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aabaker99

301 karma · joined August 27, 2014

email: username at gmail
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aabaker99··on Back and shoulder surgery is often worse than useless
> How long does the gift recipient have access to the story? The recipient has seven days to access the story and can open it five times before it expires.

Sadly I wasn’t in the first five! Thanks anyway.

aabaker99··on Tinybox – A powerful computer for deep learning
Yeah I agree the FTC article could be more clear here. I think they call out Western Union because those are tools that are commonly used by scammers.

But let’s be clear: the risks are the same if you are wiring money through Western Union or wiring through any other bank. Once you wire the money you do not have the same protections as other payment mechanisms. And if you don’t get the product as described, you are likely out your money. This is compared to other forms of payment like credit cards where you are protected. With a credit card you can issue a charge back to the seller and get your money back in the case of fraud. With a wire transfer you cannot.

aabaker99··on Tinybox – Offline AI device 120B parameters
Sure thing. For those who don’t know, wiring money like this is a good way to lose your money.

https://consumer.ftc.gov/articles/what-know-you-wire-money

aabaker99··on Tinybox – A powerful computer for deep learning
> Can I pay with something besides wire transfer? In order to keep prices low and quality high, we don't offer any customization to the box or ordering process. Wire transfer is the only accepted form of payment.

Sorry, what? Is this just a scam?

aabaker99··on What to build instead of AI agents
Hah! My opinions are not so strong so no flaming here. I was genuinely just wanting your take as someone with strong opinions.

I’ll check out Bloc, thanks.

aabaker99··on What to build instead of AI agents
What’s the best state management in Flutter?
aabaker99··on Why I stopped angel investing after 15 years, and what I'm doing instead
> Four others that raised money but with painful recapitalizations that effectively wiped out early shareholders

Does someone have a recommendation on reading that goes deeper on this point? What enables later investors to do this? What can early investors do to protect their investment?

aabaker99··on NIH freezes all research grants to Columbia University
I did a little digging because I haven’t followed the news on this. Through a chain of links from the article is https://edworkforce.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?Docum... which is a report from the Committee on Education lead by Chairwoman Virginia Foxx (R-NC) detailing anti-Semitic activity on university campuses.

It seemed to me a lot of the key findings were framed in a political way. I was hoping to see more specific damages that might justify these huge cancellations of grant funding. For example one key finding was “Northwestern put radical anti-Israel faculty in charge of negotiations with the encampment.” I admittedly don’t have time to read the full report but how is the labelling of faculty involved in the negotiation a clear case of discrimination for the violation of Title IV of the Civil Rights Act? Shouldn’t the key findings be more about the harms that were experienced by Jewish students?

It’s a shame this report is being used to justify suspension of research funding.

aabaker99··on The best programmers I know
I still like Moment because it offers better control of time zones that aren’t the browsers time zone when compared to the builtin Date APIs.

Do you have a recommendation to replace Moment for that use case?

I’m hopeful for the future with JavaScript Temporal.

aabaker99··on Ask HN: How to deal with a serious mental health breakdown?
Addressed to GP.

This resonates with my experience. When a friend is having their first manic episode, it’s hard to get them to recognize that and get the help they need. But after the aftermath of a couple manic episodes, my friend wanted to get help. Even when he had a hard time complying with meds, he was able to recognize when he was heading into another manic episode and get help proactively.

My friend’s family do a few things to mitigate some of the bad decisions that a manic episode brings on. 1) the family has location tracking, 2) the family can pause credit cards, 3) the family can take away car keys.

I don’t expect any of those mitigations will be able to be implemented today in your case. But if your friend is currently going through a bad manic episode then they will probably want to prevent future manic episodes from spiraling. Having a conversation about how to achieve that, and having a mutually defined set of warning signs, will help address the problem.

aabaker99··on Statisticians use a technique that leverages randomness to deal with the unknown
My intuition would be that there are certain conditions under which Bayesian inference for the missing data and multiple imputation lead to the same results.

What is the distinction?

The scenario described in the paper could be represented in a Bayesian method or not. “For a given missing value in one copy, randomly assign a guess from your distribution.” Here “my distribution” could be Bayesian or not but either way it’s still up to the statistician to make good choices about the model. The Bayesian can p hack here all the same.

aabaker99··on Ask HN: Should we bring software dev in-house?
I'm an engineer in this space and would be interested in learning more about your business and why you feel you are unique and under-served. My contact info is in my profile.

I do find that the biggest challenge as a vendor in logistics is highlighted by, "Our business operates in a specific niche and there are no other providers who cater specifically to our industry." This makes it difficult to make software that works for everyone even if we are all in the same industry.

aabaker99··on Adobe Firefly repeats the same AI blunders as Google Gemini
> I asked Firefly to create images using similar prompts that got Gemini in trouble. It created Black soldiers fighting for Nazi Germany in World War II. In scenes depicting the Founding Fathers and the constitutional convention in 1787, Black men and women were inserted into roles. When I asked it to create a comic book character of an old white man, it drew one, but also gave me three others of a Black man, a Black woman and a white woman. And yes, it even drew me a picture of Black Vikings, just like Gemini.

