Hacker News Reader

alfromspaceon Why some governments appear not to be acting on the Covid-19 threat

Wait, been I've been told "you can't just shut down travel", and that closing borders doesn't work, for reasons that are completely self-evident. So I'm utterly mystified that there are virtually no cases and 0 deaths in countries like Russia and Mongolia that closed their borders.

alfromspaceon Get Real: no drug or vaccine will avoid a very big coronavirus epidemic

"This is not an appeal to authority fallacy"

...yeah it is. Remdesivir has improved patient outcomes in the majority of cases it's been used so far - no, it hasn't been subject to comprehensive peer-reviewed study quite yet, but that's an awful reason to ignore our eyes in an emergent situation like this where death may be the alternative, and highly irresponsible for Derek Lowe to ignore. You're appealing to it being proper to ignore because authorities feel they haven't gone through enough red tape yet.

Am I wrong in observing that the public health response to the outbreak seems to be far less oriented towards solving the problem, but rather using psychological tactics to convince people that everything is fine, "the risk is low", and doing nothing is the proper response? (but also you're probably going to get the virus, so prepare for that, but only by washing your hands and certainly not preparing in a way that disrupts globalism)

alfromspaceon Photographer Jacob Riis showed “How the Other Half Lives” in 1890s NYC (2017)

How was the US doing as a nation when it was more exclusive?

alfromspaceon Photographer Jacob Riis showed “How the Other Half Lives” in 1890s NYC (2017)

No thanks. We don't need to cram every square mile full of people.

alfromspaceon Vitamin C and Immuno-Oncology

I agree - ran into this problem with my dad. He had a rare cancer that quickly stopped responding to hormone therapy (the only kind of treatment known to work), and deteriorated rapidly. We called Sloan Kettering to see if there were any clinical trials he could enroll in, but since my dad had recently become bedridden, he wasn't eligible for anything. I don't know if there was anything else I could have done - it seems like the argument of "he's dying and wants to try anything that has the slightest chance of working" was completely expected and unconvincing to them.

Then at his normal oncologist, a brand-new drug was recommended that only worked on cancers caused by NTRK gene fusion - but my dad would have had to get a third biopsy to confirm that and get the prescription. Why didn't they get enough material the first or second time? Nobody could say. Every step of the treatment process was done piecemeal and ultimately my dad was in no condition to get yet another biopsy. I wish there was some process by which he could've just gotten the damn pills in the off chance there was a response.

alfromspaceon Scientists Are Starting to Take Warp Drives Seriously

I'm still not getting it. What mechanism allows for knowledge of the effect before the cause objectively happens? For the third party to observe the effect, the cause had to have happened from Earth's perspective. The fact that the light hasn't reached the third party yet seems immaterial. I'm not trying to play gotcha, seriously don't get it.

"As you can see, the light from the phone call reception arrives well before the light from the placing of the phone call. Again: causality is violated."

It's still only speaking about the perspective of the ship, and it seeing effect before cause.

alfromspaceon Scientists Are Starting to Take Warp Drives Seriously

Then it doesn't violate any fundamental laws of existence, does it? We're just talking about receiving delayed images of events. The ship isn't engaging in backwards time travel by contacting Earth after seeing its call being received, because Earth knows it already placed the call. No information from the future is being conveyed to Earth, and the third party isn't actually able to affect the "cause" after seeing the "effect", because the cause is over and done with.

alfromspaceon Scientists Are Starting to Take Warp Drives Seriously

>What does the ship see? They see the phone call received on Proxima Centauri. Then they see the phone call placed from Earth. Effect precedes cause: causality is violated. In fact, if the ship had a FTL phone set up in the right way, they could call Earth before Earth placed the call. They could even tell Earth "hey, don't make that call to Proxima Centauri we just saw you make." Then what?

