tkiley

I don't trust the secondhand reporting and translation work here. I have seen several korean articles which claimed that Dr. Hyun-Tak Kim disavowed both papers. This would be very significant, as he is the coauthor with the h index! However, in the korean articles where this claim has a cited source, the source is his new scientist interview, in which he disavowed only the first paper (the one with 3 authors, including Kwon and excluding Hyun-Tak Kim):

https://archive.is/DhijM

I have not seen any credible direct quotes which show that any of the authors have distanced themselves from the second paper (the one with 6 authors including Hyun-Tak Kim).

My tentative read is that every author besides Kwon is likely thinking "this is not ready / not real, but if I pump the brakes on the hype train, Kwon will get all the credit in the unlikely event that it replicates quickly, so it's best to stay tight-lipped for the moment."

a counterpoint to this narrative: grants/scholarships have been rising rapidly, so actual net tuition prices are surprisingly flat in recent years.

> Between 2006-07 and 2019-20, COA [cost of attendance] increased by around 27% at both types of institutions, but declined by 7-8% in the few years after that. The recent decline occurred because colleges posted similar nominal COA increases as in the past, but inflation was higher. Overall, COA increased by almost 20% over those 16 years at both types of institutions.

> But average net prices rose at a considerably more modest pace. Between 2006-07 and 2019-20, average net price increased by 13% and 7% at public and private four-year institutions, respectively. Those increases reversed in the post-COVID years. Overall, average net prices are largely unchanged, adjusted for inflation, compared to 2006-07.

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/college-prices-arent-skyr...

in the past 15 years in particular, the big story of college pricing is that it has become more progressive, i.e. more expensive for those with higher incomes.

Recently, I read back through some of my forum posts on HN and elsewhere from the past ten years. In hindsight, I see that I often erred on the side of harshness, and often conflated cynicism and intelligence. As I get older, I see increasing value in a bias toward kindness. Thank you for your kind words.

You're right, a lot of the benefit is in deferring taxes to a later date. This deferral is quite valuable when you consider the time value of money and the fact that by spreading out $millions of gains over many decades, I get to put a lot more of the gains in a lower tax bracket, where if it all came in one year, it would basically all be taxed at 20%.

When you combine decades of deferral with the sizeable charitable deduction, it feels like double dipping. If putting equity in the crut only gave me one or the other (deferred taxation or a big deduction) that would seem intuitively fair. But both together? That feels absurd.

That's true! I'm happy that I am paying low taxes. It just seems ridiculous that my effective tax rate is so much lower than the effective tax rate paid by other people.

As best I can make out, a CRUT reduces your tax burden dramatically if 1) you are young, and 2) you fund the CRUT with equity that has a very low cost basis. I don't think the tax code should contain a special magic wand that reduces tax liability so low for this particular situation, because this advantage seems unfair to people who accrue their wealth over a lifetime by more traditional means.

I had a bunch of equity in a startup that had a cost basis of, essentially, $0. Under normal circumstances, I would have sold this for $millions, and would have paid nearly 20% in capital gains taxes immediately.

Instead, I contributed my equity to a CRUT. I paid zero capital gains taxes at that moment, and the CRUT pays zero capital gains taxes ever. Also, because a contribution to the trust is a contribution in part to charity (with proportions calculated according to actuarial figures of my life expectancy), I got a charitable tax deduction of many million dollars which I was able to carry forward for many years.

Each year I owe taxes on the 5% which the CRUT distributes to me every year, but since this is capital gains income, it is taxed at a very low rate -- which is effectively reduced even further because it is offset by the charitable deduction which I have been able to carry forward.

The net effect is that I'm paying capital gains taxes in a tiny trickle over the remainder of my lifetime, and I also got a giant charitable deduction to offset those capital gains taxes. When I die, the principal in the trust goes to charity. The IRS will never get the kind of bite at this equity that I would intuitively expect it to get.

I don't understand how this capital gains tax loophole could be beneficial to society. I think it should be removed from the tax code.

Another side effect of the CRUT I hadn't anticipated: Occasionally, I note the intrusive thought that my continued life is the one and only barrier which is keeping a decent amount of capital from serving charitable purposes right now. That's honestly pretty depressing sometimes.

