Hacker News: biophysboy

New comment by biophysboy in "Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business"

biophysboy — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 03:51:12 +0000

Well, because I expect this to last for two years. Nobody likes it except for birthday boy and his sycophants. All of the signs around Lake Ontario still say the name; same goes for the people that live by it.

Google should override it but I don’t expect them to, because theyre selfish and suck. Only thing to do is win elections.

New comment by biophysboy in "Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business"

biophysboy — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 03:42:21 +0000

I mean ... currently I would? The environment will be different soon

New comment by biophysboy in "Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business"

biophysboy — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 20:51:57 +0000

It makes perfect sense that govs control names within their jurisdiction - I am eyerolling at both the name change and the reaction.

I am curious though - is it convention to leave the data as is, or is it illegal to modify it?

Regardless, itll just be changed back in 2 years; as long as I can type "lake ontario" and get directed to Lake Ontario, I do not care at all what the gov database calls it currently.

New comment by biophysboy in "A Preview of DuckDB v2.0"

biophysboy — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 21:11:39 +0000

You might know this already, but you can query pandas/polars/arrow tables directly w/ duckdb and use whatever stats packages you feel like alongside it in the same python script. I feel like they do a decent job sticking to the simpler statistical fans that make sense in sql.

New comment by biophysboy in "England set to be one of the first countries to eliminate hepatitis C"

biophysboy — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 18:48:56 +0000

> Lineage A was first found in a Wuhan neighborhood right next to the wet market (closer to the wet market than 97% of Wuhan’s population). Again, it would be a bizarre coincidence if a lab leak pandemic was first detected at a wet market. But it would be an even more bizarre coincidence if a lab leak pandemic separated into two strains, and both were first detected at a wet market!

To the extent that there can ever be a "smoking gun" in this debate, this is it for me. Given the mutation rate of covid, the lab leak requires that two lineages transferred to the same area a week apart by mere accident.

New comment by biophysboy in "England set to be one of the first countries to eliminate hepatitis C"

biophysboy — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 17:27:55 +0000

There's still value in communicating with cranks. You just have to take a different tack. Just say they're a crank.

Then they hyperventilate about irrelevant details (like California) and other readers of the thread see what the whining is really about.

New comment by biophysboy in "England set to be one of the first countries to eliminate hepatitis C"

biophysboy — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 17:14:40 +0000

There are two kinds of vaccine skeptics: a much larger group of people who will in fact have conversations about costs and benefits, and a small group of cranks like yourself that should be treated like the drooling imbeciles that they are.

- Don't live in California

- Risks are considered, but you will never be satisfied

- Long-term risks have been studied with very good methodology.

New comment by biophysboy in "England set to be one of the first countries to eliminate hepatitis C"

biophysboy — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 17:07:25 +0000

Is it? There are a lot of edgy contrarians that are very overconfident - doesnt seem like a global consensus to me

New comment by biophysboy in "England set to be one of the first countries to eliminate hepatitis C"

biophysboy — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 17:02:19 +0000

You should elaborate on your secret knowledge of COVIDs origin. I was not aware this was completely settled knowledge.

New comment by biophysboy in "England set to be one of the first countries to eliminate hepatitis C"

biophysboy — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 16:54:32 +0000

Every vaccine licensed for use in the USA has a clinical review memo that list the adverse events that you claim are dismissed. You live in an imaginary fantasy world.

New comment by biophysboy in "England set to be one of the first countries to eliminate hepatitis C"

biophysboy — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 16:42:49 +0000

They are not the progenitors of the skepticism, but they gave the skeptics significantly more authority than they previously had. Over surveillance networks, vaccine scheduling, public health comms, etc. MAGA sees them as useful idiots for the coalition, rather than threats to the US.

New comment by biophysboy in "England set to be one of the first countries to eliminate hepatitis C"

biophysboy — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 16:40:08 +0000

Why is it bad for a public health communicator to say that vaccines stop spread by lowering the effective reproduction number of a pathogen? Its correct. Your extensive research didn't seem to work.

New comment by biophysboy in "How I use LLMs to learn complex topics"

biophysboy — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 21:22:23 +0000

It annoys me that the default AI mode is so tedious and longwinded. I read a lot of nonfiction - the house style of AI is basically marketing copy.

New comment by biophysboy in "Databricks drove down AI coding spend 70%"

biophysboy — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 20:02:55 +0000

Do you have tips for generating clean productive output per dollar?

New comment by biophysboy in "Tax cuts for the wealthy only benefit the rich (2023)"

biophysboy — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 17:59:41 +0000

TCJA made changes to corporate capital gains, no?

As for tax hikes <90%, this hasn’t occurred in income; the opposite has occurred. You could make the case that it hasn’t been worth it for the poorest brackets though, given other coincident policy changes

New comment by biophysboy in "New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $567m over harms to children’s mental health"

biophysboy — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 16:59:29 +0000

Well there are much simpler “algorithms” that do not use reinforcement learning and do not have the same emergent issues at stake here (addiction, ragebait, etc). The argument would be that algorithmic curation makes you an editor, not a passive host, and you should face the risk of reasonable liability if you choose to use more lucrative extractive machine learning tools.

New comment by biophysboy in "U.S. economy lost 23,000 jobs in July, a sudden reversal"

biophysboy — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 16:26:08 +0000

bls.gov/ces is the main page for this survey and has a plot.

The error updates annually. Their handbook has a Reliability section where they detail sampling/nonsampling error.

New comment by biophysboy in "U.S. economy lost 23,000 jobs in July, a sudden reversal"

biophysboy — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 15:52:26 +0000

God help us if they ever become one

New comment by biophysboy in "U.S. economy lost 23,000 jobs in July, a sudden reversal"

biophysboy — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 15:39:28 +0000

Based on the discussions in this thread, they aren’t alone

New comment by biophysboy in "U.S. economy lost 23,000 jobs in July, a sudden reversal"

biophysboy — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 15:36:13 +0000

It’s common in scientific/stats publishing to have the headline state the avg/median, the main text plot the errors, and the supplementary give the explicit numbers. They have a big page about std errors.