’t like what they’re saying, you should just shut them up.”

Machismo-driven cultures are confusing until you realize that everyone is just expecting you to literally physically assault your way to the top, and is just annoyed with you for seeking peaceful resolutions rather than immediately jumping to violence / intimidation. In such societies, (public) peaceful resolutions lower the social status of both parties making them!
Yes, it is very weird wording. It is also strange that the comparison omits graduates of schools ranked 11-20. Those schools are not as prestigious as the top-10, but their graduates (like me) go on to practice in the same expensive cities so their salaries are in the same order of magnitude.

Including this cohort in the comparison would have made the not-shocking 50% gap even less impressive.
A rare exception to the old advice to "Buy land, they're not making it anymore."
I wouldn’t go as far as to presume that a typical parent, having been traumatised through being a victim of such a system themselves, is capable of teaching the topic strictly informatively, with impartiality and without imparting a (hopefully lesser) trauma on their children. It tends to seep through generations.
what's the equivalent (especially handling bios and uefi and stuff) on linux for it? i would be really interested.
It wouldn't surprise me if some of the "hype squad" (as you put it) were part of the marketing campaign at product launch. Rave reviews about a new product that are based on benchmarks alone rarely make sense to me.
Maybe most of contemporary
employment is slavery as people like David Greaber, Noam Chomsky & Nassim Taleb have asserted.

The problem with a change that alters this however, is that you may be tampering with the bread of alot of powerful people.

There alot of incentives for the powerful to keep things the way they are.
Side question: what was the reason the WHO had a team inspect the lab in Wuhan a year after the outbreak happened? What would they even look for?
Not to discount your experience, but I think high school counselors and university advisors just aren't very good in general, or are at least very hit or miss. They will tell all kinds of students not to bother trying for an elite school, or try to steer them away from college altogether. I also missed out on a lot of opportunities that I only recognized in hindsight, because nobody thought to tell me and I didn't know where to look.
In theory but there is effectively already in many cases greater affirmative action for white people already. Lets look at Harvard as a case study.

43% of white students at Harvard are legacies, athletes, or related to staff and 75% of these 43% wouldn't have been admitted on merits.

Around 1/3 of white people at Harvard are there because of effectively white affirmative action.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/study-harvard-finds-43-...

A drive to pick people solely on merits would sound more meritorious if we applied it to white people first. I say this as a white man who believes in theory colorblind meritocracy in an imaginary world where such a thing can actually exist.
Quantum Entanglement Goes Large
Continued: (Was on-site earlier and didn't have time to type the rest as, crazy enough, this was just the beginning of what turned into years of encounters)

Before I could react to the printer landing at feet (I was frozen) he yelled almost exactly "Don't you ever fucking walk into my office like that again, G T F O" so I slowly stepped out and shut the door. As I said, it (door) was cracked open, and the entire front of the office was a large single pane of uncovered clear glass, so it's not like he was on the phone or I walked in on something.

For certain half the floor heard it, but not a sign of life in the hallway of about 12 other offices. I immediately walked straight to manager/CFO's area and rather calmly (in shock) explained what happened. It was short and sweet as was the experience. He apologized and said to please not worry about it or take it personally, that the person was simply/unfortunately "like that" and best to leave him alone and forget it ever happened, and that he would talk to the CEO about it to have him put in a word.
I'm professional, I had worked Hollywood for long enough to know of his type (first time experiencing anything like that though) so I remained calm and treated this like a test and said "no problem, never happened."

The story made its way around the office and people simultaneously joked about it while saying they were sorry about the experience too, and echoed my manager's advice to leave him alone. Fast forward about a year and one day he was gone. No one talked about it. I'm guessing the company finally got enough on him to terminate without worry of blowback. He was a partner and probably had a decent contract in place.

Now, something like 5 years after that (I had moved on to greener pastures) I was out front of a community volunteer bike shop chatting with the team. They were sticking around after-hours to let a metal salvage person take away some old/rusted inventory. A beat up old van with metal junk piled on the roof parks nearby and who walks out and over to us?? It's the guy, I recognize him instantly and as his eyes meet mine I say with a big smile "firstname-Fuckin-lastname, how the hell are ya!" and this time he is frozen, turns right on a dime, and starts power walking back to the van. I follow saying something like hey hey, come back, no hard feelings, but he must be so embarrassed he runs the rest of the way and jumps in the van and peels off. I heard he never came back to that shop again. He went from partner at a well funded firm to east LA metal salvage work. It was such an amazing feeling. I do feel for him though. As someone pointed out in comments he very likely had a mental or drug related issue. What a wild world.

Signing off.
If Apple doesn't have a monopoly, where are the other iOS app stores?
>SARS Classic

The remakes are always worse.
Who says you have to? There's a lot of artists, people reverse engineering things or people writing up historic events on Twitter. Just like on Patreon you support the person because you like what they are doing, not a random meme account because they posted a funny repost.
No but I’ve been ruined for sad ICE cars.
In my experience, I have to qualify I program "ANSI C", otherwise people assume that I am really talking about C++.

I list ANSI C and no C++ in my professional experience and yet I have had a bunch of people call me to seriously talk about me helping in their C++ project. Maybe I shouldn't fault recruiters too much, though they should probably understand what language they are hiring for. But some of these guys were technical managers.