Why would we expect Gemini or Firefly to not be able to produce these images? I can definitely sympathize with not wanting to make offensive images but there’s no way these tools could be sanitized to not produce something offensive given the right prompts. Just like how you can’t stop photoshop users from creating similar images manually.

aabaker99··on Want to build a sequencer? 454.bio opens up their plans
It turns out the dissertation is not quite published yet, but this paper [1] will be a part of it. Sam and I were in the same lab and his work has evolved to focus even more on AI-guided protein design. Perhaps the quote from the abstract that made the connection for me to this post:

> We applied the protein G B1 domain (GB1) models to design a sequence that binds to immunoglobulin G with substantially higher affinity than wild-type GB1.

[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.2104878118?downloa...

aabaker99··on Want to build a sequencer? 454.bio opens up their plans
If you’re up for reading a dissertation I have one in mind I can dig up. I will check back here in 12 hours or so or you can contact me from my profile.
aabaker99··on The Age of PageRank Is Over
I just signed up and tried it a little bit and I like what I see so far. I find myself increasingly frustrated with Google search results for a particular use case: searching for documentation. For example, today's work had me thinking about Python's datetime and timedelta and I wanted a reference on what functions are available. With Google I am annoyed with results from geeksforgeeks.org and freecodecamp.com because they are not reference materials and generally only cover some basic use cases. In Google, those two sites are in the top four results. In Kagi, they are not. Instead, there is a longer-form blog post from guru99.com, stack overflow, and the official Python documentation.

Now, I will admit that for this particular query Kagi and Google results are pretty close. But my general experience is that when I search in Google I find that I have to look farther down the search results to look past the blogspam to find the authoritative reference.

aabaker99··on Gamification affects software developers: Cautionary evidence from GitHub
I never understand people chasing daily commits to GitHub. You can push whatever git history you want to GitHub. I can rewrite all my commits so they are evenly distributed across however days I want to show up green on GitHub.
aabaker99··on Nearly Half of San Franciscans Have Been Victims of Theft, New Poll Says
I’ve been in Seattle for a mere 8 months and I’ve been robbed already.
aabaker99··on The U.S. Just Lost 26 Years' Worth of Progress on Life Expectancy
"Life expectancy" is short hand for life expectancy at birth, but other life expectancies such as life expectancy at age 65 are also measured. For instance, https://data.oecd.org/healthstat/life-expectancy-at-65.htm
aabaker99··on Ask HN: Have you ever heard of users demonstrating against software?
Is there a news article about the demonstration? I couldn’t find anything from 3 Norwegian papers with an English translation, Google, or HealthCare IT News.
aabaker99··on Patients can now access all their health records digitally
Im not in a position to produce the section reference right now but the regulation discussed in the comments, 45 CFR, requires providers are able to transfer medical records from the old practice to the new practice.
aabaker99··on “Is there a heuristic we might use to identify and flag questionable papers?”
Mentioned in TFA, the GRIM test for checking a paper’s reported mean of integers:

“”” The GRIM test is straightforward to perform. For each reported mean in a paper, the sample size (N) is found, and all fractions with denominator N are calculated. The mean is then checked against this list (being aware of the fact that values may be rounded inconsistently: depending on the context, a mean of 1.125 may be reported as 1.12 or 1.13). If the mean is not in this list, it is highlighted as mathematically impossible.[2][3] “””

Source: Wikipedia

aabaker99··on Ask HN: How did you learn math notation?
Is there any particular topic? I agree with other posters though that the notation is a short hand for the concepts and you need the concepts, not the notation.
aabaker99··on Ask HN: Looking for a book on algorithms and data structures
I find the writing style in CLRS to be quite readble. Sure the book is huge but so maybe pick and choose chapters but each chapter can be read "cover to cover". Perhaps some of the stack details you are looking for are left to exercises in CLRS? Most good "textbooks" will do this. Perhaps you don't want a general textbook on data structures but want a deep dive article on stacks.

I admit I haven't explored many other books on this topic but CLRS is very good in my opinion.

aabaker99··on Algorithm accurately predicts when teens have suicidal thoughts, behavior
See my sibling comment. Suppose you have data with 0.95 positive class and 0.05 negative class. You can achieve high ROC AUC with the classifier that blindly predicts the positive class. It may be "predictive" (after all 0.95 of the data is positive), but I would hesitate to praise such a classifier.
aabaker99··on Algorithm accurately predicts when teens have suicidal thoughts, behavior
While I agree with your overall sentiment, it is important to understand the relationship between class (im)balance and ROC curve performance. A very short article which does a great job explaining this is [0]. There are, of course, other performance metrics that are appropriate in the presence of class imbalance, such as precision-recall curves, so I wouldn't go so far as to say "metrics on biased data are going to be biased". Some metrics can correct for the class imbalance bias. Others can't.

[0] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jake-Lever/publication/...

aabaker99··on Exome sequencing and analysis of 450k UK Biobank participants
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonferroni_correction
aabaker99··on How to train large deep learning models as a startup
If you find a zero in a non negative function, I would call that a global minima, yes.
aabaker99··on How to train large deep learning models as a startup
1. Gradient descent almost always finds a non optimum local min (it is not guaranteed to find a global min).
aabaker99··on Clean environment could become U.N. human right
Was going to say this and I'll further add that the GP, when referencing US or UK objections, is referring to the veto power that the permanent members of the security council, often referred to as P5, have on security council resolutions. Any one P5 member can veto to block the adoption of security council resolutions.
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