Hacker News Reader

amputecton CDC director warns that Congo's Ebola outbreak may not be containable

That's not great! I wonder if Ebola is especially quick to mutate. This article: https://jvi.asm.org/content/early/2015/12/08/JVI.02701-15 suggests that it is. A mitigating factor is that it doesn't seem to tolerate mutations very well (i.e. lots of mutations lead to non-viable strains), but I guess with a large enough patient pool it could have out-run the vaccine.

amputecton A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

What's the alternative to "build your own platforms" though. Are you willing to compel Stripe by threat of force to keep processing credit cards for nazis? Are you willing to completely torpedo freedom of association, as long as the people demanding your company continue associating with them are sufficiently monstrous?

amputecton How Many Miles of Driving to Demonstrate Autonomous Vehicle Reliability? (2016)

FWIW the paper mentions that Google's autonomous driving fleet currently has 55 cars, so I suspect the 100 fleet size was picked to reflect a significant improvement over a notable competitor in the field.

The article mentions Google's self-driving fleet size but I didn't notice other companies. I wonder what the fleet size is at other companies that are working on this, anyone know?

The reason I ask is that I'm curious if "making more cars" is really the bottleneck. It's totally possible that the Waymo team doesn't have the headcount to keep up with the data output from the existing 55 units, or the fleet logistics bandwidth to keep up more than 50 or 60 heavily custom self-driving vehicles. It may very reasonably be a staffing issue rather than a money one, and it's possible that even if Google bought the rest of the self driving industry they might not be able to maintain more than a couple hundred cars.

Disclaimer: I work for Google, but not on self driving cars. I actually know almost nothing about our self driving efforts, sorry.

amputecton Dispelling common arguments against HTTPS

I would agree with you if this was just a list of people who think HTTP is good enough.

If you read the article it's not "HTTP is good enough" it's "HTTPS is too slow" or "HTTPS is a plot by Google to take over the web" or fundamentally misunderstanding the value proposition of HTTPS or straight up lying about what it does.

Anti-vaxxers is absolutely a valid comparison here, the people in this blog aren't just not using HTTPS, they're actively encouraging people in their capacity as professionals to avoid using it, for really dumb and dangerous reasons that don't stand up to even the slightest scrutiny.

amputecton US Employee in China Suffers Brain Injury in Case Recalling Cuba Sound 'Attack'

I was pretty amused by the suggestion in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17135061 that it's actually US spy equipment that is malfunctioning and causing the problem, but it's honestly not totally implausible.

amputecton Building games that can be understood at a glance

Oh shit, I absolutely love Infinity Loop! I played it a bunch and got a ton of mileage out of it. It hits what in my experience is a very difficult to achieve balance of relaxing and engaging, and even though it's simple it never really feels repetative (meditative, maybe?).

I played the pre-tutorial version and I found it highly intuitive and easy to get in to, I think you really nailed that aspect. Thanks for the great game!

amputecton Linus Torvalds Rants

It would be really, really easy to make the exact same points, simply by typing less. I've seen a lot of people defend Linus on the grounds that he's "terse" but this is actually quite unnecessarily verbose, and would be much clearer and easy to read without the temper tantrums bookending it. Starting from "I get tons of" and ending with the "in tinydrm-helpers.h" line would make the exact same point, without requiring an actual adult to step in and try to do damage control for him to prevent him from driving a promising newbie out of the project.

amputecton Linus Torvalds Rants

To add further context, here's Linus' (imo rude and totally unproductive) rant from https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/2/23/611, which Daniel Vetter is replying to:

The tinydrm code seems like absolute pure shit that has never seen a compiler.

I'm upset, because I expect better quality control. In fact, I expect some qualitty control, and this piece-of-shit driver has clearly seen none at all.

And those patches were apparently committed yesterday.

WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?

I get tons and tons of lines of warnings:

  drivers/gpu/drm/tinydrm/mipi-dbi.c: In function ‘mipi_dbi_typec1_command’:
  drivers/gpu/drm/tinydrm/mipi-dbi.c:65:20: warning: field width

specifier ‘’ expects argument of type ‘int’, but argument 5 has type ‘size_t {aka long unsigned int}’ [-Wformat=] DRM_DEBUG_DRIVER("cmd=%02x, par=%ph\n", cmd, len, data); \

with nasty chains of nested defines, but then I also get actual compile failures

  drivers/gpu/drm/tinydrm/core/tinydrm-helpers.c:198:26: error:

redefinition of ‘tinydrm_of_find_backlight’ struct backlight_device tinydrm_of_find_backlight(struct device dev) ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ In file included from drivers/gpu/drm/tinydrm/core/tinydrm-helpers.c:11:0: ./include/drm/tinydrm/tinydrm-helpers.h:53:1: note: previous definition of ‘tinydrm_of_find_backlight’ was here tinydrm_of_find_backlight(struct device dev) ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
(with similar stuff for tinydrm_disable_backlight()).
It looks like it might compile if CONFIG_BACKLIGHT_CLASS_DEVICE was enabled rather than being a module.
Doing this:
-#ifdef CONFIG_BACKLIGHT_CLASS_DEVICE +#if IS_ENABLED(CONFIG_BACKLIGHT_CLASS_DEVICE)
in tinydrm-helpers.h gets rid of the complete build failure, and only leaves the tens of lines of warnings.