I don't understand the problem here. The ship couldn't call Earth before Earth placed the call. It would see the call being received before Earth placing the call, but if it then called up Earth on their FTL phone and said "hey, don't make that call to Proxima Centauri we just saw you make," wouldn't Earth just reply "Uh, we already made the call, you seeing old light doesn't mean these events didn't already happen." Why does it matter what the third observer sees? Cause and effect aren't violated just because it can appear that way.

alfromspaceon Scientists Are Starting to Take Warp Drives Seriously

How does FTL violate causality? I've tried reading on it before but didn't understand it with my casual understanding of physics.

alfromspaceon Telecoms say they have a First Amendment right to sell private data

This is all just supposed to be self-evident? What even are you talking about? Be specific.

alfromspaceon Telecoms say they have a First Amendment right to sell private data

If someone becomes a NAZI after being tossed in jail for no good reason, well hey, fuck em'.

How about we stop justifying hurting people because of their (in this case retroactive) violations of social/political norms and worry more about if our society itself is tolerable and is, in fact, sometimes perfectly deserving of extreme reactions.

alfromspaceon Rural America Doesn’t Have to Starve to Death

I'm not interested in arguing over how best to increase the GDP and labeling all regulations subsidies, or having the meta-debate over how everything is technically a subsidy. I'm talking about animal rights, human happiness, and how those things have very recently been assaulted by finance in an unprecedented way.

There are more important things in the world to think about than how to most efficiently stuff people full of mass quantities of cheap processed meat from suffering animals.

alfromspaceon Rural America Doesn’t Have to Starve to Death

Nothing is inevitable. We're not slaves to the market. If the market means small farmers can never be as efficient as factory farms and finance, and may not have any place in the economy at all without contracting out all aspects of their farms and losing their standards of living - then F the market.

Sometimes we need to step back from these abstract principles and ask ourselves if we want to live in that kind of world. I'd rather have a country where normal people can farm, animals can live good lives, and we have values other than prostrating ourselves before the altar of GDP.

alfromspaceon Companies flooding Kenya with apps offering high-interest loans

It's a sin for good reason, and the secular case against usury is just as strong. It's among the worst manifestations of rent-seeking, economically worthless behavior for anyone but the usurer.

This kind of lending is economic slavery. Why should a credit card company get a 15-30% return on their investment each year? How about 400%? You can use whatever clinical microeconomic language you want about risk and investment principles and rational actors and etc etc, but people now depend on credit for their basic needs. Then lenders can petition the government to garnish borrower's wages and gain eternal, guaranteed payment often on just interest. The borrower works and pays forever without even reducing the principal, and butts sit in offices redistributing wealth to themselves without adding any value to society.

It should be illegal to charge that kind of interest "investing" in the basic needs of people. The absurd prices of basic necessities in America now demand mortgages, car loans, student loans, medical debt, and credit card debt just to squeak by as a normal middle class person. Debt wasn't the solution to the price problem, but rather the cause.

alfromspaceon Mondragon Corporation

No. Whatever effect the 737 MAX grounding has had on Boeing's profits pales in comparison to the benefit gained by rushing the plane out the door to get in front of Airbus and thus making billions in sales contracts. There has been virtually no effect on Boeing's stock price, and the plane will probably be back in service within the year.

All in all, putting lives at risk was a good move for Boeing, and they'll surely do it again.

alfromspaceon [dead]

George Soros should not be in control of anything.

alfromspaceon Not everyone has an internal monologue

>When I close my eyes, it's black. Just, black. Well, you know, depending on how bright the lights are, etc.

Maybe you already know this, but non-aphantastic (heh) just see black too. When we visualize something, it's a very different experience from seeing anything at all. It's more the knowledge of "if I could see this thing, this is how it would look".

I'd be very interested in knowing what really happens in our brains. It feels like stringing together a bunch of information and assembling a spectral "print preview" that you can't really see.

alfromspaceon European Union Calls for Five Year Strict Ban on Facial Recognition Technology

Who do you work for?

alfromspaceon Burnout: 'Sick and tired of feeling sick and tired'

One startup I interviewed at, as an experienced developer, told me (paraphrasing here) "you'll be paid a salary lower than what you probably expect, and your first few months you'll need to work overtime to get used to our trendy tech stack, we don't offer health insurance but we do offer...not quite shares, but, sort of ownership interests. You could become a millionaire!"

