Hacker News Reader

ppodon Why did the A-level algorithm say no?

You're making very strong statements over a huge assumption that you have no data to back up. This is not like previous years. The students sat no exam, they were ranked within their school, and then assigned grades based on the previous performance of their school. It is reverse affirmative action.

ppodon Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates

Quantitative social science (which maybe a lot of comp bio people might regard as a "softer" science) has really made huge strides in moving this kind of analysis to R. Of course one person can't change it, but those with high status in the field can make a difference by leading the way and setting standards.

ppodon The Overfitted Brain: Dreams evolved to assist generalization

>ridiculous hubris

>definitely not using any of them

ppodon Almost one-third of Florida children tested are positive for the coronavirus

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.15.20154294v...

The case rate has dropped faster as the restrictions have eased.

ppodon Almost one-third of Florida children tested are positive for the coronavirus

You sound very confident. There are some epidemiologists at the University of Oxford who disagree with your definitions.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.15.20154294v...

ppodon Almost one-third of Florida children tested are positive for the coronavirus

Yes, I admit that the part where I said there were no hazards and that it was safe to get infected with the virus was wrong.

ppodon Almost one-third of Florida children tested are positive for the coronavirus

Cases are low and falling in New York, Sweden, London, Italy, Spain, despite varying and loosening social distancing measures. How do you explain that? Those places already have herd immunity. Serotesting for antibodies misses t-cell immunity and other forms of resistance, and variation in spreading patterns makes the herd immunity threshold lower than we thought. This is the only plausible explanation and nobody wants to admit it.

ppodon The Meddling Middlemen of Academia

I like your blog format, is the code available? It looks like one of the RMarkdown themes a bit?

ppodon The Secret Algorithm That's Keeping Students Out of College

>grades from past grads at their school to predict what they would have scored had the pandemic not prevented in-person tests

Wait, this is like reverse affirmative action, no? Students at schools that previously performed badly will have their grades downweighted?

ppodon Slate Star Codex and Silicon Valley’s War Against the Media

"Personally I feel the Gray Tribe is just as annoying as the Gray Lady"/ "Well the important thing is that you've found a way to feel superior to both".

https://xkcd.com/774/

ppodon The largest city in each 10x10 degree latitude/longitude box

I think Dingle is bigger than and west of Clifden.

ppodon I Just Hit $100k/year On GitHub Sponsors

Off-topic question: Is Livewire comparable with RShiny, and is there anything that would let me do what Livewire does in python?

ppodon An exploratory statistical analysis of the 2014 World Cup Final

It's surprisingly hard to find practical in-depth pandas code examples like this.

ppodon An understanding of AI’s limitations is starting to sink in

That's an illusory distinction.

ppodon A mysterious company’s Covid-19 papers in top medical journals may be unraveling

Do you think this study would have been published if Trump had loudly proclaimed that Hydroxychlorine was dangerous and should be avoided?

ppodon Mark Zuckerberg Believes Only in Mark Zuckerberg

It's difficult to summarise but the last 30 minutes is where they have a really good argument, starting about here: https://youtu.be/Boj9eD0Wug8?t=3981

It gets quite philosophical, and hinges on whether people basically come to lose their own free will if embedded in a powerful algorithmic communication engine. They disagree with each other and there are definitely weak points in Zuckerberg's argument, but it is an earnest and principled-sounding defence. I think he loses the debate overall, but it's easier to attack his position than propose a coherent alternative.

There is also a part somewhere where Zuckerberg claims that when the platform takes actions such as marking a claim as untrue and linking to a source, that conspiracy theorists just use that to double-down and claim that the platform is trying to suppress their truth.

ppodon Mark Zuckerberg Believes Only in Mark Zuckerberg

What has happened to Wired? Zuckerberg goes into the principles behind these kind of decisions in depth, in his own words, in a conversation with Yuval Noah Harari that for some reason nobody ever mentions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Boj9eD0Wug8

ppodon Why Our Intuition About Sea-Level Rise Is Wrong

The problem I have with this stuff is that I just can't imagine how bad it could possibly be if sea levels rose even three meters over the next hundred years.

ppodon YouTube removes interview with professor of medicine on Covid stats and policy

Thanks for the response, I misunderstood the flagging process.

ppodon YouTube removes interview with professor of medicine on Covid stats and policy

Of course. As I said, I'm not asking what rights they have. I'm asking what you think. If you were youtube, would you ban this video?

ppodon YouTube removes interview with professor of medicine on Covid stats and policy

Of course, but I'm not asking about what rights distributors should have, I'm asking normatively whether a distributor should ban people like this.

ppodon Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment

The article is also borderline misleading, as initially I thought their real names had been posted. All that was posted was a list of which users are common moderators of large subreddits. If they are getting abuse to their accounts, the problem is the abuse, not the list.

ppodon YouTube removes interview with professor of medicine on Covid stats and policy

Yeah, I don't even think it has to be mob, it's just one of those things that happens as a site becomes more mainstream. Ironically it's related to the same issue as the submission: people equate permitting something to condoning it.

ppodon YouTube removes interview with professor of medicine on Covid stats and policy

Well ok. The reason I changed it was because I thought the original was too sensational

ppodon YouTube removes interview with professor of medicine on Covid stats and policy

Do you think that such people should be banned from content distribution channels?

ppodon YouTube removes interview with professor of medicine on Covid stats and policy

Is there any way if I can find out why my submission is flagged? The last thing I submitted was also flagged (and then unflagged), but I have tried to abide by the submission guidelines.

ppodon Government to urge us all to walk and cycle more

As I interpret it, the charts show a comparison of the change between two periods in 2020, compared to the average change over the same two periods in the previous five years. I can't see much difference between the trends this year and the five-year-average (I suppose the average difference is due to seasonality).

ppodon Government to urge us all to walk and cycle more

I still haven't found convincing data on this. There is this very weird guardian article that makes claims about large effects but contains a series of figures that seem to show very small effects:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/mar/27/coronavi...

Am I interpreting it wrong?

ppodon Government to urge us all to walk and cycle more

The evidence we have so far shows that the vast majority of cases are transmitted indoors:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.04.20053058v...

In practice, a transmission event happens through a certain amount of virus particles entering the body, and this doesn't seem to happen very often for Covid.

ppodon Can electric cars on the highway emulate plane-to-plane refueling?

Maybe special powerful cars that are constantly charged could drag others along a fixed line in a kind of "train".