Hacker News Reader

ffssffsson Roundup herbicide ingredient connected to epidemic chronic kidney disease

In this context "Roundup" means "collection". None of these studies are about the herbicide Roundup.

You changed the context pretty substantially by moving it to the end of the piece and putting it in scare quotes though. I also read it as intentionally pejorative. You might want to edit the post if that's not what you meant.

ffssffsson Twitter Is Blocking Likes and Retweets that Mention Substack

Yeah, you know, the Substack IP address. You look it up in the Yellow Pages.

ffssffsson How to hire engineering talent without the BS

I think the goal of avoiding false positives is actually more important for smaller companies. A bad hire at a startup can significantly shorten the company's runway, while a bad hire at a bigger company tends to get isolated and managed out without doing much harm (except to morale of course).

You're right about the copycat behavior. This goes all the way to top of funnel: these small, even trivial-scale web application startups just don't have hard engineering problems. Many imagine they do, or imagine they will once they take off, but the work they're offering these high powered candidates they claim to want to hire is like, wiring up CRUD apps and making javascript buttons. It's not technically deep work, it's product work. A little humility about whether or not your tech startup is truly doing "tech" problems would, I think, fix some of the expectation/reality mismatch people are having when they complain about how hard it is to hire engineers.

And sure, lots of people join Google to work on world-scale problems and end up wiring CRUD stuff anyway. But they can at least plausibly offer some technical depth (or could anyway, perhaps Google's reputation as a great place to develop an engineering career has been fading).

(this is not to knock on "CRUD" but to highlight that a technical problem solver is an overlapping but not identical skillset to someone who can work with a fast moving team to quickly and reliably develop product changes)

ffssffsson How to hire engineering talent without the BS

It's not a bad post per se but we've been reading similar, anecdotal blogs like this about making the interview process kinder for decades. Yet the only companies in a position to do a rigorous statistical test - large tech cos - stick with the traditional, somewhat adversarial whiteboarding process. I would even suggest that a strictly technical whiteboarding process can be less biased than what the author describes, because you can so regularly grade everyone on the same exact rubric. That's tougher when "pair programming" or doing a take home.

Also, stop giving take home projects. Bad candidates will cheat them and good candidates will not even do them. If one of the random startup names listed on the author's site sent me a 12 hour take home project I would delete the email. Do you think they pay twice as much as the bigger company that only makes you waste 6 hours doing a whiteboard? I doubt it.

ffssffsson Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

And the WSJ piece says the CIA is undecided! I wonder what explains the different assessments.

ffssffsson Facebook Announces Meta Verified

It's more about connections to acquaintances and mutual friends... maybe you just had to be there in ~2009 but there's really nothing like it today. For better or worse.

ffssffsson Newly public companies going private again

With what money? For this to work the way you want, the company would have to be trading at lower than the book value of its assets, in which case you might as well liquidate it. If you get the money from debt, now you have to focus on servicing the debt, which is probably worse than what the street wants (revenue growth).

ffssffsson Ask HN: Why do games (as media) make so much money?

The top 1% by household income in the US is about $500k a year. There are more than 100 million households in the US, so that's conservatively at least 1 million families who could afford to support a 5 figure microtransaction whale. That's a lot of money!

ffssffsson Production Twitter on one machine? 100Gbps NICs and NVMe are fast

And uptime is important, so you want to have that secondary running and ready, with a proxy in front of everything so you can switch as soon as you detect a failure. That's three hosts, plus your alerting has to be separate too, so that's four. Now, to orchestrate all this, we'll first get out Puppet...

ffssffsson Why Not Mars

What's a situation where Earth is destroyed and Mars is habitable? It isn't climate change, since we could just use whatever Terraforming Magic Technology we used on Mars to fix Earth. It isn't an alien attack, since they'd notice us on Mars too. It isn't war, since landing people on Mars also means we could send weapons. What exactly are we solving for here?

ffssffsson Archaeology and genetics can’t yet agree on when humans arrived in the Americas

What's the citation for the ice core stuff? I found two papers that investigated this and neither found evidence to support the impact theory, so it seems ambiguous to me, but this isn't my field so obviously I might just be failing to find a more recent result.

If you wanna read em:

Paquay, François S., et al. “Absence of Geochemical Evidence for an Impact Event at the Bølling-Allerød/Younger Dryas Transition.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 106, no. 51, 2009, pp. 21505–10

Surovell, Todd A., et al. “An Independent Evaluation of the Younger Dryas Extraterrestrial Impact Hypothesis.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 106, no. 43, 2009, pp. 18155–58.

Update: Found (some?) ice core evidence, it is indeed more recent, but I'm hopelessly out of my wheelhouse at this point so I'll just cite it for anyone also interested and suggest that these more recent publications do seem pretty confident in their conclusion that the impact did happen. So it seems user moloch-hai is correct:

Petaev, Michail I., et al. “Large Pt Anomaly in the Greenland Ice Core Points to a Cataclysm at the Onset of Younger Dryas.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 110, no. 32, 2013, pp. 12917–20.

Pretty cool stuff, thanks for sharing and prompting me to learn more about it.

ffssffsson Ask HN: Would a tech recession vindicate calls for tech unionization?

Why "probably"? A union is whatever its members make of it, and most engineers at any given tech company have relatively little seniority. It's hard to imagine them voting to join a union that would so obviously not prioritize their interests like that.

