Hacker News Reader

andxor_on Old folks see culture change

> Why do we fear being lied to? Because we don’t like others manipulating our beliefs. But our fear of being misled by false news pales by comparison to our fear of suffering total “mind-control”.

Funny thing is that because we fear being lied to, we pretend otherwise when we ARE being lied to.

andxor_on What John von Neumann did at Los Alamos (2020)

Ramanujan was extra-terrestrial. His note books have produced so many papers and PhD theses. Probably will continue to do so for many more years.

andxor_on Infant microbes and metabolites point to childhood neurodevelopmental disorders

> American pharmaceutical giant Pfizer Inc. and its subsidiary Pharmacia & Upjohn Company Inc. (hereinafter together "Pfizer") have agreed to pay $2.3 billion, the largest health care fraud settlement in the history of the Department of Justice, to resolve criminal and civil liability arising from the illegal promotion of certain pharmaceutical products, the Justice Department announced today.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-...

Most people here would not download third party libraries without a thorough audit, even if the application purpose is essentially frivolous. I would not buy anything from a company with this kind of criminal record without a full due diligence of what they selling, including conflicts of interests of the FDA reviewers involved.

Financial products sold by the banks must be treated that way too.

andxor_on Infant microbes and metabolites point to childhood neurodevelopmental disorders

Apologies. I would like to delete the comments, but unable to.

andxor_on Infant microbes and metabolites point to childhood neurodevelopmental disorders

There is also no group other than big pharma that have paid as much criminal fines in the history of commerce. So instead of cultivating a religious faith in whatever they are pushing, be skeptical and do some due diligence.

andxor_on Jon Stewart roasts SF tech CEOs, says Apple stopped him from interviewing critic

Your comments are a bit harsh and naive. One cannot look to paid entertainment professionals for moral and ethical guidance. Nor can we hold them to higher standards than mere mortals.

andxor_on Leadership is a hell of a drug

> this is how business often operates on a day to day basis - vague objectives with recognition for effort and process, instead of the actual result.

That's a good point. Perhaps, seen more in larger businesses than smaller ones. As businesses grow, they accumulate support staff. Moreover, planning horizons get longer, so it gets difficult to associate "pnl" and effort concurrently.

andxor_on TikTok told to break with China's Communist Party or lose access to US users

China is the new bogey man. We always need someone to hate to rally the troops (and to keep them distracted).

andxor_on Leadership is a hell of a drug

A leader shows direction(s) and has followers i.e. those that execute.

To show direction, one needs to know his stuff well. Many qualify for this. Getting followers that execute is very hard. Mountains have been written about this, with a lot of them being the typical business school stuff ridden with survivorship bias from following the success stories.

andxor_on How to be a good listener

Higher suicide rates in themselves might not be an evolutionary handicap.

They probably get far more stuff done relative to the ones that are emotionally closer to females and live longer. Just spit balling here.

andxor_on How to be a good listener

> What a different world we’d live in if more boys felt safe sharing feelings, in their own way, right from the start.

What if it turned out to be a world much worse than what we have? There is perhaps some evolutionary advantage to people that suck it up and carry on?

andxor_on An Interview with Scott Alexander

Markets are about information processing. The information set is huge and price update has bandwidth limitation. GPT-n like systems perhaps can increase that bandwidth by orders of magnitude. That is in some sense "seeing the future".

andxor_on Wall Street's DEI Retreat Has Officially Begun

I hope this does not swing back harder in the other direction.

andxor_on [dead]

This is some far left nutcase conspiracy! Trump derangement syndrome is real and deserves a place in DSM manual.

andxor_on Comments Are Code

I prefer well written comments and short variable names to long, descriptive variable names. A bit like how math textbooks are written.

Of course, this is in the context of professional programming where code is written and maintained by trained engineers and not 'anyone'.

andxor_on Big Pharma spends billions more on executives and stockholders than on R&D

Unfortunately, we gave them record, windfall profits with no downside or obligations by forcing drugs on people under threats of ostracisation and loss of employment. Now we don't get to whine about them.

andxor_on Building an LLM from Scratch: Automatic Differentiation (2023)

Very well written. AD is like magic and this is a good exposition on the basic building block.

I quite like Jeremy's approach: https://nbviewer.org/github/fastai/fastbook/blob/master/17_f...

It shows a very simple "Pythonic" approach to assemble gradient of a composition of functions from the gradients of the components.

andxor_on Building an LLM from Scratch: Automatic Differentiation (2023)

Great stuff. Thanks for sharing.

andxor_on Mastering Programming (2016)

You can too!