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nilram

228 karma · joined March 4, 2013

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nilram··on New insights into why aspirin works so well
What you describe sounds complex, but for the vertigo part, check out BPPV (benign paroxysmal positional vertigo). If you have seen an ENT, they've probably covered this base, but even though it's the most common cause of vertigo-induced trips to the ER, my ER doc didn't cover it. It was two weeks before I saw an ENT who basically fixed it with the Epley maneuver. "Basically fixed" because I still have some lingering (and annoying) effects that echo some of the other symptoms you describe. BPPV is unique in my experience of medicine in that it has a simple test (Dixie-Hallpike maneuver), and an easy fix.

The other thing that comes to mind is Ménière’s disease, a disease affecting the pressures of the inner ear. It's probably also considered if you've seen an ENT. A friend worked on his Ménière’s with diet (low salt, low glycemic index foods), and diuretics, but what is helping now is allergy shots. His ENT noticed that there was a seasonal component to his symptoms and sent him to an allergist. (The first allergist he went to did testing but found nothing; the next allergist found plenty of reactions and hit on an effective treatment.) Actually, his symptoms sound quite similar to yours. The Mayo clinic page on Ménière’s mentions various treatment modalities, though not allergy treatment.

nilram··on The risks of cleaning with bleach and other disinfectants
Similar situation, I have a bathroom with an exhaust fan but no openable windows. Besides the squeegee religion, I have a circulation fan on a timer that I let run for a couple hours to dry things out.
nilram··on Can I use university provided laptop for working on my own startup?
Depends on how ethical you want to be, and on any agreements you signed. Based on experience with a university professor, and a small company with a potentially profitable idea, it can complicate taking the product to market. I'd recommend finding some alternative compute engine (cf craigslist), transferring your work to it, and disavowing anything you did on the university laptop.
nilram··on Ask HN: How do you manage your private tech inventory?
And re: Sharpies, a silver sharpie is great for writing on black external power supplies.
nilram··on Ask HN: Best resource to learn how to invest 10k, 30k, 90k
AAII. American Association of Individual Investors. www.aaii.com

I've been a member for a long time and I've helped out with a local chapter.

They're a non-profit, and not affiliated with a particular financial institution. Doesn't accept ads (except, it seems, for the Discover card). Offline: Has a monthly magazine with a variety of ideas and strategies. Local chapters bring in speakers who are asked to make educational presentations about their work. In practice, most speakers put in small plug, but it's rarely more than a slide or two.

Since they're a non-profit, I don't feel like I have to second-guess what their intentions are, like wondering how much a broker is going to make off of my business, or if they're recommending a trade because of their commission. They do have a few add-on newsletters (that I've never subscribed to), but that's also a straightforward purchase model (vs broker & commission scenario).

nilram··on Tell HN: People are spamming GitHub issues with ChatGPT
Creating some random sentences, this came up as 98% chance as fake: My name is Aram. I have a large piece of fish in my backpack. I want to go to the mountains. I have no goals in life. This is all I can write.

When I changed "I want..." to "I quite want...", the slider moved from 98% to 21% chance fake.

nilram··on Ask HN: What do you do to recharge after a day of work?
Your doc should think of this, but add thyroid to the list. Has to be in line before adjusting any of the others the parent mentions (well, except insulin, but I'm hand-waving here).
nilram··on The Telephone of the Future (1988) [video]
Funny that the newscaster called the (large brick) cellphone a "trademark of the yuppies." While do recall one self-employed white-collar friend having one, they were much more common among building contractors and tradespeople.
nilram··on I tried 30 mustards this summer
It’s probably this brand, which I’ve seen in the Pacific Northwest (in the US). They do make good products but I don’t see a hot Olde English mustard among their current offerings.

https://www.beavertonfoods.com/beaver-brand/

nilram··on New phone can make calls and send texts, but it cannot access social media
My partner's mom's, age 96, was needing a new phone, so we got the latest "feature" phone from Lively (company formerly known as Jitterbug). On the new phone, the minimum number of keypresses to make a call to anyone in her phonebook was about 8. The minimum on the prior phone (which I know only by Jitterbug) was 2. Although she was an early adopter of word processing and email many years ago, she couldn't track what was going on with this new phone enough to use it. We found a direct replacement of the prior phone and have moved her back to that.

