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lejohnq

266 karma · joined January 19, 2012

https://sandbox.github.io/

formerly Cofounder Statwing YCS12 acquired by Qualtrics

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lejohnq··on Vapor chamber tech keeps iPhone 17 Pro cool
I’ve been caseless for a while and have had a couple of drops and the phone has been fine. When I eventually upgrade my phone, I’ll probably stay caseless, or add minimal protection. Mainly cause if the increasingly rare catastrophic drop happens, it’d be unpleasant to deal with.

I do like some cases for their design elements, I might use one to just further personalize my phone.

lejohnq··on I'm puzzled how anyone trusts ChatGPT for code
I wouldn’t say I trust ChatGPT without verification yet, but it definitely accelerates me by generating good enough code for me to quickly debug.

I am a much faster debugger than a from scratch generator, so ChatGPT/etc helps accelerate me through those moments even when I know exactly what I want to write.

This makes it useful enough a tool to use anytime I’m writing code

lejohnq··on Ask HN: People with direct knowledge of YouTube Algorithm-why the repeats?
I don’t know anything about the algorithm, but my dumb lizard brain take is that I often find comfort in watching the same stuff again. Whenever a 3blue1brown video pops up in my feed again, it’s like seeing an old friend and I’ll watch to the end again.

I can think of many videos like this, that pop up in a feed after many years and you’ll see the comments like “see y’all again in a year when the algorithm brings this back” or “I always click when this video is recommended”.

I have several friends who’ll rewatch whole shows again and again for a similar reason. There’s the comfort of something familiar.

So I guess I don’t mind when youtube does this

lejohnq··on PayPal has restricted our account after we invoiced a key containing “ALEP”
This sounds awful. I honestly don’t know my mom’s birthday and perhaps interestingly she doesn’t technically know it either. Papers lost (and probably made up) multiple times when her family fled her home and then country before ending up here.

And she definitely has a birthday on her driver’s license now, but I think she might have to look at it to make sure she got it right.

lejohnq··on Changes at YC
I think that’s 6 out of 100 instead of 1/6
lejohnq··on SVB lobbied the government to relax some Dodd-Frank provisions
I think it would cover interest rate risk because an increase in rates causes bond value to decrease, implying the bonds SVB held lose value and they would not be able to cover capital.

And if they have to value it appropriately every quarter, the issue likely would have been seen earlier and maybe they could have changed their positions as the rates were rising instead of being in a hole and trying to do it all at once.

At least I think that’s how the regulations might have worked here.

lejohnq··on Declining sperm count: Much more than you wanted to know
Might be TMI, but I get my sperm tested frequently (partly because of this problem), and will say there is a lot of variability in my samples.

A standard deviation of 48.29 for total motile, and a very low positive correlation with abstinence period (R^2 of 0.082). There isn’t a discernible pattern over time yet (I’m expecting as I age for my average to decrease but I haven’t seen that yet), and I haven’t made any significant diet changes. I think my hydration level is important but I haven’t tracked that in conjunction with my tests. Also because it takes 74 days [1] for spermatogenesis, any change you make in lifestyle has to be performed for a while before it potentially can affect your sperm.

Alls that to say, I wouldn’t necessarily worry about one test being low. I’ve had some lows that initially worried me when I was first testing, and now it feels within expected variation. Though, the broader macro trend (or potential of a trend) is still concerning, so its worth it to me to keep an eye on it individually

Reference: [1] https://www.givelegacy.com/what-is-sperm/

lejohnq··on Stop overcomplicating it: A simple guidebook to upping your management game
For what it’s worth, the book this article is based on explicitly talks about these two different responsibilities and why a manager (by title) will always have to do both in some capacity.

And the amount of each responsibility a manager holds varies depending on level, like a “Director of Engineering” will be more on the “leadership” side setting direction but they still need “management” of their direct reports (other engineering managers or managers of managers), whereas an “Engineering Manager” will likely spend more time in “management” at the service of their team of IC engineers.

lejohnq··on What I’ve learned from users
Down 80% from IPO but with a market cap above 10 billion. Compared to when YC invested I think that’s still pretty good
lejohnq··on Winning Wordle
I also enjoyed this video from 3Blue1Brown about solving wordle with information theory:

https://youtu.be/v68zYyaEmEA

lejohnq··on What the Omicron wave is revealing about human immunity
That link doesn’t indicate “accumulating evidence that they have no effect”, and the link explicitly states “it would be imprudent to recommend the removal of facemasks from surgery”.

It is a literature review that didn’t find strong evidence for surgical mask effectiveness more because it hasn’t been researched deeply. And it notes that the absence of evidence does not indicate ineffectiveness of surgical masks, and rather a more significant research trial would have to be performed (and there were caveats to the feasibility of doing that as well).

Specific quotes from that article:

“What literature that is available on the subject tends to be dated with poorly explained methodology. There is also uncertainty over whether the results of such studies can be extrapolated to current surgical practice given the advent of new antiseptic techniques since they were completed.”

