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I understand this intellectually but it is just exhausting

Decades ago when I was getting started there was a team that fell way behind and everyone on the team worked weekends and many days until midnight and finally delivered some buggy arguable product 6 months late. They were hailed as heroes. No one even noticed me and my team delivering on time. I learned a valuable and entirely inapplicable lesson.

gmarxon Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

Yes if you look exactly at the early pandemic then Sweden did worse than its immediate neighbors (but not worse than the rest of the OECD countries). But the real measure of success in policy has to include the rest of the pandemic and its aftermath. The others caught up.

gmarxon Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

All valid things to check but would also need to be checked for other OECD countries. I would not assume the OECD methodology does not take account of the aging. Also I would not assume this had much of an effect. The way it might would be if a lot of younger people moved to Sweden during the pandemic . In general cross border movement slowed during that time

gmarxon Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

I can always be wrong but I did a rigorous analysis and other people reported similar findings.

gmarxon Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

I have a medical background and when the pandemic started I did a literature to see if masks had helped with other respiratory virus epidemics (as masking had been common for years in many Asian countries ). the results were decidedly unimpressive and I concluded masks might to something but it was not a big effect at a societal level. The mistake that many smart people without medical backgrounds make is assuming that if a measure "makes sense" from a basic science point of view, it must have a real effect in a patient or a society. Counter-intuitively this almost always turns out to be wrong.

I did a study of mask based on self reports early in the pandemic and I did show a significant slowing of the progress of the pandemic in states that had a high claimed rate of mask use. I had (I thought) some clever ways of eliminating other differences between states in my analysis and was surprised to see so much slowing. However, I am not sure which way the causality runs. I can easily see heavy masking making it such a bummer to go to bars (e.g.) that the lack of socialization caused the slowing.

But in summary, to your point, to the medically knowledgeable there was a lot of evidence before that masks would not do much (not nothing) and there is a lot more now that masks didn't do much

gmarxon Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

Perhaps your April 2020 number is correct but I think it's irrelevant because it is too time-boxed. I did an analysis (matching those by others) using the OECD excess deaths data and if you extend the time period through last fall, Sweden did either best (according to other's analysis) or second best (according to mine). Excess deaths actually continued after the pandemic has subsided in many countries (US and UK at least I recall) and I think it reasonable to assume the pandemic and pandemic policy had something to do with it. To judge overall success of policies you need to look at the whole time of the pandemic and its aftermath and the Swedes did better than almost everyone

gmarxon Defamed by ChatGPT

my lay opinion (subject to change based on coming real world cases) is that if you ask the question and it libels someone there is no damage. If you publish it without checking if it is true, there are possible damages and the human who published it to the world is liable.

If a company starts a news service based on such content and doesn't fact check, they should be liable.

gmarxon A Whale-Oiled Machine

For a person of GenX this is a fascinating thread, most notably for the lack of moral posturing. We were raised to consider whaling an unspeakable evil. To the current generation it looks like an engineering and history discussion. I wonder if we could get away with wearing fur again? Has enough time passed that activists have forgotten they are supposed to hurl blood at anyone wearing a fur coat?

gmarxon Improved audio rendering with an optimised version of memcpy (2013)

absolutely and whether you think you care about sound quality or not, one thing I have found is that it makes a huge difference for dialog clarity. I watched Dune when it came out in a brand new theater in Los Angeles and then a few months later on my home system. I was quite surprised by how much more of the dialog was intelligible than I had thought

gmarxon The overfitted brain: Dreams evolved to assist generalization (2021)

I have wondered this too. What if dreams are a side-effect of a maintenance process, like if you were always kind and rewind your VHS but choose to watch them while doing so.

Also occurred to me (thanks to chatGPT) that dreams might be produced in the same way chatGPT produces narratives, by running through a series of "what is likely to be next according to my trained network" decisions

gmarxon Why do modern pop songs have so many credited writers?

