Hacker News Reader

haltingproblemon Churchill’s Famine: The killing of three million is a story waiting to be retold

I have never heard of this!! Please share some resources that you think are unbiased, would love to learn more.

haltingproblemon Churchill’s Famine: The killing of three million is a story waiting to be retold

No famines in India that resulted in mass deaths after 1947. If the difference was just governance, Indians vs. British, then the fault lies with the British. The Indian governments inherited British institutions in India but Indian leaders lacked administrative experience. They also did not have the resources of the British empire and had to face the mass horrors and disruption of partition.

All this lays the culpability at the door of the British for the Bengal famnine.

haltingproblemon Epstein's Private Calendar Reveals Prominent Names, Including CIA Chief

Who else wants to believe that the current CIA Chief and the then Deputy Secretary of State, just took a meeting with a guy, scratch that multiple meetings without knowing anything about him? These people are in constant danger of being honey trapped, recruited, entrapped and they take the usual measures that are commonplace in dealing with strangers but all these fell by the wayside with Epstein.

The exact same script can be repeated for the person who is now Goldman's Chief Counsel and was the counsel at the White house. He was making her travel arrangements and we are told they are just casual acquaintances.

haltingproblemon Fever: Suppress or Let It Ride?

"Is fever good or bad? Scientifically, we just do not know. However, if we take the evolutionary perspective, then blunting of the adaptive febrile response must be maladaptive. Fever is estimated to be more than 4 million years old and has been documented in the phyla Vertebrata, Arthropoda, and Annelida (7). Despite its long history of study, the exact mechanism of fever and its potentially protective effect is not fully delineated. One could hypothesize that treatment of fever compromises immune competence and renders patients more susceptible to infection. Take, for example, the classic experiment by Kluger et al. in 1981 (21,22). Here, Kluger et al. infected cold-blooded iguanas with bacteria. He gave them the opportunity to seek heat via sunlamps and all but one sought the warmth to raise their temperature. The one who did not was the only one who died. Next, he injected the iguanas with bacteria and gave them antipyretics. The iguanas that were able to mount a fever despite the antipyretic were the only ones that survived."

There seems to be significant evidence as outlined in the article that letting fever ride (i.e. leave it untreated) can save lives. Given the pervasiveness of fever and its treatment, the public health benefits of letting it tide can be quite large - both in deaths and reduced transmissions.

This can have an outsize impact something akin to hand washing before surgery. I wonder why this does not get more airtime from health professionals!

haltingproblemon Coinbase’s chief product officer will leave with a $105M payday

In looking for a pattern in the data are we just being fooled by randomness?

haltingproblemon China’s Population Falls, Heralding a Demographic Crisis

My question was why did the Chinese intelligentsia not foresee this 20 years ago (2000s) or 30 years ago (1990s) rather than over the past 5-10 years. Even now they don't seem to be attacking it with any vigor.

haltingproblemon China’s Population Falls, Heralding a Demographic Crisis

I am quite befuddled by the claims of the demographic crisis, did Chinese planners not forsee this since population dynamics models are relatively straightforward compared to say, epidemiological or climate models. Chinese Academies are quite good. Is this fear mongering by a spirited cadre of believers who might be most likely wrong or a very likely outcome?

haltingproblemon [dead]

Crypto is like giving your banknotes to a guy who then gives you a digital receipt which only you can access and sometimes even you cannot, the receipt value fluctuates and can be traded for other receipts or transferred to an exchange of unknown jurisdiction where it might be swappable for your banknotes again.

haltingproblemon What would a decentralised Uber look like?

This has been proposed and the protocol developed and a sample app deployed in Bangalore [1].

The app leverages the ONDC protocol and Beckn [2]. There are technical talks on it by the founder of Beckn who was also the architect of Aadhar which is India's Biometric identity system. Beckn was also cofounded by the founder of UPI, which is India's digital payment system and currently the largest in the world. Great Video explainer on Beckn [3].

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/b1bc25c5-43c8-458d-bdc3-ab66c7cb5... / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oedj_fGXAs

[2] https://twitter.com/becknprotocol?lang=en

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dizVoQ1MVmY

haltingproblemon What Should Be on the Roadmap?

Economic framework is probably overstating it. Reinersten quantifies the value of delay which he does using economics. This is the first time I have seen delay quantified in the context of agile product development (maybe I need to read more!). Extended to the roadmap the same idea can be used to sequence/prioritize features?