How the hell did this get to the point where crap like this is even sent to me? Nobody tested anything*?

AND WHY THE HELL WAS THIS UTTER SHITE SENT TO ME IF IT WAS COMMITTED YESTERDAY?

amputecton Comparative efficacy and acceptability of 21 antidepressant drugs

I basically agree with your friend, but I'm pro-drugs for pepole who find them helpful. I very strongly suspect that the underlying "problem", like with cancer, is actually an enormous variety of problems that cluster into vaguely similar symptom groups. I am absolutely not an expert here, this is a layperson's opinion, but it's really hard to imagine that there's just one specific cause that we're treating. I think that's why different drug classes vary so wildly in effectiveness from person to person, there's a ton of underlying confounding variables that we simply don't understand.

But what we do know is that anti-depressants can be a powerful tool for helping people who aren't responsive to other types of treatment. Even if it takes some effort to figure out which one is the best fit for the underlying disorder, that's better than nothing.

amputecton Comparative efficacy and acceptability of 21 antidepressant drugs

I think that the United States is getting better about dealing with mental health, but we still have a long way to go. This is a little soap-boxy and anecdotal, and I apologize if it's inappropriate here.

If I hadn't gotten a prescription for Prozac I probably would have killed myself by now. And I definitely would have destroyed my marriage and most of my important friendships. That's not an over-dramatization, it's the honest truth just based on the direction my life was heading without them.

If you can't make your own neurotransmitters, store bought are fine. I'm not writing this to say "RARGH YOU MUST USE THESE DRUGS", but I absolutely am writing it to say "hey, this worked for me and got me out of a really dark and bad place". If you are reading this from a dark and bad place, please know that you're not alone. You have a lot of options, and I promise that if you take that first step, things can get better.

amputecton There's a Persistent Hum in Windsor, Ontario, and No One Knows Why

This article references one of my favorite anecdotes about infrasound and "hauntings": https://gizmodo.com/some-ghosts-may-be-sound-waves-just-belo...

It's early in, look for the part about Vic Tandy.

amputecton Why do we keep designing streets for speed?

I've got a guess as to what the author is talking about, because gun owners have a similar thing. In the case of guns, it's "there's no such thing as an accidental discharge, only a negligent one".

By this reading, the author is probably saying that unless your car malfunctions and prevents you from stopping or steering, or there is some equivalent fluke happening (a deer darts out in front of you and you physically can't stop in time), then "accidents" are caused by negligence (not checking lanes when changing, playing with the radio, not looking for pedestrians) or malfeasance (unsafe passing, driving at an unsafe speed for the conditions, drunk driving).

I have mixed feelings about this, but I've been driving a while and I've seen a lot of truly stupid and/or mean spirited and/or reckless behavior that could quite predictably result in a collision, but it'd be a stretch to call the sad and obvious outcome an 'accident'.

amputecton AT&T giving $1000 bonus to all its employees because of tax reform

Per https://www.att.com/gen/general?pid=22150 AT&T was already required to pay this out to at least 20,000 employees because of negotiations with the Communications Workers of America union.

amputecton Microsoft Moves to End Secrecy in Sexual Harassment Claims

> The stories I've read have done a good and careful job of corroborating and verifying their stories.

There are several good recent examples of this: - the project veritas employee trying to shop a false abortion story to the post - the schumer accusation that was shown to be falsified - weinstein's fake accuser that was planted by his own team to discredit investigations

When people come with false information, it gets found and reported on, because journalists do their due dilligence. News organizations are really careful about this kind of thing, because screwing up here is a really good way to get your entire org badly burned.

amputecton People Who Speed-Listen to Podcasts

My two favorite podcasts are Sawbones and Welcome to Night Vale. I don't, like, personally care if people listen to them at high speed. It doesn't bug me and I don't judge them for it. My personal experience (descriptive, not prescriptive) follows:

Sawbones is an edu-comedy podcast about medical history, and I tried listening to it faster and just didn't enjoy it as much. I really enjoy the comedic timing and interplay between the hosts, and it's already information rich enough that I feel fine listening to it at normal speed is fine.

