Hacker News: djannzjkzxn

New comment by djannzjkzxn in "We can no longer ignore the potential of psychedelic drugs to treat depression"

djannzjkzxn — Mon, 08 Jun 2020 22:19:22 +0000

If you don’t mind me asking, what is hell about visual snow? I have some visual artifacts including snow but they don’t cause any suffering. They are just things I can see that don’t have any emotional significance. I don’t think about them unless my attention is drawn to them somehow. Maybe the snow is more disrupting for you than my artifacts are? Do they limit your ability to perceive the world?

New comment by djannzjkzxn in "5G and Shannon’s Law"

djannzjkzxn — Sun, 07 Jun 2020 22:21:51 +0000

Total US mortgage debt and corporate debt are around the same size - roughly $15 trillion each. Mortgage and corporate bondholders have both seen principal losses in recent history. Fed support is pushing down both types of rates, and it’s not obvious to me that one is somehow unfairly pushed down more than the other.

New comment by djannzjkzxn in "5G and Shannon’s Law"

djannzjkzxn — Sun, 07 Jun 2020 06:57:44 +0000

Consumers can get a mortgage with 3% interest rate.

New comment by djannzjkzxn in "The May jobs report had “misclassification error,” underreported by 3 points"

djannzjkzxn — Sat, 06 Jun 2020 06:09:38 +0000

It’s weird to describe it as cooking the books when they are being completely transparent about the issue that is occurring. If they wanted to cook the books all they had to do was leave out the disclaimer.

New comment by djannzjkzxn in "People try to do right by each other, no matter the motivation, study finds"

djannzjkzxn — Fri, 05 Jun 2020 21:00:43 +0000

If the world is divided into many super-tribes made up of millions of people (based on ethnicity, religion, etc), try to encourage mixture of those super-tribes at school, work, and socially. Then people have a maximum composition of different super-tribes within their personal 100-person tribe. This way people will be less likely to identify everyone from another super-tribe as part of the outgroup.

New comment by djannzjkzxn in "DeepFaceDrawing Generates Photorealistic Portraits from Freehand Sketches"

djannzjkzxn — Fri, 05 Jun 2020 07:04:02 +0000

Adding a line where you want there to be a shadow in the output seems like something you could learn from trial and error when messing with a model. It somewhat weakens the accomplishment of the paper if the sketches aren’t drawn by naive users, but it’s a lot more defensible than generating the input like you suggest.

New comment by djannzjkzxn in "Three authors retract study on hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine"

djannzjkzxn — Thu, 04 Jun 2020 22:05:48 +0000

This was the original report: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

They claimed that hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine both caused more deaths. The study claimed a huge effect size (~20% increase in death rate) and a giant sample (14888 treated, 81144 control across 671 hospitals). Despite not being a proper blinded trial, this still appeared to be strong evidence and sufficient to stop any reasonable doctor who heard of this study from giving these drugs to patients. If the evidence was fabricated, that’s a big deal.

New comment by djannzjkzxn in "S&P 500 CEO Pay by Pay Ratio"

djannzjkzxn — Thu, 04 Jun 2020 00:07:55 +0000

A CEO gets paid in stock, which the company later buys back with cash. Ergo, the CEO getting stock compensation reduced the amount of money available to pay workers.

GAAP requires companies to report stock compensation as an expense because it does actually move wealth around in a zero-sum fashion. It’s not a magic free money tree.

New comment by djannzjkzxn in "America has more new spaceships on the way"

djannzjkzxn — Tue, 02 Jun 2020 04:56:11 +0000

They can land the Falcon 9 first stage in the middle of the drone ship. Any reason they can’t locate a perfect spot on the moon and land there exactly?

New comment by djannzjkzxn in "Tesla Model 3 Drives into Overturned Truck in Apparent Autopilot Failure"

djannzjkzxn — Mon, 01 Jun 2020 21:16:52 +0000

The occurrence of this crash shows that the self-driving system as a whole is insufficient. I don’t see how you can be sure the problem is the camera and not the software.

