Hacker News Reader

james-redwoodon The darker side of being a doctor (2017)

This has been extensively debunked. Read the original methods of the BMJ article that you linked. They took every single minor error, like prescribing medicine 15 minutes late, and if the patient died, even of an aggressive cancer that they had already, it would be counted in the 'medical error that caused the death' statistic.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/16/upshot/death-by-medical-e...

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/863788?scode=msp&st=fpf...

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/medical-errors-2020/

james-redwoodon Hacking my “smart” toothbrush

Next up: 2FA for your toothbrush

james-redwoodon India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

Reading the source that Nature cites, it seems like the content has been made temporarily unexaminable ‘in light of COVID’, rather than the section actually getting cut from the textbook. https://ncert.nic.in/rationalised-content.php Could any Indian with a new physical textbook perhaps confirm? It’s a rather concerning policy.

The headline also seems awfully clickbaity. What the policy seems to have done is shifted basic evolution down to younger grades and moved the more advanced concepts to more senior grades. However, this shifts more advanced concepts up to grades in which science as a subject is not compulsory. Regressive as this is, this isn’t what the headline suggests.

james-redwoodon Linda Yaccarino is the new CEO of Twitter

I'm a former Rhodesian (present day Zimbabwe) who moved to South Africa after things went south in Zim. For context, I'm white, so it's not like I have a racial gripe against Musk. Elon went to one of the fanciest private schools in the country's capital and lived in one of its richest suburbs. Yes, technically Boys High is a public school, but people from outside South Africa don't know what the Model C school policy was. His father was extraordinarily wealthy and if you do read interviews by both Elon and Errol, they both admit this. His mother was an international supermodel and his family was generally pretty well connected in the greater scheme of things. The entire story about him struggling during college (where he went to an Ivy League university paid for by his father) is complete bullshit. I don't dispute his ingenuity in starting Zip2 (funded by his father too by the way), but he wasn't starting from the bottom with no help - that's the grossly inaccurate part that Elon still pushes for optics and people who are too stupid or unaware of how SA works lap it up.

james-redwoodon Help! Is This Arabic?

I pity the poor dev who has a Moroccan co-worker that helpfully offers to translate their application into darija thinking it’s Arabic

james-redwoodon Help! Is This Arabic?

Two billion people can read it to some degree because of Islam. A minority of them actually use the script to write things daily.

And there are plenty of people other than this guy making contributions to it, you’ve only just read a singular post by a single person outlining his most common gripes with companies that do not consult native speakers for their translations. It’s not an exhaustive list of people working in the sphere. Imagine if you read a blog post by Linus Torvalds, and thought: ‘wow, it’s crazy that no one else is making contributions to this cool open source kernel?’ - that’s exactly what you’ve done in your comment.

james-redwoodon Ask HN: HN-like forum for literature and cinema?

In my personal experience the quality of discussion is awful on both boards. It’s genuinely worse than Reddit, which was a low bar.

james-redwoodon Rishi Sunak will be next UK prime minister

Could you provide a source? There's nothing I can find about Sunak being connected to the WEF in any way. Although the hashtag #wefpuppet has exploded on Twitter by what looks like a bot network.

james-redwoodon Rishi Sunak will be next UK prime minister

Sunak, an Oxford and Stanford educated billionaire, is perhaps the best candidate the Conservative party can unsurprisingly put forward at the current moment. Given his background as a successful investment banker at Goldman Sachs, one can only wonder about what his economic policies would look like.

james-redwoodon America’s Throwaway Spies: How the CIA Failed Iranian Informants

This made me sick to my stomach. Absolutely revolting behaviour by the CIA against extraordinarily brave Iranians who risked their lives and even did prison time to help.

james-redwoodon Ask HN: Is there any “PBS Kids” alternatives these days?

Da Vinci

james-redwoodon Ask HN: Why is Python package management still a dumpster fire?

https://xkcd.com/1987/

A relevant XKCD comic that encapsulates this well.

james-redwoodon Who’s your favorite public thinker?

