HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

richardhod

933 karma · joined October 25, 2016

submissionscomments
richardhod··on Trouble with Erythritol
Verbatim response to that tweet, from a highly qualified friend with relevant scientific expertise:

"idk that critique is pretty dismissive of the actual experimental evidence that they generated in the study… consuming an erythritol sweetened beverage raises the erythritol level in the blood to a level that clearly causes an effect on platelets, and coincides with the difference between the measured levels in the observational study… seems pretty convincing to me".

richardhod··on Reliability: It’s not great
What are the limitations to heroku that people are going to Fly for? Maybe there's a standard article that would be useful to read about it?
richardhod··on Facebook LLAMA is being openly distributed via torrents
I was confused by your first reply at first. I think that's because you are answering a different question from a number of other people. You're asking about the conditions under which and AI might fool people into thinking it was a human, whereas I think others are considering the conditions under which a human might consistently emotionally attach to an AI, even if the human doesn't really think it's real.
richardhod··on British Motorway Database
I did get the order wrong. Must have been the Preston bypass that was first, which I double checked
richardhod··on British Motorway Database
The first sections of motorway... Definitions definitions
richardhod··on British Motorway Database
My father was present, as a boy, at the opening of the Lancaster bypass, which was the first section of motorway constructed in in Britain, followed by the Preston bypass. He was always very careful to remind people how the M6 was the first motorway in Britain and not the M1.
richardhod··on How Police Exploited the Capitol Riot’s Digital Records
Another issue here is there is a problem with laws which are broad enough that it requires selective enforcements for them to be available. Because then you can get a problematic force which then uses them selectively for political purposes. This indeed is how the Soviet state worked and indeed current Russian state works to quash dissent.
richardhod··on How Police Exploited the Capitol Riot’s Digital Records
Being 'normal' != is constitutional
richardhod··on Up to the 1990s, raw salmon sushi was not eaten in Japan
Indeed. Farmed ones aren't given the same diet. I suspect it's not as healthy for them either, but it does well enough for industrial purposes. Think of cattle feed v grass, etc
richardhod··on Ancient Apocalypse reviewed
I like the ending: 'If you don’t like Hancock’s story about the super-intelligent advanced civilisation being wiped off the face of the planet, here’s another that might explain how Netflix gave the greenlight to Ancient Apocalypse: the platform’s senior manager of unscripted originals happens to be Hancock’s son. Honestly, what are the chances?'
richardhod··on Death by vegetable oil: What the studies say (2020)
While I don't disagree with the general tenor of the article and the apparent real issues with these oils,

Regarding the section quoted below: this doesn't appear to have any statistical coherence, since naive calculations like this tend to make many implicit unwarranted assumptions.

'If heavy smoking (a pack of cigarettes per day) increases risk of death by 80% and increasing vegetable oil consumption (by 12% of calories) increases risk of death by 62%, we can use some back-of-the-napkin math to infer that every 5% increase in daily calories from vegetable oil is as dangerous as smoking 7 cigarettes per day.

Another way of looking at it: each additional teaspoon of vegetable oil you consume could increase your risk of death as much as smoking 2 cigarettes. '

richardhod··on Up to the 1990s, raw salmon sushi was not eaten in Japan
It's not the same at all. At first glance it might feel the same, but the structural questions are different. The fact that the Facebook does have privacy problems does not show that Atlantic salmon does actually have parasites problems in the same way that pacific salmon does.

Argument by analogy is not good argumentation.

richardhod··on Up to the 1990s, raw salmon sushi was not eaten in Japan
Farmed salmon doesn't have the red colour we associate with salmon, and they add that colour later so that it looks right to us.

https://www.foodandwine.com/news/your-salmon-might-be-lying-...

richardhod··on How Twitter moderated the Covid debate
Where you went wrong is getting it backwards. The vaccines are orders of magnitude less likely to cause cardiac problems than the virus itself, for fairly obvious medical reasons.

And that cardiac events in both cases are a minor part of the greater effects and dangers of catching the disease.

