Hacker News Reader

aab0on The origins of the Nazis’ secret horse breeding project

I actually do expect more from a longreads post. They're usually a top-notch site and above dark patterns like that.

aab0on The origins of the Nazis’ secret horse breeding project

Cuts out at the most interesting point.

aab0on Forum engine written entirely in Assembly

So... anyone tried fuzzing it yet?

aab0on New class of galaxy has been discovered, made almost entirely of dark matter

No infrared. Already ruled out by earlier infrared surveys looking for Dyson spheres.

aab0on Use It Too Much and Lose It? The Effect of Working Hours on Cognitive Ability [pdf]

An economics paper would usually try to exploit a natural experiment changing work hours for people in a way independent of their intelligence and jobs. For example, new labor legislation banning 40-hour work weeks, causing a drop in worked hours: you should be able to see cognitive scores of the same individual increase after the legislation takes effect.

aab0on Sensorwake: Olfactory Alarm Clock

We use vibrating alarm clocks. If you're only hard of hearing, a regular alarm clock can still work as well. My favorite alarm clock had a vibrator and sound, but it also had a socket for my lamp to plug into, so it would wake me up in all 3 ways. Fantastic for waking up at 6AM when I just wanted to either kill myself or go back to sleep. (Sadly, when I was at NTID, the socket for the vibrator to plug in broke.)

aab0on Use It Too Much and Lose It? The Effect of Working Hours on Cognitive Ability [pdf]

This is one of the most unconvincing instruments I've ever seen in an economics paper. They don't even try to justify why variables like 'parents alive' (!), 'other public benefits' (!!), 'owning your own house' (!!!), or 'number of children' or 'work experience' (!!!!) are all causally independent of intelligence. There's no way these form a valid instrument allowing causal inference.

Hey, why not throw in education or grades while you're at it, after all, "The validity of the variables used to generate exclusion restrictions needs to be investigated in future research", since that would be as valid an instrumental variable as any of the others...

(I also object to the media framing this as an argument for 3-day work weeks. If cognitive performance peaked at 3-days, employee performance could still be way worse due to the few hours split up, in addition to the economic overhead for businesses of having many part-timers.)

aab0on Use It Too Much and Lose It? The Effect of Working Hours on Cognitive Ability [pdf]

Preprints are very common in economics. Their papers can float around for years before being 'published'. The figures & tables are at the end of the PDF.

aab0on Artist Peter Doig victorious as court agrees '$10m' painting is not his work

Nor were all of the mentioned facts in the pre-trial coverage. I don't remember the stuff about the other Doig's sister, and the prison records had not yet surfaced (the prison system had been unable to find them at the time).

aab0on Sensorwake: Olfactory Alarm Clock

Kind of suspicious. None of the media articles mentions anyone who's actually used it, and even the original Kickstarter backers have yet to get and try it out: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/222459303/sensorwake-wa... ScienceAlert also mentions that two earlier sleep studies found that various scents hardly worked to wake people up: http://www.sciencealert.com/this-scent-producing-alarm-clock...

aab0on The Complexity Barrier (2003)

The disease one is pretty silly. How awful, now that we've eliminated smallpox and have cures for tuberculosis, malaria, and all the other major killers of humanity we are

"increasingly concerned by new rather subtle diseases (SARS, HIV, BSE etc,) which are very difficult to understand, often difficult to diagnose or only become apparent long after the infection, and which often seem to originate through some change introduced by modern practices, such as use of antibiotics on farm animals or a change in the practices used in preparing meat."

Except new diseases have been constantly arising through human history and those examples arise from the usual ancient zoonotic transmission routes: eating wild meat and living in close proximity with animals. (With the exception of BSE, which inherently will never be anything but an extremely trivial disease.) The only thing 'modern' or 'complex' about them is the names, and that medicine has advanced past witchcraft and is able to notice them.

aab0on Leonard Guarente's Anti-Aging Pill

"After a rocky start — in his memoir, Ageless Quest, Guarente cops to quitting smoking when he was in third grade — he has lived a generally healthy life. Besides Basis, he takes a low-dose statin, aspirin, and vitamin D; weighs himself every day; eats a mostly Mediterranean diet (red wine included); and does a mix of cardio (on the elliptical machine, ever since his knees wore out and he had to stop running) and strength training three days a week at a gym near his home in the Boston suburb of Newton."

