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ossicones

103 karma · joined November 19, 2015

Data scientist in healthcare.
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ossicones··on The darker side of being a doctor
The American Medical Association would sooner let the whole thing burn than allow that to happen
ossicones··on Access to Urban Woodlands Linked with Lower Use of Antidepressants
Maybe! But we’d still have to explain why people who live near woodlands take even more antidepressants when they move farther from the woodlands
ossicones··on Access to Urban Woodlands Linked with Lower Use of Antidepressants
There's a strange contradiction in the findings, even just those in the abstract. When they look across individuals and try to predict antidepressant use based on exposure to woodlands, they find higher use among those who live closer to woodlands. It's only when they look at individual trajectories that they see reduced antidepressant use lining up with periods where they lived closer to woodlands.

It's almost like the same type of people who use antidepressants also like to live near woodlands. And they get depressed when they don't live near woodlands.

ossicones··on Demand for Canadian citizenship certificates soaring, fuelled by Americans
My partner is one of these applicants from the US. For us, it's not something we're intending to take advantage of any time in the foreseeable future. Maybe we'll retire in Victoria some day, but ultimately it's just a cheap thing we can do to keep our options open. I don't think this should be read as saying that there'll be hundreds of thousands of Americans moving to Canada.
ossicones··on I am retiring from tech to live offline
This is so camp.
ossicones··on Three-Em Dash
Kierkegaard found an application for the three-em dash here: “I have just now come from a party where I was its life and soul; witticisms streamed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me, but I went away ⸻ yes, the dash should be as long as the radius of the earth's orbit ⸻ and wanted to shoot myself.”
ossicones··on Mercurial Dyson – a plan for the disassembly of planet Mercury
Stuff like this is why I read HN
ossicones··on I miss thinking hard
I sympathize with this. I wonder if the author might find it helpful to reimagine the thinking they do as coming up with good questions, rather than good answers. I was inspired to try to do so myself after reading this essay: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s13059-019-1902-1

"[I]f a scientist proposes an important question and provides an answer to it that is later deemed wrong, the scientist will still be credited with posing the question. This is because the framing of a fundamentally new question lies, by definition, beyond what we can expect within our frame of knowledge: while answering a question relies upon logic, coming up with a new question often rests on an illogical leap into the unknown."

ossicones··on Qwen3-Coder-Next
What browser use agent are they using here?
ossicones··on On being sane in insane places (1973) [pdf]
If you've ever taken a depression screener at a wellness visit, that's a consequence of this work. This paper describes how unreliable psychiatric diagnosis used to be. There were standards, but they ultimately came down to physician judgment. This created demand for more objective standards, which resulted in the "checklist" approach that we have now.
ossicones··on Deathbed Advice/Regret
I shared this with my partner who works in palliative care. He said that it’s rare to hear people expressing deathbed regrets like this. What he hears more of is people saying that their illness is God’s punishment for a behavior pretty universally accepted as bad, especially when there’s substance abuse involved.
ossicones··on Hokusai Moyo Gafu: an album of dyeing patterns
Does anyone know how are these patterns were intended to be applied? It seems like they might be block printed, but the fact that they're called "dyeing patterns" makes me think of some kind of resist or shibori.
ossicones··on America's elite universities are bloated, complacent and illiberal
International students often end up subsidizing US students. Restricting student visas might end up actually increasing tuition.

Also, I disagree that $1m/year for the president of Harvard is ridiculous. That's less than the CEOs of many regional hospital systems are paid, and I think the impact of Harvard is much greater.

With you on restricting student loans for non-STEM programs, though.

ossicones··on Seaborn bug responsible for finding of declining disruptiveness in science
Oh man, I’ve been tricked so many times by the names of packages and frameworks… and here I did it to others. Sorry!
ossicones··on The Minimal Phone pairs an E Ink screen with a QWERTY keyboard and Android
The interface looks similar to the Windows phone, which isn't a bad thing IMO
ossicones··on Dana-Farberications at Harvard University
If researchers were unable to trust their collaborators, it would mean that they would have to master and oversee every step of every process. This would stop interdisciplinary research completely and massively reduce output.

In software, this would be the equivalent of not importing a package unless you first checked the code line by line.

The system works okay now, but there's a lot of room for improvement. I generally think the best way to improve it is to require more open data so that consumers of research can validate the findings of papers.

ossicones··on Dana-Farberications at Harvard University
I would’ve preferred a less editorialized article about this. In particular, this article has left me wondering who’s actually written fraudulent articles and whose biggest mistake was trusting the wrong collaborators.
ossicones··on Orthic Shorthand – Write as fast as you type
I tried to learn Shavian and struggled with it because of its phonetic nature. Every time I wanted to spell something, I had to think about how I pronounce the word.
ossicones··on How much of the world is it possible to model?
The excellent new book, "Modeling Social Behavior" by Paul Smaldino, starts with a quote from Jakob von Uexküll that I've abbreviated a bit here:

"An unbroken description of reality would be simultaneously the truest and most useless thing in the world, and it would certainly not be science. If we want to make reality and therefore truth useful to science, we must do violence to reality. [...] In nature, everything is equally essential. By seeking out the relationships that seem essential to us, we order the material in a surveyable way at the same time. Then we are doing science."

I appreciated how this quote emphasizes that science and modeling are inextricably connected.

ossicones··on [dead]
Pretty sure that's the wrong link.
ossicones··on CausalPy: A Python package for causal inference in quasi-experimental settings
It seems like the Bayesian capability is the main differentiator from PyWhy. Is that correct?
ossicones··on Ask HN: What website you couldn’t do your job without, and useful to the layman
Readwise has become essential for me. It's an RSS reader, read later app, and spaced repetition app in one. The idea is that you take in new articles to read, highlight them, and then review the highlights daily via spaced repetition.

It's brought to life for me Richard Feynman's idea that the way to do great work is to keep a dozen questions at the forefront of your mind and wait for inspiration. It's remarkable how often I'll see something in my daily review that helps me reframe my approach to a question.

ossicones··on Ask HN: Good Books on the History of Technology?
Probably the most personally influential history of technology book I've read is Paul Rabinow's "Making PCR." It deals with issues around the path dependence of technology and how new technologies often arise from repurposing existing technologies.

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo361492...

ossicones··on What are embeddings?
The way that this book answered its title question was unsatisfying to me. It felt like it was so focused on the data structure of embeddings that it totally glossed over questions about what the structures mean, why they work so well, and emerging research issues in embeddings.

It's like if someone wrote a book called "What is consciousness?" and just provided an annotated list of neurotransmitters. That approach leaves a lot out.