skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One thing that is hard to quantify is the risk of long-term effects, which are unknown.

There is an elegant argument, due to Laplace, that says that if you have an urn containing red and blue balls, you extract N balls, and M of them are red, you should assume that the probability that the next ball is red is (M+1)/(N+2), and not M/N as one might naively assume. The general case requires integrating the beta function, which is kind of advanced, but the M=0 case can be done with elementary calculus, as follows.

Call X the probability of extracting a blue ball, which we view as a property of the urn. If we don't know anything about X, before we extract any balls, we should assume a uniform prior distribution P[X]=1 for 0<=X<=1 (this is the main and only assumption). The probability of seeing M=0 red balls after extracting N, for given X, is the same as the probability that all balls are blue, i.e., P[M=0|X]=X^N. But we care about P[X|M], not P[M|X]. By Bayes' theorem, P[X|M] is proportional to P[M|X]P[X], times a proportionality constant that makes the total probability be 1. Because we assumed P[X]=1, we have that P[X|M=0] is proportional to P[M=0|X]=X^N. The integral of X^N between X=0 and 1 is 1/(N+1), yielding P[X|M=0]=(N+1) X^N. The expected value of X is the integral for X=[0,1] of X P[X|M=0], which is E[X]=(N+1)/(N+2). This is the expected probability of a ball being blue, with 1-E[X]=1/(N+2) being the probability of a ball being red. QED.

Now say we have historically observed 1000 vaccines and they were all safe in the long term. It is still perfectly rational to assume that there is a 1/1002 chance that this vaccine is unsafe in the long term. Anybody claiming otherwise better have a cogent argument about why the prior probability should not be uniform. Saying that 1000 vaccines were long-term safe and thus this one is long-term safe is equivalent to assuming a prior of the form P[X]=1/(X (1-X)), which is hard to justify (and diverges at 0 and 1).

Basically, the problem is that we are entering the territory where the risk from the disease is comparable to a rational estimate of the risk of what we don't know, and it's hard to come to any kind of cogent conclusion.

But anybody who claims that all past vaccines were long-term safe and thus this one is long-term safe clearly does not understand basic probability.
Perfect! This is an example of content that social networks don’t consider harmful enough to ban. An example of content that is considered too harmful to allow by every social network is pro-eating disorder and pro-self harm content.

Where do you think anti-vaxx lives on that spectrum?
My prayers have been answered. Google Meet devs I beg you, make the app more efficient.
The company can offer something called a Tender Offer or Liquidity Event (I've heard them used interchangeably) where when they're raising new funding the employees can put up the shares they hold as a part of the sale. Alternatively a share buy back.
No I'm not certain but I can certainly say that the whole setup is much more responsive after taking MQTT out of the loop.
Love your website, Ken. I discovered it some time back from HN (long before I registered an account here). You are an inspiration.
Looked good until I saw where the money was going. “Latinx” is not a thing, what a load of nonsense
What did you do to beat Mixpanel to IPO - when they had a couple year head-start?
This thing has been going on for a long time.

First time some seriously tired to make "computer composer", maybe 1960s?, it passed double blind test flying colors. Professional musicians declared that computer could never compose something like this" about computer made music.

Using learning and using generative grammars has been used to imitate different jazz musicians in 90s.

Some modern composers use computers to generate music, they just tweak parameters until it is how they like it. It's still human made.
> That... wasn't the claim.

That did appear to be the claim in Fauci's 60 Minutes interview. It was a pretty colossal messaging fuckup and damaged Fauci's credibility and trustworthiness early in the game.
> john list does have a phd, and spent 8 years teaching elsewhere prior to UC. not sure if that supports your meritocracy argument, as one would think someone with his reputation today could advance quicker.

I know John List has a PhD. I said he went to an unranked school. You had previously said

> Google Research employs 2000+ people. I believe not only they all have PhDs, but also from top-tier schools.

and I was pointing out that Google Research seemed unlikely to be more credentialist than university economic research, implying that there would be quite a few people at GR with PhDs from non-top schools.

I don't think there's much disagreement between us. I doubt there are more than 20 researchers at GR without PhDs, if that many. May your research and life be fruitful.
> You actually mean spread an opinion. I doubt any one citizen would conduct a trial or research; some may actually look at data, but that is rare. These are opinions, most likely biased by a belief.

You could say that about most breaking news.

It is not reasonable to expect people to conduct a rigorous field research before sharing their observations, especially if people's lives are on the line.

I distinctly remember citizen journalists sharing videos and pictures of the chaos in China at the end of 2019, trying to warn us. I remember all the tech platforms and our media doing everything they could to suppress it.
Disagree. Functional programmers often speak of implementing programs with a pure core and a thin layer on the outside that handles effects. (Read the article I pointed to earlier.)