Most other frameworks are qualitative and seems like they were coined by someone who just graduated from b-school - high on feel good power words but low on objectivity ;)

Reinersten has some videos on youtube which are good intro into his thinking -

1- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=du2WV1IbULU - This one is actually part of a playlist

2- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6v6W7jkwok - This is longer and covers a bunch of his ideas.

haltingproblemon What Should Be on the Roadmap?

This is a high quality writeup around roadmaps and covers many ideas missing from product management discussions.

Reinertsen in "Product Flow" brings a economic framework to product management discussions. If you can incorporate your ideas around roadmap into a formal economic framework, it would be an original contribution.

haltingproblemon Statistical process control after W. Edwards Deming

Any chance of you doing a writeup on using Deming's idea to optimize ads? That would be a very interesting read as most ad optimization methods lack in intellectual rigor and controls.

haltingproblemon Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?

Moving atoms must be 6x10^23 more satisfying than slinging electrons. Kudos to making the leap to building infrastructure for the community.

May I ask what made you take the leap?

haltingproblemon India lifted 415M out of poverty in 15 years, says UN

Kudos to father and son.

haltingproblemon India lifted 415M out of poverty in 15 years, says UN

Every generation is the last one to have prosperity. "My children will be better off than me" said no upper middle class burgher, evah.

haltingproblemon Things your manager might not know (2021)

Your past statements do not whitewash your current statement. See the unfolding Kayne West saga. Your statement stands on its own.

My question was: do you think this is limited to Indian consulting companies or is endemic to all consulting companies? You seem to be doubling down on I would say the accusation stands verified.

haltingproblemon Things your manager might not know (2021)

OT but I am making a year-end resolution to skim everything Julia and Patrick have written on their site, then make a list of deep-dive pieces.

The amount of useful content these two crank out is mind-boggling. They hold down day-jobs and write more useful stuff than 98.3413% of writers out there!

I would love to see a fire-side chat on how their process works.

haltingproblemon Kathleen Booth, the inventor of assembly language, has died

The hackaday reference below says she built an assembler. Given how little we know of her achievements and give her credit for those, I would err on the side of crediting her rather than the other interpretation. But just my opinion:)

haltingproblemon [dead]

"The world has watched in appalled fascination as the UK’s ruling party scrapes the bottom of its human resources barrel: it found there its first Black chancellor of the exchequer and then, to clear up his mess, its first Hindu prime minister. Yet exultant noises from India as well as Britain would make us believe that some historic milestone has been reached."

This is too much even for the guardian. Did the writer just call hiring the first Black Chancellor, scraping the bottom of the barrel.

haltingproblemon Folic Acid Supplement Linked with Reduction in Suicide Attempts and Self-Harm

Folic Acid is generally underrated as a supplement. There are myriad benefits with weak effects including of course benefits in pregnancy, heart disease and stroke and cognitive effects. The downside is high doses (10-100x RDA) produce cancer adverse outcomes. This also seems to be true of B-12.

I wish there was more effort in nutrition science devoted to B-12 and B-9 (folic acid) instead of Vit-D.

haltingproblemon The Forgotten Operating System That Keeps the NYC Subway System Alive (2019)

The system went live in 1993 so what distro would they have chosen in ~1990, when the system choice was made and is that distro still around? How many ports would they have had to make over the ensuing years.

I love Linux and use it everyday but it would have been a poor choice in 1990 and some would argue would still be a poor choice today given other industrial OS-es on the market.

haltingproblemon The Forgotten Operating System That Keeps the NYC Subway System Alive (2019)

The articles makes vague complains and leaves many questions unanswered.

First, I don't get the primary complaint in the article. The MTA chose OS/2 in the early 1990s, when there no other choices and it has served the MTA for almost 30 years with minimal hassles of upgrades or outages. I can't recall a single day when the Metrocard was not working - sure there are problems but it is more a UI/UX issue - a app that shows you Metrocard usage and balance would be insanely useful but we lack small mercies but hey you can pay with your smartwatch /s.

A piece of technology that is stable for 30 years is remarkable. Even if they had gone with Linux/NT the upgrade cycles themselves would have wreaked havoc. OS/2 seems like a brilliant choice in that regard.

Questions left unaddressed:

- What tech did they move to now with contactless payments?

- The move to contactless payments is awesome but what happens to people who lack smartphones or do not have credit cards or <big-tech>-pay setup on their phones. Or just casual tourists visiting from overseas with no US cards. How do they pay? Do they keep supporting metrocards forever? Does that mean to support Metrocards they need OS/2 and assorted new systems.

