zck

> I don't believe in passive index investing. You know how Warren Buffett made a multimillion dollar bet that the index will outperform a bunch of hedge funds over a decade long period? My truthful belief is I don't necessarily believe passive investing to be the answer.

This was glided over without much detail. Warren Buffett did make this bet. But he won it! https://longbets.org/362/ It's like saying "You know how Galileo was talking about an experiment to see if heavier things fall faster? My truthful belief is that I don't necessarily believe that something lighter could fall at the same speed".

>If their model is payment for order flow, there's no question they just want you to trade, no matter if you win or lose money.

The broker wanting people to trade is also the case if they had charged $10 per trade, the prior business model for retail trading.

Sure, that would be fun! Thanks!

I want to get better at playing music with other people. I've played a little guitar with friends, and want to be better at accompanying them. Also, I got a harmonica, for times I'm not able to carry a guitar.

But antibodies aren't the only thing that matters; focusing only on antibody levels without acknowledging that you only care about antibody levels _as a proxy for protection_ is the error I talked about in my comment.

There are Memory T cells and Memory B cells that last for decades. So if these cells were able to fend off the virus by themselves, you could have zero antibodies and be fine.

Some possibly useful articles:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlates_of_immunity

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_B_cell

The previous paragraph:

> This continued adaptation has helped Keyence grow to become Japan's third-most-valuable listed company, behind only Toyota Motor and Sony Group, with a market capitalization of nearly 16 trillion yen ($141 billion).

There's a secondary issue here. Sometimes, we look at outcome data: what is the decrease in getting sick or dying after taking a vaccine? This is the number you actually care about.

Other times, we look at a number that correlates: what is the increase in _antibody levels_? One example from this article:

> A recent (but not yet peer-reviewed) study of more than half a million U.S. veterans showed that the Johnson & Johnson shot’s protection against infection (whether or not that leads to disease or hospitalization) had plummeted from 88 percent to 3 percent by mid-August, while the other vaccines’ effectiveness had declined much less. Research published in the past few months also signals that Moderna’s shot beats out Pfizer’s in terms of both antibody count and hospitalizations prevented, while a National Institutes of Health study released earlier this month found that Moderna’s booster shot lifted participants’ antibody levels a bit more than Pfizer’s, and that both mRNA boosters were miles ahead of J&J’s.

My understanding is that we don't know how much antibody levels need to increase to provide a level of safety. Or, for that matter, if at some point, further antibody levels don't help at all! If there's a light rain, a full-body drysuit will keep you dry. But so will an umbrella! The drysuit is overkill!

We certainly want antibodies against the virus, but I don't believe we know how much is overkill. One reason this might matter is if we could have given smaller shots to people and ramped up injections much sooner. Or even in the present, we could send more injections to other countries for lower cost, if a certain volume of vaccine could be given to more people.

I see a lot of Clojure results, but when I go into the actual page, I had to go to seven or eight different pages to actually see Clojure mentioned. I'm not sure where the data actually comes from.

I'm personally using Quil (http://quil.info/), a Clojure wrapper around Processing. It's a good tool. You can also use Processing (https://processing.org/) directly, if you prefer Java. There are other frameworks, but I'm less familiar with them. There's probably one for your preferred programming language!

Those patterns look very cool, and not that technically hard to technically do -- the artistry is the challenge with those.

Once you get the framework working, you can start thinking about what you want to do. Begin by doing simple things -- graph a plain circle of one color. Then add complexity and randomness.

Feel free to email me (email in profile) if you want more specific advice. (Offer open to anyone people reading this)

I've been into generative art for a few years. I actually started posting my artwork here a few weeks ago: https://zck.org/art

Often, revenge bedtime procrastination is doing things we don't want to do instead of going to bed.

This article also says:

> It takes two seconds to decide upon which special-function key to press. Deciding among abstract symbols is a high-level cognitive function. Not only is this decision not boring, the user actually experiences amnesia! Real amnesia! The time-slice spent making the decision simply ceases to exist.

That's not my experience at all. Once you learn a keyboard shortcut, it doesn't take two seconds to recall it. Were his tests on expert users, or on beginners?

The weirdest thing I have done in Emacs is using it to generate WAVE files, with a visual interface. The music loops, so you can keep playing with it. I've given talks about the package at !!Con 2021 and EmacsConf 2020.

Info about this at https://zck.org/bangbangcon2021. Video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeTDIrJeriI. Bonus: the presentation itself is done from within Emacs, in another library I wrote.

> [Mercurial]...includes no unnecessary concepts/models (read: git's index)

As someone who stubbornly uses mercurial for all his code, git's index is the single greatest feature that git has over mercurial (not counting the Magit interface). The index allows me to _incrementally_ build up a commit. I can go back and fix things, add and remove things from the index, and only when I'm ready, commit. In mercurial, I have to hold so much more state in my head about what is ready to commit, what needs to be fixed, and what is code that needs to be reverted.

And `hg commit -i` is nice, but is not a replacement for the index. Git's index allows me to add hunks, then stop, go to lunch, review the status, remove some bits, add more, then commit.

I'm told that Mercurial's queues feature would support this, but I find it incredibly non-ergonomic, and I can't quite figure out how to use it as an index replacement.

Art certainly can be appreciated entirely "inside" the art, yes. Doing so can be a fine tool! But I believe it's wrong to dismiss all possible meta-analysis of art. Some things add more to an understanding, appreciation, or the importance of art.

> I could never understand people writing about art, analyzing some painting texture, style of brush strokes, author intent, historical context or whatnot, or digging into artist biography or their development; not in order to learn how to make art, mastering the craft, but for the sole sake of analysis, critique or "art appreciation".

You don't get more out of art if you know its context?