If you don't have a pure core then you are not using FP.
Obviously you have to A/B test it and try both.
Wait, I thought this was a fake case stemming from structural misogyny!
There's an interesting paper[1] that argues that real numbers aren't physical, for the precise reasons you stated. That is, only the subset of real numbers that contain a finite amount of information (like constructive real numbers) are physically meaningful.

A consequence of this is that classical physics is not really deterministic: this is because, in general (ie. including chaotic systems), the evolution of a system depends on a set of initial conditions that are specified by full real numbers, impossible to measure with finite precision. So, the use of real numbers is hiding the indeterminism in the initial conditions, much like the function in this article encodes a dataset in a single parameter.

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.06824
One of many things I learned from writing software just for myself is that I'm just about as bad as anybody at figuring out what I really want, even when I'm talking to myself. I've even had one or two cases where I ignored a feature I asked myself for, and much later realized: Hey, I could actually use that. The worst is asking myself, "How many times do I have to ask for this before you quit procrastinating and just get it done???" I'm not sure which of me is the bigger jerk.
> notion that all culture and aspects of a particular culture are of equal worth

I never made such a claim.

The problem is that everyone has their opinion on what needs to be preserved. I might not care at all about what you have on your hard drive, and vice versa.

Archive and libraries aren't Eternal and Forever Storage. Future archivist might as well prune them (as they do).

However, at the current time we don't have enough data to decide which things are worth preserving, and which are not.
Google/FAANG have no real point of control anywhere in the process of how the sciences operate. Scientists publish in journals, while social media, search, et al. are handy but not something that guides their research or their consensus.

The real gatekeeping comes in what research gets grants and funding, but if you look into what's happening there, it's not comparable to the Church proscribing things - it mostly means that the DoD, petrochem, and a few industries have outsized influence on what research is done.
In q/kdb, bracket for unary function application is optional, that is, f[x] is the same as f x. I found it very convenient after a while, and wish other language follows. It is very convenient to write f g h x, than f[g[h[x]]]
> it's something you get for free with shared dependencies.

Yes, it's also something you get for free with Flatpaks; if the base image gets updated, the Flatpaks running on it will also get fixed libraries without having to rebuild the Flatpak.

From that point of view, there's not actually that much difference between an RPM or DEB and .flatpak; you have a base system along with some dependencies that will get updated and you'll get the updates 'for free'. Everything that is not included in the base image you will have to provide yourself and you'll have to do it yourself.
Never knew what coil whine was, but it does make a “dit dit” sound when I move the mouse onscreen. I don’t notice however unless in an absolutely quiet room with my ear tilted to keyboard. Never had issues with sleep.
> It reduces severe symptoms but more and more vaccinated are contracting it daily even in places of 95+% vaccinated

That's what the world living with COVID looks like. Given the Delta's estimated reproduction number (5~8), there's no herd immunity achievable in a near future. Then make it less severe and transmissible so we can handle it without strict lockdown and overloading public health infrastructure. At least until we get a universal vaccine against COVID.
Back in the day, I used JRuby because it was the only way I was able to run Ruby on Windows 2003 servers that I was forced to use while working for the Federal Government. (Yes, Thin and Mongrel existed, but their perf on Windows was REALLY bad)

Was it fast? No. Was it "good enough?" yep. It never fell over.
Reminds me of the stereotype of dentists giving out toothbrushes on Halloween.

Maybe if you're life is about preventing cavities you think that's what kids should always have in mind, but life would suck if before every action we asked "will this contribute to tooth decay" - much more than it would suck with a few cavities.
My comment was in regard to vaccine safety/side effects, not long-term efficacy.

Flu vaccines are only really effective for a single season. Hopefully it’s longer, but even if c19 vaccines give you only 1-2 years protection before requiring a booster, I’d say that’s still pretty good.
This might enable simulation but forecasting is a chaotic problem isn't it? It's essentially like trying to predict a stream of random numbers - even if they follow a certain attractor, it's still impossible to know exactly what form they'll take.
> why I would have anything to do with "useRef with useEffect and useCallback". I've never encountered any issue with these things.

The fact that you are asking and haven't hit the issue suggests you haven't actually used useRef before.

> Oh, you just hated React all along, so you probably never understood it.

Sure, asshole. I've only been using React for 6 years now. But whatever.
Do you mean socialization as an end goal? Autists don't have it as an end goal. A wolf doesn't suffer if it can't fly, the problem is simply not on the table in the first place.
They did this a year too late, and even after doing so, waited four months to reveal the results.
Thanks for doing the AMA!

How did you discover your repeatable distribution channel, and what did it end up being?
Your assertion is orthogonal to the original thread. When the "Arab Spring" started all the talking heads were going on about free speech, Democratic values, the positive role social media is playing, and beating the war drums. It's only after the situation had started threatening geopolitical interests did the tune change.