It kinda seems to me a lot of technical world assumes C died and C++ is newer and better version of it, which obviously is wrong way to look at it. These are separate languages that for unfortunate historical reasons share a lot of tooling and language syntax.
> This was the other thing. We fell into the hands of Agile cultists (really no other way to portray them) and wound up getting buried in process, useless meetings, etc.

That's curious since "agile", as the name suggests, should be very lean on the process. There is nothing agile about a lot of process details!

Sure, people get too invested and miss the boat, but in general it's not too hard to remind them what "agile" is about (hey, it's in the name!), and in my experience, they usually relent.
I sort-of am: I'd say it seems most reasonable to assign a negative reaction to any purchases, so the positive reasons need to be enough to justify it.
I moderate r/crypto . It's about cryptography, not cryptocurrency. Imagine the spam we get.
I agree, if they're particularly interesting. There's a whole wealth of information out there that's not available in English, and machine translation tools are good enough to mostly make sense of most things nowadays.
"a leading world center for research on coronaviruses" presumes some form of uniqueness amongst potential other similar facilities
Yeah read that too but seriously? You going to spend the energy harvesting and transporting that to the center of the country so cows fart a little less? Meanwhile China still puking out a third of the world's CO2 with no end in sight.
Malice is a form of self-interest.
With air traffic everything that was in Italy in November could have come from any country with same day express shipping.
JS is the most used language for web development both client and server side.
It's easy to find fullstack repos with only JS code and a bunch of shell scripts to launch the tooling like webpack bundler and cypress e2e tester.
By wrapping the tooling also in JS it's possible to take advantage of shared configuration written in JS and write reusable functions to share across scripts.
Currently I have all my tooling scripts in bash (not yet in JS) and it's becoming hard to manage. Sharing functions and constant values across folders in shell bash script is very cumbersome.
Couldn't agree more. It's highly proceeded fake food.

I think you could do better by simply eating more veggies and cutting red meat consumption.
> [1] https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/02/02/my...

Okay, this is the best article of them all, the one I was wishing for. Congratulations, you win ten thousand Internets!

Best part (although the whole thing is totally worth reading):

As Neubert says, “Welcome to the bottleneck!” Turning a mixture of mRNA and a set of lipids into a well-defined mix of solid nanoparticles with consistent mRNA encapsulation, well, that’s the hard part. ... Everyone is almost certainly having to use some sort of specially-built microfluidics device ... These will be special-purpose bespoke machines, and if you ask other drug companies if they have one sitting around, the answer will be “Of course not”. This is not anything close to a traditional drug manufacturing process. And this is the single biggest reason why you cannot simply call up those “dozens” of other companies and ask them to shift their existing production over to making the mRNA vaccines.
> You can even use the chart (and maybe Wikipedia) to identify specific reasons as to why you're doing something wrong

There's a book called "Learner English" by Michael Swan and Bernard Smith for identifying common problems faced by English learners coming from different language backgrounds. They don't have a section on Finnish, at least in my second edition.
same tools really ... stuff like syslinux is included, and for "flashing" you could just use dd.
> A future without passwords

No, thank you, especially if Google is going to be the gatekeeper.

https://github.com/pcarrier/gauth FTW
I wonder how do they trade stock in Indonesia, Vietnam or in old times before euro in Italy? Maybe ask them about solution?
There's also the classic can't, count, and cunt (the last being one of the most offensive expletives).
> I don't want my kids to be taught that there's this amorphous but pervasive "systemic racism" and "white supremacy" out to get people who look like them, but which they can't do anything about.

My local PBS station recently aired a series on Asian Americans. The first episode was all about how they were ill treated in the past, and their fight for civil liberties.

I didn't bother watching the other episodes. Certainly not a show I'll ever let my (Asian) children watch. It was a good episode if the topic was specifically about civil right struggles by Asian Americans, but deciding to start a series about a whole group of people with how they were mistreated is problematic. There's a lot more to Asian Americans than just their treatments by whites. Why not begin with their achievements and cultures, and leave this for a later episode? Is their mistreatment so important to their identity?

If I watched a series on African Americans, and it began with all the (real) systemic racism - their low graduation rates, high teen pregnancies, high unemployment, and tied it to the centuries of slavery, it would be equally problematic. Why not begin the series with things like "Every single new genre of American music in the 20th century (rap, rock n roll, etc) was pioneered by African Americans"? How many people know the negatives, and how many know this accomplishment? Ask yourself: Would a documentary series starting with their problematic statistics result in more people knowing the negatives vs the positives?

When I talk to people from my home country, you'll see this dissonance: They all sympathize with the "plight of the black man", and they'll all tell me to stay away from them. They watch documentaries like these.

I don't want my children growing up believing they are victims of society, even if there is truth to it. I grew up in a third country, and my race was definitely discriminated against in nasty ways. Yet my parents and school did not try to inculcate a sense of victimhood, and I can tell you - it's extremely beneficial not to be weighed down by that belief. And the racism there was more overt than here - often having to deal with it in stores and in school.

Of course, there will be conversations with my kids about it. But it will be somewhere in the middle of the list of important discussions to have, not on the top.
If you can program C well, C++ isn't going to be too much of a problem for you. The reverse is not necessarily true. If I were hiring on a C++ project I'd definitely want to talk to someone who is genuinely good at C - they may not want to talk of course.
The jvm takes 50 ms to start. That's 620ms unaccounted for in Hello World.