Derek's writing influenced me quite a bit in the early 2000s. I bootstrapped a software business from zero to near $10m in annualized revenue, and sold it almost half a decade ago. I contributed 100% of my equity into a charitable remainder trust because I learned about that idea from his website.

Since then, I've done a lot of "puttering". I'm teaching myself jazz guitar, and I'm currently enrolled in law school. I have basically unlimited time to read whatever interests me. If I could go back five years and give myself some advice, I would say that "enough" is not durably satisfying. Purpose is durably satisfying. Purpose arises from constraints. Having "enough" means you lack a particular type of constraint. Thus, enough" can get in the way of developing purpose, particularly if you are somewhat undisciplined like me.

(Also, I would abolish charitable remainder trusts from the tax code. I created one for lifestyle reasons not tax reasons, but after experiencing the tax consequences firsthand, I think they are profoundly unfair.)

I'm surprised that a "Free Speech" network would demand that its users indemnify it against liability arising from their speech. Here's Parler's ToS:

> You agree to defend and indemnify Parler [...] from and against any and all claims, actions, damages, obligations losses, liabilities, costs or debt, and expenses (including but not limited to all attorneys fees) arising from or relating to your access to and use of the Services. Parler will have the right to conduct its own defense, at your expense, in any action or proceeding covered by this indemnity.

Twitter has no similar clause, because 47 USC § 230 provides computer services with a pretty good shield against liability of this kind. I'm not sure why Parler would include such a clause.

"But what value of R would you pick?"

I don't know -- and until we can agree on the answer to your simple question with a high degree of confidence, I think complex models based on specific assumed values of R obscure more than they reveal.

A little bit of modeling is useful because humans are intuitively bad at exponential math and we need scary graphs to jolt us awake sometimes. But when we don't even know the basic parameters (transmission/hospitalization/fatality) with a high degree of precision, complex models with myriad parameters create a false sense of confidence.

I poked at the github repo for a bit. The ugliness of the code doesn't bother me, but the quantity of parameters does.

Here's one params file that specifies some of the inputs to a run of the model:

https://github.com/mrc-ide/covid-sim/blob/master/data/param_...

Here's another one:

https://github.com/mrc-ide/covid-sim/blob/master/data/admin_...

There are hundreds of constants in there. A lot of them appear to be wild-ass guesses. Presumably, all of them affect the output of the model in some way.

When a model has enough parameters for which you can make unsubstantiated guesses, you have a ton of wiggle room to generate whatever particular output you want. I'd like to see policy and public discussion focus more on the key parameters (R-naught, hospitalization rate, fatality rate) and less on overly-sophisticated models.

Even though the answer to your question is "no", many lawyers will advise you to add the copyright symbol anyway. Even if the symbol is not operative by law, it still operates on the minds of potential copyists who don't know whether it matters. In this regard, the copyright symbol is kinda like the "protected by ADT" sign in a front yard: It's not protection per se, but it might serve as a deterrent.

On the other hand, the likelihood that a mere copyright symbol will deter economically-consequential copying from a website/webapp is quite low. Therefore, as a former founder and current law student (and definitely not a lawyer yet), I'd advise you to do whatever the hell makes sense for your business for ancillary reasons. Add the symbol if you think you're dealing with superstitious folks to whom a copyright symbol lends an aura of credibility; omit it if you are going for a clean aesthetic.

> So from Facebook's perspective, this is probably a big win.

It does feel like they confessed and repented a few spectacularly egregious sins and bought a $5 billion indulgence for the rest.

If the pi is designed to throttle at a temperature where its lifespan is reduced from 50 to 49 years, then it is throttling at a gratuitously low temperature that affects quite a few use cases.

On the other hand, if it is designed to throttle at a temperature that materially reduces the lifespan, then it needs a fan to preserve its lifespan.

Either way, the hardware is starkly suboptimal for a pretty large set of advertised use cases until you add a fan.

lag compensating projectiles on the client decreases usability more often than you'd think.

Projectiles like rockets apply a lot of forces to the player which are not easily predictable. If you fire a rocket and client-side prediction has it leaving your vicinity without collision but the server has someone stepping into the path of the rocket so it explodes close enough that the explosion exerts force that changes your position, you're going to have a really bad misprediction on the player's position, which of course can get waaaay worse if the player launches another rocket while the first rocket's effect on player position has not been sorted out properly.