This is a pretty sensible anti-aging regimen. Vitamin D and baby aspirin reduce all-cause mortality in the elderly in the meta-analyses, statins are probably helpful, daily weighing will help avoid obesity and metabolic disorder leading to all sorts of bad things like diabetes, and likewise the cardio & weight training. Such a regimen is probably good for at least 2 additional years of life expectancy. If he was going to add anything more, it would have to be metformin or low-dose rapamycin, and those are speculative enough that one might want to wait for TAME/MILES results before deciding.

aab0on Machine Learning and Ketosis

I don't think it matters whether you run 4 passes or 1 pass, it's still going to overfit. You can run an online linear regression in a single pass too, but that doesn't magick away the uncertainties. The results are still going to be garbage, and any effects you get are due to your health-consciousness and not any specific dietary choices you make (how could it be, when the data is so weak and noisy that each item can easily flip signs?).

aab0on Proxima Centauri has a Earth-like planet

They've refused to deny it, so they've confirmed it.

When I saw the headline, I literally went 'Oh come on!' out loud. Apparently there's a bloody Earth-like planet everywhere if even our neighboring star has one.

aab0on A Startup Turns to Saffron to Help Afghanistan Regrow

I think you might be confusing saffron with poppies. Saffron is sufficiently expensive and widely used in cuisine it's hard to see it being popular for any psychoactive properties it might have compared to, say, nutmeg.

aab0on Machine Learning and Ketosis

Well, he also disables the holdout set (`--holdout_off ariel.train`), so between that and not reporting the uncertainties and his absolutely tiny dataset with high measurement error and the low prior probability that any of these effects could be that big... Nah. It's just overfitting noise.

I tried to run the makefile, but apparently the version of Vowpal Rabbit that ships on my Ubuntu (7.3) is so outdated that it doesn't support the bootstrap option.

aab0on Machine Learning and Ketosis

> - How significant are the estimates of lifestyle factors? Do you have p-values? If you bootstrap resample, how much do the rankings change at the extremes?

His VW script does do bootstrapping ('--bootstrap 16') but he doesn't report it anywhere I see. https://github.com/JohnLangford/vowpal_wabbit/wiki/using-vw-... seems to not report any sort of p-value or confidence interval which might be derived from the bootstrapping. (The 'relevance' is 'the relative distance of each variable from the best constant prediction', not sure what that means.)

So if you want to know, it looks like you'll have to run it yourself and visualize the output. I would guess that the uncertainties are huge and none of them reach even p<0.05 - it simply should not be possible to get mean loss of like 0.2 and reliable estimates of hundreds of variables like 'melon' out of less than 4 months of data when the random measurement error of the scale itself is on the order of half a pound (I have an Omron body fat scale, and even taking 2-3 measurements daily, there's a lot of error) unless his VW regression is grossly overfitting.

aab0on Why Buyers Shunned the World's Largest Diamond

I would guess that the natural diamonds' prices have fallen as the synthetics increasingly set a price floor. They have such large stockpiles of diamonds and they have to bring in revenue, they can't simply pretend the synthetics don't exist on the market and price accordingly. Or to put it another way: for such perfect substitutes and commodities, the prices should be near-identical, and so it is wrong to try to imply that consumers haven't saved a ton of money because the prices are similar; you need a time-series of prices.

aab0on How my open source hobby project became my job: 10 years of OptaPlanner

Are you sure? I would assume that Red Hat requires all employees to sign copyright assignment and other such legal agreements. He would no longer be able to change the license at all, simply because he no longer owns the copyright to many of the earlier contributions.

aab0on SpaceMint: A Cryptocurrency Based on Proofs of Space [pdf]

So it replaces regular energy expenses with instead very large up front capital investments in hard drives which is no more green - hard drives don't appear out of thin air - and adds in wacky incentives/vulnerabilities as now anyone with large storage space can enter at any time with the equivalent of enormous hashpower to crush the network without any economic penalty as they can simply go back to using their hard drives for storage afterwards without any significant expense incurred (by design).

aab0on Driving dataset for car autopilot AI training

> A disengage should be understood to probably be an accident

I don't think it should. A disengage is simply a precaution. Whether it would have been an accident if the self-driving car had continued on is a question of counterfactuals, and they examine it with the recorded data and simulations of the car software to see what would happen; and they report that of the 269 disengages, only 13 probably would've led to an accident with physical contact with something it shouldn't've, and at least 2 of those are trivial. You claim to have read the report in detail, so I'm not sure why I have to explain this.

