Hacker News: aharrison

New comment by aharrison in "Nvidia calling gaming PC owners to put their systems to work fighting Covid-19"

aharrison — Sat, 14 Mar 2020 19:38:51 +0000

Assuming your question is in good faith, the answer is: when you rent something on AWS, you are paying for total cost of ownership sliced out. When you run something on your gaming rig GPU, you already paid for the machine/GPU - now you are "just" paying for electricity and depreciation. So if you have a gaming rig sitting around while you are writing a web app or whatever, let it do some science for just the cost of electricity.

New comment by aharrison in "Show HN: AI Dungeon 2 – AI-generated text adventure built with 1.5B param GPT-2"

aharrison — Fri, 06 Dec 2019 02:08:14 +0000

Can corroborate, same problem of OOMs. Regardless, this is excellent work. Thank you for sharing.

New comment by aharrison in "Three Men Charged in ‘Swatting’ Schemes"

aharrison — Thu, 24 Jan 2019 04:10:51 +0000

You will note that I did not say "scam" anonymous call. I said "anonymous call" which includes both real and anonymous calls. Police officers should respond with force dictated by the circumstances of their situation, trained in such analysis, and held accountable to their decisions - both as individual officers and as departments. The source of the initial investigation should have little if any impact on the level of force used in the encounter.

New comment by aharrison in "Three Men Charged in ‘Swatting’ Schemes"

aharrison — Thu, 24 Jan 2019 04:00:40 +0000

I'm a little surprised you didn't mention anything about police being held accountable when responding with unreasonable force to anonymous tips. If we are going to start talking about fixing this issue, I'm not sure getting rid of blocked numbers is going to materially impact these outcomes.

Likewise, what is your recommendation on eliminating the threat of burner phones?

New comment by aharrison in "Soylent recalls powder after dairy accidentally slips into 1.8 powder"

aharrison — Tue, 25 Apr 2017 18:44:25 +0000

I'm not sure how much better their quality control is (they are another SV startup), but I have been eating Mealsquares (http://www.mealsquares.com/) for about half of my caloric load for over a year now and couldn't be happier. I also like the fact that they are solid food rather than liquid, just as a preference. I'm sensitive to gluten, corn, and soy, so Mealsquares are a huge boon when I am in a rush or need to opt out of eating somewhere (e.g. traveling).

(I'm not affiliated with them in any way.)

New comment by aharrison in "Epistemic learned helplessness (2013)"

aharrison — Sat, 26 Sep 2015 01:05:49 +0000

That is an excellent essay and it scares the crap out of me, because I see it play out every day in both directions and it often does feel exactly like epistemic learned helplessness.

There are so many biases that affect individuals (hindsight, hyperbolic discounting, confirmation, etc) that to get correct answers, you have to look at and trust other accounts. You have to do studies, you have to trust those studies, and you have to track actual hard evidence.

But large enough systems become increasingly opaque, and it can be hard to test your web of trust empirically. This reduces huge organizations to cargo cult behavior, or worse, fundamentally unsound behavior because "it worked for me."

I don't know what to do about this besides what CFAR is trying, which is to get people better at weighing evidence and changing their damned minds. You have to constantly be asking yourself: "what would the world look like if this were true? What would the world like like if it wasn't?" It is hard work, but I think it is critical to our continued improvements as a civilization and a species.

New comment by aharrison in "Organizational debt is like technical debt, but worse"

aharrison — Sun, 24 May 2015 02:15:17 +0000

We knew what he meant, which was the point of the communication. He is making a general observation about data, not a formal proof.

New comment by aharrison in "AMD's next-gen Zen CPU heading to desktops, servers in 2016"

aharrison — Thu, 07 May 2015 04:59:20 +0000

I remembered there was an antitrust lawsuit between AMD and Intel, but hadn't heard how it resolved. Turns out Intel paid 1.25 billion to settle it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_Devices,_Inc._v.....

A quick google search fails to bring up the original suit text, but from what I recall it was pretty scathing. I hope that cash infusion is at the root of this announcement and AMD can get back in the game.

New comment by aharrison in "Ask HN: Which book are you reading these days?"

aharrison — Thu, 09 Apr 2015 18:47:48 +0000

I will second this and say that in my opinion it gets better as you go along, although it gets tedious in parts. Be prepared, it is a long story.

New comment by aharrison in "Soylent Update 3/13"

aharrison — Fri, 14 Mar 2014 00:24:01 +0000

That is actual one of the creator's goals:

“I’d like this to be something that is like coffee — a commodity something that’s available everywhere. Maybe a utility like water and power. Something that is ubiquitous and easy to consume,” he said. “I’d like to see it in grocery and convenience stores soon.” ( http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/01/soylent-1m-preorders/ )

You have to keep in mind this is an early adopter, hot-off-the-manufacturing-line, hey-look-this-might-work version. Give it time to grow, mature, and let economies of scale kick in.

New comment by aharrison in "Soylent: Manufacturing Update"

aharrison — Fri, 25 Oct 2013 22:53:17 +0000

I don't have a citation either way, so I will just say that I noticed a reaction to oats just like a reaction to gluten. Could be that mine were contaminated, could potentially be that I am allergic to oats as well.

