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mythas

105 karma · joined May 5, 2017

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mythas··on Filing the corners off my MacBooks
I always like to cite Benford’s law for this one.
mythas··on Take the Pedals Off the Bike
Yup! I’ve taught 4 kids with this method. A year or 2 on the balance bike, 2-ish weeks with training wheels and then take the training wheels off and they get it within 5-10 minutes. Took a bunch of frustration with the first kid to arrive at this method but I’ve done it with the next 3 and it works flawlessly.
mythas··on CoRncrete: A corn starch based building material (2017)
Yeah when the CORN-FREAKING-CRETE skyscraper crowd funding video comes out we can all be more skeptical than we were for SOLAR-FREAKING-ROADWAYS.
mythas··on You'll regret using natural keys
Care to expand on this thought? Curious what you have in mind!
mythas··on You'll regret using natural keys
Another example that happens surprisingly often in healthcare. A registration clerk will incorrectly enter a personal health number (PHN) into the system. Then the actuall holder of that PHN shows up. If this were the PK then the system just wouldn’t handle this case and the reg clerk would have a huge mess to sort out on the spot. A surrogate key on the Person table allows this registration to be made where 2 people have the same PHN in the system. Then cleanup can be handled after the fact to track down the first person, determine their correct PHN and update the record.
mythas··on Examples of AI rip-offs making their way into Google News
It’s a nice closed loop now so it’s inevitable that ai generated content will win google search. One can pump out content, see how it scores, and iterate until they have an ai trained to top the google search results. It’s already so frustrating looking for real info. Soon it will be impossible.
mythas··on Analog Chess
How close to the king are they covering? .0000001 units? The king can move .00000009 units. You can always make a smaller real number.
mythas··on Ohio Lottery to Give 5 People $1M Each to Encourage Vaccination
I feel like this will make those who are scared so much more suspicious. They’ll think “There’s no free lunch so why are you bribing me to get something? It must be really bad if you have to go this far”
mythas··on 75% of med students are on antidepressants, stimulants, or both? (2017)
“Until you figure out where the no free lunch theorem has stashed the harm” is a saying I will be using for the rest of my days.
mythas··on Ask HN: Favorite teachers on YouTube?
“Keep your dick in a vice” is a play on words of the saying “keep you stick on the ice”. The latter being made famous by the Canadian comedian Steve Smith aka Red Green.
mythas··on Is Type 2 Diabetes Reversible at Scale?
As it is Peter Attia I’m assuming it was some form of intermittent fasting with some version of Keto. He doesn’t really like giving one size fits all solutions so that’s probably why it isn’t mentioned here. Source joe Rogan podcast interview.
mythas··on Prevalence of vitamin D deficiency in adults admitted to psychiatric hospital
These kinds of studies often feel like the result of some p-hacking. Take a smallish sample size from a population of interest, record a bunch of data on them, then pick the result that is most abnormal and say “hmmm maybe this is why this population is different.” Not saying that’s the case here I’m just always skeptical until I know the methodology.
mythas··on Why are diapers so expensive?
I have an 8 month old and just the other day was thinking how are they able to make these things so cheaply? Seriously for 80 cents a day I can avoid the nightmare of cloth diapers (sorry planet). All the estimates in the post are soooo far off the mark. They are done with the cost of premium diapers for 4 year olds at the rate of use of a sub 2 month old. I’d say 350 bucks Canadian a year if I extrapolate out our costs to complete our kids first year.
mythas··on A letter from Drew and Arash
Wait are you telling me that every wasted minute you have at work isn’t due to file hosting issues? Personally I feel that if people designed digital spaces with as much care as they do physical spaces my work day would be rainbows and unicorns. /s
mythas··on Hack everything without fear
Like most hard things in life the most honest advice anyone can give you is stop worrying about getting stuck, embrace confusion and learn to love being lost. If you can learn to not lose confidence when you’re in the wilderness then you have learned how to learn. Unfortunately this is challenging to do. It’s like telling someone the way to do a pull up is to do a pull-up. For self motivated people this is all the coaching they need. For most however, they need someone to hold their hand through all the steps.
mythas··on How Tier 2 cloud vendors banded together to cope with Spectre and Meltdown
Then suddenly he said, “I have it! We are going to swim all together like 0.1% of the biggest fish in the sea!”

~ Leo Lionni, Swimmy

mythas··on Can anyone make money on the moon?
There is all sorts of money to be made on the moon. You can be a moon welder, you can lead EVAs for groups of tourists, you can even be a smuggler and sneak in Cuban cigars to the moons upper class.
mythas··on The Girl with the Brick Earring
But the goal here really isn’t to minimize the number of pieces used. It is to minimize total cost of covering the space. This makes things much more complex as it turns into some weird variant of a knapsack problem.
mythas··on Show HN: Nebula – Alarm clock where you grow stars while you sleep
I like the app but am offended by the idea of stars being made from cosmic dust. Can you add a divine intervention option?
mythas··on Neural Translation of Musical Style
So my sister went 14/18. She says,

"The jazz ones are very obvious. Also the voicing of the parts in the first chunk of songs was more nuanced with the human than the AI. The jazz is too straight in the runs with the AI, too "perfect". Real life players stall/hitch, even if just a little! But really, it's pretty impressive - way better than old school canned midi player stuff!"

How effective do you think this approach can be with altering timings to try and imitate that style?

mythas··on Neural Translation of Musical Style
First off super cool project with impressive results!! I am not a musician but I was fairly reliably (>75%) able to identify the NN. It took listening to a few examples but I quickly realized that smoothness was the give away. Humans make much more significant jumps when going from soft to aggressive or visa versa where the NN tended to smooth out these changes. I'm going to have my sister (a classically trained pianist) take a listen and see what she thinks.

Edit spelling

mythas··on How to explain zero-knowledge protocols to your children (1998) [pdf]
My preferred example: I want to prove to you I know how to do a card trick. I have you pick a card memorize it and put it in the deck. Then I am able to reproduce your card. I can do this a million times to convince you, but never reveal the method of the trick to you. As long as when the verifier picks a card they don't show it to anyone, any other spectators can't know if we are colluding and can't determine how the trick is done.

I prefer this example as it is easier to visual knowing how to do a card trick than it is to understand how you would identify the number of beans in a jar. It also allows you to further explain things like collisions as a magic trick can have multiple methods. Or how by observing enough cases of the trick and "thinking" really hard you might be able to figure out how the trick is done. The crappier the magician the easier it is to figure out their trick.