Hacker News Reader

contagiousflowon We're experimenting with advertising

Just wait until we have AI agents finding optimizing for click through rates.

contagiousflowon Wealth Distribution in the United States

What does a linear scale not tell you about the object of the graph? I'm not sure what further insights you could glean from a logarithmic scale.

contagiousflowon The Wobbly Table Theorem (2022)

> criticisms of a pure math theorem being applied to physics

Next you're going to tell me the Moving sofa problem isn't really about moving sofas!

contagiousflowon The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

Are you removing paid working time in doing the extra work? If not it is just an opportunity cost

contagiousflowon Ask HN: What's the "best" book you've ever read?

If the test is an insincere answer to a question that may tell me a lot about your worldview, then I'm fine failing it. I would rather know genuine people.

contagiousflowon California bans legacy admissions at private universities

MIT doesn't have legacy admissions. Do they have a prestige problem?

contagiousflowon California bans legacy admissions at private universities

The difference is higher education is supposed to be a ladder. That may sound like idealism but removing (or limiting) that ladder based on class is against any ideals of economic mobility or meritocracies.

contagiousflowon California bans legacy admissions at private universities

Well then they shouldn't be affected by this changed.

contagiousflowon AI tool cuts unexpected deaths in hospital by 26%, Canadian study finds

It's a 26% decrease in relative terms, but looking at the study shows that it is a 0.5% decrease in absolute terms (1.6% vs 2.1%). A 0.5% decrease is great and should be applauded, but I think the article framing of this being a breakthrough is misleading and even goes against the conclusions of the very paper it is reporting on.

contagiousflowon AI tool cuts unexpected deaths in hospital by 26%, Canadian study finds

I think the real question is why is this being reported on. There are always medical advancements, but because this one gets chosen as a news story because "AI" in the headline gets clicks.

contagiousflowon Scramble: Open-Source Alternative to Grammarly

But the code as give is said to respect privacy.

contagiousflowon Boeing workers vote to strike

Yeah, if you want to talk about long term results that kind of necessitates talking about actions that happened a long time ago...

Or would you like to talk about the long term results from actions of unions last year?

contagiousflowon Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

> eventually these fake humans will have lower error rates than real ones

Source?

contagiousflowon Project Hammer: reduce collusion in the Canadian grocery sector

Are you Canadian or aware of the history of Canadian grocery chains?

contagiousflowon The Far-Reaching Ripple Effects of a Discredited Cancer Study

What tasks being automated will make research more epistemologically sound?

contagiousflowon the US government has to start paying for things again

3 actually. https://budget.house.gov/resources/staff-working-papers/us-d...

contagiousflowon the US government has to start paying for things again

I mean, that has already happened. But I think the point of that statement is there is no known number where once debt reaches, the US will be downgraded further.

contagiousflowon Personality Types and Hiring

https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/spc3.124...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/014829...

It has been long regarded as pseudoscience

contagiousflowon Big tech wants to make AI cost nothing

I'm not sure if you are reading what I am saying by bias. Human language, events, decisions, only exists in the cultural and historical contexts around it.

> unbiased courts

You say this as something could ever exist. A court will always have a bias because it is humans with values and morals that make a decision. Think about the classic "would you steal bread to feed your family", or even the trolley problem, or as a very concrete example the recent overturning of Roe v Wade in America (keeping in mind that both sides of that discussion reveal an implicit bias based on your starting set of morals and values). Any question that involves a base set of values and morals will never have an unbiased answer.

contagiousflowon Big tech wants to make AI cost nothing

There is literally no such thing as an unbiased text generator. No matter how you cut it there are an infinite pool of prompts that will need some sort of implicit value system at the heart of the answer. Any implicit bias just from selection of training data will be reflected back at the user.

> Uncensored, tunable LLMs under the full control of their users could scour the internet for propaganda, look for connections between people and organisations and just generally make the work of propagandists who don't have their reader's interests in mind more difficult.

Even this example, what sources do you trust that is or is not "in the readers best interest", what is propaganda or what is an implicit value in a society, when you tune an LLM does that just mean you're steering it to give answers that you like more?

Creating an unbiased LLM is as much of a fools errand as creating an unbiased news publication

contagiousflowon Big tech wants to make AI cost nothing

How would you define unbiased?