MarkMc

> And it’s not as if anyone is clicking Google search ads for Coca-Cola and ordering a 6-pack right there. This is the same problem that these companies have with TV advertising.

Supermarkets already have a loyalty card program where you receive a small discount and in return you agree to receive targeted advertising based on your purchases.

Why don't these loyalty programs add a clause saying that they may also share your personal information with Google? That would mean Coca-Cola or Proctor and Gamble could see how much they spent on advertising to a particular person, and how much that person spent in buying the company's products.

"The HSM-based Backup Key Vault will be responsible for enforcing password verification attempts and rendering the key permanently inaccessible after a limited number of unsuccessful attempts to access it"

Is this standard practice for HSM? It seems to give hackers the ability to maliciously delete the users key and thereby effectively delete the users data.

Fascinating that players in VR would not attempt to turn the handle of a latched door, and instead would simply assume the door was locked. And the solution was incredible: simply play the hand-rotation animation when the player grabs the handle - and the player will think they had rotated their hand!

This article is wrong to assume targeted advertising requires complex machine learning algorithms. Here are some personal examples where my ads have been poorly targeted:

- I'm actively looking to buy a house for more than a million dollars, and I'm signed into my real estate app using my Google email address. Meanwhile YouTube is showing me ads for Candy Crush Saga.

- A week ago I almost bought an iMac on Apple's website but bailed at the credit card payment screen. I had logged into my Apple account with my Google email address, yet since then I've not seen one ad to suggest I should buy that iMac (although I do see Apple ads for iPhone on Twitter)

- Twitter kept showing me Disney Plus ads even after I signed up

- In 2019 on holiday in Bali I saw YouTube ads in Indonesian, despite being logged in and being unable to speak that language

It's not pointless - the point is to reduce the number of people who come into Australia. Quarantine is not perfect; fewer arrivals means fewer sources of infection.

Thereputic Plasma Exchange (ie. exchanging blood plasma with saline and albumin) seems a very promising treatment for aging. [1] [2]

"These findings are exciting not only because they represent a scientific advance in understanding aging, but also because they herald the first real anti-aging product that could come to market. Therapeutic plasma exchange is FDA-approved (not for aging, but for a bunch of other conditions). I imagine there remain prohibitions on advertising that it can add years to your life, but it is safe, and a doctor can prescribe it off label. It’s also cheap. An automated plasmapheresis machine—which lets you do treatment after treatment—can be bought online for under $3,000. That is less than the cost of a single transfusion of young blood sold by the startup Ambrosia. How long until someone opens a clinic offering plasma dilution? I bet someone tries it in 2021. If it works, people will get over the weirdness, and it could be commonplace by 2030." [3]

[1] https://www.aging-us.com/article/103418/text#fulltext

[2] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11357-020-00297-8

[3] https://elidourado.com/blog/notes-on-technology-2020s/

Here's an idea, although I'm not sure if it would work:

The government allows Tesla to conduct a randomised control trial: When you get in a Tesla you enter your destination, then there's a 50% chance of having to drive the car manually (the 'control') and 50% chance of having the car drive you (the 'treatment'). After 10 million trips, if the treatment group had fewer accidents than the control group, then Tesla is allowed to roll out self driving to everyone. But on the other hand, if treatment has more accidents than the control group then Tesla must pay, say, $10 million for each excess fatality.

>> It gets safer overtime.

> There is no evidence of this happening yet.

With aircraft any crash or near-crash is investigated and then the software and procedures for all similar aircraft are updated. Over the decades this has resulted in a huge reduction in the rate of accidents. Isn't it likely that the same thing will happen with self-driving cars?

Another thing that gets missed is this: With self-driving cars every single fatal accident will be investigated, and the result of that investigation will be used to improve the software on all cars in the network.

In this way the rate at which cars kill people will decline, similar to the systematic decline in airplane deaths over the years.

So maybe it's worth initially accepting a self-driving fatality rate that is slightly above the human-driving rate?

> In the weeks following this move, the rate of infections among healthcare workers on red wards dropped spectacularly, quickly falling to the level experienced by staff on green wards where there were no Covid patients

Why has taken so long to identify what type of masks are effective? Why did nobody do a randomized controlled trial of these FFP3 masks when the pandemic hit?

I find it strange that it has taken so long, given the simplicity of the technology and the huge potential benefit. How many lives could have been saved if this report was published a year ago?

At least in England and Wales the pandemic seems to have led to a reduction in crime:

> Total police recorded crime decreased by 4% in England and Wales to approximately 5.8 million offences in the 12 months ending June 2020; police reported crime levels were relatively stable from July 2019 to March 2020 and the annual decrease was mainly driven by substantial falls during the April to June 2020 period, particularly in theft offences.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeand...

