Hacker News Reader

Got it, thanks!

I think their license works for the current version at time of purchase and next version, so you’re good to go till version 5

anthony_romeoon Trinary Decision Trees for missing value handling

Minor and pedantic: should this instead be “Ternary Decision Tree”?

anthony_romeoon The Password Game

Fun!

But I wasn’t able to finish: I got a captcha with digits 5, 3, 7, and 8. When the chessboard appeared, the best move was Qe6. These conflicted with the rule to have all digits sum to 25 (5+3+7+8+6=29).

anthony_romeoon Quantum Computing 101

As also a non-expert, I can add that the superposition and entanglement of qubits are performed using gates as in classical computing. There’s the Hadamard gate which takes two particles outputs a quantum superposition of the particles. Passing the result of this into a controlled-not gate, or CNOT, entangles the particles and induces them into a Bell state. From there, calculations are performed until some sort of measurement, wherein the entangled particles collapse into one possible definitive state.

anthony_romeoon Ask HN: Which books have made you a better thinker and problem solver?

For another logic text, I really enjoyed Walton’s Informal Logic: A Pragmatic Approach.

It describes arguments as existing within different types of dialectic contexts (e.g. debate, deliberation, negotiation). Arguments that are fallacious in one context (e.g. threatening your opponent in a debate) are not in other contexts (e.g. threatening your opponent in a negotiation). From this, informal fallacies are defined not as inherently bad arguments that must always be avoided, but rather they emerge when one inappropriately shifts the dialectic from one type of argument to another.

anthony_romeoon APL deserves its renaissance too (2018)

I’ve been dabbling in this, and created my own keyboard layout to include all kinds of math characters using the right Alt key for level 3 and level 4 shift. Also replaced caps lock with the compose key. Didn’t take too long to get accustomed to it since it’s a corruption of the Greek keyboard layout (which is laid out similar to QWERTY).

I haven’t had the audacity to use it in production code, but it’s interesting to play around with and great for quick note taking or hacker news comments. (Sadly I’m on my phone right now to not make use of it for this comment)

anthony_romeoon Likely cause of mystery child hepatitis outbreak found

> Why were lockdowns so unquestionably pushed?

If memory serves me right, early on in the pandemic, the health care systems of a number of countries and cities (e.g. Italy, NYC) were completely overwhelmed by infected individuals with severe respiratory illnesses, many of whom needed several days of ventilator treatment to survive. Many aspects of society in these areas ceased to function because of the effects of the virus itself (and the effective collapse of the health care system). Support for government mandates grew out of a desire to mitigate the effects of the virus.

In the US, after a pretty devastating March 2020, government mandates were largely left to the states, meaning that states/cities more strongly affected by COVID were able to choose stronger mitigation strategies and vice-versa.

After we learned more about the virus, after a vaccine was developed & released, and after the virus mercifully mutated into a less lethal version of itself, the likelihood repeating the same sort of shock on the healthcare system dropped. Many states had already lifted their restrictions in 2020, and states that were hit harder early (e.g. NY, CA) gradually lifted their restrictions throughout 2021.

I interpret Dr. Birx's quote to suggest that she believed that "fifteen days" time was not enough time to slow the spread, and that this was the largest span of time for which she was able to obtain authorization. The later expansion to "thirty days to slow the spread" suggests that Dr. Birx was correct.

I'll also note that, the following month, the President of the United States suggested that citizens should "LIBERATE MICHIGAN!" of their mask mandates and business restrictions. From this, your claim that mask mandates were "unquestionably pushed" seems inaccurate to me. On the contrary -- the first year of the pandemic was a perpetual deliberation on the effectiveness of mitigation strategies. Lockdown strategies continue to be debated despite lockdowns being basically nonexistent in most of the US now.

anthony_romeoon ‘What Do You Think Is the Most Important Problem Facing This Country Today?’

Who are "the news media companies" here, exactly? Who is "they" and what do you mean when you say they "forgot race relations to push other issues"?

I ask this because I'm pretty sure race relations are still being discussed among "the news media" and I'm wondering how you came to this conclusion.

anthony_romeoon New Arizona law makes it illegal to film within 8 feet of police

10 feet away from what, exactly? A ‘law enforcement activity’? Is that area defined in a meaningful way?

