Recent submissions

Comment · 1 year ago
Comment · 1 year ago
The only reason I'm not downloading it is because 3 days not enough for me to evaluate it and I don't really want to have to add another reminder to cancel yet another subscription.
Comment · 1 year ago
Yes, a safe mode would be great. I think it's a "nice to have" for a lot of early adopter (type of people who read HN), but it will be a "must have" more corporate types (a much bigger market).
Comment · 1 year ago
Agreed. However, I think you're being overly charitable in calling it a "pet peeve", it's more like a pathological misunderstanding of stats that leads to a lot of bad outcomes especially in popular wellness media.

As an example, read just about any health or nutrition research article referenced in popular media and there's very often a pretty weak effect size even though they've achieved "statistical significance." People then end up making big changes to their lifestyles and habits based on research that really does not justify those changes.

Comment · 2 years ago
I support full legalization of cannabis and I agree that those are valid concerns.

Yes, the harm done to addicts will probably increase. There's always trade offs. I think people on the pro-legalization side are not doing enough to address this.

One of the problems with public discourse is that each side doesn't want to give an inch to the other side. I think a lot of people who support legalization of cannabis kinda know that harms to addicts might increase, but they're afraid that if they mention that then that will just give a talking point to the prohibitionists.

Both sides are guilty of misusing or ignoring facts and concerns that don't benefit their preferred take on the issue. However, it seems to me the prohibitionists are far more egregious when it comes making bad arguments.

Comment · 3 years ago
This pretty much sums it up. There's about ten other things that are self-evidently more important in a job search than this.
Comment · 3 years ago
Just chiming in to confirm this anecdote - the only difference is that the machine I gave my partner was a macbook air, not pro. Still works fine for almost all normal person use cases.
Comment · 3 years ago
Agreed. But I think you're referring to "AI innovation" and the author (and others) are referring to "AI product innovation," i.e. how AI is actually showing up in people's everyday life - and that pace is absolutely overwhelming.
Comment · 3 years ago
Yes please, this is a legitimate course of government action. I personally am very reluctant to sign up for new subscription from smaller companies because I don't want the hassle of unsubscribing.

Tough-to-cancel subscriptions actually make it harder for small businesses to succeed because potential customers like me are reluctant to sign up for subscriptions thanks to a few bad apples polluting the market.

Comment · 4 years ago
I agree with your basic idea, but I don't think there's really any way around this - at some point these systems will have to be tested in a real world environment.

I guess the question is: how much higher should the bar be set? And if we set it substantially higher then how much longer will it take to improve the performance and safety of these systems?

Comment · 4 years ago
Yes, of course, anyone with a decent imagination can do so.

Unfortunately, that has little practical impact.

I can construct a lot of scenarios where I build an amazing startup and become a billionaire seemingly overnight.

Tragically, my bank account balance always seems to ignore the brilliant scenarios my mind comes up with.

Honestly, outside of philosophy departments questions like this aren't terribly useful.

The problem with your question is that ignores the specific circumstances of this case - where there obviously was no dirty bomb, there was no "certainty", there were not one million lives at stake in some definite deterministic sense.

Comment · 4 years ago
Well, there's a lot to comment on here, I'll address just your last sentence.

If you owned a deli or corner-store would you be willing to hire someone with criminal record?

Would you be willing to hire someone who doesn't have a home?

Keep in mind that not having a home means they probably have no way to consistently keep themselves clean. And what do they put on the employment application for their address? And how good of an employee is someone going to be when they don't know where they're going to sleep at night?

Comment · 4 years ago
Hmmm. Two issues stand out for me.

1. If I'm understanding this correctly, it seems like the active control (stretching) performed worse than the so-called passive control (watching a "popular sitcom"). The Cohen's d for the active control ranged from 0.214 to 0.737, and 0.102 - 0.286 for the passive control. So watching a "popular sitcom" is closer to aerobic activity in its effect on recovery?

2. The abstract says the passive control was watching a "popular sitcom", this is weird. Does this mean the researchers picked a show for the subjects to watch? That doesn't make any sense, if I had to watch a show I didn't select that would be annoying and possibly interfere with recovery. But maybe the researchers didn't

A Cohen's d of 0.2 is considered small and the values for the passive controls top out at 0.286, and apparently there's even a negative relationship with restlessness.

My bet is that if someone tried to do a similar study but instead of picking a sitcom for the subject they allowed the subjects to simply watching whatever TV they would like to watch at the moment, the effect size would disappear.

I am assuming I'm just missing something here, but from my fairly basic, non-expert understanding, it's not possible to draw the conclusions that the authors drew. Furthermore, the design seemed flawed from the beginning (although kudos for providing an active control). The main issue seems to be that their passive control wasn't really passive, it was making subject watch a show that they might not normally watch for relaxation purposes.

Comment · 4 years ago
What is BizOps? I noticed a lot of the non-technical roles here have that title. I've read wildly varying definitions ranging from Strategy to KPI management and data analytics, has the industry settled on a relatively consistent definition?
Comment · 4 years ago
That's not a fair comparison.

Lotteries and casinos are recognized as a form of entertainment - gambling - people may not behave rationally and they may end up ruining their lives, but there is a certain folk wisdom that gambling just loses money and you shouldn't do it (except for fun).

Investing has different norms and expectations. Few people think that financial analysis is "fun" in the same way that going to a casino or buying lottery tickets is fun - so the "entertainment" value isn't there in the same way. But many financially unqualified people will be bamboozled by con-artists who take advantage of the apparent "respectability" of investing.

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