For example, it's interesting to know that much of art, starting with Impressionism was a response to photography (https://kiamaartgallery.wordpress.com/tag/influence-of-photo...). Previously, art was judged based on how realistic it was. But when photography came around, painting could not compete. So artists had to come up with new methods and goals. Some wanted to make the viewer experience a feeling, even if that meant not literally painting truth.

Another example: the Surrealists used Freud's work on free association, dreams, and the unconscious in their own work.

Or this poster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Klinger-Johannisthal-1908.... While the characters are interesting, there's more to it than that. It was originally designed for a 1908 air show in Germany. That's only five years after the Wright brothers' first flight! Airplanes were still brand new. Doesn't that impact how you see the characters here?

I certainly agree that anyone can create art, but I don't believe that the only thing worth doing with art is either creating it or blindly consuming it. To bring it back to your programming example, don't you get more out of Babbage's Difference Engine when you find out that it was built in the 1990s -- and worked?

Are these corporation-decided donations, or matching donations for employee donations?

For places humans have dammed a river, a fish ladder can be installed to let fish continue to swim upstream: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish_ladder. I wonder why that's not used here.

Perhaps it's related to this being a _lock_, not a dam. In addition to having water loss from the lock, the middle part of the lock goes up and down, so you'd have to have separate fish ladders for each part.

For the most fun fish transport I've seen, check out the Salmon Cannon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nopg9JSTTzg and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGzdOpCisnQ. It uses a pressurized tube to transfer salmon from the low to high side. In the second video, the distance is over a kilometer.

Beyond the valid supply chain issues, there's also the problem of having to prevent the plunger from being depressed and leaking vaccine.

The point of the plunger is that, when pressed, it pushes the vaccine out the tip of the needle. When needles are shipped empty, they can be thrown in a bag with other needles, and the box doesn't need especially careful handling. The plunger can be shipped completely depressed, and the needle being rattled around won't move the plunger. And even if the plunger does move, it's not a problem.

But what if the needle has vaccine in it? Then the needle ships with the plunger raised. The needle will have to have hardware to prevent the needle from depressing while in transit. Needles are capped, yes, but the current cap does not have to be waterproof; it's just a cover to make the needle safer.

And what if the needle does get slightly depressed, and we lose some vaccine? Even if we had vaccine in a bottle, it's a bad idea to mix vaccine lots! So we have to throw out the needle and vaccine entirely.

Mainly because I did not know that existed. I'll have to test it before thinking about switching it out. I wonder if there's some sort of unit test suite for .htaccess configurations -- big changes like this could definitely break something, and my config works for me now.

It does seem like it might be more magic than I prefer in programming, though.

The tattoos weren't a coincidence. The imposter was specifically impersonating him. The imposter went so far as to get the _same exact words_ tattooed on both hands.

The dedication to impersonating Dr. Lodder is why it's concerning. The imposter wasn't just submitting Lodder's work as his own; he _permanently altered his body_ to appear more like Lodder.

In the .htaccess:

  RewriteEngine on
  RewriteCond ${REQUEST_FILENAME} !-D
  RewriteRule "^((?:.*/)*[^/.]+)$" "$1.html" [NC]

Yeah! The command I use is: `rsync --recursive -vv --delete --filter="protect /.well-known" /path/to/site/on/local/box user_site@ssh.phx.nearlyfreespeech.net:/home/public/`

I add `--delete` to clean up any files I might've created on the box (e.g., to test .htaccess), and then `--filter="protect /.well-known" so that I keep any files related to serving as https.

I use https://nearlyfreespeech.net for my static site.

It isn't free -- it is pretty cheap -- but it has a lot going for it. It requires no custom tooling -- I upload via rsync. This makes it trivial to migrate to a new provider if necessary.

I develop my site locally, then rsync it up. I have a custom domain pointed at the site, and also a custom .htaccess, so I have a good amount of control over the site. I do things like serve html without the .html filetype in the url; e.g. https://zck.org/emacsconf2020 is stored on the server as emacsconf2020.html . (I do this so Emacs recognizes the files as html, but keeps the urls clean).

It's a nice tool if you want to get a little involved in your setup, without getting wrapped up in proprietary tooling. It does charge for what you use, so it's not a great site if you are going to host Blu-ray images that get downloaded from everyone on HN.

In two consecutive years (2017, 2018), Buzzfeed was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting: https://www.pulitzer.org/finalists/staff-buzzfeed-news and https://www.pulitzer.org/finalists/chris-hamby-buzzfeed-news.

The link submitted here doesn't work for me, but this one does: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2021/02/07/pfizer... .

At least in NYC, talks are overwhelmingly the most common meetup structure.

I like this idea. I'm an organizer of the New York Emacs meetup (https://emacsnyc.org/), and we had had "Hack Night" meetups as one of our formats. Those worked ok, letting people work on things either together or alone. We did a standup at the beginning, where people said what they wanted to work on, or could help with.

I like the idea of putting this on a whiteboard; it makes it far easier to remember what people are interested in -- and more importantly, _who_ is interested in a topic.

> I never really see people use them purely to replace words one-for-one.

This article does that. Here it might be more often than the author would normally do, but I've seen things like that non-ironically.

> To stay relevant in the age of social media you had to support emoji or you were in the .

EDIT: HN stripped the emoji. The end of that sentence was "or you were :skull: in the :droplet:", read as "or you were dead in the water".

I got a 92! Pretty neat to look at.

It might also be interesting to see actual correlations between things. Seeing that a particular graph is 0.75 correlated is interesting, sure, but it might be more revealing that a particular graph is as correlated as, say, proportion of citizens in a country with college degrees and Nobel Prizes.

Cool! It might be fun to show, at the end, the path you took through the maze on a map.