What if a bystander records 10 feet away, but a second person stands in between and records 5 feet away? Has the area of law enforcement activity expanded to include the first bystander because of the second bystander is breaking a law?

I guess bystanders who didn’t bring their tape measure can just run the risk of recording and let the courts shake it out, right?

anthony_romeoon New Arizona law makes it illegal to film within 8 feet of police

So hypothetically, if one is being illegally beaten by a person who happens to be an on-duty police officer, all the victim has to do to achieve justice is turn on their camera to record the incident to gather evidence. Bystanders can feel good that they’re ignoring the incident and carrying on with their days, as they know that it’s the victim’s responsibility to record their own beating.

anthony_romeoon Supreme Court Overturns Roe vs. Wade

Thanks for your response in the other thread (FTR your reply was already flagged dead by the time I noticed it). I’m responding to that.

I understand your position. On your point about why people think marriage is a right… I suspect this is because, at present, many rights are coupled with marriage - visitation rights at a hospital being the classic example.

anthony_romeoon Supreme Court Overturns Roe vs. Wade

What do you actually believe then?

anthony_romeoon Supreme Court Overturns Roe vs. Wade

You're not suggesting this, but your line of reasoning can be applied to prevent people who are sterile from getting married.

Couples without children can adopt children, regardless of the gender of the parents.

anthony_romeoon Ask HN: What are examples of common beliefs conclusively invalidated by data?

Don't hold me to this, but if I recall, the recommendation is to consume 8 cups (1 cup = 8 oz ≈ 0.23L) of water a day, and the water contained in our food counts. This is to say, people conflated 8 cups of water to mean 8 glasses of water.

anthony_romeoon Ask HN: Shouldn't an 8% inflation rate be synonymous to an economic recession?

In the past, a recession was defined as two consecutive quarters of decline in GDP [I think the definition has loosened somewhat recently, but I’ll ignore that].

Real GDP (which accounts for inflation) was up in 4Q 2021, but down 1Q 2022. Based on a somewhat arbitrarily-selected article I briefly skimmed the beginning of, Real GDP is expected to be up in 2Q.

https://www.philadelphiafed.org/surveys-and-data/real-time-d...

Of course, it always comes down to the details, which I haven’t really looked into.

anthony_romeoon Some monkeypox patients also have sexually transmitted diseases, CDC says

I was responding to your suggestion that avoiding calling monkeypox a ‘gay disease’ was “just political correctness” by suggesting that some meaningful percentage may instead be “actual correctness.”

anthony_romeoon Some monkeypox patients also have sexually transmitted diseases, CDC says

Neither syphilis nor unsafe sex nor HIV are unique to gay men, nor is monkeypox. I think that is enough to genuinely disqualify it as a ‘gay disease’.

anthony_romeoon Find a good available .com domain

One fun paranoid thought I ponder over when getting a domain: What if someone with a lot of money and a distaste for what I write decides to buy the .com version of my site and post ugly photos of me to it? For me, I’d rather obviate that and just find an adequate .com.

anthony_romeoon WTFPython: Exploring and understanding Python through surprising snippets

> If I'm not mistaken there's a chapter in Effective Python about this, where they recommend never using lists or dicts as Class attributes or default values for parameters and instead use factories or use None and then initialize them with default values when a new instance is created.

Ya, this is because the initialized object is stored as the default parameter, and is not initialized every time the function runs.

    def functy(dicty={}):
        print('dicty=', dicty)
        return dicty
   
    output = functy()
    # dicty = {}

    output.update({'key': 'value'})

    functy()
    # dicty = {'key': 'value'}

anthony_romeoon IQ Test Made by Mensa Norway

Just a note on IQ tests: a test conducted by a psychologist includes several different areas beyond what this test covers. Longer term memory, for example, is a component not assessed here. These components are scored both separately and combined as a 'full-scale IQ', and will highlight both strengths and deficiencies in these particular areas. Some people who scored average or low on this test can still have a high IQ in other functional areas, and some who scored highly may just be particularly well-attuned to solving symbolic arithmetic puzzles but be deficient in other areas.

anthony_romeoon Russia’s Possible Invasion of Ukraine

I prefer to think of a democracy as an unstable fixed point and requires active support and maintenance by its citizens/leadership to remain close to that point.

anthony_romeoon I have no capslock and I must scream

I replaced Caps Lock with the Compose Key (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key) and now I feel like a wizard when I type.

anthony_romeoon Ask HN: General Mood of the Community

IMO The tone of HN comments is teetering over the edge of decorum, similar to the atmosphere of Reddit prior to every new nadir of commentary there.