aab0on Firefox’s latest Test Pilot: No More 404s

The difference is exactly what I said: if they deleted it, it's gone forever. If they hide it, it can come back. I've seen pages I cite disappear for a year or two thanks to scummy squatters - but they came back! It's the difference between being sentenced to execution and to 1 year of prison.

aab0on Police had woman’s Facebook deactivated during standoff

Maybe you should read up on Sovereign Citizen stuff. It is literally gobbledegook, based on making up linguistic stuff like claiming that 'understand' means 'stand under [to make a contract]'. Some of it is free-association verbal gibberish based on sound similarities, strongly reminiscent of schizophrenia's 'word salad'.

aab0on Driving dataset for car autopilot AI training

https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en...

269 disengages over their entire fleet per year and perhaps 13 hypothetical accidents of unknown magnitude (but some quite minor: "2 of these involved simulated contact with traffic cones") if they hadn't disengaged is 'staggering'?

aab0on Firefox’s latest Test Pilot: No More 404s

They're not deleting it, just hiding it from public access. Once the squatter goes away, the content comes back.

aab0on Florida cut $100M from its mental hospitals – chaos followed

Scott Alexander, a psychiatrist, has written some interesting material on the deinstitutionalization movement: http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/03/31/book-review-my-brother-... http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/03/07/reverse-voxsplaining-pr...

aab0on The Case Against the Mortgage Interest Deduction

Land is fixed, so the greater ability to pay from the subsidy simply increases the 'rent' earned by landowners. To a great extent, one gets the same house on the same land, but priced higher.

aab0on Police had woman’s Facebook deactivated during standoff

> According to a police report from the March stop, which the department released after the shooting, Gaines was stopped when an officer saw that in place of a license plate she had a piece of cardboard on her vehicle. The cardboard declared, “Any Government official who compromises this pursuit to happiness and right to travel, will be criminally responsible and fined, as this is a natural right and freedom.”

So she was a Sovereign Citizen (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_citizen_movement)? http://heavy.com/news/2016/08/korryn-gaines-instagram-videos... quotes her spouting more of the sovereign citizen legal gobbledegook. Apparently there's even a black version of all this stuff: http://www.rawstory.com/2014/08/sovereign-citizens-express-f...

aab0on [dead]

Apparently the Iranians don't believe it was merely coincidental:

> Iranian press reports have quoted senior Iranian defense officials describing the cash as a ransom payment. The Iranian foreign ministry didn’t respond to a request for comment...Revolutionary Guard commanders boasted at the time that the Americans had succumbed to Iranian pressure. “Taking this much money back was in return for the release of the American spies,” said Gen. Mohammad Reza Naghdi, commander of the Guard’s Basij militia, on state media.

aab0on 23andMe Pulls Off Massive Crowdsourced Depression Study

> Yes, pre-Ioannidis is the period I was referring to. Things cleaned up a lot in 2012+. What you said does not conflict with what I said..

A candidate-gene study != GWAS. It's particularly bizarre to criticize GWASes for the sins of candidate-gene study when GWASes were literally partially designed to avoid those problems. Don't equivocate. If you have criticisms of actual GWASes as they are run and good reason to doubt that the hits are noise and will not replicate in well-powered followups (contrary to what we actually see, in this GWAS and others...), give them; don't swap in criticisms of candidate-gene studies and pretend they're the same thing, because they're not.

> Doesn't the significance level being "ludicrous" depend on things like the degree of multiple testing happening?

It does. And that's exactly why holding replications to 10-8 is ludicrous. The error rate when testing 5 or 15 SNPs at 10-8 is much much much smaller than when testing 500,000 SNPs. Why would you hold a multiple-test of 5 tests to the same standard as 500,000+ tests?

> I'm not saying anything controversial in the field.

If you're insinuating that GWASes are as bad as candidate-gene studies were, or that a p-value threshold of 10-8 should be used for everything, or that we cannot have high confidence in any given hit at 10-8 (especially when replicated at 10-5) you certainly are saying controversial things.

> I also gave this particular paper praise for holding to a higher standard than some other GWA studies.

Such as?