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glaugh

2,024 karma · joined August 27, 2011

Campwing Founder https://campwing.com

Campwing simplifies summer camp search by collecting fine-grained detail on just about every camp in the SF, LA, and Seattle areas

——

Statwing Cofounder https://www.statwing.com

Statwing was acquired by Qualtrics in 2016, and the product lives on as Stats iQ

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glaugh··on McDonald's is a premium product now (2024)
Gosh, this was exactly my thought in reading that, and I just learned about it today
glaugh··on Oregon school cell phone ban: 'Engaged students, joyful teachers'
Saw this the other day: https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/5726492-social-media-...

Writer’s org’s founders include Meta, among many others: https://itif.org/our-supporters/

I’m no expert here, so leaving this as a datapoint

glaugh··on FBI is investigating Minnesota Signal chats tracking ICE
Do you mean just technically trivial? I agree with that.

If you mean more broadly trivial, I see that quite differently. An administration that has repeatedly abused its power in order to intimidate and punish political opponents is opening an investigation into grassroots political opponents. That feels worth being concerned about.

glaugh··on The past was not that cute
That series of blog posts is incredible, as is all his work. One thing that stuck with me is that while our deep evolutionary past is very important, the majority of humans who have lived have been peasants in an agrarian society
glaugh··on Sports supplement creatine makes no difference to muscle gains, trial finds
Yeah. A lot of the warnings on the side of the box are based on really suspect data from a very long time ago (Abraham Morgentaler at Harvard is my go-to for this) but the point cj raises is legit.

When a man takes exogenous testosterone, their endogenous production (in the testicles) plummets. This is largely fine, but the production in the testicles also leads to sperm production, and that gets lost.

The solution to this is HCG, which stimulates some testicular production. But it is not a perfect solution, and recently CA has made it much harder to use HCG for this purpose (which was always off-label).

glaugh··on Sports supplement creatine makes no difference to muscle gains, trial finds
My personal experience, having had low testosterone for much of my life and then now being on testosterone replacement therapy:

- It’s obvious to me that I (n=1) gained a ton of muscle and lost a ton of fat very quickly without having done dramatic changes in workouts at first

- It also made it waaaay easier to work out. I used to hate it bc I was exhausted all the time, and now I don’t really mind, and sometimes even enjoy it. In actual practice pulling these variables apart is hard

PSA: T levels have declined markedly over the past generation or two. But when one tests for low T, the goalposts move bc every time a new population is studied for setting benchmarks (generally every decade or two), the definition of clinically “low” is moved to the new 2.5%ile of that study, such that someone in the current 3rd %ile (considered A-okay by most doctors) would have been in maybe 2.4th %ile (considered red alert by most doctors) using the previous benchmarks (made up numbers but roughly right).

(This is a dumb approach, the binary magic of the 2.5%ile (2 standard deviations), and it frustrates me greatly bc i was denied care bc my first test was 2.4%ile and 2nd was 2.6%ile and thus i was told i was fine bc of the 2nd result and offered anti-depressants instead).

Fixing this is not about muscles, it’s about having energy to live life fully and not be cranky.

So if you’re constantly tired, consider testing for this. And use a functional doc, as in my experience from shepherding 5-10 other folks through this process, the standard doc knows little about this stuff and thinks that having a condition like this is binary

Sorry, a bit off-topic, but no change in my life has been more important besides kids, so I try to spread the word where even somewhat appropriate

glaugh··on Alzheimer's biomarkers now visible up to a decade ahead of symptoms
> …small amounts of clumping tau protein in the brain and cerebrospinal fluid, which lead to Alzheimer's disease.

I don’t think this should be stated as a proven fact anymore, given the doubt now cast over the amyloid hypothesis

This is a nice summary of the case: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/plain-english-with-der...

glaugh··on Why is Warner Bros. Discovery putting old movies on YouTube?
I went to a Jesuit high school but am not religious now. But I still have a soft spot for the Jesuits. They tend to be liberal (relatively speaking) and taught extensively about social justice, and generally are very education-oriented.
glaugh··on Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed
I’d say it’s pro economic development. Like they express concerns around the decline of anti-trust enforcement.

