Hacker News Reader

devalgoon California sets Covid-19 daily record, Bay Area cumulative total passes 20k

Ah yes a member of the "Sacrifice your grandparents for the stonks" class. I'm sorry but the idea of discarding potentially millions of live for the economy is inhuman.

devalgoon You can't tell people anything (2004)

Of course they never admit the truth, that the only way they got rich/famous was by writing self help books and have never done anything real outside that.

devalgoon California sets Covid-19 daily record, Bay Area cumulative total passes 20k

Uh Math? You have unconstrained exponential growth across the country in most major cities outside the Northeast. There is only 1 ending here unless there are massive changes.

devalgoon California sets Covid-19 daily record, Bay Area cumulative total passes 20k

And the curve is now going straight back up at exponential rates. The lockdown should have lasted until we had a vaccine. Period.

devalgoon California sets Covid-19 daily record, Bay Area cumulative total passes 20k

Flatten the curve was meant to spread the infections across time to decrease stress on the healthcare system. Our lockdown was ineffectual because of lax enforcement and the public's apathy. So it achieved none of its goals. Places like Italy, Spain, New Zealand have "won" against the virus using lockdowns and are now on track to be back to normal. In NZs case they are already back to normal. Without another lockdown it's almost assured at this point that we will reach the breaking point of our healthcare system. It's inevitable unless a miracle vaccine arrives very soon.

devalgoon Nanoplastics accumulate in land-plant tissues: study

This along with antibiotic resistance, ocean acidification and others are silent civilization killers. Male fertility has been dropping for the past several decades and accumulation of microplastics has been suggested as a possible cause. Will the species become infertile because of this? Will we sterilize our oceans? Will we go back to the 1800s medically where invasive surgeries will be nearly impossible due to no working antibiotics? Few people are aware of these problems and even fewer are working on solutions.

devalgoon Andrew Ng: The suspension of H1B is bad for the US and bad for innovation

Pretty sure this is demonstrably false. There are large spreadsheets out there documenting H1B wages at FAANG type companies and they are almost universally less than the equivalent US Citizen wages.

devalgoon Andrew Ng: The suspension of H1B is bad for the US and bad for innovation

>some of whom arrive on a H1B

Isn't this the key part, isn't that graph rather irrelevant to the H1B discussion if it doesn't specifically point out the H1B numbers?

As an aside the H1B is an abusive system that depresses technical wages and oppresses the visa holders who can lose their residency on the whims of large corporations.

devalgoon Andrew Ng: The suspension of H1B is bad for the US and bad for innovation

H1B is a scam. It allows employers to shortchange their workers and abuse immigrants who are beholden to them for their right to live in the US.

devalgoon Most employees of NYT won’t be required back in physical offices until 2021

It's probably a question of awareness. How many of these people are reading e.g arxiv preprints to see this kind of research in the first place? There's also a rebound/face saving effect: if the CDC, State Health Officials, etc. got it wrong at first why should we believe them about anything? I just really doubt there are secret totalitarian Mayors and Governors out there intentionally locking people in their homes despite all evidence. Given politicians obsession with reelection and the unpopularity of these lockdowns it doesn't make sense they would do it for no reason and basically guarantee they lose their next election.

devalgoon Andrew Yang's Data Dividend Project is pushing Big Tech to pay users for data

I agree with that but we're talking about things that are really measurements of your mind right? What kind of articles do you read, what kind of posts do you like, products you like to buy etc. The Tech giants use rough simulacra of your mind to try and target you as efficiently as possible with ads. This seems like some kind of Black Mirror episode to me.

devalgoon Andrew Yang's Data Dividend Project is pushing Big Tech to pay users for data

It gets hairy quickly. Do you own your DNA sequence? You could say it's essentially just data. Would you be opposed to a company patenting your DNA and profiting off it?

devalgoon Most employees of NYT won’t be required back in physical offices until 2021

As klenwell said, deaths are very lagging. It could take weeks for a person admitted to a hospital to die so it shouldn't at all be reassuring that those numbers are going down. They are bound to rebound.

How is this downvoted? If you have evidence showing all of the new cases are from younger people or totally asymptomatic carriers go ahead and show it otherwise its literally a tautology, more cases = more deaths.

devalgoon Most employees of NYT won’t be required back in physical offices until 2021

It's definitely concerning how people are acting but that being said I think the initial research is showing that outdoor spread during the day is very unlikely. UV light seems to be devastating to Covid and Vitamin D seems to be protective. So a crowded beach is probably not all that bad. Packed bars and restaurants? That's a near worst case scenario

devalgoon Andrew Yang's Data Dividend Project is pushing Big Tech to pay users for data

Is anyone really going to weep for Zuck if he drops down to merely a millionaire instead of a billionaire? I certainly won't...

devalgoon Andrew Yang's Data Dividend Project is pushing Big Tech to pay users for data

>Aren't companies already paying indirectly by providing free service?