> They are putting on steam largely because of the USA's shit healthcare system "after Zach's latest cancer scare, we determined that with my healthcare plan's copay etc., I'd be wiped out if I had to undergo the same procedures . . "

I have mixed feelings about this.

On the one hand, it totally sucks.

On the other hand, I suspect that as as consequence of this crappy pressure, Dwarf Fortress will reach a substantially wider audience and bring joy to a greater number of people.

I'll be interested to see how Tarn looks back on this moment in, say, five years.

I haven't played a big-budget game in years, but I decided to give RDR2 a try, specifically because reviewers described it as slow and boring.

I think it's great, for the exact reason that other people think it's slow and boring. It's specifically designed to quash your tendency to speedrun or minmax: It requires you to simply come along for the ride.

On the one hand, this is a bit annoying sometimes. On the other hand, it revives the sense of wonder that I haven't felt since I learned to treat games as something to win rather than something to get lost in.

Oh man, there are so many hilarious threads buried in the Straight Dope archives. I have no idea how that forum managed to maintain such a high concentration of genuinely witty posters for so long, but it was a great crowd for years. (Might still be, I dunno.)

> you probably wouldn't pay 400$ for a bag of saline solution

Hey, this is a great example: I might very well pay $400 for a bag of saline solution even if I knew the price in advance, because I don't care about the price of the bag. I care about the all-in cost of my treatment. If that total cost happens to include a $400 bag, I don't really care.

The "$30 Asprin" narrative sometimes misses the big picture of healthcare costs. The price of an apsrin or bag of saline solution is inflated to cover the enormous fixed costs of running a hospital with an ER. Could the ER charge $4 per bag or $0.25 per asprin? Of course, but if they lose their per-unit margin on the saline and asprin, they're going to jack up the price of some other CPT code because they have to cover their fixed costs somewhere.

> Healthcare providers must likewise be required to publish their rates in a uniform format such as industry standard CPT codes or a percentage of Medicare rates.

This proposal does not address the primary reason that price transparency is really goddamn hard: Even if you know exactly what a provider will charge for each CPT code, you don't know which CPT codes are going to be billed for a particular patient care event.

Inconsistent cost per line item is not the key problem with transparency. Tools like Castlight actually do a pretty decent job of guessing how much each item on a provider's CPT "menu" is going to cost a patient. In many (most?) situations, it is simply not possible to predict which CPT codes are going to be billed for a particular patient's care. This is the key reason price transparency tools tend to give a range rather than a specific price for a particular procedure.

(Also: Big picture, the idea that this would decrease costs by 33% is absurd. If healthcare providers had to publish real legit price sheets that were used by real consumers, prices would converge within a market, but they would not converge that low. Published pricing is not going to cause these businesses to collectively roll over and give up 33% of their revenue.)

It seems like it's good to be able to rebuild everything at a moment's notice after patching against a major exploit, though. You should have a fast way to rebuild secrets and servers after the next heartbleed-scale vulnerability.

I did a Show HN / feedback post for my startup almost nine years ago and got some very mixed feedback, but I felt that it was all well intentioned and at least somewhat reasonable.

Over time, it seems like the feedback for early stage startups on HN has become progressively more gratuitously negative.

In some cases, armchair critics have valid points, but I've gradually adopted this rule of thumb: Unless I'd give a naysayer's argument a >90% chance of coming to fruition, I probably just need to ignore it and address it when it actually shows up in the business (as feedback from, say, real customers). An armchair critic with a story about why I'm going to crash and burn with, say, 60% probability just isn't worth worrying about, because hard work and elbow grease can chip away at that 60% pretty quickly when the time comes.

Hi Paul. I'd love to see your service take off. I've spent a few years in healthcare IT and think that the world would be a better place if you succeed.

With that said, there are a number of startups that have struggled with similar ideas. How are you different from, say, PicnicHealth?

Tesla is shipping 75kWh batteries as 60kWh batteries, and requiring customers to pay an extra $8,500 to flip a configuration bit to unlock that last 15kwh.

