Hacker News Reader

throwaway626on How I got here

It’s some strange bias that lets people get worked up about this one already-convicted dealer but pass over in silence the pharmaceutical companies that designed these opioids to be so addictive and marketed them so aggressively so that doctors would over-prescribe them.

throwaway626on Regarding Proposed US Restrictions on RISC-V

The US has a clear interest in preventing reunification with the mainland, regardless of the island’s legal status.

throwaway626on Applied Category Theory: Textbook (2019)

David Spivak is a treasure. One of the clearest expositors of category theory out there.

throwaway626on America's shoplifting problem, explained by retail workers and thieves

Michael Hobbes has spent some time debunking the panic articles coming out of mainstream media on this topic.

https://x.com/rottenindenmark/status/1596614556448882688

He also covered an article a while back about a Target in (I believe) Brooklyn allegedly closing because of OCR only to reopen three blocks away. Yep, that’s gonna stop the alleged hordes of roving gangs of shoplifters.

It’s hard to make any conclusive claims without more evidence, but both retailers and police seem reticent to give any hard numbers.

throwaway626on How to pronounce the trickiest English words

CJK characters do encode some phonetic content, it’s just an imperfect process and is more or less unreliable from dialect to dialect.

throwaway626on Big landlords used software to collude on rent prices, DC lawsuit says

I’m not trolling. I’m treating your business no different from any other business. You don’t deserve even more special treatment from the justice system merely because you’re a landlord.

One company I partly own sued a customer for nonpayment several years ago. Customer declared bankruptcy. Sucks for all the same reasons as your relatively tiny tenant dispute. At the next board meeting, we didn’t waste our time bemoaning the existence of bankruptcy protection—after all, we may benefit from it ourselves someday. Instead we developed plans for how to mitigate the risk of nonpayment in the future.

You run a business; act like it. Accept the inherent danger of swimming or get out of the pool.

throwaway626on Big landlords used software to collude on rent prices, DC lawsuit says

I’m sorry you failed to react to changing market conditions. Have you considered reinvesting in a less risky sector, like index funds?

throwaway626on Big landlords used software to collude on rent prices, DC lawsuit says

You made an investment decision (allowing hotel guests to legally become tenants) and it ended poorly for you. Why should the government bail you out for “almost no cost”? The legal system doesn’t exist to insulate you from risk.

throwaway626on Tao Te Ching – Gia-Fu Feng, Jane English Translation (1989)

Qohelet was most likely compiled by multiple authors well after the Babylonian conquest. The presence of loanwords in the text makes a date in the 10th century BCE highly unlikely.

Solomon the Biblical personage probably never existed. No archaeological evidence, as far as I’m aware, has been found.

throwaway626on Tao Te Ching – Gia-Fu Feng, Jane English Translation (1989)

I don’t judge scholarly translations by their poetics, so perhaps you shouldn’t judge poetic interpretations by their scholarly merit.

The world is big enough for both.

throwaway626on Tao Te Ching – Gia-Fu Feng, Jane English Translation (1989)

She had the humility to admit she knew little about ancient Chinese and the courage to go ahead and venture a translation anyway, striving to touch something deeper than language.

Her success is extremely laudable for this reason.

throwaway626on Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education

You misread the claim and are arguing against something I didn’t say.

throwaway626on Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education

> By the way, I don't think there is anyone homeschooling with the "only textbook is the Bible"

They’re pretty common, in fact. Here’s a curriculum company that’ll gladly give you the tools: https://answersingenesis.org/homeschool-edition/

“The Bible is the only education you need” is a very common meme among evangelical Christians.

> and in most states you need to file a curriculum every year that gets reviewed and approved.

Most states have almost no recourse to reject submitted curricula, no matter how specious they are. One influential homeschool association has a 24/7 legal hotline specifically for subverting these mild attempts at accountability.

throwaway626on Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education

So, to be clear, you’re fine with funding special needs education and etc. as long as it’s someone else footing the bill.

throwaway626on Comp Sci in 2027 (Short Story by Eliezer Yudkowsky)

As a work of fiction, HPMOR is little more than an exercise in repackaging genre tropes and pop culture references. It doesn’t have a coherent theme; the execution varies from mediocre to poor. Plot holes abound, characters vanish inexplicably, etc. In many ways, it’s a less successful version of Ready Player One that’s clamped on to HP’s coattails. Of course, that formula can be entertaining, but it has limited impact.

Lest you think I have an ax to grind with Yudkowsky, I did enjoy Three Worlds Collide. It shares many problems with HPMOR (the writing is inconsistent and the world-building is incoherent) but it at least tells a tight story with a beginning, middle and end. I’d say it’s about as effective as the median submission to Amazing Stories back in the 60s.

throwaway626on Gender-Affirming Care Is Dangerous - I Know Because I Helped Pioneer It

“Disengaged” here means that they did not make it through the assessment/pre-screening process and did not receive treatment, which is not what is meant by “detransition” or what is commonly understood as contributing to “regret rate”.

When an elderly person rejects knee replacement prior to surgery e.g., because they’ve learned the risks, they’re also not counted in the regret rate for knee replacement.

EDIT: Those that disengaged did not complete treatment, therefore they cannot regret completing treatment. Perhaps they regret starting treatment and perhaps they don’t; either way, that’s not the same thing as detransition. I can’t read their minds to figure out why they disengaged, and neither can anyone else.

throwaway626on Gender-Affirming Care Is Dangerous - I Know Because I Helped Pioneer It

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8503911/

Between 1% and 8%, depending on how detransition is defined. This article found 6.9% (12/175, 6 clearly detransitioning and 6 ambiguous) at one clinic, including anyone who sought and received care over a certain interval.