Hacker News Reader

adamiscool8on Facebook, Twitter block the NY Post from posting

>The Biden campaign has records to that time indicating no such meeting took place.

This isn't true. They made the specific denial that according to his official schedules from the time, the meeting never happened. And then later quietly also said they "would not rule out the possibility that the former VP had some kind of informal interaction with Pozharskyi, which wouldn’t appear on Biden’s official schedule". [0]

[0] https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/14/biden-campaign-lash...

adamiscool8on Eric Yuan's Visa Application Was Rejected 8 Times

What's wrong with the luck of the draw?

adamiscool8on Room-Temperature Superconductivity Achieved for the First Time

Is that preposterous? The idea that "spacetime"(?) may have superconductive properties doesn't seem facially outlandish, but again I'm not a fancy scientist. He is an awarded US Navy scientist though, and these patents were specially requested by Navy brass, so I'm not inclined to think he's a scammer that slipped one by his attorneys.

adamiscool8on Facebook, Twitter block the NY Post from posting

The instinct some people have to preserve themselves from cognitive dissonance is extremely powerful. Rather than re-examine their own beliefs, it's easier to find reasons to dismiss that which is creating the conflict.

adamiscool8on Room-Temperature Superconductivity Achieved for the First Time

Can someone much smarter than me clarify if this is supportive of, or related to, the US Navy patent from several years ago for Piezoelectricity-induced Room Temperature Superconductor? [0][1]

[0] https://patents.google.com/patent/US20190058105A1/en [1] https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2019/02/us-navy-pa...

adamiscool8on Vilified early over Covid-19 strategy, Sweden seems to have scourge controlled

Maybe now, but that was not at all a sanctioned idea at the time, if we only listened to health experts as you suggest. [0][1][2]

[0] https://www.who.int/news-room/articles-detail/updated-who-re...

[1] https://www.statnews.com/2020/01/31/as-far-right-calls-for-c...

[2] https://euobserver.com/coronavirus/147576

adamiscool8on Trump’s Taxes Show Chronic Losses and Years of Income Tax Avoidance

But there's no indication presented this won't all be easily re-financeable, rolled over as most corporate debt is.

adamiscool8on Hootsuite CEO terminating contract with ICE

There's a range of possibilities between "everyone made it up" and "ICE condones concentration camp experiments on detainees".

adamiscool8on Mark in the Middle

That thread looks like reasonable discussion of an alternative viewpoint but, much like the Facebook employees, you dismiss them because you presume the superiority of your own beliefs.

adamiscool8on Hootsuite CEO terminating contract with ICE

>The Irwin County Hospital issued a statement defending Amin, saying he “is a long-time member of the Irwin County Hospital medical staff and has been in good standing for the entirety of his service to the Irwin County community.”

>The Associated Press on Friday reported that at least eight women since 2017 had been taken to see Amin for gynecological treatment, though it did not find evidence of mass hysterectomies as alleged in the complaint.

[0] https://apnews.com/article/georgia-archive-immigration-f3b10...

adamiscool8on Ask HN: What Happened to Larry Page?

The unnecessary dismissal of these theories as having "no basis in fact" probably contributes to their stickiness. This absolutely does have basis in, arguably misconstrued, fact:

>The claim emerged after a Reddit Q&A in which Gates mentioned foreseeing the use of “digital certificates” to show who has been tested for COVID-19 or who has recovered from the disease . Most of the iterations of this claim misleadingly refer to “quantum dot dye” technology, which was founded by the Gates Foundation. Kevin McHugh, one of the lead authors of the “quantum dot dye” research paper, confirmed to Reuters this technology is not a microchip or human implantable capsule. Instead, it is similar to a tattoo, which would help provide up-to-date patient vaccine records for professionals in places lacking medical records. [0]

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-gates-fauci/fal...

adamiscool8on Conservative TV networks tout conspiracies

Like conspiracy theorists tend to do, this is a conflation of the fact that Russia, like all countries, engaged in active operations during the election focused on advancing their own interests, and the hoax suggestion that President Trump’s campaign coordinated and conspired in those activities.

adamiscool8on Conservative TV networks tout conspiracies

Generally when people insist something happened a certain way despite a massive investigation that concluded the opposite, we regard them as loony conspiracy theorists.

