Hacker News: dahinds

New comment by dahinds in "I want to live like Costco people"

dahinds — Thu, 07 May 2026 18:58:39 +0000

The claim could be true even if every customer is exactly like you. The implication is that Costco doesn't really make money selling stuff, they just need to roughly break even. And "breaking even" here includes paying rewards on purchases. The fact that you earn a lot of rewards doesn't stop your membership dues from contributing to Costco's bottom line.

New comment by dahinds in "UK Biobank health data listed for sale in China, government confirms"

dahinds — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 17:14:44 +0000

Not sure how that follows. It seems mostly irrelevant whether the new incident is related to the github issue.

New comment by dahinds in "SpaceX files to go public"

dahinds — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 23:43:28 +0000

The cheapest option might be to buy the index and sell short the appropriate amount of Musk companies.

New comment by dahinds in "In 2025, Meta paid an effective federal tax rate of 3.5%"

dahinds — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 19:43:12 +0000

Mostly never -- most of the deferral was an accounting adjustment for the value of future tax credits that they could no longer take advantage of, so there is no actual tax liability here that will eventually be paid.

New comment by dahinds in "xAI joins SpaceX"

dahinds — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 22:37:30 +0000

Yes but if the solar panel area scales linearly with radiator area, the problem doesn't get worse?

New comment by dahinds in "xAI joins SpaceX"

dahinds — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 22:22:03 +0000

This isn't really true, though? The ISS does it with radiators that are ~1/2 the area of its solar panels, and both should scale linearly with power?

New comment by dahinds in "The '3.5% rule': How a small minority can change the world (2019)"

dahinds — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 23:11:46 +0000

What does it mean to "fund protests"? I'm also a "normal" person who has been to a couple No Kings protests, and no one paid me. Someone spent some money on fliers, I suppose.

The major No Kings events were in June and October last year. January is not a great time for outdoors protests in much of the country. Does it somehow make the protests inauthentic if focus has now shifted towards ICE?

New comment by dahinds in "I have recordings proving Coinbase knew about breach months before disclosure"

dahinds — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 22:09:34 +0000

"With Bitcoin you do not get government bailouts" -- yeah maybe not yet? Is it beyond belief that a government with leadership deeply invested in crypto currencies might take action if something super disruptive happens?

New comment by dahinds in "Pharma is a small component of US health care spending"

dahinds — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 20:06:20 +0000

It is often illegal to purchase drugs from other sources?

The named drugs are injectable and require cold storage so it is not trivial to safely source them from overseas.

New comment by dahinds in "Trump to impose $100k fee for H-1B worker visas, White House says"

dahinds — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 21:06:44 +0000

I think I'm not understanding what comparison you're trying to make. I thought you were expressing some doubt about whether H1B, or temporary skilled worker visas generally, were beneficial for the host country. You asked, "why don't other countries encourage this specific type of immigration" and I pointed out that they do have similar programs. Now you ask "why don't they have even higher rates of skilled worker immigration?"

Japan's SSW program has close to 300k workers. The U.S. H1B program has about 700k workers, so by population, Japan's program appears to be a bit larger. New Zealand's AEWV program has 80k workers with a population of 5 million so proportionally that's much larger.

New comment by dahinds in "Trump to impose $100k fee for H-1B worker visas, White House says"

dahinds — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 04:44:05 +0000

All the countries you mention offer temporary work visas for skilled workers, of varying similarity to an H1B.

New comment by dahinds in "Tesla said it didn't have key data in a fatal crash, then a hacker found it"

dahinds — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 16:45:58 +0000

> They cheated because their cars didn't meet new emissions standards. They were fine by the standards of the year before.

> So a bureaucracy just declared that a legal level of emissions was now illegal.

That is not at all what happened and not how emissions standards are deployed. The EPA's Tier 2 standards were finalized in 2000 to phase in during the 2004-2008 model years [1].

[1] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2000/02/10/00-19/c...

New comment by dahinds in "Attack of the Sadistic Zombies – Paul Krugman"

dahinds — Mon, 19 May 2025 15:23:41 +0000

Can you reference where Krugman made the claim you're criticizing?

New comment by dahinds in "NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions"

dahinds — Fri, 09 May 2025 19:33:01 +0000

The terminations so far focus on anything with any mention of a DEI related objective and that may seem "fine", but these don't constitute a lot of the NSF's budget (the terminated grants total < $1 billion and if you click through them you'll see that for many, that's 5 years of funding). The planned cuts are much deeper[1], DEI is just not where the "big bucks" are.

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Fiscal...

New comment by dahinds in "How to Delete Your 23andMe Data"

dahinds — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 01:09:53 +0000

are you asking about methods to improve privacy of aggregated datasets? They seem to be not super popular with people in the field, I think because they sharply curtail how data can be used compared to having access to datasets with no strong privacy guarantees. I think the maybe more impactful recent shift is toward "trusted research environments" where you get to work with a particular dataset only in a controlled setting with actively monitored egress.

New comment by dahinds in "How to Delete Your 23andMe Data"

dahinds — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 00:01:08 +0000

The top-of-thread linked to an article that was specifically about aggregated data sharing, not individual-level data sharing. The consent document you're linking to did not exist when that article was written; our general research consent only covers aggregated data sharing. It was only in 2018 that we added the second-level consent for individual-level data sharing.

I think we've generally been pretty careful to present only scientifically well supported results, which has not helped the perceived utility of our health product. There are certainly valid arguments to be had about the business model.

New comment by dahinds in "How to Delete Your 23andMe Data"

dahinds — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 23:05:17 +0000

I would not argue with you on that it is "selling your data". But I also think there are meaningful differences in harm levels for different kinds of "selling your data", and fully identified data has more potential harms than de-identified data where you have to assume that an adversary is willing to violate contracts and/or the law to learn about particular individuals.

There is considerable confusion about the distinction between aggregated data and de-identified individual-level data. I would say that I don't consider sufficiently aggregated data to be "your data" in a particularly meaningful personal sense of "your", even though there are still some re-identification risks from these types of datasets.

I was contesting the statement that "The data has already been sold... [and] the damage is already done" which I still think is highly misleading.

New comment by dahinds in "How to Delete Your 23andMe Data"

dahinds — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 22:49:13 +0000

I can go to a data broker and purchase access to de-identified EMR data for most of the U.S. population. There are much more useful de-identified datasets around than ours, if someone is motivated to try to re-identify those datasets. That data is all bought and sold without anyone's consent and this is all fine under HIPAA.

New comment by dahinds in "How to Delete Your 23andMe Data"

dahinds — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 22:25:51 +0000

Indeed, but here "re-identification" generally means the sort of attack where you have an aggregated genomic dataset, and you already have access to full genomic data for a target individual, and you use the genomic dataset to infer something about that target that you didn't know, like whether or not they participated in that study. Not to entirely minimize this sort of attack, but the NIH decided it was a sufficiently low risk that most of the sorts of datasets it applies to (like GWAS) are routinely shared with no access controls.

New comment by dahinds in "How to Delete Your 23andMe Data"

dahinds — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 22:16:09 +0000

Here "de-identified" means stripped of PII (name, address, phone number, email, etc). You are correct that genetic information is intrinsically identifiABLE (in the sense that it is stable and uniquely distinguishing for individuals). When we've shared individual-level data with a partner, it was with consent of the participants involved, and under a contract that prohibits re-identification.