Hacker News Reader

ridewinteron Twitter hides Donald Trump tweet for “glorifying violence”

Ahh the beauty of the Internet, where a 16 year old kid can create a platform more powerful than the most powerful people in the world...

ridewinteron The Argument Against Quantum Computers and the Quantum Laws of Nature [pdf]

If anyone is curious on how qubits actually work, I wrote an article explaining from a multiverse perspective: https://medium.com/@dangish/the-quantum-computer-explained-u...

ridewinteron Surviving Depression

One way to understand meditation is to just give yourself the time & space to experience & become bored with your repetitive thoughts. You don't stop thinking - you just become bored with it and settle down. It's immensely healing once you've experienced it.

ridewinteron Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust lawsuits against Google

Yes, broadening the context is my whole point. 20 years ago it was the OS, 10 years ago it was search, today it's social networks, tomorrow? The monopolies from each era struggle in the next. Let Google solve & dominate search while innovation moves on to the next big thing.

ridewinteron 40-60% of the unexposed produce Covid-19 antibodies due to earlier cold exposure [pdf]

Couldn't this explain why children are at less risk? They are constantly catching various common colds.

ridewinteron Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust lawsuits against Google

They said the same thing about Microsoft. Along came Google destroying them in an ancillary arena. Expect that trend to continue in the future.

ridewinteron TSMC Announces Intention to Build and Operate Advanced Semiconductor Fab in U.S.

Good question. There there must be something material otherwise TSMC wouldn't have such a lead on their competitors.

ridewinteron Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension

As the developer of an exposure notification app put on ice by Apple-Google, it's due time to take back the freedom of the internet that made it so powerful in the beginning.

Is there anything happening around an all-web app phone? Seems like all the pieces are there..like native functionality in JavaScript with certain extensions.

ridewinteron U.S. field hospitals stand down, most without treating any Covid-19 patients

It's incredible the amount of unknowns even at this point in the epidemic. Anyone who claims to understand what's going on is just frontin. That's my big takeaway so far.

ridewinteron NHS open-sources contract tracing iOS and Android apps

A variety of countermeasures can be used to keep the app awake in the background, including restarting services and (more controversially) location.

And IMO, including a general/non-precise location of contact is incredibly useful for epidemiological purposes and to assist the manual contact tracing teams. The value far outweighing the hit to privacy.

In any case, Google-Apple are dictating how these apps need to be built and released, so private innovation doesn't seem welcome at this juncture.

ridewinteron NHS open-sources contract tracing iOS and Android apps

I built an exposure notification app that solved the backgrounding issue by simply using the backend to reconstruct the missing Android -> iOS piece: https://medium.com/@dangish/a-solution-to-iphone-backgroundi...

ridewinteron Me on Covid-19 contact tracing apps

If you can get clusters of people to use it, say everyone in a big office building, it's a lot easier to hit that 20-60% number than in the population as a whole.

IMO these apps will be most useful as a tool to assist manual contact tracing teams at first.

ridewinteron Japan set to ban entry from the U.S. as early as next week

Not too long ago a headline like this would be absolutely massive news. Now it barely even registers. Crazy times...

ridewinteron FDA issues first emergency use authorization for point-of-care diagnostic

There was also a poll this week that showed only 37% trust what he says.

https://www.npr.org/2020/03/17/816680033/poll-americans-dont...

ridewinteron FDA issues first emergency use authorization for point-of-care diagnostic

Telling the truth ("anybody that needs a test gets a test"), taking responsibility ("I don't take responsibility at all [for the lack of testing]"), making tough calls instead of leaving states and cities to fend for their own.

And the switch from "this is a hoax" to "I always knew this was a pandemic" doesn't inspire confidence either.

ridewinteron S&P 500 drops 9%, extending losses after 15-minute trading halt

Paging Andrew Yang...

ridewinteron South Korea's drive-through testing for coronavirus

And I thought it was only here in the USA... Almost good to know that we're not alone in our incompetence.

At least next time around we should all be prepared like Taiwan was this time.

ridewinteron Double Slits with Single Atoms

Yes, true. The particle is a quantized excitation of the field that travels in a wave. The original point remains.

ridewinteron Double Slits with Single Atoms

Because there's only one particle that we can observe going through one slit. Cover up the other slit that nothing is going through and there's no interference.

Edit: I think I understand what you're saying. The field isn't separate from the particle - the particle is the quantized field itself.

ridewinteron Double Slits with Single Atoms

Why should this electron be able to cross universes and talk to another one and interfere, while nothing else can cross universes?

See "decoherence": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_decoherence

ridewinteron Double Slits with Single Atoms

Place a detector in front of the slits. Only a single particle in a single slit is detected. There is no "splitting" of the particle that we can see.

Edit: If you try to actually define "wave function collapse" and "observer" you are back into the same mumbo-jumbo as "wave-particle duality". They are just placeholders that obscure the mystery.

ridewinteron Double Slits with Single Atoms

The phrase "wave-particle duality" obscures the central mystery in quantum mechanics. You can visualize waves quantized into particles - that's not mysterious. But how does a single particle create an interference pattern when there's no other particles for it to interfere with? And how does covering up one slit destroy the interference pattern when there is only one particle going though one of the slits in the first place?

Just saying "wave-particle duality explains it" is false. It was a shock for me to realize that everything taught in physics textbooks was so misleading. (For a good explanation see MWI)

ridewinteron SpaceX launches more Starlink satellites, misses booster landing

SpaceX should put some telescopes into orbit for public use as a goodwill gesture here.

ridewinteron Sweden gives employees unpaid time off to be entrepreneurs (2019)

The median income in the US has in fact been on the rise for a long time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United...

ridewinteron Sweden gives employees unpaid time off to be entrepreneurs (2019)

This doesn't seem to be something that's common knowledge. Can you point to information on how to use private health insurance like this?

ridewinteron Artificial intelligence will do what we ask, and that's a problem

Thanks. You should've written this article :)

ridewinteron Artificial intelligence will do what we ask, and that's a problem

The article's main example of an AI fail is YouTube's recommendation engine optimizing for extremist content. But it didn't seem to explain how "inverse reinforcement learning" would solve it - don't people's clicks already model their desires?

Nothing in here seems to be an advancement towards AGI. I'm sure their robot can learn the optimal rules for driving in a simulator, but what about the unexpected in the real world? We don't even have a clue as to how human creativity actually works, much less how to make a creative machine (ie an AGI).

ridewinteron Apple may have to abandon Lightning connector cable

I'm reminded about 30 times a day when dismissing a cookie popup of the stupidness of EU regulations. When considering the lifetimes wasted recreating that popup on countless websites, I'm ready to go full Libertarian.

ridewinteron Health care veteran tries to upend the system and bring drug prices down

The common trope is that European price controls hinder innovation in pharmaceuticals [1]. I've read that American pharmaceutical firms spend 4x in R&D per capita than European counterparts.

Counterpoints?

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd2293

ridewinteron Russia deploys Avangard hypersonic missile system

How is Starship related to Brilliant Pebbles? It's Starlink that seems to prove that you can put a constellation of satellites in the tens of thousands affordably. That's the type of coverage that Brilliant Pebbles needs to succeed, right?