In this case the investigation “did not find that the Trump campaign, or anyone associated with it, conspired or coordinated with the Russian government” but because the conspiracy theorists at issue are MSM-sanctioned they can peddle their poisonous hoax of a colluding, treasonous public official to their hearts content.

adamiscool8on Conservative TV networks tout conspiracies

No mention of the delusional, years-long coverage of the Russian collusion hoax by mainstream media, and those videos have stayed up on YouTube and Facebook — I suppose some “conspiracy theories” are more socially acceptable than others.

adamiscool8on Sanders, Warren, and Wyden back national facial recognition ban bill

Not only is that a canard[0], it's a tiny fraction of the 50,000 annual human trafficking victims incentivized by maintaining lax enforcement of the southern border. [1]

[0] https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/29/us/immigration-refugee-child-...

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-border-trafficking/fe...

adamiscool8on A new theory about political polarization

Trump has supported universal healthcare [0] for much longer than he's been against it, and he has quite the ongoing spat over systemic corruption in the nation's top law enforcement agency. [1] The problem is the system provides no path to electability for someone mixing and matching ingroup/outgroup ideals.

[0] https://www.ontheissues.org/2020/Donald_Trump_Health_Care.ht...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/10/william-barr...

adamiscool8on A $35 keyboard for children transformed me into a novelist

The author is using a 2007 model from eBay, but it is cool to see the technology from my childhood classroom almost 30 years ago persist. I definitely wrote a few elementary essays on these in my day.

adamiscool8on Unimpressed by online classes, college students file lawsuits for refunds

That level of dependence on immigration by schools is foolish, short-sighted, and unsustainable. Forced immigration reductions, whether self-imposed or politically enabled, would ideally provide a much needed opportunity to refocus on developing the domestic talent pipeline and improving the general accessibility of American graduate programs to Americans.

adamiscool8on What other coronaviruses tell us about SARS-CoV-2

But isn't that the point? They accepted more deaths up front, but over the long-run those countries should average out about the same per capita, while Sweden avoided immediate negative social/economic impacts.

adamiscool8on YouTube removed a viral video of two doctors calling for an end to quarantine

My understanding has always been that good science is supposed to be falsifiable. If the new rules are science can only be dictated by authoritative institutions and cannot be publicly questioned, is it still science?

adamiscool8on Ultraviolet Irradiation of Blood: “The Cure That Time Forgot”? (2018)

The thought process of "we can disinfect surfaces why not people" is essentially how germ theory and antiseptics were discovered. It's incredibly strange and scary to me how this form of thinking is now pathologized.

adamiscool8on Kanye West Vaults from Broke to Billions with Yeezy in Demand

The quotes around "unhinged" were to imply positively pivotal figures — like Leonardo da Vinci, Walt Disney, or Steve Jobs — not categorical terrorists.

adamiscool8on Kanye West Vaults from Broke to Billions with Yeezy in Demand

A corollary observation would be that many very pivotal figures in history regularly sounded "unhinged".

adamiscool8on Outcomes of hydroxychloroquine usage in US veterans hospitalized with Covid-19 [pdf]

This is, most charitably, an uninformed (and presumably partisan) reading of the study.

Let's try reading this paper the proper way, starting at the end:

>the findings from this retrospective study suggest caution in using hydroxychloroquine in hospitalized Covid-19 patients, particularly when not combined with azithromycin.

So that's not saying HCQ can't be helpful, or is a waste of time as you implied. That just says it requires caution, which is totally fair -- this is uncharted territory. What else do we have?

>Our study cohort comprised only men whose median age was over 65 years. Therefore, the results may not necessarily reflect outcomes in women or in younger hospitalized populations

OK, so we know the paper itself is a lot narrower in it's prescriptions than the many headlines that will be generate from it. It certainly didn't "kill 20 patients".

>hydroxychloroquine, with or without azithromycin, was more likely to be prescribed to patients with more severe disease, as assessed by baseline ventilatory status and metabolic and hematologic parameters. Thus, as expected, increased mortality was observed in patients treated with hydroxychloroquine, both with and without azithromycin. Nevertheless, the increased risk of overall mortality in the hydroxychloroquine-only group persisted after adjusting for the propensity of being treated with the drug.

