Hacker News Reader

brmon About that Hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19 trial

If you're going to make these statements you should also share what you've been reading...

brmon Intuit to buy Credit Karma for $7B

Three people start a credit website because they want free access to their information. 11 years later they sell it to a company who actively tries to squash free access. Is there a German word for companies that grow and then exit this way?

brmon Guide to the London Startup Ecosystem

Random aside but this seems like a decent place to ask it...

Does anyone know what's going on with the Startup and Innovator Visas? Most of the endorsing bodies don't even have a process set up yet and the ones that do only endorse their incubatees or make you subscribe to their accounting services.

Anyone have any insight? Are any endorsing bodies actively approving Startup and Innovator visas? If I'm an entrepreneur with £50,000+ to invest in my internet startup and I want to locate it in London and I don't want to go through Techstars, what is supposed to happen? Because as far as I can tell, the process of bringing a startup to London is currently very broken. /endrant

But seriously? Anyone have any success or advice?

brmon Frank Abagnale on the death of the con artist and the rise of cybercrime

I've noticed something similar as well. I like to think of it as algorithmically assisted bader meinhoff syndrome. It used to be that you heard of something and then saw it because your brain was now aware of it. Now your brain is still aware of what you've just read but digital systems are also looking to feed you things. They're not working together but having two things working at once makes it happen slightly more frequently than if your brain alone was just working to bader meinhoff you. But now your brain sees more patterns and believes it's getting "bader meinhoffed" more often. It's purely a speculative hypothesis and I'm happy to be proven wrong but it's the best answer I've been able to arrive at for a sort of glitch in reality that I've experienced recently as well.

brmon A Third of America’s Economy Is Concentrated in Thirty-one Counties

And 2/3rds of the US population lives in 3.5% of the land area, what do you expect?

The correction here is not to spread things out again but to adapt to the concentration.

brmon It’s Not Enough to Be Right – You Also Have to Be Kind

You don't have to be kind. You just shouldn't be unkind.

brmon Ask HN: What to do after the workday?

I'm a little sad at the thought that we as a society don't help people to better deal with questions like these. Or that someone alive in space and time can be stuck like this.

See a movie. Date a person. Start a community war. Draw a picture. Read a book. Write a book. Go for a swim. Call a relative. Visit a friend. Make a friend. Take a night class. Play a video game. Whittle. Cook. Volunteer. Brew beer. Start a fight. Walk around. Pull a prank. Make graffiti. Build a robot. Throw a party. Have a regular potluck. Buy a dart board and get really good. Play a game. Feed some ducks.

But I'm genuinely curious. Did you have this problem as a kid or after the school day or did it sorta just happen when you started in the workforce?

brmon Twitter to ban political advertising

brm on We Never Paid for Journalism

These are the best three I found with a quick search:
http://theconversation.com/the-manipulation-of-the-american-...
https://books.google.com/books?id=3De8nd_B_C8C&printsec=fron...
http://www.historyisaweapon.org/defcon1/bernprop.html

brm on Selfie-seeking Instagrammers are ruining the world’s beautiful places

Unfortunately the problem here is not the selfie or instagram, its the smartphone.
An incredible tool with side effects people aren't yet capable of dealing with.
The problems with social media mainly exist because we have always on internet and a very good camera in the palm of our hands.
If it were a layer more difficult many of these issues go away.
That said I don't think its socially possible to put it back in the bag, so we'll probably have to simply invent a bigger distraction.

brm on How will movies, as we know them, survive the next ten years?

There is a not at all farfetched (anymore) scenario where Amazon or Netflix circle back around and roll out a series of movie theaters or "event cinemas" and try to sell people on it as some sort new real world experience where they're able to capture everything down to the concessions and market their own tentpole franchises.

brm on Thawing permafrost is destroying Arctic cities (2016)

There aren’t going to be long term winners from climate change. They might be less affected but it’s not going to be good. New illnesses, food scarcity and other things will only make some places “winnings” a relative thing.
Would you consider a tornado that levels your house a long term winner for your basement?

brm on Pogo stick rental startup swears it’s not a joke

Yeah, but if you view it as a novel way to get people to download an app and later the app offers scooters, bikes, and rides you can see where it might be going...
I'm not saying pogo sticks as an onboarding strategy is a great idea but its also not nearly the worst idea i've ever encountered from a startup.

brm on I Grew Up Gifted, but My Life Didn’t Turn Out the Way I Expected

That’s also how you’d raise a plough horse.
The toughest thing in life for a smart person to figure out is often what’s worth working hard at and what they truly want.
It seems as rare to find a person who has gone through the steps to decide if they truly want and value the outcome they’re working towards as it is to find a smart person who doesn’t apply themselves fully when they’re actually interested in, value, and want to accomplish or do something.
Intelligence is a blunt instrument and should be taught to be used with the same consideration and care as you would any other potentially dangerous tool or device.

brm on WeWork Files for IPO

Successful communities involve resource sharing between peers.
They need to find a way to make coworking less transactional and more cooperative.
If they’re not going to be working on the same thing they need to find a reason to interact with a purpose.
This is the tough river to cross in a pay for space business. It’s why hotels aren’t collegial either. If you want it to feel good or collegial you need to build in mutual benefit or a responsibility of ownership like when a grocery coop has members do monthly work for the benefit of the coop.
I’m honestly not sure what a corporate coworking space can do to get what they’re doing to this point.