Buzzfeed News have been writing serious, in-depth news articles for years now. Here's a great one from 2016 about how Facebook is the internet in Myanmar: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/sheerafrenkel/fake-news...

Unfortunately their brand is tainted by the reddit-meme listicle crap of their sister site. I'm surprised they haven't changed their name yet.

McLaren College | Mumbai, India | Online Teacher | Full-time | REMOTE

"Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?"

-- Steve Jobs to Pepsi CEO John Sculley, 1983

Join us on our mission to change the world! McLaren College is an online school designed to identify and train people in poor countries for software engineering careers who otherwise would not have such an opportunity. We do not charge any up-front fees for our course; our fees are charged as a percentage of a student's income after they graduate (or complete at least 60% of the course). We enrolled our first batch of students for our Flutter and React programming course in September 2019 and are currently preparing our next batch of students for a MERN-stack course.

If you have a passion for programming and helping others, please consider applying for our teaching assistant role: https://mclarencollege.in/jobs/online-teaching-assistant.htm...

Send your CV to jobs@mclarencollege.in including the role you are applying for and let us know how you heard about the role (ie. on HN).

This is why Trump's threat to withdraw from NATO was so short-sighted. In the 20th century NATO was basically America supporting Europe against Russia. But in the 21st century it will be Europe supporting the US against China.

Impressive, but not quite good enough to avoid the 'uncanny valley' - the lips are not perfectly synced to the audio. Also it should allow a way stress certain words in the input script.

> EVs are eventually going to cost way less to make than typical ICE (internal combustion engine) cars, and per unit that savings translates into a lot of fucking profit

Not in a competitive market which is where Tesla may be in 10 or 15 years, especially if everyone commutes by robo-taxi.

When Berkshire Hathaway was still a textile company the operating manager excitedly told Warren Buffett about a new loom machine being developed which was far more efficient. Buffett's responded that if the report was true he would likely close the business, because he cost savings would flow to the customer and the long-term return on the new capital investment would be low.

To me the best explanation of the Monty Hall problem is to imagine there are 1000 doors. You pick a door and the host opens 998 other doors. Since you almost certainly did not choose the correct door, the host has almost certainly identify the correct door, so you should change your guess.

Then apply the same logic for 100 doors, then 10 doors, then 3 doors.

Craig Barton's excellent book [1] makes a compelling argument in favour of the 'explicit instruction' for teaching maths. Here's an excerpt:

---------------

I was particularly proud of a guided discovery task I came up with for introducing some of the more complex laws of indices to my Year 11 class two years ago. The worksheet looked like this:

https://photos.app.goo.gl/dzWPzw32hWVDLvYG8

Nice, eh? Again, I ask the question: what could possibly go wrong?

Well, quite a lot, as it turns out.

My takeaway

When considering a guided discovery task, the question I should have asked myself is: what is the best that can happen? Take the laws of indices lesson. The best that can happen is that all students discover the laws of indices for themselves, leaving no gaps in their knowledge, nor developing any misconceptions, in a reasonable time frame. We can then proceed with the rest of the lesson, maybe moving on to application questions, or interleaving other topics into the examples (see Chapter 12), such as indices involving surds or fractions.

How often does that actually happen?

In my experience, literally never.

What actually happens is that one or two students discover exactly what I wanted them to discover. They are feeling great about themselves, and rightly so – as we have seen in Chapter 2, success is motivating. A handful of students have some kind of idea what is going on, but with an eclectic mix of gaps in their knowledge and newly formed misconceptions. Some of these students are aware they have gaps and misconceptions, others are blissfully ignorant. And the rest of the students do not have a flipping clue what is going on. They are feeling confused and pretty down about themselves when they see their fellow classmates have figured it out.

Any form of decent formative assessment strategy (Chapter 11) quickly reveals this disparity between levels of understanding, and as such I cannot move on with the lesson. So what do I inevitably end up doing? Teaching the laws of indices, of course! Maybe I will set those students who seem to have understood it off on the work I hoped everyone else would be moving on to – mind you, I would really like them to hear my explanation and do the worked examples, but how can I justify doing so when they have demonstrated their understanding? Hmmm…

Anyway, back to the rest of the class. By this stage, I am 30 minutes into a 50-minute lesson, rattling through a series of worked examples on the laws of indices far quicker and with much less care than I should. There is zero time for the students to practise their newly acquired skills and hence consolidate their knowledge, nor sufficient time for me to do any kind of application questions which would show them the full breadth of the topic.