> I'm sick of machines constantly nagging for my attention.

Same. And in her case, she can manage far less attention than she used to. Tech companies don't accommodate for that.

nilram··on The Cookbook and Home Economics Collection
In a beautiful thread on Twitter, one of the participants related how her grandmother’s recipes only made sense once she talked with the her grandmother about her measurements. A cup? That was the blue cup she kept over there. A tablespoon? Why, that’s this one. A handful? Here ya go, honey. It’s not that those measurements are “wildly imprecise,“ necessarily, it’s that they are quite particular to the cook.
nilram··on Weather Service warns: ‘dangerous’ and ‘historic’ heat wave in Pacific Northwest
Predicted to have a nighttime low of 74 degrees F, so the strategy of cooling the house with fans overnight is going to be less effective.
nilram··on Vonnegut Reviews Heinlein's “Stranger in a Strange Land”
I have always thought of Heinlein as having written two original books. The first part of _Stranger in a Strange Land_ was one of them, then pick the second part or any of his other books for the other. I really tried to look for originality in his others that I read, but aside from names and settings, I just didn’t find any. I wish he had written more books with the freshness of SiaSL.
nilram··on Mystery Pineapple in an Ancient Mosaic
I was going to agree with you, noting that it’s in a basket of fruit (with an offering of foods) but humans have used Pine nuts for food since prehistoric times (per Wikipedia). It seems the simplest explanation–it’s not that Romans didn’t know how to draw pinecones, but that a particular Roman had a hard time representing a pinecone in a mosaic.
nilram··on When the prison banned board games, we played chess in our minds
Not the GP, but for me, in the context of numbers that I use on a keypad (or, ahem, in the context of a rotary dial), the physical actions are linked into the memorization, along with some combination of aural and visual memory.
nilram··on How bad is your Spotify?
> You know music existed before 2019, right?

It gave me the line about being stuck in 2010. Just an insult machine. It would actually be useful if it gave me songs it thought were more "cool" based on my current lists. Still, I'm getting a perspective by reading other people's amusement with the comments here on HN.

nilram··on The unexpected rule of adjectival ordering in English (2016)
I can basically agree with those generalizations, but in particular I've always been puzzled why British English tends to use "hospital" without any determiner, but American (really, U.S.) English almost always does. As a native US English speaker, I don't think I've heard one of my compatriots say something like "he was injured and taken to hospital." Always has "the" (without regard to the audience knowing which hospital) or "a" but I've virtually never heard an article used in British English.
nilram··on The unexpected rule of adjectival ordering in English (2016)
> far less likely that you'd want to specify that the "green knife" entity is to be used for whittling. It is far more likely that you'd want to specify that the "whittling knife" is green.

I don't know what a whittling knife looks like, so I would be far more likely to specify that the green knife is used for whittling.

nilram··on How Big Oil Misled the Public into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled
“Reduce, reuse” is part of the old saying but it was never heard, because it was never advertised. The entities that could afford advertising, or afford lobbying for it, have more riding on the recycle piece of that—-because reduce and reuse doesn’t pay their bills. Or their salaries and bonuses.
nilram··on Ways to fetch financial data for algo trading
I didn't realize it was running locally, so I think I was inadvertently thrashing it: running in Chrome with many, many tabs open; on an old machine that was probably running low on memory; and randomly pressing F5 instead of Cmd-Enter (some part of my brain was thinking of a SQL environment I use).

I added price and industry to the default display, used NYSE and Nasdaq data sets, and queried something like filter profile.lastDiv > 3 and profile.industry startsWith "Utilities" and profile.industry contains "Electric". I probably tried to start my query before the data sets completed loading. I don't know if interrupting the data loading or pressing F5 is more correlated with it acting strangely. (This is on the latest Chrome, under OSX 10.13.6.)

I tried again using Firefox 79.0 and it works fine. F5 reloads the page (and logs me out, ahem). Tried to do a few things while it was loading data and it was more solid.

I'd put saving column layouts (at least the last one used) ahead of enums for field matching. Seems like once you add enums, you'll have to be continually vigilant for data oddities.