Wasn't there a Beatles anecdote where Lennon says to McCartney "let's write a swimming pool!" People get good at music because they love it, but just because they love it and we love them, don't assume they aren't in it for the money.

gmarxon Is Hate Speech Legal?

The right to free speech does not protect your right to commit crimes or civilly damage someone merely by speaking as part of the crime or tort. So if you and your friends plan to rob a bank together, the planning, or conspiracy, can be a separate charge in addition to the robbery. Libel is a tort because you lie (important) to damage someone's reputation and this could cost them money.

Hate speech is mostly just hurting peoples feelings. It neither helps cause physical damage nor costs the victims money. You cannot, in the US, ban the expression of a thought just because you think somewhere down the line it could result in damage to someone.

So three guys conspire to burn down a church- that could damage someone. A guy writing on the internet that churches are full of pedos and someone who reads that decides to burn down a church? The guy who burns the church only committed a crime.

There could be grey areas between those two situations and that is for law to decide. But the crime cannot be essentially the thoughts and ideas expressed

gmarxon Is Hate Speech Legal?

Per my other comment, you cannot hide behind "speech alone is harmless". If a reasonable person would think you were joking it might be a defense but if you took the money anyway, I doubt that defense would hold up.

We could easily make the penalty for SWATting life in prison. If you got caught the only free speech defense I could imagine would be that you sincerely believed that SWAT was needed and you were mistaken. Sometimes that defense would work, but I can imagine all kinds of scenarios in which the defense would be useless, e.g. you did it to the same guy multiple times, or you don't live anywhere near the location you sent SWAT to

gmarxon Is Hate Speech Legal?

The answer is that the right to free speech does not provide a trick to get around other laws. How close to violence do you have to get? That crime/tort is usually called "assault" and (IANAL) the standard is usually on the order of "would a reasonable person thing he was about to be subject to some kind of physical attack". So brandishing a knife and saying in a serious tone "prepare to be stabbed" would count. Saying "I think anyone whose favorite band is 'Green Day'" would probably not.

We also have laws and civil actions for fraud, defamation, slander, libel. For all of them a key component is that you are lying to achieve some end- take money, or ruin someone's reputation.

These lines are actually very easy to draw. If the thing you are bothered by and trying to outlaw is the thought behind them then they are protected. If you are trying to stop something that would be considered criminal or a civil tort regardless of how it was achieved (stealing, making some think he is about to get hurt, ruining someone's reputation) then it is not protected.

gmarxon Ask HN: Why do some people not communicate clearly?

Poor communicators do not try to imagine the state of anyone outside their own heads. So they fail to explain things that the other person doesn't know, and over explain things they find more interesting or relevant than the answer to the actual question asked.

Also, we seem to have lost respect for editors in writing and it may have spilled over into oral communication. When answering a technical question it would help if people kept the old inverted pyramid structure in mind. Instead people indulge in a "let me take you on a fascinating intellectual journey to parts unknown; Will I ever answer the question you asked? Who knows? But I appreciate your patience and indulgence".

I will often interrupt a few minutes into a monologue that doesn't seem to be circling my question and say "It's ok if you think I asked the wrong question, but in that case you need to say 'the answer to the question you asked is X, now here is why I think it is the wrong question...'"

gmarxon Ask HN: Why do some people not communicate clearly?

This is a huge part of it. Most people just can't keep track of what people outside their own heads would know. So they end up over explaining things that don't need it and not explaining at all things the other person doesn't know.

gmarxon Ask HN: Why do some people not communicate clearly?

This is almost always incorrect. Many (most) people objectively are bad at communication. If you cannot make your point of view clear to anyone but yourself, you are bad at communication.

gmarxon Excess death from around the world due to Covid

Fascinating analysis and I cannot immediately see the flaws. I don't see any specific good counter-arguments in this thread.