Someone that hasn’t been mentioned yet is Dominic Cummings. His Twitter page and Substack are fantastic.

james-redwoodon LibGen's Bloat Problem

That’s not going to work, because outside of e-book enthusiasts, few know what DJVU is and even fewer have the technological skills and will to figure out how to open it. A large part of LibGen’s demographic are university students downloading exorbitantly priced textbooks, and given that, having both a pdf and a djvu available would be ideal.

james-redwoodon [dead]

I could certainly imagine that some of these children grow up without a fundamental grasp of the basic sciences as well as the entire idea behind scientific enquiry. While this is also occasionally the case in secular schools, at least I feel most students do get exposed to it and that it is enormously beneficial for childhood development as well as teaching kids how to think rationally.

james-redwoodon What Beirut was like before the war (2019)

I didn’t intend to make it seem that simple - I did so rather to point out the fallacies in the parent comment and point out the main reason for civil war to my knowledge. I’m well aware the situation is significantly more complex today.

james-redwoodon What Beirut was like before the war (2019)

While that did happen in my home country of Zimbabwe, it’s not the case for the examples that he mentioned. Especially considering that even Lebanon was under a mandate and had far more freedom to rule themselves, which in my opinion came nowhere near actual colonialism.

james-redwoodon What Beirut was like before the war (2019)

Lebanon became independent in 1945. Civil war began in 1975, largely as a result of radical Islamist Palestinians who had left Palestine and wanted an Islamic state in Lebanon. Lebanon beforehand, it is important to note, was not Muslim majority at all. It was Christian and Druze, and that was the very foundation of the country itself. It was never the country of Muslims in the first place.

Iran was also never colonised by European countries. Its decline began with both theocratic rule as well as sanctions, but even despite this it’s still remarkably functional and developed in comparison to a ton of countries that weren’t put in such a position.

james-redwoodon WeWork co-founder lines up $350m A16Z investment for a new real estate venture

La plus ca change, la plus c'est la meme chose

james-redwoodon ICE Set Up a Fake College to Catch Alleged Student Visa Fraud

I feel terrible for that student who lost $15k to what amounts essentially to government mandated fraud. Good grief.

james-redwoodon Family Spends 48 Hours in the Wild Due to Google Maps

Does no one carry a physical mapbook these days? I always keep one in the back just for situations like these.

james-redwoodon Law enforcement took more stuff from people than burglars did last year (2015)

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

Look up ‘civil asset forfeiture’. It’s shocking.

james-redwoodon Windows10Debloater: Script to remove Windows 10 bloatware (2021)

Windows makes Ubuntu look like Puppy Linux

james-redwoodon A model for journalistic copypasta

This is perhaps one of the best pieces of writing I've ever seen on HN. Very, very pertinent.

james-redwoodon Ask HN: What Happened to Open Courseware?

I’ve typically found the videos associated with it by searching YouTube and the internet, albeit this approach is not consistently successful.

james-redwoodon They Told Their Therapists Everything. Hackers Leaked It All (2021)

> Sure, some questioned the purity of Tapio’s motives; Kristian Wahlbeck, director of development at Finland’s oldest mental health nonprofit, says he was “a bit frowned-upon” and “perceived as too business-minded.” And yes, there were occasional stories about Vastaamo doing shady-seeming things, such as using Google ads to try to poach prospective patients from a university clinic, as the newspaper Iltalehti reported. But people kept signing up.

> But the slick exterior concealed deep vulnerabilities. Mikael Koivukangas, head of R&D at a Finnish medtech firm called Onesys Medical, points out that Vastaamo’s system violated one of the “first principles of cybersecurity”: It didn’t anonymize the records. It didn’t even encrypt them. The only thing protecting patients’ confessions and confidences were a couple of firewalls and a server login screen. Anyone with experience in the field, Koivukangas says, could’ve helped Vastaamo design a safer system.

Disappointing, but I'm not surprised.

james-redwoodon Ask HN: What Happened to Open Courseware?

It was a big trend a few years back. But many are still going strong - I for one do them all the time, and I've found it extraordinarily enriching. MIT will almost certainly never take them down, as it's part of their institutional spirit. Others on the other hand, I'm not too sure about.

james-redwoodon Twitter paid $5000 bug bounty that resulted in 5.4mm leaked records

This is probably why it was not reported for several months, and why selling the records to the highest bidder on the darkweb was so much more lucrative. Companies need to give out less pathetic incentives to security researchers.

james-redwoodon Computing Adler32 Checksums at 41 GB/s

It works well in science (think the Nobel Prizes), and there's certainly more than enough money floating around in the tech community for it to work.

james-redwoodon The Apollo On-Board Computers

I once met a first year engineering student who was the daughter of a friend of mine. When she complained that you can do nothing cool with small computers, I pointed her to an article about this.