My guess is in most cases you'd still end up with an avenue for merit based layoffs, they just wouldn't start until new hiring had been completely stopped, and perhaps include an option for everyone to take a pay cut instead (which might be bad! but it's an idea I've heard floated by engineers way more than seniority based protections).

ffssffsson Magic beans, Bahamian penthouses, old-fashioned fraud and other important SBF-in

Check out the "Moral perspectives" section: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_and_the_Beanstalk

I think you're both right, the 1807 version published by Tabart added the moral justification for the killing of the giant which is still common today. But the story may originate in pre-history oral tradition, where it's anyone's guess whether or not Jack is a remorseless violent thief.

ffssffsson Decentralized storage company Storj removed their warrant canary

Indeed, the bar is (supposed to be) very high for this kind of thing. But at the same time, it feels like exactly the kind of "gotcha" that rarely flies, because the situation was so deliberately constructed. But without any (public?) litigation, it's anyone's guess what may happen.

ffssffsson Decentralized storage company Storj removed their warrant canary

Judges in regular courts really don't like "one weird trick" style legal arguments. I'm guessing judges in secret national security courts like them even less. Hence the skepticism that, in this circumstance, they wouldn't just order the site to update their canary and threaten the operators with charges themselves if they refuse.

ffssffsson Fetish tabooness vs. popularity

It's a little sensational but I feel like she's pretty up front about the limitations. The problem with representativeness is admitted, not really engaged with (I'd expect a more thorough study to compare with older results with better understood biases and extrapolate from there), but it's not hidden either.

I think the main problem is actually that Aella herself is not a faceless researcher but a somewhat controversial online personality who used her own brand to find participants. So for example anyone who blocked her on twitter probably didn't have a chance at taking this, even if they are also likely to be closer to kink communities than the average twitter user who wouldn't even know of her existence.

ffssffsson Fetish tabooness vs. popularity

I posted links to this survey on my social media, primarily twitter and reddit, with some indirect advertising on fetlife and discord; these made up 74.4% of my results. Another 22.4% reported ‘other’ from the list of sources. The last 3.2% came from telegram, tumblr, and facebook; these categories have low enough sample that I’m not going to include them on graphs in this blog post.

I'm not sure this is representative of anything other than "people who follow Aella and are interested enough in the topic to fill out a self-report survey".

ffssffsson Boston housing price dataset was removed from scikit-learn 1.2

Sadly, assumptions of good faith are easily exploited by bad actors (the classic term for this is "just asking questions") but I suppose you're right, I should not have assumed malice.

ffssffsson Boston housing price dataset was removed from scikit-learn 1.2

What's the point of such an incendiary comment? No, you aren't understanding it right. At worst you are offering a deliberately misleading interpretation. Here's what the link says:

         The Boston housing prices dataset has an ethical problem: as
            investigated in [1], the authors of this dataset engineered a
            non-invertible variable "B" assuming that racial self-segregation had a
            positive impact on house prices [2]. Furthermore the goal of the
            research that led to the creation of this dataset was to study the
            impact of air quality but it did not give adequate demonstration of the
            validity of this assumption.
            The scikit-learn maintainers therefore strongly discourage the use of
            this dataset unless the purpose of the code is to study and educate
            about ethical issues in data science and machine learning.

ffssffsson FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried allegedly cashes out US$684,000 on-chain data show

Well what's the other explanation, that he'll cut his GPS monitor off, stowaway on a ship bound for Africa, and take the money out as gold or something? Knowing that this means his parents will lose their house? For a few hundred thousand dollars?

I agree it's suspicious though! I hope it's thoroughly investigated and his bail revoked if he is in violation.

ffssffsson FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried allegedly cashes out US$684,000 on-chain data show

His bail terms specifically restrict him from doing transactions larger than $1,000 without government approval, so he is actually restricted from doing this. Presumably his supervisors are investigating. I think a more reasonable explanation is that this is part of some consolidation of funds associated with FTX as part of the bankruptcy.

ffssffsson No, Romanian Cops Did Not Find Andrew Tate Because of a Pizza Box

No it goes way back to the 80s and 90s when radio consolidated. You had guys like Limbaugh reading off lists of men who died of AIDS and laughing at them. Same grift, different generation.

ffssffsson Stone tablet shows Babylonians able to approximate √2 with 99.9999% accuracy

I think this is the paper it's all coming from: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S031508609...

They've found some tables of similar estimations, which apparently match the results you get when you apply the author's algorithm, suggesting that's what the Babylonians used as well. I don't think the method itself is actually attested anywhere in known texts.

ffssffsson Hydroxychloroquine lowers Alzheimer's disease and related dementias risk

> incidents where the body damages itself

I don't think this is right, isn't the etiology of Alzheimers still pretty much completely unknown?

ffssffsson I Lost All Faith in LastPass

If anything I would intuit such an implementation is sacrificing performance for security, since it rules out some classic vulnerabilities.

ffssffsson Tesla used car price bubble pops, weighs on new car demand

The styling looks really dated now too. Look at a Tesla next to one of the new Mercedes or BMW EV models. It's not good.

ffssffsson Why Solana was decimated by Bankman-Fried’s downfall

Sure, it's kind of like really crappy penny stocks that are in danger of being delisted and probably doing fraud. But real companies have cashflows and assets, get audited by real auditors, hire real employees instead of teenage "anons", etc. It's actually pretty different!

ffssffsson Tell HN: People are spamming GitHub issues with ChatGPT

GPT-2 output detector flags it bright red (which is interesting since this was presumably done with GPT-3): https://huggingface.co/openai-detector/

I have a feeling we're going to have to stick this kind of thing in every piece of input processing middleware over the next couple years.

ffssffsson Archaeologists devise a better clock for Biblical times

This is all accurate (well the technical bits, I don't know much about biblical history or its historicity) however I will make one maddening correction: archeologists conventionally use the word "sherd" (short for "potsherd") when referring to broken pieces of ceramic artifacts. The word "shard" has an almost identical meaning, except that it connotes some sharpness, and is not exclusive to ceramics as "sherd" is.