So the people who received HCQ+AZ were worse off from the jump, but they adjusted for propensity of treatment, now how was that done?

>we created propensity scores for hydroxychloroquine use alone and hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin use during the hospital stay. Propensity scores were estimated via multinomial logistic regression of treatment group. All baseline covariates were included in the propensity score models. The propensity scores were entered into the outcome models with restricted cubic splines.

Well, I don't know what that all means, but I can Googles -- here's a paper called "A Tutorial on Propensity Score Estimation for Multiple Treatments Using Generalized Boosted Models" [0], what does that have to say about this method?

>If there are unmeasured variables that predict outcomes and differ among treatment groups then the estimates can be biased. This limitation, however, is not specific to the methods we present; indeed, all causal modeling strategies that use observational study data must contend with this limitation in one way or another.

Hmm, so that's a weak point in this study for sure. How did the VA study contend with that?

>We did, however adjust for a large number of Covid19-relevant confounders including comorbidities, medications, clinical and laboratory abnormalities. Despite propensity score adjustment for a large number of relevant confounders, we cannot rule out the possibility of selection bias or residual confounding.

OK, so what did this study really find? That for men aged 65+ and above hospitalized with COVID-19, based on an adjusted and possibly confounded model of when HCQ/+AZ would be prescribed, those who received HCQ alone may have a 1.1-6.2x increased risk of mortality, but when combined with AZ did not lead to an increase in overall mortality, and in fact could reduce it by nearly half.

But of course, that's not a sexy headline, and it certainly won't rally the right people.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3710547/

adamiscool8on Facebook, Google to be forced to share ad revenue with Australian media

The code was to require the companies to negotiate in good faith on how to pay news media for use of their content, advise news media in advance of algorithm changes that would affect content rankings, favour original source news content in search page results, and share data with media companies.

This seems...confused. At that point why wouldn't Facebook, Google, et al just ban the media company links from their platforms and avoid the hassle?

adamiscool8on Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?

I was in the exact same position -- the ecosystem looks intimidating these days, but fortunately PHP is pretty much still PHP. I started back in by getting a handle on Composer[0], which is the only new necessity, and if you have any *nix experience is just a basic package manager (so you don't have to worry about checking for updates and managing individual dependency files like the old days).

Composer also provides the benefit of a lot of neat packages that can help accomplish a lot of the heavy lifting, depending on your needs. For my purposes, the Slim Framework[1] was perfect. Beyond that, PHP still has PDO, so I wrote a simple class to manage my common CRUD activities. I haven't bought into the npm-gulp-JS-babel hamster wheel nonsense for the front-end. I still download the odd JS library and FTP upload my files.

Tying it back to the OP, I really rediscovered the joy of programming by ignoring all the over-engineered nonsense that's taken over (particularly in web dev). I stopped feeling like I'm behind if I don't spend a day learning about a process that might save me 20 minutes but will be deprecated in a month and obsolete in a year. I went back to just writing the code that does what I need it to do.

[0] https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/php-composer/

[1] http://www.slimframework.com/

adamiscool8on China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

That solves for the protest problem, not for the demographic crunch or China's desperate need to deleverage its economic system. [0]

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/17/chinas-corporate-debt-is-big...

adamiscool8on Covid Notes from an Intensivist in the Seattle

The clinical notes are interesting but with a sample of 21 patients and 11 deaths, is the Law of Small Numbers not in play?

adamiscool8on SXSW Cancelled Due to Coronavirus

It's 0.6% based on 42 deaths out of 6,284 confirmed cases out of 158,000 tests out of a population of 51 million. The flu is 0.1%, but COVID-19's mortality rate very easily could still be significantly overstated.

adamiscool8on SXSW Cancelled Due to Coronavirus

But many countries have stopped counting mild cases, and how many asymptomatic cases are out there already? I don't know if any modelling has been done, but the true mortality rate could be much, much lower -- perhaps even lower than a pandemic flu. [0]

[0] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2002387?query=rec...