Hacker News Reader

opprobiumon California has set a benchmark for renewable energy

TX seems to be heavily investing in solar: https://archive.is/0V3zK

opprobiumon The Work-from-Home Era Is Bad for Burglars

A secular trend is an ongoing directional shift, in contrast to a cyclical change: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_variation

opprobiumon Orbital's Hartnoll brothers look back

A great track, but if I really had to pick only one I'd choose Lush 3.

Also... I think Halcyon+On+On is amazing, but it's based so heavily on Opus III's cover of It's a Fine Day that it borders on being a (fantastic) remix. Also interesting to look back at the earlier remix of the original recording of that song by A Guy Called Gerald.

opprobiumon Implementation of Mamba in one file of PyTorch

Re 3) Even if you don't care about long context length, Mamba is much cheaper per token of auto-regressive output. Each token has to only compute the next step of a linear RNN, the transformer has to attend back over all previous outputs, which rapidly grows in cost and memory.

opprobiumon CRISPR cure for HIV now tested in 3 people

I agree with your logic that if they got surprisingly good efficacy results they would have reported it, but the Phase I participants received a much smaller dose than the planned actual treatment.

It would have been great if the treatment had clinical efficacy at even the safety dosing level, but it's also not especially disappointing that it didn't.

opprobiumon Argentina's Senate approves bill to eliminate income tax

Parent is referring to rate of inflation (> 100% currently in AR, not remotely comparable to US), not to national debt.

opprobiumon Japanese scientists working on creating human eggs and sperm in the lab

I never said anything about the likely safety of the technology, so I'm not sure what that has to do with it?

The genetic mix from parents is randomized. Always. Both good and bad results are equally the result of a random process initiated by the parents. A combination of recessive genes to cause disease is not more or less random than a combination of healthy genes. The parents roll the dice, the child gets the result.

In other words: The ethics can't proceed from first principles around consent to experimentation. It has to include, as you say, empirical questions about the technology in question. But that's a different sub-thread.

If I had to say anything about that: I think this is one of those things that is just going to happen whether or not anyone likes it. The fact that it has already succeeded with mice + the massive applications... it's just going to get tried, it's just a matter of which country it happens in. The fact that it could potentially be used by same sex couples is a total side note to how strongly this will be pulled along by the same existing demands that drive IVF currently, the potential is just too powerful. So I imagine we're just going to see eventually.

opprobiumon Japanese scientists working on creating human eggs and sperm in the lab

Of course they are: The parent's genes are mixed randomly. Every child is the non-consenting participant in a randomized trial. That the structure of the experiment being run is standardized does nothing to change this fundamentally uncontrolled character.

Which is ethically fine by me! I'm just pointing out that reproduction is one of the areas where the limitations of consent based bioethics are blindingly obvious.

opprobiumon Japanese scientists working on creating human eggs and sperm in the lab

Mixing two parents genes randomly and then seeing what happens (ie, normal human reproduction) is also experimenting on a future human without their consent.

Applications of ideas around consent to human reproduction are confusing and self-contradictory at the best of times.

opprobiumon The Exercise Paradox [pdf]

The claim seems to be that exercise adaptation includes shutting down other metabolic activity to keep energy use stable. And that this could explain some of the beneficial effects of exercises because some of those activities that could be down regulated are things like inflammatory processes that are harmful if left over active.

I think the article is poorly written. What it says can't be true for very high activity levels (eg, marathon training or something), but does seem possible for moderate activity increases like the extra steps people get out of casual fit bit use.

It makes it really unclear what level of activity the Hazda it talks about are at, but sort of implies that it is in this moderate range. At one point it describes "moderately active" people as "the kind of folks who get some exercise during the week and make a point to take the stairs" so it seems like the activity level they are describing is not especially high.

opprobiumon Clinical Trial of HIV Vaccine Begins in United States and South Africa

Totally agree that it has to be ethically possible.

opprobiumon Clinical Trial of HIV Vaccine Begins in United States and South Africa

The parent's comment is referencing the availability of highly effective PREP (https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/basics/prep.html), not treatment after infection.

The ethical issue is that to study people taking an unproven vaccine, you do have to specifically have participants not take an existing well proven prevention medicine. Since existing prep works well enough that you would never be able to determine vaccine efficacy if they were using it. Having a vaccine is still strictly better, but that's the issue, not comparing to lifetime treatment.

To your uncertainty, effective treatment (reducing viral load to undetectable) reduces transmission to zero (https://www.niaid.nih.gov/diseases-conditions/treatment-prev...).

opprobiumon Dating app Grindr loses nearly half its staff after trying to force RTO

My guess is that handling bots, spam and abuse is one of the harder parts of the app at this point. It's a constant moving adversary that only gets worse the more popular your social app is, and not handling the problem can really drive users away.

opprobiumon Are any words the same in all languages?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mama_and_papa

"In linguistics, mama and papa are considered a special case of false cognates. In many languages of the world, sequences of sounds similar to /mama/ and /papa/ mean "mother" and "father", usually but not always in that order."