I'm not going to look through rose-tinted glasses and suggest "things were better in the good ol' days". Contrarian reactions to top posts are the bread-and-butter of a healthy message board.

However, to me it feels like the quality of these contrarian takes have gone down. People seem far more 'committed' to pushing their positions to incense others with overgeneralizing karma-clickbait. This causes the dialectic to become more of a debate instead of a deliberation, and to me the latter is far more useful and engaging.

With that said, I also know that my tastes change as I get older, so this could truly be my own delusion.

anthony_romeoon How to Mislead with Facts

Tangentially, some years ago I recall reading a few articles about the problem with 'misconception busting' articles [I may try to find such an article later]. Apparently, content formatted like...

> Myth: Spinach has a high iron content

> Fact: Spinach does not have a particularly high iron content

... actually tends to reinforce the misconception in readers.

This suggests to me that similar fact-checking content is inherently harmful for their achieving their intended purpose.

anthony_romeoon What is the inverse of a circle?

A black hole is just an object with so much dense mass that its Schwarzschild radius[1^] extends outside of its body. Everything has a Schwarzschild radius.

[1^]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarzschild_radius

anthony_romeoon Panwriter – Distraction-free Markdown editor with pandoc integration

Some places have a healthy mix. GitHub will bold and italicize the text to suggest the rendering of certain blocks, without changing font sizes. Good for reducing the need to swap between edit and preview to verify simple formatting issues as I write.

What I truly despise is when markdown blocks are parsed immediately, where the delimiters are instantly removed and the text gets formatted into a terrible WYSIWYG editor. It causes me to constantly swap mental models as I write. It’s the worst of both worlds.

anthony_romeoon Ask HN: Is the past disappearing on the web?

  The ten best pencils you can buy {{ datetime.date.today().strftime('%B %Y') }}

anthony_romeoon Workers are calling out sick in droves

I started with "As a statistical aside with respect to worker shortages and unemployment in the U.S., here's some BLS data" so yes, very clearly I was being tangential.

From the original comment, I was more interested in the part "It's like the 'worker shortage' kind of garbage... we've got plenty of workers in most sectors" and was curious about unemployment rates.

Whether or not it is 'distracting' is arguable, but I apologize if it was distracting.

anthony_romeoon Workers are calling out sick in droves

As a statistical aside with respect to worker shortages and unemployment in the U.S., here's some BLS data:

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm

For reference, unemployment rates in the US are recorded by six increasingly-broad measures (from U-1 to U-6). U-3 is the internationally-defined "official" unemployment representing 'everyone actively working, or actively looking for work'. U-6, the broadest measure, includes U-3 as well as "all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force" [basically, unemployed people who stopped looking for work (but theoretically want to work), as well as the underemployed].

U-3 alone does not provide a full picture of unemployment. Sometimes U-3 can go down, but U-4, U-5, or U-6 increase because workers are leaving the labor force entirely.

Based on the BLS data, unemployment has been trending down by all measures. This suggests to me that the continued decreases in the unemployment are real and not misleading.

Other tables also indicate that U-3 has decreased among all industries and age ranges:

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t14.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t10.htm

My armchair suspicion is that, though the "worker shortage" was a very real issue in 2021, the problem [at least nationally] has broadly leveled-out, and that discussions on a national "worker shortages" continue to emerge from a type of, say, 'conversational inertia' when discussing localized labor shortages (e.g. problems with industry X in state/county Y) or acute shocks to supply (e.g. large numbers of people getting sick at the same time). Localized shortages or acute shocks are also meaningful and need to be resolved as they come up, but they may be only tangentially-related to a national worker shortage.

I'd love to hear more thoughts on this if others want to chime-in. I didn't do any sort of rigorous analysis on this. There could also be still substantial multi-state/regional shortages hidden among the numbers. I didn't really delve into "reality" or how the data may not actually reflect "real life" or other labor-related issues (e.g. income) -- I just like looking at these stats every now and then.