One thing I would contradict is his idea that it is suspicious that excess deaths taper just as vaccinations do. Wouldn't we expect that if the vaccines worked well? Presumably vaccines taper as the vulnerable population is saturated with vaccine. Some time after that you would expect deaths to slow

gmarxon Excess death from around the world due to Covid

I don't know if the UK system has unique characteristics that would have made it likely to collapse (whatever that means) but I equally sure it wouldn't have happened in the US. I waited in vain for stories of people dying because no more beds or ventilators were available and never found one. I ready plenty about how we were close. The way probability works if we were really close, there would have been many examples of it actually happening.

Either way, that doesn't really answer his analysis unless you can account for the collapse not happening in Sweden

gmarxon Ask HN: Apps that are built with Git as the back end?

My medical terminology value set creation tool uses git (well, a java implementation of git) to store and version value sets

gmarxon The inflated promise of science education

"Follow the science!" implies that science can determine an exactly correct public policy but this is nonsense. Public policy is all about tradeoffs,e.g. excess deaths for economics and mental health. It has to take into account how people want to live and their emotional reactions and all the unpredictable complex effects of human behavior. The scientist can say what he thinks would happen to cases in New York City if 95% of people wore surgical masks whenever they left the house and (if he is being honest) how confident he is in that prediction.

How to balance that predicted effect's benefits for society against the negative effects of requiring this is absolutely not up to the scientist and is no more in his field of expertise than it is in mine

gmarxon Why companies are interested in Myers-Briggs types

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sliding_scale_fees

gmarxon FTC proposes rule to ban junk fees, bait-and-switch tactics plaguing car buyers

I had forgotten that this was done in racing but can't imagine why you would want this for a commuter vehicle. I assumed they were just adding a line item to the bill and nitrogen made it sound more legit. But now that you mention it maybe they were offering to fill the tires with nitrogen like in the race cars but then just using regular air because really how would the customer know?

gmarxon FTC proposes rule to ban junk fees, bait-and-switch tactics plaguing car buyers

Charging customers for nitrogen filled tires that contain no more nitrogen than air (hey 78% is a lot!) reminds me of an idea I had to market regular salt as "ancient sea salt". I cracked myself up with this idea and thinking about the suckers in Whole Foods switching to it from their pink Himalayan or whatever regular sea salt.

Then I searched and discovered that of course some scumbag was actually doing it. Hehe

gmarxon Why companies are interested in Myers-Briggs types

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sliding_scale_fees

I learned the term WRT insulin for diabetes. I think the key is that the scale you use for determining something (fees, insulin dose) changes depending on other characteristics of the person

gmarxon Why companies are interested in Myers-Briggs types

The author says each of the big 5 is on a "sliding scale". I admit this is a bit pedantic, but isn't each just on a plain old scale? Wouldn't a sliding scale imply that one score could affect how another was graded?

gmarxon Never Hire a Herd of Goats to Mow Your Lawn

I didn't realize until the end that this was written by AI. The progress of the story was just silly enough that I kept reading, assuming that all the nonsense would come together in the end. It did in a very computery way.

This may explain much of the poor content on the web

gmarxon Health insurers just published close to a trillion hospital prices

The next question would be 'how long did the average negotiation take' followed by 'how much were the average people on each side of the negotiation paid?" (or are most of these negotiations the result of computers talking to each other? Either way with a few assumptions one could make an estimate of the smallest amount these different prices cost the system. Might be huge

gmarxon Show HN: Search and Explore Medical Terminologies

This is from an admin module in a project I did a long time ago. In my new job I find I need to search medical terminologies such as SNOMED, ICD10, RXNORM and LOINC and available tools were frustrating. So I extracted this from the old project and put it up on the web.

Feedback from coworkers has been extremely positive so I am opening it up to wider use.

My hope is that for someone who uses these terminology systems in his work, the UX becomes pretty easy with a little exploration.

My current plan is that it is free to search and compile lists (or value sets) then charge for download and value set management.

I am looking forward to Hacker News feedback.