Hacker News: Vera_Wilde

New comment by Vera_Wilde in "Rarity Roulette – an interactive simulator for mass screenings"

Vera_Wilde — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 11:06:49 +0000

I'm especially interested in feedback on the modeling choices — prevalence curves, specificity sliders, and whether (and how) to add correlated errors or adversarial behavior.

If anyone works in health tech, security, or trust & safety, I'd also love to hear how this maps to your practical experience with low-prevalence detection.

If you test the simulator, I'd love to hear what surprised you most — especially if something behaved differently than you expected. Thanks in advance!

New comment by Vera_Wilde in "Rarity Roulette – an interactive simulator for mass screenings"

Vera_Wilde — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 11:02:54 +0000

An interactive simulator for visualizing how false positives explode in mass screenings for low-prevalence problems. Relevant across diverse domains including security (e.g., Chat Control; iBorderCtrl), medicine (e.g., mammography; PSA testing), and so much more.

The purpose is to begin to more easily visualize how prevalence, sensitivity, specificity, investigative capacity, and strategic behavior interact to shape real-world outcomes.

Interactive tool: https://verawilde.github.io/rarity-roulette/

Would love feedback, critiques, and ideas for improvements.

Rarity Roulette – an interactive simulator for mass screenings

Vera_Wilde — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 11:02:54 +0000

Article URL: https://wildetruth.substack.com/p/rarity-roulette

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45963606

Points: 1

# Comments: 2

New comment by Vera_Wilde in "Where do the children play?"

Vera_Wilde — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 04:14:59 +0000

A lot of what's changed isn't parenting instincts but the systems kids are embedded in. Traffic speed, liability fears, school policies, and surveillance culture all push toward zero-risk tolerance. When the background structure punishes normal exploration, parents behave accordingly. Freedom and safety aren't individual traits; they're properties of an environment.

New comment by Vera_Wilde in "The time has finally come for geothermal energy"

Vera_Wilde — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 04:09:48 +0000

One underappreciated challenge in geothermal is simply the distribution of usable rock formations — low-prevalence resources. Better drilling reduces the rarity penalty by making more sites viable. Similar structure to many screening problems: improve detection and you can shift what counts as "reachable."

New comment by Vera_Wilde in "What Did Medieval Peasants Know? (2022)"

Vera_Wilde — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 06:55:12 +0000

Medieval life lacked precision measurement: no clocks, no KPIs, no micro-evaluation. Much of modern stress isn't workload but being quantified. That shift from 'work until the task is done' to 'work until the metric is satisfied' changes everything.

New comment by Vera_Wilde in "Heretic: Automatic censorship removal for language models"

Vera_Wilde — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 06:45:32 +0000

The directional‐ablation approach in Heretic is clever: by identifying residual “refusal directions” and ablating them, they shift the trade-off frontier for the model. In rare‐event screening terms: they’re effectively changing the detection threshold geometry rather than trying just to get better data. It resonates with how improving a test’s accuracy in low-prevalence settings often fails unless you address threshold + base rate.

New comment by Vera_Wilde in "Transgenerational Epigenetic Inheritance: the story of learned avoidance"

Vera_Wilde — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 02:52:00 +0000

Worms are great, but they're not your grandma.

So one thing missing from the excitement around this line of work: how little these worm effects generalize to mammals.

C. elegans has very unusual biology — direct soma→germline communication pathways, minimal nervous systems, and short generational cycles. Epigenetic inheritance is much easier to observe there than in mice or humans, where mechanisms differ and dilution across meiosis tends to erase these “marks.”

This means that, even if the PA14 avoidance effect replicates, it’s not evidence that humans inherit learned behaviours. It’s evidence that worms are an interesting edge-case system.

New comment by Vera_Wilde in "Our investigation into the suspicious pressure on Archive.today"

Vera_Wilde — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 02:45:03 +0000

If an opaque actor can fabricate legal-ish complaints and pressure DNS providers into blocking a site, the system is wide open for abuse. Smaller services without legal teams would just fold.

Curious if others are seeing this kind of “shadow regulation” pop up more frequently elsewhere — especially in email filtering, CDN layers, and AI content moderation.

New comment by Vera_Wilde in "Being poor vs. being broke"

Vera_Wilde — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 07:07:56 +0000

Hah!

Yeah, the bonobo/chimp contrast shows it’s not an inevitability. We just optimized for the wrong equilibrium.

New comment by Vera_Wilde in "AI World Clocks"

Vera_Wilde — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 07:04:08 +0000

It's really beautiful! Super clean UI.

The thing I always want from timezone tools is: “Let me simulate a date after one side has shifted but the other hasn’t.”

Humans do badly with DST offset transitions; computers do great with them.

New comment by Vera_Wilde in "The disguised return of EU Chat Control"

Vera_Wilde — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 07:00:38 +0000

Grateful for Breyer's consistent excellent work tracking and opposing these proposals.

The Zombie proposal just keeps rising from the dead. The technical/mathematical objections don’t change.

I still haven’t seen a counter-argument stating why a mass-scanning architecture should be expected to work, given the base rates and error rates involved.