- What is the mainframe part of the stack and what function does it do.

haltingproblemon Anti-royal protesters are being arrested in the U.K. as 'Not My King' tag grows

This is not the constitution but the product of a 5-year committee to codify a new constitution.

haltingproblemon Anti-royal protesters are being arrested in the U.K. as 'Not My King' tag grows

From your link:

The Constitution of the United Kingdom or British constitution comprises the written and unwritten arrangements that establish the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland as a political body. Unlike in most countries, no attempt has been made to codify such arrangements into a single document, thus it is known as an uncodified constitution. This enables the constitution to be easily changed as no provisions are formally entrenched;[2] the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom recognises that there are constitutional principles, including parliamentary sovereignty, the rule of law, democracy, and upholding international law.

You cannot point me to a document that is the constitution. Words like uncodified or "unwritten arrangements" just create a semantic whack-a-mole, furthering the point that no written constitution exists.

haltingproblemon Anti-royal protesters are being arrested in the U.K. as 'Not My King' tag grows

There is no constitution. How can it be a constitutional monarchy? Before anyone points out that it is an unwritten constitution, please exchange my invisible benjies for some gold.

haltingproblemon All poverty is energy poverty

Quibble with the numbers all you want, but there is a fundamental truth in this visible to anyone who grew up in the third world amidst poverty.

One of the biggest (hidden) revolution in healthcare for poor rural Indian women is availability of LPG cylinders to replace fossil fuels - wood and cow dung - for cooking. Fossil fuels cause lung deaths [1] due to indoor pollution. The green agenda cuts against it.

The biggest enabler to education is electrification. I vividly remember growing up 20 years ago that only the middle class with electrification could afford to compete in schools as you needed to power light bulbs to study at night. No electrification and reliable supply then you cannot study. The situation is worse in villages with no electrification. Forget computers and internet, this is just about having enough to power a 40 W equivalent light bulb to read a book.

Many times, the agenda of the liberal west seems like class warfare against the poor of the third world: "we will not give up our heated/cooled mansions and our SUVs and our extravagant vacations across the globe but will make energy so expensive that you are crowded out of the market". A British business can afford a 20-50% power bill hike or even go out of business, a third world poor citizen is pushed over the edge into grinding poverty.

[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1178622119874314

haltingproblemon Indian government withdraws Personal Data Protection Bill

India had universal suffrage in 1950 and has deep parliamentary traditions. India was a democracy before the US, France, UK, Spain and numerous other Western cradles of democracy.

US got universal suffrage in 1965 (Voting Rights act). France was killing a million Algerians whom it ruled and were demanding self-determination in 1954-1962 and finally became colony free in 1977. UK was running concentration camps in Kenya in the 1960s and free of its last colony in the 1980 approaching something like Universal Suffrage. Spain was a dictatorship till 1979.

haltingproblemon Net-zero commitments could limit warming to below 2 °C

What confuses me is that everyone is pledging net-zero by some date but emissions keep rising. So somehwere someone is "laundering" emissions. A quick perusal of the offset-credit industry shows that there is massive recycling (reuse) of credits, relabeling of existing sinks as offsets and all the financial engineering and shenanigans that happen when commons are financialized.

This all makes me very skeptical of lean towards the opinion that climate salvation lies in an alternate energy source which makes fossil fuels uneconomic.

haltingproblemon Is the Ride over for Uber?

> rideshare pricing for both demand and supply sides is an incredibly sophisticated statistics and economics problem, where appropriate modeling can have long term revenue impact.

This is the fallacy of completeness and sounds vaguely like Wassily Leontief's input-output planning and has been proven to not work [1]. In the absence of complete information - demand and supply, "appropriate modeling" will always fall short. Economics has again and again showed that sophisticated models always fail and simple heuristics based models work far better. I suspect a simple rules driven system would work just as well.

Uber big innovation IMHO was making supply extremely flexible by massively lowering cost to become a driver and making it possible to be a marginal driver. As a society, we should run with that innovation. The rest of stuff, the fancy app, the car tracking, the dynamic pricing is fluff hiding the real value add.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input%E2%80%93output_model

haltingproblemon Is the Ride over for Uber?

> rideshare pricing for both demand and supply sides is an incredibly sophisticated statistics and economics problem, where appropriate modeling can have long term revenue impact.