I don't mind DRM for digital goods in which the variable cost is essentially $0, but this sort of DRM on physical goods leaves a yucky taste in my mouth. I'm curious how illegal it would be for someone to perform (and sell) a jailbreak/unlock for that last 15kWh of capacity.

Bettridge's law of headlines is out in full force today.

>... if we lived in such a world, would you still be upset that Mark Zuckerberg had a lot more money than you? Why?

That's a really good question. Theoretically, I would be fine with that kind of world, but I dont think that kind of world has ever existed or will ever exist. It is more realistic to attack the problem on both fronts - maximize social mobility and minimize the influence of wealth on politics, but also recognize that you will never completely succeed. Wealth will always equal opportunity and influence to some extent, so inequality will always be a bad thing to some extent.

For what it's worth, I'm not upset that Zuck has a lot more money than me. I just think that entrepreneurially generated inequality should not be a sacred cow, and I'm speaking as someone who has created a good deal of inequality with entrepreneurship.

I'm surprised at how primitive the response to pg's essay has been. None of it seems to respond to the central point of the essay (which is that economic inequality has many causes, and we should specifically attack the bad causes, not inequality itself).

In spite of all the noise, I do disagree with the central point.

Economic inequality may be caused by good things, but it is still bad. Wealth is opportunity and political influence. Therefore economic inequality is inequality of opportunity and political influence. Persistent intergenerational economic inequality is pretty much bad by definition.

Inequality - a bad thing - can be caused as a byproduct of good activity. It's still bad. It's a negative externality, like environmental pollution. In fact, there's some striking parallels - a buildup of inequality, like a buildup of pollution, can trigger the collapse of the ecosystem.

We need to agree that inequality is categorically bad so we can have a real discussion of how to keep it under control. It would be crazy to argue that farming is good so farm-related pollution does not need to be controlled. Likewise with startups and inequality.

Ok. Here's a response to his central argument:

pg argues we shouldn't attack inequality itself because inequality has both good and bad causes and is thus amoral. He argues we should focus on the bad causes instead.

I disagree. Inequality may have good and bad causes, but it is not amoral. Persistent transgenerational inequality is, by definition, the breakdown of democracy, meritocracy, and universal opportunity, and it is bad, even if it is caused by good things.

Inequality is a bad side effect of (usually) good processes. We already have an economic term for this: It's a negative externality - like environmental pollution.

The similarities between inequality and pollution give me considerable pause for thought. Both can grow or dissipate over time in the right conditions. Both are growing much too quickly right now, threatening to cause severe damage to our biological and economic ecosystems.

It is important that we recognize inequality as categorically bad, even when it is caused by good things like entrepreneurship. This allows us to have real discussions about how we keep inequality - like pollution - under control.

Ironically, this will preserve the democratic and meritocratic tendencies that have made the past 50 years such a great time for startups.

Heh.. you hit the nail on the head here. I've been in health integration for the past five years. By restful nosql whizbang node standards, healthcare is full of really weird old shit, and if you want to interoperate, you have to be ready to party like it's 1999, because a lot of these systems were legacy even then.

It is rather frustrating to see some of the API designs that are finally getting shipped in healthcare now, though. Right now, I'm interfacing with a market leading EMR vendor's web services API. They advertise it as "REST" with a straight face, but it's the lake wobegon of REST APIs, where all of the responses are "HTTP/1.1 201 Created" (even the GETs) and all of the response times are horrible.

Personally, I'm rooting for startups like Redox Engine (https://www.redoxengine.com/) to bring some sanity to this world, because I don't think the EMR vendors are going to do it on their own.

Hey philip - nice work!

Have you looked at going into the healthcare industry in particular?

I've been working in the patient scheduling space for almost ten years, and people are constantly complaining about the sorry state of staff scheduling in every part of a hospital.

Healthcare tends to be an infuriatingly unique industry, which means lots of client hand-holding and industry-specific product concessions, but the flip side is that healthcare is a great sandbox to play in - large enough to build a decent business, but specialized enough that you can be a market leader with a relatively small number of customers.

Hit me up if this sets off your spider sense, I'd love to talk offline.

You've mentioned that co-founder fallouts are one of the most biggest problems facing companies at YC stage.

Do you see any useful correlates to this problem? What types of teams tend to have infighting vs. those that don't?