I think it's more about changing the frame. That Tech companies have been profiting off something you actually have always intrinsically owned, your personal data, and now is the time to retake that ownership.

devalgoon Mozilla VPN

Let them stay in the Niche maybe? I'd rather have a really great safe browser than half a dozen half baked products from the same company.

devalgoon Boston Dynamics shop: Spot Explorer

Not sure this take feels right but it doesn't really feel sufficient to say "this time is different" either. It's pretty easy to come up with dozens of military based use cases but really difficult to find commercial ones. Possible use cases for say delivery still rely on human drivers (in delivery vans) or tele-operators for example so it's not clear there's a business case for using them.

devalgoon Boston Dynamics shop: Spot Explorer

Well they have $20,000+ addons for better Lidar range, on device compute etc. Doesn't seem all that cheap to do interesting things..

devalgoon Boston Dynamics shop: Spot Explorer

So outside of mounting a gun on it or doing basic industrial inspections it's really just a $74,500 toy right?

devalgoon After GitHub CEO backs Black Lives Matter, workers demand an end to ICE contract

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...

Feel free to try and explain it away but to say no one is calling for this would at this point be willful blindness. I have complete freedom to think that many of the protests demands are dangerous, poorly thought out and outright foolish.

devalgoon Harvard University Won’t Require SAT, ACT for Admissions Next Year

>Right so you’re saying they could randomly pick from their applicant pool because right now only perfect scores apply.

This would actually be a reasonable way to go. Set a cut off ACT/SAT/GPA and just do a lottery for kids that are above it. Actual fairness. Of course thats not what HPY + Stanford etc. are interested in. They are still just finishing schools for the elite. If you want actual meritocracy go to MIT or Caltech

devalgoon After GitHub CEO backs Black Lives Matter, workers demand an end to ICE contract

>But I think the larger call is saying that ICE as it currently is conceived as a paramilitary-style organization is not the way control the border and manage immigration.

This seems like what people on the right do with Trump. He'll say some outlandish or indefensible thing on Twitter and pundits will walk it back and lay out some complex argument to support it. It's not convincing in either case. It's the same with abolish the police. The protesters seem to be very clear that's what thy want and people will go to great lengths explaining oh no what they really want is to divert funding to community groups and improve training they don't actually want to abolish the police. Like what? Is anyone stupid enough to believe this stuff?

devalgoon After GitHub CEO backs Black Lives Matter, workers demand an end to ICE contract

I don't understand the calls to abolish ICE. Open borders are simply not a realistic policy in the current world. We can barely keep things operating as it is in the US, what would happen when tens of millions of largely unskilled immigrants were to stream across the border? Do people actually think nothing negative will happen?

devalgoon Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone

Probably not wise to put words in my mouth. I have no love for the police but the kumbaya bs people are spouting about the CHAZ is ludicrous.

devalgoon Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone

>They apparently also did it in Camden, NJ, and that turned out quite well.

This is an appalling misunderstanding of what really happened in Camden. Take a trip there, know what you'll find? Police cars, policemen and police stations. THEY STILL HAVE POLICE! What they REALLY did was a police reboot, essentially fired everyone and rebuilt from the ground up. People who point to Camden to try and support their narrative are dangerously misinformed.

devalgoon After 10 years in tech isolation, I’m now outsider to things I once had mastered

True but we also execute people in the US, our prisons have despicable living conditions and we routinely use solitary confinement which could be considered a form of torture by some.

devalgoon Deep learning of physical laws from scarce data

I'd be wary of that. He needs to make some predictions that can be tested or it's just another string theory/brane theory/many worlds/etc. theory that makes a lot of claims but hasn't advanced the science at all. We need testable predictions, preferably new particles in energy regimes we can actually reach with current or near future tech.

Edit: There's a big danger in accepting theories because they have simplicity or beauty. That's how we ended up with String Theory and Fundamental Theoretical Physics has basically stalled since the '50s because of it.

devalgoon Deep learning of physical laws from scarce data

Yes that's what I said, the data you need for a unifying theory is unavailable because we don't have colliders that can reach the right energies. Giant Neural Networks don't fix that.

devalgoon The Looming Bank Collapse

Short of saying that a hyper inflation event in the US would probably break civilization and so allocating capital is irrelevant at that point, isn't the obvious answer Bitcoin or other crypto assets?