>Social media companies actually had a hugely successful anti-ISIS recruiting and propoganda campaign.

I question if that's the case. That's like closing the barn doors after the horses have already left. The networks were already in place. The damage already done.

Aggregators like r/syriancivilwar had no shortage of atrocities to share most of which directly from social media.
> At this point even if the shot cured cancer I wouldn't take it because of how it's pushed.

And there it is. For you at least, this has nothing to do with evidence, or facts, or information, or patience or empathy or reasoning or sound medical judgment or anything else, it's just plain stubbornness that's so out of control you're willing to die rather than do something someone else told you to do.

Look, I get it. I hate being told what to do. But at least be honest with yourself that that's what's going on, and that all your talk of side effects and whatnot is a smokescreen.
The problem is that your page https://val-lang.org/ lists http://www.briiant.com/ as the canonical URL. HN's software replaces submitted URLs with canonical URLs now.

I've switched it back on the current submission.
It is strange to me how many think that “you are going to die” is a harsher threat than “you will live a long life that will be severely crippled”.

If I die, I cease to exist. So, while from the standpoint of the pre-death me, it is very unfortunate, the post-death me is either a null or an ephemeral entity in a different dimension (depending on which of the belief systems works)

Remaining in the same spatial domain but set back into oblivion by my own choices is about as close to the definition of hell as it can get.
‘flu vaccines roll out annually and certainly don’t get 3-5 year clinical trials.
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The author is atleast referring to those rants as "angry mails" he got.

I think these automated CI systems is a losing battle. It makes the build chain to complex. There is too much corner cases that gives false positives unless you keep it dead simple, like eg. enabling all warnings are errors or something in gcc.
There are a number of people that dislike hooks, many of who are vocal in React threads. Basically the entire classes-are-fine camp do, and there are a few of us in the "the React team doesn't appear to understand the functional paradigm" camp.

I fully expect that in a few years React will be widely seen as a J2EE-like poster child of over-engineering shark jumping for the functional paradigm. I already do.
> it is essentially free labor for Apple, Amazon, and pretty much any big company

It heavily depends on what kind of software one is developing, in many cases it is not applicable at all.
When device manufacturers start preferentially favouring, or discriminating against, specific content, channels, or voices, I think you'll find they're similarly regulated. As televisions get "smarter", they are no longer passive carriers but active agents.

An HDMI cable is literally a dumb pipe, and the end-user controls both ends, fully.

(Whether or not they control what reaches the feed-end of that pipe is of course a different question.)
Assuming your data is much shorter than the number of digits to search, and that repeated digits do not appear often enough to matter, the hit rate is just pow(10, numberOfDigitsInData) / numberOfDigitsToSearch. Same idea for any other base (if you then count digits of that base, not base 10 digits of course).

That is, odds of finding a 6 digit datum in a million digits are fairly good. Finding longer data becomes exceedingly unlikely very fast.
For the Romans, all that mattered is that the followers didn't wish to start an actual rebellion against Rome. Which doesn't seem like they did from the writings of Paul and the rest of the NT and early Christianity.
People always want that for teapots. I have a device that uses it as an indication it’s internal data shouldn’t be trusted (some unknown error).

I have it respond with 418 as “I taste colors and the government spies on you with the ground in your house wiring”.

I like it for that more than actual tea pots which is far too on the nose.
Police in the US don't investigate any but very expensive property crime against individuals, either. And I don't actually know that they investigate very expensive property crime—I just assume they do. Certainly mid-five-figures of theft from multiple locations by one crew with tons of video evidence isn't enough to get them interested, beyond taking the report.

... unless your country is the US, in which case, yeah, true.
Oldest screen in web archive I can find is https://web.archive.org/web/20121204213532/http://www.amplit... "Welcome to our awesome mobile analytics platform!" with just a login form.

Oldest landing page I can find is https://web.archive.org/web/20130529150217/https://amplitude...
What are the potential advantages of an mmwave tracking system? The only previous commercial application I can think of was the pixel 4, which was very range and accuracy limited and power hungry.
The setting to tell my phone to turn all the way off when I turn it off is in under "iCloud" settings and is called "Find my network", and that's considered "pretty easy to find"?
They probably thought you were crowdfunding when they went onto the website and it said "Money. We always need money. Right now our funding goal is $50,000."
>things work in simulation but applying them to the market makes them not work

Can you elaborate? Is this because large flows of money eventually become the market? Insinuating that some strategies only work at low trade volume?
At first pass, I don't see how this applies to people sharing information about vaccines whether personal experience, science, or misunderstood science.

How would you say that people sharing information about vaccines and their effects are intolerant?

