Hacker News Reader

jcaldason NASA just sent a software update to a spacecraft 12B miles away

As Oscar Wilde wrote, "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars".

jcaldason The secret joke at the heart of the Harvard affirmative-action case

I have always seen Ivy League admission controversies as stemming from the fact that the number of "perfect" (as measured by objective criteria) candidates is so high versus available spots, that there are only two solutions:

* Select candidates randomly from a pool of perfect candidates.

* Select candidates based on additional, subjective criteria.

The first approach seems inherently fairer, but schools went with the second approach. It's hardly surprising that all sorts of biases creep in.

I once read that a candidate was rejected because, having an enormous amount of extracurricular activities in his CV, was deemed "too intense".

jcaldason Regulators should treat stablecoins like banks

In my opinion, regulators have a too-big-to-fail problem here. Tether is known to be used for artificially inflating the crypto market in collusion with certain exchanges. There is a lot of documentation on this, the following two articles are a good start:

https://theodoregreenbaum.medium.com/the-crypto-time-bomb-is...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-26/tether-ex...

If news suddenly come out about Tether being formally accused by the Department of Justice, the market may react in panic and things might get ugly. As an anecdote, I have a friend who told me she put a significant amount of her life savings into "etherium and carnado" (sic). There are millions of people like this who will get absolutely crushed.

I don't see a non-painful solution here. The regulators were too slow and have allowed a monster to be created.

jcaldason Vietnam War images from the North Vietnamese side

If anyone here is interested in Vietnam war photography, I highly recommend the book Vietnam Inc., by Philip Jones Griffith (1971).

jcaldason Baltic airlines reroute flights to avoid Belarus airspace

Lukashenko will not go down without a fight, and Russia is very unwilling to see a color revolution again next to its borders. Putin dreams of annexing Belarus.

Couple this with the EU's overall weakness and fragmented interests (eg nordstream 2), and it's hard to imagine a good outcome.

A few sanctions will come out of this that will make EU officials look good and further place Belarus into Russian hands (namely, as you wrote, making Belarus airspace dependent on Russian airspace). Let's see what the real leader of the EU has to say.

If the EU can't stand for the people of Belarus, for the sake of freedom and human rights, then it will have once again failed.

jcaldason Tesla has suspended vehicle purchases using Bitcoin

There is a far more eco-friendly alternative to proof-of-work (PoW) called proof-of-stake (PoS).

I wonder if a serious discussion will finally begin on moving Bitcoin to PoS. This will certainly have a strong opposition and will likely lead to a fork, i.e. two cryptocurrencies will exist at the same time, call them BTC-PoW and BTC-PoS.

In any case these news are a leap forward in the crypto space. IMO, replacing PoW by PoS is a bit like replacing incandescent light bulbs with LEDs at home.

jcaldason Why Robinhood disabled buys but not sells

As you can see, buys make this worse, sells make it better. Robinhood could not execute buys, because it would increase the deposits they'd need, which they legally must obligate by. Sells, on the other hand, do not have this problem. They would not push the 95% boundary more to the right.

I have been trying to analyze this Robinhood story in an unbiased and objective way. My motivation is that I am interested in contemporary history and believe that what we witnessed in these past few days is a historical event.

I have a question to those here who are knowledgeable about finance and law (I am certainly not).

If my stock trading app stops allowing buying a stock, while still allowing selling a stock, even if this is done purely for technical reasons (see quote at beginning of this comment), am I incurring in market manipulation? To me the answer is evidently yes, but I would like to hear other opinions.

jcaldason When You’re Outnumbered: Lessons from Two British Masters of Irregular Warfare

Chechnya after the 1994-1996 war is also an excellent example.

jcaldason One Page Dungeon Generator

Awesome. How easy would it be to generate a corresponding interactive 3d environment?

jcaldason Psychology’s Replication Crisis Is Real

I suspect Ethereum itself may provide a feasible basis for supporting open, transparent research.

jcaldason Psychology’s Replication Crisis Is Real

> Is this something you witnessed going down in person, or did you just develop a strong feeling given a lot of clues?

The latter.

jcaldason Psychology’s Replication Crisis Is Real

It's somewhat heart-warming to read the comments here about machine learning. I did my PhD in machine learning from 2007 to 2012, and the main reason I left research was because of the widespread fraud.

Most papers reported an improved performance over some other methods in very specific data sets, but source code was almost always not provided. Once, I dug so deeply into a very highly cited paper that I understood not only that the results were faked, but precisely the tricks that were used to fake them.

I believe scientific fraud arises primarily from two causes:

- Publish or perish. Everyone's desperate to publish. Some Principal Investigators have a new paper roughly every other week!

- Careerism. For some highly ambitious people, publishing papers comes before everything else, even if that means committing fraud. This happens even with highly successful researchers, who have the occasional brilliant, highly cited paper, but who also publish a lot of incremental, dubious work.

P.S. Mildly off-topic, but I love the Ethereum research community at https://ethresear.ch/ , precisely because it is so open and transparent! I wish an equivalent community existed for machine learning.