brm on Thinking on Your Feet

The flow state of great athletes is not the type of autopilot you describe exactly, it’s not a totally automatic function. If you look at their comments it’s actually a state of hyperfocus. They may get there in a similar way to what you describe but the space they go to looks different than what you’re describing. “The rim gets bigger” if you will. The game slows down and becomes easier. They’re so in the moment that everything narrows, yes, but it’s that that makes decisions easier, the information they need is simply hyper available. Ask someone like Tiger Woods where the pin was or what the wind was doing on the 12th hole on a specific course during a win 15 years ago and he can tell you that. He can also tell you where contact was on the club face. Same goes for LeBron and others. It’s not that decisions are made by your body or muscle memory etc it’s that the decisions you need to make become easier to make.

brm on World Happiness Report, 2019

You may be leading yourself astray by improperly defining happiness...

brm on Lyft's IPO Is Making the Same Circle of Men Rich, Again

What percentage of billionaires actually use their wealth this way?

brm on A woman who doesn't feel pain

source please.

brm on Andrew Yang and Pete Buttigieg Have Blown Up on Twitter, and in Betting Markets

weight of money has an effect on odds but the bookmakers are still the ones setting them.

brm on Sick marine mammals turning up on California beaches

According to the Oregon Department of Agriculture:
Commercial evisceration zones and orders
Oregon crab: Crab containing viscera harvested from zone K are under an evisceration order effective 12:01 a.m. February 11, 2019, due to elevated levels of domoic acid in the crab viscera. Crab harvested from zones J and L are under an evisceration order effective 12:01 a.m. February 14, 2019, as a buffer zones to zone K. See the link below called Evisceration orders and recall information for details.
California crab: Crab containing viscera harvested from California waters are under an evisceration order effective 12:01 a.m. January 15, 2019, due to elevated levels of domoic acid in the crab viscera. This remains in effect until further notice.
https://www.oregon.gov/oda/programs/foodsafety/shellfish/pag...
Is it related? Looks likely, but not directly quantifiable:
Domoic acid is a naturally occurring biotoxin that does not present danger in small quantities. It becomes dangerous when it is present in large quantities. While we are uncertain of the causes of the influx of domoic acid in our oceans, scientists are researching possible causes for the increased levels. Possible contributing factors include global climate change, eutrophication from fertilizers, agricultural and urban runoff, aquaculture activity, coastal development and consequently the increased exposure to waters and foods contaminated by domoic acid. https://www.oceansoffun.org/domoic_acid_poisoning
The increasing frequency and geographic extent of toxic algal blooms along populated coastlines is generally attributed to human activities https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2996450/ 1. Parsons ML, Dortch Q, Turner RE. Sedimentological evidence of an increase in Pseudo-nitzschia (Bacillariophyceae) abundance in response to coastal eutrophication. Limnol Oceanogr. 2002;47:551–558. 2. Hallegraeff GM. A review of harmful algal blooms and their apparent global increase. Phycologia. 1993;32:79–99.

brm on Books I Recommend

Counterpoint: while I agree that audio is useful for learning, I’d encourage everyone to not consider mental downtime wasted. And that we should resist the urge to fill it with content constantly. We must be able as humans to simply sit alone with our own thoughts. It’s as important for creativity and mental output as anything learned in those “dead”, “wasted” times.

brm on Why Design Thinking Works

You have a point on the flavors but the problems with the marketing in Juul’s early years we’re pretty evident... https://www.forbes.com/sites/kathleenchaykowski/2018/11/16/t...
The SRITA archive is pretty damning

brm on Gut bacteria may offer a treatment for autism

More than an allergy I was curious about something to the effect of eosinophilic esophagitis or one of the other eosinophilic gastrointestinal disorders. I present with a similar timeline and symptoms to your description and was querying to see if that was a point of divergence.

brm on Gut bacteria may offer a treatment for autism

Not sure which reply chain to jump into here, but during endoscopic evaluation have you ever had biopsies taken to check eosinophil counts in your stomach or esophageal tissue?

brm on ‘Emerging’ as a Writer After 40

Wiped my comment because it was too late too delete. I shouldn't have passed any judgement on this woman at all. I don't need to have an opinion on the internet.

brm on Forced Out by Deadly Fires, Then Trapped in Traffic

Jams happen most often because people operate cars with incomplete information about the cars around them and inability to operate their cars optimally. As self driving cars advance and become networked the idea is that they could perform a lift like this while communicating with one another.
That said, this is a possibility but not a proper solution.
Public transit is perhaps also a possibility but not a solution.
The real solution though seems much less palatable. Only a few disasters require the mass evacuation of people and perhaps its simply better to keep our cities and populations from the edges of fire prone lands and draw back our cities and people from the immediate coastal paths of hurricanes.

brm on How to Keep Your Job as Your Company Grows

I'm not sure it's exactly the coaching or books you're looking for but YC itself did a series of interviews called Employee #1 about how different people in different roles navigated being an early employee of a successful company to varying outcomes. I found it helpful if not directly instructive.
https://blog.ycombinator.com/category/employee-1/

brm on What happens if you mistakenly apply for British citizenship?

It shouldn't be this hard in the first place...
Want a strong country? Let anyone who puts 50,000 of your currency in a local bank and has a college degree stay there.
I shouldn't need 250K and have a business plan, or 2 million pounds to invest. I certainly shouldn't have to bond myself to a corporation or get married to be allowed to live there and pay taxes. Ban me from public government benefits for 5 years until I'm a citizen, sure...
But you should welcome the young, educated, and reasonably stable. Who else is going to eventually pay to support everyone else?
Really though further ax to grind... How is it that in 2018 the easiest way to move countries is still marriage?!

brm on The Four Thieves Vinegar Collective

Well, I can think of a few countries that might find it worthwhile to invest in the health of their citizens. In America we’ll have to make it part of the department of defense in order to get it funded.