But it is even worse than that. Even if I could somehow freeze time and spend those lost 30 minutes going through carefully structured and well-chosen worked examples (Chapters 6 and 7), I am not back at square one. I am behind square one, because my students are no longer coming at the topic with fresh eyes. Many of those who failed to ‘discover’ the key relationships have already decided that indices are difficult, and yet another area of maths that they don’t understand. It’s going to take more than my magically retrieved 30 minutes to turn that one around.

And so I wave goodbye to a group of confused students trundling out of the door, promising that we will pick this up again tomorrow, assuring them it will all be fine. I am already dreading the lesson, wanting to open up proceedings by saying ‘okay, everyone, forget what happened yesterday’. In the past, I blamed my students for this – if only more of them could have figured it out. Now, I know the blame rests squarely at my feet. I never gave them a chance.

[1] "How I Wish I'd Taught Maths: Lessons learned from research, conversations with experts, and 12 years of mistakes" https://amzn.eu/3BkjAsl

McLaren College | Mumbai, India | Online Teacher | Full-time | REMOTE

"Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?"

-- Steve Jobs to Pepsi CEO John Sculley, 1983

Join us on our mission to change the world! McLaren College is an online school designed to identify and train people in poor countries for software engineering careers who otherwise would not have such an opportunity. We do not charge any up-front fees for our course; our fees are charged as a percentage of a student's income after they graduate (or complete at least 60% of the course). We enrolled our first batch of students for our Flutter and React programming course in September 2019 and are currently preparing our next batch of students for a MERN-stack course.

If you have a passion for programming and helping others, please consider applying for our teaching assistant role: https://mclarencollege.in/jobs/online-teaching-assistant.htm...

Send your CV to jobs@mclarencollege.in including the role you are applying for and let us know how you heard about the role (ie. on HN).

4 points and no comments on Hacker News. Clearly not many people are interested in this issue. To me it feels a bit like those 'we are not prepared for a global pandemic' warnings before 2020.

Suppose I know of a number of people in India who have covid symptoms and difficulty breathing but cannot get treatment in any hospital due to overcrowding. As someone who lives in a Western country, what is the most effective way to help them?

I could simply send them money, but they might use it to bribe hospital staff for treatment, or outbid other people for oxygen cannisters. They would benefit but other people would lose out.

Maybe I should buy medicine in my home country and send it to them? Or maybe buy oxygen concentrator machines on Alibaba and have them shipped to India?

Wow this makes BCG look really bad and no doubt has cost them lots of business. They really should have offered more than $16k hush money!

I'm a Google shareholder partly because I find their ads are so poorly targeted at me.

For example, I'm currently looking to buy a car - my recent search history includes "buy z4" and "merc c class". Yet YouTube is showing me generic ads for the local supermarket and off-track-betting (and I've never gambled in my life). So it seems Google has a lot of room to improve the algorithm that matches viewer to advertiser

> Bitcoin isn’t a cash competitor, it’s a gold competitor - and it’s a pretty good one.

I wonder whether people will switch to Bitcoin en-mass when Asteroid mining becomes viable.

I'm sure that if McDonald's paid Taylor a bonus for 99.99% uptime then at least half of 'operator errors' would disappear.

A few hours? That is a fantastic return on investment!

By the way, you should definitely add this to your CV. It's the sort of technical thing that really stands out from other candidates.

They need the scale of Facebook to work?

Suez Canal Authority makes $5.6 billion per year, so a week's loss of throughput would be in the order of $100 million.

Warren Buffett has become very rich in part because he appreciates the value of goodwill to a business while others ignore it. Here's a summary of what he's written on the topic:

To a business, goodwill is an asset just as real as cash or vehicles. In fact it is often more valuable than fixed assets because it appreciates over time while the latter depreciates. Despite this, it doesn't appear on the traditional Profit and Loss statement so is overlooked by managers whose compensation is based on such an inadequate measure of profit.

Thanks for the honest reflection. It's interesting to consider how long YC might have continued to dismiss the remote option if Covid-19 had not appeared. Maybe another decade?

It's also interesting to consider other areas where the cost-benefit ratio fluctuates depending on the level of effort - and that changes over time. For example, the US Air Force would probably say that drone aircraft are becoming important, but that the war in Afghanistan shows the US still needs aircraft with a pilot in the cockpit. However, if you gave the Air Force an ultimatum and said that in 12 months it had to fight a mock battle with only unmanned aircraft - and all officers would be demoted if they lost - then the US might develop a fighting capability far in excess of its current ability.