“It is clear that more studies are required before any absolute conclusions can be drawn regarding the effectiveness or, indeed, ineffectiveness of surgical masks. The published literature does suggest that it may be reasonable to further examine the need for masks in contemporary surgical practice given the interests of comfort, budget constraints and potential ease of communication, although any such study would undoubtedly have to be large and well controlled to prove causality given the low event frequency of surgical site infections.”

“It is important not to construe an absence of evidence for effectiveness with evidence for the absence of effectiveness. While there is a lack of evidence supporting the effectiveness of facemasks, there is similarly a lack of evidence supporting their ineffectiveness. With the information currently available, it would be imprudent to recommend the removal of facemasks from surgery. Instead, in the medical field where common practice can so easily become dogma, it is necessary to recognise the constant need to maintain a healthy scepticism towards established beliefs and to periodically re-evaluate and critically assess their scientific merit.”

lejohnq··on Be curious, not judgmental
This reminded me of a clip from Ted Lasso with the same quote: https://youtu.be/5x0PzUoJS-U

Nice to see this pop up here

lejohnq··on CatMeows: A Publicly-Available Dataset of Cat Vocalizations (2020)
What I experienced with my cats is they don’t seem to care about learning you, rather they expect you to learn them and their signals.

They have the intelligence to communicate but it’s typically on their terms.

Also here’s an example of a cat learning to speak with language buttons: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pvgfI9P377U

lejohnq··on Dataflow, a self-hosted Observable notebook editor
This is pretty awesome. Feels like a streamlit for the javascript world.
lejohnq··on The deck we used to raise our seed funding
Out of curiosity, what was the first product?
lejohnq··on Show HN: Stackby – Spreadsheets, Databases and No-code APIs in a single platform
For airtable, at least, yes this is just revision history. Not any data that is older than a year
lejohnq··on Annie of Annie's Mac and Cheese
Using real cheese is surprisingly difficult because it doesn’t melt in the nice creamy way without additions.

Sodium citrate for example helps your cheese melt creamily.

The powder likely contains the right balance of additions that give you a great creamy mac & cheese.

A good reference: https://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2016/11/sodium-citrate-b...

lejohnq··on Visa Buys Plaid
From the documents at: https://investor.visa.com/events-calendar/Event-Details/2020...

Deal is

* $4.9B cash consideration

* $400m retention equity as VISA RSUs

lejohnq··on Twitter Powers of Ten (data visualization)
The url should probably be corrected to this blog post: http://www.robweir.com/blog/2011/03/twitter-powers-of-ten.ht...
lejohnq··on Dataset: Ten Years of NFL Plays Analyzed, Visualized, Quizzified
Richard Sherman [1] must have written this quiz.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjOkTib5eVQ

lejohnq··on The Easiest Data Analysis Mistake to Make
Thanks, really appreciate it! We use numpy, scipy, and pandas.

EDIT: clarified libraries we use.

lejohnq··on The Ecological Fallacy
Simpson's paradox is an example of the ecological fallacy. I think specifically when you have the signs of the group relationship being the opposite of the individual relationship like in http://blog.statwing.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/ecologic....

Wikipedia has more specific math for this at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_fallacy#Simpson.27s_...

lejohnq··on The Ecological Fallacy
Here's another image for some intuition about what is going on: http://blog.statwing.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/ecologic...

You wouldn't be able to say anything with confidence about individuals without the individual data but this image helps me think about what individual data would be needed to back up or refute an inference based on group data.

If you can find data within some groups and they show very little to no relationship for X and Y then it's a little more likely that you can use the group inference. But in any case watch out!

lejohnq··on A Statistical Portrait of a Y Combinator Batch
Sorry that's a little confusing, especially since most companies nowadays have social components. For this dataset we categorized social based on whether or not the social component is critical to their business.
lejohnq··on Show HN: Statwing is statistical analysis, simplified
Thanks!

We are trying to make Statwing automatically display the right analyses for the portions of your data you are most interested in.

If we can accomplish that, then hopefully we've helped make you faster at understanding the relationships in your data. Maybe that is enough so you don't need to break out R for basic analyses. Otherwise I would also use R. I made some graphs in R that wouldn't be able to do in Statwing right now, but if we can output the right things based on your data then hopefully you could save some time with us.

lejohnq··on Show HN: Statwing is statistical analysis, simplified
I also work on Statwing so thanks very much for the comment.

Now that I look at it more, the front page buttons do look weird compared to all of our other buttons. We've become numb to it after looking at it so often. Most of our buttons do the design thing that you described, so we'll change that shortly! Thanks for the feedback.

lejohnq··on Ask HN: Good Hackathon Prizes
At http://crowdhack.crowdconf.com/ the winner got a nepalese knife http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kukri.

I really wanted to win that.