New comment by aharrison in "Soylent: Manufacturing Update"

aharrison — Fri, 25 Oct 2013 22:29:03 +0000

One of my favorite things about Soylent is that it provides a "reasonable" but consistent baseline for doing these sorts of tests. Until Soylent there wasn't a non-medical meal replacement that at least theoretically tried to be everything you need. Once Soylent has been battle tested for awhile, we can start doing actual experiments with controlled variables around diets. If we can get that far without throwing the baby out with the bathwater, we will potentially upend how we do nutritional testing.

New comment by aharrison in "Soylent: Manufacturing Update"

aharrison — Fri, 25 Oct 2013 22:25:19 +0000

I tried this, and here was my experience:

1. I am gluten intolerant, so swap out oat flour for almond flour. Swap out B complex supplement for marmite. Also, calling marmite "real food" is a bit of a stetch in my estimation.

2. After the first week, realized I was probably mildly allergic to casin, swapped to coconut milk.

3. After the first week after that change, noticed I am probably also mildly allergic to banana. Cut it completely.

So what I ended up with was a high fat low carbohydrate equivalent that isn't too bad. I actually drink this pretty regularly, and it is extremely filling. However, calling this guy an idiot is disingenuous to say the least; his work is going through considerably more scrutiny than Soylent Orange, and it contains considerably less allergens. Depending on who you talk to, up to 15% of people are gluten intolerant[1] and so, when keeping risks in mind, we should be cognizant of the dangerous of various proposals.

All in all, I actually do like (my modified) Soylent Orange, but ad hominem attacks are unnecessary and "real food" is a suprisingly slippery concept. Hell, coconut and almonds are common allergies too!

New comment by aharrison in "To an alarming degree, science is not self-correcting"

aharrison — Thu, 17 Oct 2013 22:14:32 +0000

I agree and have run into that problem myself. Unfortunately, fixing that impression takes time and to my knowledge there isn't any real way to explain the problem with "Platonic truth" as a tangent off of a discussion around research journals, for instance. It requires a full step back and a couple hours of discussion to explain it at all, if you haven't been exposed to it before.

If anyone has any recommendations on that front, I am all ears.

New comment by aharrison in "To an alarming degree, science is not self-correcting"

aharrison — Thu, 17 Oct 2013 20:21:46 +0000

In my experience, when most engineering-oriented people use the word truth, they (wittingly or unwittling) mean the pragmatic definition of "allows us to make stronger-than-previous predictive models about something". Most of the argument in philosophy of science circles strikes me as meta-interesting, not eminently relevant to the practice of science.

Especially when dealing with psychology, a lot of those "what, exactly, is an electron" sort of deeply epistemological statements are not really asked, because we have enough trouble with the simplistic models we have.

So yeah, my recommendation (for what it is worth) is to always assume "most predictive model available" when someone says truth, and be aware that you are making that assumption and that simplification.

New comment by aharrison in "Using Katas to Improve Your Coding"

aharrison — Thu, 03 Oct 2013 20:19:41 +0000

Not necessarily like screenflow, but I have used Open Broadcaster ( http://obsproject.com/ ) for this purpose. All it does is recover various screen buffers to an mp4, but that is more than sufficient for this purpose in my opinion. Plus it is OSS.

Great for streaming video games to Twitch.tv or its variants, as well.

How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought you Think (2003)

aharrison — Thu, 19 Sep 2013 07:20:50 +0000

Article URL: http://speakeasy.org/~lion/nb/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6410307

Points: 90

# Comments: 38

New comment by aharrison in "Theranos"

aharrison — Sun, 08 Sep 2013 19:26:21 +0000

I have looked at the DIYBio groups on a number of occasions, and while they are fascinating it their own right, they aren't quite what I am interested in. DIYBio (as far as I can tell) is considerably more interested in DNA sequencing and genetics, whereas I am more interested in diagnostic tools for improving my quality and quantity of life.

An example of something I am interested in is: http://jenslabs.com/category/electronics/ketosis-detector/

but my more general question is: how can we do everything a standard blood panel does now, except do it extremely frequently (e.g. daily or hourly or even continuously) and noninvasively or as close as is feasible.

Of course, I know very little about the field, so this might all be the equivalent of "Hey guys, I know a little HTML and I was wondering if I could build a MMORPG..." posts on gamedev, but hey, gotta start somewhere. :D

New comment by aharrison in "Theranos"

aharrison — Sun, 08 Sep 2013 19:09:35 +0000

You appear to be interested and aware of the current state of clinical chemistry. Are you aware of any HN/Slashdot-esque sites for this pursuit? One of my main areas of hobbyist interest this year is biochemical assays and health diagnostic mechanisms, but there is a lot of chaff in my google searches.

Any pointers would be appreciated. My email is in my profile if you would like to discuss it more in depth.

New comment by aharrison in "Margins on website development are shrinking"

aharrison — Mon, 20 May 2013 20:46:52 +0000

One thing I don't see people talk about enough in the context of home or car repair is liability. Not only do I not want to mess with a broken toilet, but if I screw up and flood my bathroom, it is my fault. If the plumber does it (less likely because they know what they are doing) then they are on the hook. For some things the cost of failure is low, but for many, especially when being paid a programmers salary, the marginal savings (e.g. 15 bucks for an oil change) isn't worth the time and liability.

YMMV (literally :D).