I’m sure it’s true that they used to advocate dictators, but in the 30 years of reading it as my primary news source, they’ve always seemed to me to be very consistently on the side of liberalism (in the older sense of the word) and very concerned about democracy

glaugh··on I had to take down my course-swapping site or be expelled
I know very little about lawyering, but I could imagine a UW-alum or Seattle-area lawyer advising pro bono bc of generosity or good publicity on a very newsworthy case

Anyone on here friends with a UW-alum or Seattle-area lawyer who might be interested but doesn’t read HN?

glaugh··on Carlsen disqualified from World Rapid and Blitz championship for wearing jeans
Possibly this is not the actual dress code? Or I'm missing something.

3.a. The following is acceptable for men players, captains, head of delegation. -- Suits, ties, dressy pants, trousers, jeans...

3.b. The following is NOT acceptable for men players, captains, head of delegation. -- Beach-wear slips, profanity and nude or semi-nude pictures printed on shirts, torn pants or jeans...

glaugh··on Task-specific LLM evals that do and don't work
Great, thank you (and hedgehog), that makes sense
glaugh··on Task-specific LLM evals that do and don't work
Thank you (and teMPOral) for these comments, this sounds potentially useful to me.

I hate to ask this, but I'm struggling to find any thorough posts or articles or papers about this, do you have any links you could point me toward?

glaugh··on Y Combinator and Power in Silicon Valley
I was in the S12 batch. A couple years later we were demonstrably failing. I emailed the general YC advice line or something similar with a question, and pg responded with a thoughtful comment that was genuinely useful

I don’t think there’s any chance he saw any economic value in us, he took that time because he cared about startups and well-meaning failures like us

It’s a small thing, yes, but I’ve always thought it said a lot about him

glaugh··on Detecting when LLMs are uncertain
Fwiw this feels deeply relevant to my usage of LLMs to structure data. I’d like exactly a good indicator of uncertainty for each bit of data.
glaugh··on Ask HN: What have you built with LLMs?
I built a website to help people find summer camps for their kids.

https://campwing.camp/

Right now it’s just what i got up in a hurry last year, covers Seattle area only. Next year will cover SF and LA at least (and have a lot more features).

The data is quite granular (each row is one batch, say x age group at y location with z theme) and I do a lot of structuring data with prompts and now OpenAI’s Structured Outputs. I think the data gathering would have made this cost prohibitive otherwise.

I’m not engineer by training or work experience, so this also would have been impossible for me to build without ChatGPT’s help coding.

glaugh··on No Right Turn on Red Is Now the Default [for New Projects] in Seattle
The notable part, to me:

“The memo cites a recent study, published in the journal of the Institute of Traffic Engineers (ITE), looking at Washington, D.C.’s implementation of no-turn-on-red restrictions at 100 intersections in 2019. Driver-to-driver conflicts were reduced by 97%, and vehicle-pedestrian conflicts were reduced by 92% following the installation of consistent no-turn-on-red (NTOR) signage.”

glaugh··on What archaeology is telling us about the real Jesus
The Jesuit high school I went to had a class “Jesus of History, Christ of Faith”, that looked at what we do and don’t know about a historical Jesus (at least as of ~2000).

I’m sure I’d had my doubts before, but that class convinced me to stop believing for good.

Gotta hand it to the Jesuits for teaching that class though; all these years later and I still have a lot of respect for that order

glaugh··on Parental alienation and the unregulated experts shattering children’s lives
I believe flybrand had to look up the word and then just wanted to save time for other folks (like me) who might also have needed to do so :)
glaugh··on Ask HN: Favorite purchases of last two years?
Clavinova digital piano! I hated piano as a kid, largely bc of the lesson style (and plan on trying Suzuki method with my kids).

I’ve played guitar (poorly) for years and I’m shocked with how (relatively) easy it is on piano to do fun improvisation or learn songs I love (Radiohead’s Videotape to start, now trying Piano Man)

And digital means I can turn down the volume when kids are sleeping, use as a midi controller, etc. I’m not audiophilic enough to really care about the tonal difference between it and a real piano, I really can’t tell

glaugh··on Professor who harnessed power of cactuses is a top inventor
This is what I came here to say, very much agree. I frequently have the experience of going to examine.com or Cochrane Collaboration for info on more natural remedies and see that we just don’t have enough science on them to know.