Yeah no thanks.

alfromspaceon Boeing – master of financial engineering instead of aircraft engineering

The continuously-activating MCAS is such a monumentally stupid and dangerous system that I think you'd be a fool to trust any Boeing-engineered aircraft. I'll be avoiding them for the next few decades.

alfromspaceon How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”

A more honest framing is that the issue is disagreement over what discrimination means, not that it can't exist or is good. Probably the most contentious issue is representation itself. Can a group of people be overrepresented or underrepresented in an organization without the organization being discriminatory? James Damore made the case that it's probable. And what happened to him shows that it isn't about "unpalatable ideas", it's about avoiding even having the discussion.

alfromspaceon Climate Change Is Killing Alpine Skiing as We Know It

People do adapt, and I think that's a feature, not a bug, often forgotten. Climate change is real, but how hubristic was it for us to work toward a globally industrialized world, then post hoc pretend that we must A. Take drastic action to preserve the climate within the centuries-long snapshot we're accustomed to, or else the planet is on fire B. Never expect humanity to adapt, and pretend it's some kind of terribly stupid and illogical thing to do.

Certainly in the long term, the climate will change. We harnessed the natural world and brought it on ourselves sooner. I think we should do what we can, but the apocalyptic language of "planet on fire", etc, and all of us pretending that our little snapshot of the climate is all there ever was and we should never expect to adapt to anything else seems utterly foolish and more big-headed than I can put into words.

alfromspaceon Education and Men without Work

Labor force participation rate. It says in the article.

alfromspaceon 'Megafire' in Australia Engulfs 1.5M Acres

Nature is a cruel place. It's hard to grapple with as somebody who values animal life equally to human life, but also is cognizant of how far beyond our reach it is to remove all the tragedies that are really just part of the ecosystem.

alfromspaceon The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)

This is essentially what James Damore was fired for saying.

alfromspaceon College-educated workers are taking over the American factory floor

Important to note it was only determined to be biased on the basis of disparate impact, which I think is a baloney concept. In other words, if one group of people doesn't do as well on something as another group on average, the thing can be considered a violation of the 14th amendment.

The NY City fire department recently had to shell out millions to people who weren't hired because of a similar ruling. No discrimination found other than that black people didn't do as well on a test as white people.

alfromspaceon The Intoxicating History of Gin

I promise I actually like the taste of gin.

alfromspaceon Sacha Baron Cohen Uses ADL Speech to Tear Apart Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook

We're talking about the ADL being a Zionist organization, and the viewpoints that caused individuals to be the subjects of spying (or whatever you want to call it) clearly indicates a pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian bias. I don't think anyone would argue CAIR isn't a pro-Islamic organization with accompanying biases.

alfromspaceon Sacha Baron Cohen Uses ADL Speech to Tear Apart Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-04-13-mn-22383-...

https://psmag.com/news/kings-garbage-76228

The ADL spied extensively on not only pro-Palestinian activists, but also on anti-South African apartheid activists, presumably because they didn't want their critiques being used on Israel.

alfromspaceon Sacha Baron Cohen Uses ADL Speech to Tear Apart Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook

If normal people want to hear my message, and there's only one platform they can effectively locate it through, then I'd say you are required to provide services to me. At this point, it's like cutting off somebody's internet or phone service for their political views - the argument that Verizon isn't the government and is just "muh showing you the door" wears thin.

There seems to be this underlying assumption that nationalism, paleoconservatism and various commonly-held views that are wrongly called "fascism" are actually things people want to hear, and if we allow them the same access to services as any other views, their popularity will overturn this entire neoliberal scheme that's being artificially propped up by organizations like the ADL rooting out free speech in every area they can legally do so. I sort of agree - this entire project would fail without censorship.

And, if as Baron Cohen implies, we're really just a bunch of stupid hateful beasts always primed to commit another Holocaust as soon as the boot is off our neck, well...then we've got deeper problems in our society than a lack of social media censorship.