One of the things I really like about WtNV is the almost menacing, deliberate pacing of the narrator. His speech is so perfectly even, regardless of the content, that it's almost hypnotic. I tried that at 1.25x and it felt off, but again it's a personal preference thing.

amputecton 'Staying longer at home' was key to stone age technology change 60k years ago

In the time of the aspect book and the many small birds, the word piano was the primary means of communication.

amputecton Google and ProPublica team up to build a national hate crime database

I encourage you to look at the full list of partners, this isn't "google and one liberal rag" it's "google and a ton of major journalism outlets and universities", and it's worth evaluating through that lens.

I am cautiously optimistic that they might be able to accomplish something good here and create a more data-driven analysis of something that's a hot-button, highly emotionally charged topic right now.

amputecton Google and ProPublica team up to build a national hate crime database

w/r/t "hate towards the haters" (assuming by "haters" here you mean people literally waving a nazi flag, or more colloquially, "nazis"), you might find this essay on the paradox of tolerence interesting: https://extranewsfeed.com/tolerance-is-not-a-moral-precept-1...

amputecton Focus on Infants During Childbirth Leaves U.S. Moms in Danger

That's terrible, I am sorry for your loss.

amputecton Is neuroenhancement by noninvasive brain stimulation a net zero-sum proposition?

This is a good and funny reply. Also, it accidentally led me down a fun rabbit hole and I ended up trying to learn about the oldest scientific works are that are still regularly cited today.

Answers: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C48&as_yl... is a good starting point. Euler's paper demonstrating that there is no solution to the Königsberg bridge problem and inventing graph theory in the process is one of the more recognizable (to me) papers, but there's a lot of truly interesting, foundational work there.

My wife guessed that Newton would be on there, but I couldn't easily turn him up. I'm probably just bad with Google scholar, or maybe it's so foundational that nobody bothers to provide a citation for e.g the very existence of _calculus_ or _gravity_

My original question was "the oldest still-cited scientific work") but I relaxed my criteria due to poorly defined definitions on 'still-cited' and 'scientific'. Still an interesting way to spend some time, so thanks for the digression!

amputecton Soylent recalls powder after dairy accidentally slips into 1.8 powder

Medical food and meal replacement shakes existed well before soylent, they're usually intended for people who are on a feeding tube. There's a lot of common brands like Ensure, and you can find probably at least one decent option in a reasonably well-stocked grocery store. If you want to order online there's some interesting stuff like: http://www.functionalformularies.com/liquid-hope-information...

Soylent's main distinguishing features are marketing and sloppiness. They are also a little cheaper than other options, but here as with most things, you get what you pay for.

amputecton What It’s Like to Lose Your Short-Term Memory

This is a fascinating perspective, thank you for sharing.

amputecton Uber's VP of global vehicle programs is out

FTA: "Marakby’s departure comes not too long after Uber lost its head of comms, president, head of AI Labs, VP of growth and SVP of engineering."

This feels like one of those things that's going to keep snowballing.

amputecton Princeton’s Ad-Blocker May Put an End to the Ad-Blocking Arms Race

Only if you do it on twitter.

amputecton I am an Uber survivor

It's even better when it's "Oh, he's a good person and has never done this before and I'm sure he'll never do it again" followed by studiously failing to document the incident so that every time is the first time.

amputecton Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber

That's an excellent proverb, and the way things are going in my neck of the woods, I feel like I'm going to get a lot of mileage out of it.

amputecton Balaji Srinivasan, who may run the FDA for Trump, hates the FDA

Looking forward to a Yelp for Yelp Clones, where I can rate yelp-for-X sites on how trustworthy the ratings are.

amputecton Balaji Srinivasan, who may run the FDA for Trump, hates the FDA

Imagine the little perverse incentives that companies offer to leave a Yelp rating (rate us and get some free breadsticks! or whatever), but with pharmaceuticals (leave us a five star rating and get a new car, or a new medical device, or whatever). That sounds really, really bad, and it would require a lot of regulation and oversight to make sure ratings weren't being manipulated. I suspect those two things will be in short supply in the incoming administration.

amputecton My Google Internship

Yes, it is, but I think the implementation matters. In my building on the Google Kirkland campus, we have men's and women's bathrooms in a few different places, and also one place where there's 5 single-occupancy unisex bathrooms and one mother's room. It's great! It doesn't take any space away from the other bathrooms, and it accommodates people who are uncomfortable in the cisgender multi-person bathrooms for whatever reason (maybe they're somewhere in the QUILTBAG or maybe there's totally unrelated physical or psychological reasons they prefer single-occupancy restrooms).

My understanding is that we're not trying to strike down all the barriers and make all toilets unisex, but there definitely are people who are working to make sure that every building has at least one of those unisex single-occupancy bathrooms, for people who need it. It doesn't cost Googlers anything except at most a couple of conference rooms.

amputecton Under Fire, Theranos CEO Stifled Bad News

Highlight the title, right click, search google for it, and click the wsj result. The wsj website displays articles for people coming in through google. This worked for me at any rate, and I wasn't able to see it by clicking the direct link.