HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

slackson

76 karma · joined January 14, 2012

submissionscomments
slackson··on YouTube deleting comments who criticize their hiding of the dislike count
RSS/Atom feeds and video files you can play with whatever video player you want seems like it'd cover most of those concerns? The relatively closed nature of YouTube isn't necessarily something you'd want to replicate.

The bigger issue would be search and discovery, especially since I can't think of any obvious way to prevent services from spoofing engagement data to influence rankings.

slackson··on Just Wanted to Say Thanks
I was going to say that I think people kind of build up an immunity or aversion to those sorts of requests as they become more common, but after some consideration there's a difference between individual vs mass communication in that regard.
slackson··on Housing Constraints and Spatial Misallocation [pdf]
I've never understood why people assume that sort of investment is going to be going to the housing market in particular, especially when it goes along with complaints of absentee foreign landlords and unoccupied housing. Surely even if you're fleeing instability you still want to make the best investments you can, and refusing to rent property or investing in already overactive markets rather than somewhere else is just leaving money on the ground. I could definitely be wrong, but I suspect many people assuming otherwise have neither data nor theory to back that up.
slackson··on Movable Housing for Scalable Cities: A Reply to YC
>It has a section about land value taxes that offers a total non-solution to the supply-and-demand problem of land.

Can you expand on this? I'm not exactly sure what you consider the problem to be.

slackson··on The viability of JavaScript frameworks on mobile
They compare it to polymer in the docs - much smaller, for one.
slackson··on Show HN: SciZone – Embed scientific datasets and phenomena on the web
This seems pretty cool, and being able to display charts easily is a valuable thing to have. There doesn't seem to be any fallback for people to view charts if they don't have the extension installed, however. Even just a link to something like the landing page, with the chart they're looking for in place of the US/Russia Nuclear stockpiles chart.
slackson··on The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics
So what if the PETA case offers a deal that is accepted under the circumstances those families are actually in? All offers and trades are contingent on the circumstances someone's in - you wouldn't take a job with a $20/hour salary if you have the education and skills for something higher-paying than that, but that doesn't mean it should be illegal to offer wages of $20/hour.

The "more fair" solutions to the problem of surge pricing involve either Uber themselves paying out of pocket, drivers not receiving fair compensation, or neglecting to tackle the problem at all.

slackson··on Gerrymandering and a cure for it – the shortest splitline algorithm
Is the US system better in that regard?
slackson··on Can Economic Growth Last?
Nominal GDP growth and real GDP growth are very different things, and it's the latter people are referring to. If it was only nominal that mattered, we could have a arbitrary economic growth through inflation.
slackson··on Gaps in Alumni Earnings Stand Out in Release of College Data
Why are they too easy to get?
slackson··on An intellectually challenging game of loop
There is at the start of the article?
slackson··on Apprentice.at – Apprenticeships, not internships
I don't think you're disagreeing here. Kalium is saying that an apprenticeship model is the wrong way to teach these skills.
slackson··on A Simple Fix for Drunken Driving: Modest, Immediate Penalties
Are you arguing that there isn't a causal effect between people living together and domestic violence?
slackson··on Lessons I Learned from Co-Founding a Tech Startup
Putting aside single-payer, what's the rationale for doing health insurance through employers, rather than individuals paying for it out of their income?
slackson··on Why Y Combinator Funded a Radical Political Party in Argentina
This is the sort of place real change is going to come from. Transparent public information, that at the very least will shame politicians into voting in the interests of the people.

I understand it's probably not a top priority, but it'd be amazing if prediction markets on the impacts of policies could be included in this tool. It wouldn't even need to be real money, just a way to keep track of people's performance, and weight their impact on later markets accordingly. This would enable true access to the "wisdom of the crowd", and allow citizens to have a proper insight into how candidates and citizens perform in terms of forecasting the impact of policies, and making decisions based on that information.

slackson··on Cheap Smartphone Dongle Diagnoses HIV And Syphilis
It would be useful for both purposes, wouldn't it?
slackson··on Gamma-ray bursts are a threat to life
I'm not so sure about your conclusion there. The galaxy is around 100k light years across. Seems like a lot, but the Orion project looked like it could potentially reach speeds of 10% the speed of light. Even assuming that's optimistic, and it could only get to 1% the speed of light on average, that's just ten million years.
slackson··on Show HN: Hacker News' “most unique support email of 2014”
Language changes all the time. Everyone knew what was intended to be communicated. I don't really see what the problem is, it's not like there's some platonic ideal of the English language to be violated.
slackson··on Feeling Sad Makes Us More Creative
There's one recommending boredom now too.
slackson··on Starivore Extraterrestrials – Interacting Binary Stars as Metabolic Systems [pdf]
I think it's just meant to be assonant with "carnivore".
slackson··on Charlie Hebdo: first cover since terror attack depicts prophet Muhammad
What are the costs of trigger warnings, compared to the benefits? It seems like a blatantly worthwhile tradeoff to me.
slackson··on My experiment with smart drugs (2008)
I think SJS has only resulted from modafinil use fewer than ten times in total. It's a rare enough response that it's difficult to figure out the actual risks, and I can't find info on the actual rates of modafinil usage. But it seems like something that's probably on the order of a 1/100,000 chance.
slackson··on TMSU is a tool for tagging your files
I remember looking at this a few years ago. My main reason for not using it was the time it would have taken to tag all my files.

Basically, if you have so many files that it's worth tagging them, you need to spend a lot of time tagging, and if you have so few that it's reasonable to tag them all, you don't need this system. If you have a manageable number but expect tagging to be useful in the near future, then this might be useful.

I'd be interested in hearing from people who have found a use for TMSU.

slackson··on What happens when patients find out how good their doctors really are? (2004)
Iteration is a pretty good way to deal with this, IME. Get it to be serviceable but mediocre ASAP, then continue improving until better marginal benefits can be found elsewhere.
slackson··on The Other Side of Depression
You know what my worst nightmare was? Depression.
slackson··on -2000 lines of code
"The more any quantitative social indicator (or even some qualitative indicator) is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."
slackson··on 2014 Gates Annual Letter: Myths that block progress for the poor
If you want to know enough to donate with confidence, GiveWell has good charity recommendations.

In any case, don't let indecision paralyse you into inaction. Put some proportion of money aside for charity, start doing research, etc. We're not perfect, it's okay to be a bit selfish, and it's good to want to do better. There's any number of options between a spartan life where you donate most of your money, and donating nothing.

slackson··on Dawn of Autonomous Corporations, Powered by Bitcoin
Betting on profits of the agent conditional on various code changes. "Agent profits will increase X% by date Y, given code change Z." If code change Z isn't chosen, money is refunded to the people who bet in the market. If it is chosen, then it stays open until date Y, where it pays off depending on the eventual profits.
slackson··on Dawn of Autonomous Corporations, Powered by Bitcoin
Bitcoin autonomous corporations could use prediction markets to choose code changes.
slackson··on Dawn of Autonomous Corporations, Powered by Bitcoin
Do you know what relation this has to bitcoin or autonomous corporations?
Page 1 of 2Next →