I think I'd find it interesting to be able to plot attributes or computed attributes against another. Not sure how other tools get around the reporting period issue.

Interesting tool; thanks for putting it out.

nilram··on Ways to fetch financial data for algo trading
I'm learning Python for exactly this purpose (well, and for manipulating the data). Thanks, you've given me a leg up.
nilram··on Ways to fetch financial data for algo trading
This is very cool. I’m sending the link off to an investor friend who is programming-savvy, and to some others who aren’t.

I can deal with the auto-complete. A list of fields would help whet the appetite of my less-programming savvy friends. Having a manual or tutorial would help, too. A good number of potential users are retired and might have more of that learning-style.

It would be useful to be able to get a list of the industries in your db so a user could deal with the inconsistencies of that naming data. For example, EIN, for instance, matches to profile.industry == "UtilitiesRegulated Electric" but the detailed info displays "Utilities Regulated Electric”. Others, like DUK, match to the latter. Both of these are on NYSE.

I was doing some simple queries, but now it’s not returning data. Maybe you're getting too much attention from hacker news.

Any thought or intention of adding historical data? And allowing for backtesting of screens?

nilram··on US Border Patrol says they can create central repository of traveler emails
How did I know Person X sent me a, a "zip bomb"? I haven't opened their email yet. Why would they do a nasty thing like that?
nilram··on Not everyone needs 8 hours of sleep: new research
I'm also a 9-hour-a-day person. My partner is probably at 7, but gets up quietly. I can function ok with 7, but I'm miserable and much less functional with anything less. Up late packing and up early for a flight? Misery. But, though I won't be going again soon, I enjoy a lot of the aspects of flight and most importantly, I don't have to think much during.
nilram··on WordSafety: Check a name for unwanted meanings in foreign languages
I entered the noun form of a common English obscenity and it caught it.
nilram··on One of the earliest science fiction books was written by a 1660s duchess (2016)
I was very interested when I learned my high school English teacher was writing a novel and I expressed my admiration. “Oh, everyone’s writing a novel,“ he replied. I asked him how it was going and he said he’d had this character who was just too good and was taking over the book. “So,” he said, “I killed him.”
nilram··on Ask HN: Best resources to learn about stock trading and investing?
I like AAII, American Association of Individual Investors. It's a independent, non-profit organization with resources and publications to learn about investing without bias to any particular company or product. https://www.aaii.com/

I see they have on-demand webinars, too. https://www.aaii.com/webinars

Local chapters have meetups with presentations and discussion. Now online, of course. There's a page on their website about local chapters and their activities. Presenters at chapter meetings are supposed to be educational and without a sales pitch. In practice they're 98% educational and may have a slide or a handout on the company they work for. Here's the YouTube page for past presentations from one chapter. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnxl8fQH-F4ooXb-U8IO6zQ

Ameritrade has videos on learning about investing, trading, and their platform features, including most basic "this is a stock, this is a bond" type videos. I thought E*Trade had a bunch of similar videos, but I'm not finding them now. Both E-Trade and Charles Schwaub have both live and on-demand webinars. Probably other brokers do also. https://us.etrade.com/knowledge/investing-basics (more textual) https://us.etrade.com/knowledge/events#events_tab2 (on-demand webinars) https://www.tdameritrade.com/education/investment-videos.pag...

Trying to look at it with the eye of a beginner, it seems to get pretty specialized pretty quickly. Hope you can find something in there that fits what you're looking for.

nilram··on US Secret Service: “Massive Fraud” Against State Unemployment Insurance Programs
There is no will to improve those systems because people on unemployment aren’t typically a group that can donate funds to politicians.
nilram··on Airlines want to cancel rule requiring them to refund fares for canceled flights
Over the last decade, airlines spent 96% of their free cash flow buying back stock[1]. This improves the stock value for investors (and executives). Rather than requesting bailouts and rule changes, imo they should be selling that stock to raise capital.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-16/u-s-airli...

nilram··on We Just Witnessed the Fastest Stock Market Correction on Record
Out of the 25 corrections charted, the 3rd fastest was in 1955; the 6th fastest was in 1946.
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