New comment by djannzjkzxn in "As Qualified Immunity Takes Center Stage, More Delay from SCOTUS"

djannzjkzxn — Mon, 01 Jun 2020 21:02:48 +0000

Not exactly the same, but the legislature retroactively extended the statute of limitations for sexual abuse lawsuits. Not a case of a newly illegal act, but a case where someone who was in the clear for a past act became liable again.

New comment by djannzjkzxn in "The nightmare that colleges face this fall"

djannzjkzxn — Sat, 30 May 2020 02:15:46 +0000

I went to a college where students were required to live on campus and banned from having a car. My experience after attending multiple of these programs is that the numbers showing the dangers of drunk driving in the college age cohort are misrepresented as measuring the risk of alcohol poisoning among college students. Students were pretty much told that going to a frat party put them in mortal danger. In reality, every college student who dies of alcohol poisoning earns a local news story, and if the incidence were anything like 15 out of 100000 college students per year, the news would be full of such stories.

I worked as an RA - it was my job to enact policies addressing various risks facing the student body - and my perception is that extreme overreaction was the norm.

New comment by djannzjkzxn in "The nightmare that colleges face this fall"

djannzjkzxn — Fri, 29 May 2020 23:44:16 +0000

Even if the risk is objectively small, I think even those rare cases lead to an extreme response when you look at the way colleges react to other small risks. It would probably kill many times more students than alcohol poisoning does, to give some comparison. Alcohol poisoning deaths are incredibly rare but colleges spend a day teaching students about it. Scale that response up proportionately and it doesn’t surprise that a college shuts down to keep a few students from dying.

New comment by djannzjkzxn in "Twitter hides Donald Trump tweet for “glorifying violence”"

djannzjkzxn — Fri, 29 May 2020 17:43:03 +0000

The electoral college as a system for weighting the votes of people based on where they live is unjust in my opinion, but it’s well-understood as part of the rules of the system as it exists today. The mechanics of that system where the electors are humans who cast votes instead of just points that get tallied is a formality we could get rid of.

New comment by djannzjkzxn in "Twitter hides Donald Trump tweet for “glorifying violence”"

djannzjkzxn — Fri, 29 May 2020 07:49:17 +0000

My ballot has the candidate’s name on it, not some elector. If electors conspired to change the outcome, the people would rightfully consider it nothing more than a coup, regardless of the 18th-century design of the electoral college.

New comment by djannzjkzxn in "Remote work means anyone can take your job"

djannzjkzxn — Thu, 28 May 2020 20:23:09 +0000

When people say they want to break up the big tech companies they are not talking about making them do a stock split. They are talking about dividing them into separate entities. This comment seems to conflate these two actions. Amazon or BRK could do a stock split if they thought it would raise their market cap, and it wouldn’t be a big political controversy. It would increase the number of shares but not change the corporate structure or affect any monopoly concerns.

New comment by djannzjkzxn in "Ask HN: How to prevent audio downsampling with AirPods?"

djannzjkzxn — Mon, 18 May 2020 03:22:40 +0000

On Windows, the AirPods Pro maintain two connections with the PC, one using the headset protocol and the other using the better-sounding media protocol. It seems like they both work at the same time - I’ve had good experiences on video calls where somebody is streaming background music and it sounds the way it’s supposed to.

Also the noise cancelation definitely works although it’s impossible for me to objectively judge if it’s different than how it worked in the past (seems super hard to know without a blind test given how brains habituate).

New comment by djannzjkzxn in "Ask HN: People who rejected a FAANG offer. Why?"

djannzjkzxn — Mon, 18 May 2020 02:57:02 +0000

Hard to get good liquidity from a unicorn. The description sounds like trading to me.

New comment by djannzjkzxn in "Georgism"

djannzjkzxn — Mon, 18 May 2020 01:16:28 +0000

It sounds like the argument is that voters are rational and therefore must vote for the correct level of LVT. Doesn’t the evidence show that the ideal LVT rate is zero, since that’s what they have in fact enacted?

New comment by djannzjkzxn in "Walmart Just Launched a Line of Backpacking Gear"

djannzjkzxn — Sat, 16 May 2020 05:02:06 +0000

There’s some negative sentiment toward Ozark Trail among the set of people who have seen abandoned tents as far as the eye can see at the end of music festivals. Not sure if that’s common enough to lower the value of the brand.