Hacker News: cltby

New comment by cltby in "California is chasing wealth that has feet"

cltby — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 23:31:27 +0000

These are assertions, not arguments. Respond to points in the post you replied to. Be sure you understand them first.

New comment by cltby in "OpenAI Welcomes Sarah Friar (CFO) and Kevin Weil (CPO)"

cltby — Mon, 10 Jun 2024 18:53:45 +0000

I would think you should admire her for taking a strong moral stand at the expense of the business. She added a number of grievance-oriented features to reduce "bigotry", "xenophobia", etc; thereby making the product less able to render reality; thereby hurting its value proposition; thereby losing users; thereby cratering the share price.

New comment by cltby in "Insecure vehicles should be banned, not security tools like the Flipper Zero"

cltby — Wed, 21 Feb 2024 17:04:13 +0000

Criminality is congenital. Social interventions will not fix the kid. Neither for that matter will prison, but at least it will protect the rest of us from his increasingly violent depredations.

New comment by cltby in "Ask HN: How to get into quantitative trading?"

cltby — Fri, 26 Jan 2024 21:48:37 +0000

> (and unless you are a crook, there is not)

What sort of shenanigans do you think profitable automated traders are engaged in?

New comment by cltby in "Amazon Time Sync Service now supports microsecond-accurate time"

cltby — Fri, 17 Nov 2023 20:03:15 +0000

High frequency trading (measuring latency, inferring event ordering, etc). Since most crypto derivatives trading takes place at ap-northeast-1, it feels like AWS is orienting this release towards financial markets customers.

New comment by cltby in "FCC aims to reinstate net neutrality after us Democrats gain control of panel"

cltby — Tue, 26 Sep 2023 13:55:05 +0000

Because we should have strong priors disfavoring regulation, and this is a stalking horse for yet more internet regulation.

New comment by cltby in "Lead poisoning causes more death, IQ loss than thought: study"

cltby — Thu, 21 Sep 2023 23:39:09 +0000

Sorry, is your criticism that IQ proponents conflate point estimates with unknown population parameters? Is that what other IQ critics see as the core of the disagreement in this debate?

New comment by cltby in "Lead poisoning causes more death, IQ loss than thought: study"

cltby — Thu, 21 Sep 2023 19:18:15 +0000

> otherwise identical cohorts.

You could do this stratification/matching for any IQ study. What's special about lead-IQ?

New comment by cltby in "Lead poisoning causes more death, IQ loss than thought: study"

cltby — Thu, 21 Sep 2023 19:15:14 +0000

But these controls could be done for any IQ-related study. Is IQ-skepticism based on the belief that IQ researchers generally don't use controls? That lead-IQ researchers alone do this?

New comment by cltby in "Lead poisoning causes more death, IQ loss than thought: study"

cltby — Thu, 21 Sep 2023 18:49:30 +0000

Question for any IQ skeptics here (e.g. "it just measures your ability to take tests" or "it just tells you how rich your parents are"): what's your response to studies like this? Is there anything that can be said about the effect of lead on cognitive function? Why might IQ be a good measure of lead-induced stupidification, but unreliable for literally anything else?

New comment by cltby in "Is the end of AIDS in sight?"

cltby — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 21:06:35 +0000

Good comment. I concede if it's really ~$20/month it's a rounding error and an obvious policy win.

New comment by cltby in "Is the end of AIDS in sight?"

cltby — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 20:59:58 +0000

There's wide, wide middle ground between celibacy and the debauched status quo.

New comment by cltby in "Is the end of AIDS in sight?"

cltby — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 20:44:42 +0000

Rather depressing that we're subsidizing wanton sexual indulgence to the tune of $30k/year/person.

New comment by cltby in "New York, California Lose Firms Managing an Estimated $2T in Assets"

cltby — Fri, 25 Aug 2023 16:45:06 +0000

Assuming:

* average 1% asset management fee (modal number if you poke around)

* 0% investment carry (hedge funds get away with charging this, but most asset managers don't)

* 9% effective tax rate (revenues disproportionately go to high earners)

gets you $1.8B lost tax revenues. The 0% carry assumption is very conservative, so the $1.8B is a lower bound. Even so, CA and NY collect about $400B annually. As a first order thing, this doesn't move the needle very much.

New comment by cltby in "DOJ sues SpaceX for discriminating against asylees and refugees in hiring"

cltby — Thu, 24 Aug 2023 17:29:26 +0000

> The United States seeks fair consideration and back pay for asylees and refugees who were deterred or denied employment at SpaceX due to the alleged discrimination.

Does anybody know how such penalties are calculated? In "role-based damages," penalties would be limited to the total wages for the hiring reqs in question. This corresponds to the counterfactual where each of the roles would have been gone to an asylee. But I could also see the DOJ arguing that every "deterred" asylee is owed foregone wages. This "applicant-based damages" doesn't correspond to any serious counterfactual, but it has the virtue of being a much bigger number.

New comment by cltby in "In every reported mistaken arrest using facial recognition, person was Black"

cltby — Mon, 07 Aug 2023 02:55:02 +0000

Because models are trained and validated on real data. Given a training set of crimes and corresponding surveillance footage, arrestee info is a (not noisy) label for “who is the guy in the movie.”

New comment by cltby in "In every reported mistaken arrest using facial recognition, person was Black"

cltby — Sun, 06 Aug 2023 23:10:29 +0000

With a moment's thought, even the most emotive amongst us should see that the mugshots will be part of the training set--the photographed individuals are, after all, the class of true positives.

New comment by cltby in "In every reported mistaken arrest using facial recognition, person was Black"

cltby — Sun, 06 Aug 2023 23:01:18 +0000

This doesn't rescue their claim. If the suggested class imbalance really exists in the training/test sets, the model will preferentially identify whites as criminals.

New comment by cltby in "In every reported mistaken arrest using facial recognition, person was Black"

cltby — Sun, 06 Aug 2023 22:47:13 +0000

Are black faces overrepresented or underrepresented? According to AI researchers, we're faced with Schrodinger's Mugshot--there's simultaneously too many and too few!

New comment by cltby in "In every reported mistaken arrest using facial recognition, person was Black"

cltby — Sun, 06 Aug 2023 22:02:32 +0000

> "We believe this results from factors that include the lack of Black faces in the algorithms' training data sets..." the researchers wrote in an op-ed for Scientific American.

> The research also demonstrated that Black people are overrepresented in databases of mugshots.

The sort of clear-headed thinking that makes the AI bias field as respected as it is.