So it's about not focusing on the wrong things

richardhod··on The 5GHz “Problem” for Wi-Fi Networks: DFS (2018)
Given the level of corruption within the current UK government, I would not necessarily agree with your use of the word literally here. But at least in law and in principle yes.
richardhod··on The pocket guide to debugging
Yes I'm having the same issue
richardhod··on The topologist’s world map (2020)
Whereas I would call Northern Ireland an exclave colony, although in the current political status fittest part of the UK, much as Puerto Rico is part of the US, or the non-Russia Soviet States were part of the Soviet Union.
richardhod··on The topologist’s world map (2020)
You misunderstand the status of these countries, which are countries. They have their own football teams. The only reason that they are largely ruled from Westminster is due to the the military strength of England.
richardhod··on The topologist’s world map (2020)
This gets Ireland so wrong it is unbelievable. Firstly the British isles are treated differently from all the other islands on the map, and it's hard to tell that there's even a blue line separating it from the rest of Europe.

Secondly, Ireland doesn't even have a blue line, which implies it is connected by land to Britain

And thirdly, Wales and Scotland should really be acknowledged, and at the same time you might suggest Northern Ireland as well.

richardhod··on Binance outflows hit $6B as Mazars halts ‘proof of reserves’ work
This is interesting. Do you have any good links for the Russian connection!
richardhod··on Who invented the thumb drive?
Also a good guess because if I remember correctly the floppy floppy disks which were flatter with a larger surface area and actually floppy were about 512k or so.

I only ever saw one machine with one of those in though and of course it was at school, running useless software for us

richardhod··on The Uninhabitable Earth (2017)
This is an extremely naive and ascientific hot take.

Dinosaurs are large creatures of a completely different order, not mammals. The sea ecosystem which had evolved over millions of years to deal with those temperatures is a completely different ecosystem from what we have now.

It's not about whether some humans can survive in difficult conditions, it's whether the current ecosystem can survive the unprecedentedly fast and rapid warming. And whether billions of humans will starve

richardhod··on Accelerando (2005)
Do please note that Stross is quite well known not to a fan of the idea of the Singularity, and that his book should not be taken as a manual for the future, and rather as a cautionary tale and fantastically creative techno future
richardhod··on Accelerando (2005)
It's not a mess structurally. If you read the notes on it, you will will find Stross wrote a series of nine loosely connected short stories, which follow each other temporally and thematically. If you you try to remember it's not a novel as such it will help you relax and enjoy each section better.

Stephenson's inability to finish books coherently is a completely different issue

richardhod··on Laundry at the end of the world
I think it's more that this is an American base and people in the United States seem to use antediluvian top loaders a lot, possibly because of a historical surfeit of space, and possibly never prevalence of shared machine rooms in apartment blocks.

Europeans visiting the United States are often bemused by the antiquated looking, advanced electronics-free top loading washing machines everywhere. I'm sure somebody has written a good article on why this remains the case largely in the United States.

If you want a really reliable, modern front loading washing machine, you buy German. Miele, Bosch really are the gold standard and are built to last 20-years rather than the planned obsolescence of most washing machines.

richardhod··on A Soviet circus clown tried to prove that dogs can be psychic
Not plausible for a human but maybe plausible for a dog?
richardhod··on How boring should your team's codebases be
I think you mean: we can't have simplicity, because it doesn't sell!
richardhod··on A thermal battery that uses superheated bricks [video]
heating uses the vast majority of domestic (and dare I say often industrial) energy consumption. so it matters, even if it's not for electric generation. A lot of rooftop solar systems go direct to water heating, being more efficient than rouoting that through electrics. (ideally, you want both)
richardhod··on Mud boosts the immune system
.. and this is one of the biggest sources of antibiotic resistance: people not finishing the course of antibiotics becasue they 'feel better now', rather than eliminating the pathogen so it can't gain resistance. Generally, there should never be leftover antibiotics.
richardhod··on Mud boosts the immune system
I do take my rather glib comment back, with apologies to the readers here, I know better than that. Indeed, the Hygiene Hypothesis is misused a lot, and which I was actively looking up post-comment. It's the reason a lot of people are - erroneously - trying to infect themselves with COVID-19, to prorect themselves from later catching... the very same harmful pathogen.

See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5320962/

Page 1 of 7Next →