Feels like the kind of market failure that could be solved by foundations, government funding, or legislated incentives to pharma

glaugh··on Piano Practice Software Progress
I’m not qualified to have an opinion here, but interesting to note that Thom Yorke of Radiohead has never learned to read sheet music (and they have a decent number of piano-based tunes)
glaugh··on KFC Mascot Col. Sanders Talks Malbolge Programming on General Hospital
The BK bumper car game has turned into a weird little christmas tradition in my family. Actually a very fun, easy-to-learn/hard-ish-to-master game (basically 2D Rocket League)
glaugh··on People that think you’re an asshole
And this observation does have empirical backing and is known as the “Spotlight Effect”. The more careful definition of it (which I agree is not the point of the pithy story) is “People tend to overestimate the degree to which others notice them and their failings.”

(Caveat that I haven’t looked into how deeply this has survived the psych and social psych replication crisis)

glaugh··on TreeCard: The wooden debit card that plants trees
This feels very clever to me. I think people have very wrong senses of how bad various actions are for carbon footprint. I know folks who don’t eat meat for CO2 reasons (which I’m fine with) but fly across the US all the time—-sorry citation needed and happy to be corrected but I did this math once and it was roughly one year of meat = one (round?)trip.

A side-benefit, in my view, is to show that actually offsetting carbon footprints isn’t terribly expensive (for people who have the disposable income to fly across the country), which I think counters the “We’d have to shut down the economy to stop global warming” misconception that I believe a lot of people have (citation also needed here, just personal experience)

The Indulgences That Actually Work Card (in the sense of old Catholic indulgences), you could call it :)

glaugh··on Covid-19 Changes Our Sleep
Barely related PSA: Just want to underline the “You don’t have to be overweight to have sleep apnea” thing. I, for example, have teeny tiny airway (via overbite) that gives me Obstructive Sleep Apnea. Took me, oh, 20 years to figure this out

(Snoring is normalized/funny in our society but should be viewed as cause for potential concern)

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/snoring/sympt...

glaugh··on Stanford apologizes after vaccine allocation leaves out medical residents
Fwiw, the administration said: “”” We are writing to acknowledge the significant concerns expressed by our community regarding the development and execution of our vaccine distribution plan. We take complete responsibility and profusely apologize to all of you. We fully recognize we should have acted more swiftly to address the errors that resulted in an outcome we did not anticipate “””

The chief resident sent an email explaining the nature of the error. The chief resident is, per my limited understanding, a resident from the previous year who stays on in a leadership role. Not obvious to me that someone in that position explaining the root cause is problematic.

glaugh··on Amazon reportedly has Pinkerton agents surveil workers who try to form unions
“What did you expect?” is my least favorite conversational trope (it’s more disappointing on HN because in general I have higher expectations here, but it’s common everywhere).

On the surface it sounds smart and world-weary. As an actual part of a conversation, whether something is expected is pretty orthogonal to whether, say, something would ideally be done about it.

I suppose it is relevant to whether something makes good content, but hopefully most of us aren’t here primarily to comment on our judgment of content marketability

I think the most common place I see it is with surveillance conversations

Though I should note that I’m not seeing those comments towards the top anymore, so that’s good

glaugh··on The Covid Science Wars
Thank you for this thoughtful post and prompt

> What helps you to sympathize and communicate with others?

You and others have suggested good ideas. Another that I find useful is to always give something. It doesn’t have to be falsely giving in on a fact. It can be “Y’know I was thinking the exact same thing then I ran into this paper!” or “This is interesting, I hadn’t thought of it this way. And...”

I think the tiniest, almost inconsequential gift and saving of face that that represents can totally change the tone of a conversation

Just my two cents

glaugh··on The Laptev Sea hasn't frozen
My boomer parents were raised by parents who were taught not to tell their kids they loved them.

My (privileged) five-year-old has emotional tools that I didn’t have until I was 25.

I do think we’re generally getting better at raising empathetic kids. It’s not uniform, but it’s better.

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