How would you say that people not wanting to get vaccinated are intolerant of any particular demographic group? That's not targeting anyone by race, gender, sexual orientation, religion. It's a decision for them self about their person.
It exists, e.g. DOMAI.
When you ask people to imagine a feature, they're going to imagine the absolute perfect version of the feature, for them personally. A feature that requires no effort to set up or use, provides exactly the information or functionality they want, and never gets in the way of anything else.

Everyone takes for granted how smooth their own workflow is to them, both because they're already used to it, and because they sunk effort into it to make it smooth (via learning or planning), which has probably been forgotten. So, people just take for granted that new features will maintain that acquired smoothness --- unfortunately, they usually don't.

As the author found out, most of the work in building features is often not in the "raw functionality" of the feature, but rather in making something that performs its functions while also not costing the user significant extra mental or physical effort to use.
CORBA usually evolved into a very service / data oriented approach moving type value pairs around. Really only example problems were OO. At least that's how it worked on the number CORBA projects I was on.
I'm sorry, I'm not quite sure I understand your point.

Are you saying that using our own limited understanding of the vast array of domains to process the impossible amount of information out there is a better system than deferring to various domain experts?

Because, just no. That would not be better. It would be worse. It is worse.

And I'm not saying deferring to domain experts is perfect. It is not. But it's better than expecting everyone to become domain experts in everything.
Congrats!

HN is always saying that working for a FAANG is better money than working for a startup even if it IPOs, so my question to you is: How did your employees make out during the IPO? Is the prevailing HN wisdom correct? Did your average developer employee that stuck it through with you on your journey end up with more or less than what they would have made working at FAANG?
I'm always reminded of this when Theranos comes up. Years ago I was in the hospital, they wouldn't let me out until a blood test showed some numbers that made them feel better. I asked about how the one test worked. The nurse would come in and draw a tube of blood (I forget the volume, but if you've had your blood drawn for a test, a typical tube sized - 10's of mL). And then that'd go down to the lab and be mixed with reagents and a tech would look in a microscope slide and count things. Then they'd reverse the math and turn the things they counted into a concentration of stuff in my blood. That's the number the doctor looked at. So when I worked through the process, and deduced that what the lab tech counted was on average 4 particles of interest. And since I was an obnoxious grad student, I brought up shot noise and said that means there's a 50% error in the measurement and that the doctor should discharge me. Of course, he said that even with a 50% buffer, the numbers were too low for him to feel comfortable.

Long story, but they needed an entire tube of my blood to count 4 particles in the microscope. A drop of blood would not have enough things in it to count. Real life is discrete, and often we need a big sample just to get enough things to count.

That's why I always though Theranos was a fraud.
Your comment is more true today than it was back then, not that I disagree with you posting it. Back then linters were a twinkle in the hopeful eye of software devs. Now they're battle hardened.
> Most (>99.99%) software development is not similar to, say, mathematical, engineering or scientific inquiry: there's no similar value produced for society by working on it (open source or otherwise)

Claiming that less than 0.01% of open source projects provides any value overall seems to be quite pessimistic and not matching reality. Really, just 1 project in 10 000?
Yes, I know the cause, but I'm pointing out a flaw in their plan.

It would be smarter to look for pools of products and be less targetted. E.g. to know that people who buy long lived leather belts may also be interested in long-lived leather wallets, or long-lived shirts, or glass containers instead of plastic, etc, and then rotate all these products in, rather than this targetted barrage of non-stop belt ads for the next year. This just can't be the optimal advertising strategy, there must be diminishing returns to this level of specificity.
Sodomy laws I understand have a history of used to unfairly target or persecute people. I don't agree with obscenity laws, but I think the need to get rid of the former was much more acute.

(Though it supports the idea that all laws should have a sunset clause and have to be intentionally renewed rather than just stay on the books because of apathy)
On the subject of changing tastes, I suspect that in 10 years anything in a corporate Memphis style [1] is going to look horribly amateurist and outdated. This shows up a lot more in landing pages and tutorials than ads, but I'm sure there are similar artifacts in ads these days.

[1] https://en.communia.blog/corporate-memphis/
Why wait at all in that case and not just hold down the power button right away?
Interesting. I'm on 15.1 beta, so perhaps there's a difference. Is it possible the "Find My network" isn't supported on some phones?
> I’ve seen this kind of phenomenon first hand when it comes to drugs.

In 7th or 8th grade, I remember watching a video in health class that included a (presumably fictional) dramatization where a kid died his first time trying marijuana because (unbeknownst to him) it had been laced with crack cocaine. It was difficult to take much of health class seriously after seeing that video.

If your audience doesn't have much background in your subject matter, they're still able to spot lazy arguments. They know they're unable to judge the merits of the rest, but the lazy arguments spoil the whole message. Many times, lazy arguments are less damaging when the audience has the necessary background to evaluate everything being said.
Why is HN Bitcoin news biased toward FUD?
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At this point I would much rather see a list of things that are not predicted to be in short supply.