Hacker News: kweinber

New comment by kweinber in "What Americans die from vs. what the news reports on"

kweinber — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 00:28:53 +0000

Heart disease is grossly overrepresented because the default cause of death is “cardiac arrest”. This is because that the definition of death is heart stoppage in most states. So if a doc doesn’t know the actual cause, that’s what they write down.

New comment by kweinber in "Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid"

kweinber — Mon, 12 Jun 2023 12:23:39 +0000

I’m not defending anything about a lab leak. I’m addressing the previous poster’s question about why there were attacks on Asian Americans and not Russian ones.

The lab leak theory and weaponization theories were never squelched. The right wing in this country fantasizes that their viewpoints are marginalized while having their most extreme viewpoints broadcast on the top watched news programs in history. The idea that the lab theories were squelched was floated by those very same programs as part of their promotional formula.

New comment by kweinber in "Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid"

kweinber — Mon, 12 Jun 2023 11:41:27 +0000

At the time the US had a president that routinely used race-baiting as a divisive political technique. He admired Vladimir Putin and defended Russian actions, so the Russian people weren’t a subject of his attacks.

New comment by kweinber in "Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI"

kweinber — Tue, 16 May 2023 20:17:13 +0000

Did you watch the hearing? He specifically said that licensing wouldn’t be for the smaller places and didn’t want to impede their progress. The pitfalls of consolidation and regulatory capture also came up.

New comment by kweinber in "Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong"

kweinber — Mon, 17 Apr 2023 15:54:51 +0000

If there are rules and they sometimes have exceptions or inconsistencies, that doesn't mean that there aren't any rules.

English is phonetic in that way. Sometimes the phonetics are applied with exception-cases and alternatives.

New comment by kweinber in "Ask HN: Has anyone here left the big city in pursue of a simpler life?"

kweinber — Mon, 20 Mar 2023 13:57:33 +0000

I find it interesting that some people feel that moving away from cities and towards a more natural lifestyle means moving to a farm or ranch.

As Steven Pinker notes in his brilliant “Enlightenment Now”, there is nothing natural about a farm. It is basically a factory that subjugates the local ecology to produce monoculture crops so delicate that you have to domesticate humans to take care of them. If you want to live in nature and get away from command and control culture, you may want to skip the farm or livestock ranch and experience nature more directly as forests, meadows etc.

New comment by kweinber in "Need help with students who've turned my class into a dating service"

kweinber — Tue, 31 Jan 2023 03:52:32 +0000

This is an economics problem and this teacher should work with their Econ department to change the rules for course auditing and increase reputational costs to disincentive this behavior. A few options: 1) Make auditing those classes more expensive by limiting the total number of courses a student can audit, or capping the number of students that can audit those courses. 2) Make auditing a remote-only class option. 3) Give lectures on how to spot this behavior which will make the perpetrators obvious and undesirable. 4)Have a no-dating policy between students within the same class under penalty of failure. 5) Couple course participation with a mandatory internship at a STEM company (something a serious student would want but a time-suck for a fake student).

The economics department might enjoy testing these policy changes and could get some papers out of them.

(I wish I could have posted on the original site but I need some sort of karma to do that)

New comment by kweinber in "Idaho murders: Suspect was identified through DNA using genealogy databases"

kweinber — Tue, 03 Jan 2023 06:27:41 +0000

Here’s a bigger thought. Imagine a world where serial killers get caught a lot earlier before killing scores of people. The government is not the only enemy.

New comment by kweinber in "Tesla used car price bubble pops, weighs on new car demand"

kweinber — Thu, 29 Dec 2022 16:58:49 +0000

We were about to be a two Tesla house this year and now there is 0% chance we’ll be that after the latest shenanigans. Although my car is well made, I’m a little embarrassed to drive it around now.

New comment by kweinber in "Fred Brooks has died"

kweinber — Fri, 18 Nov 2022 03:28:14 +0000

Sad loss. One might wonder how much faster technology’s state of the art would have progressed if we had more people like Fred Brooks working in the field.

New comment by kweinber in "Ask HN: Skeptical about my company going “full serverless”. What am I missing?"

kweinber — Tue, 08 Nov 2022 17:24:07 +0000

It makes versioning not seem so bad by introducing you to hotter hells.

New comment by kweinber in "Just don’t"

kweinber — Tue, 08 Nov 2022 17:12:42 +0000

This sounds really patronizing. I would be careful with that phrasing. People who don’t want their problem solved often know the solutions and don’t like the tradeoffs or change they entail. It is often not a knowledge problem.

New comment by kweinber in "Investing in Flow"

kweinber — Mon, 15 Aug 2022 13:55:16 +0000

or an HBO Max account.

New comment by kweinber in "MIT invents $4 solar desalination device"

kweinber — Wed, 03 Aug 2022 13:20:27 +0000

Great question. There is a study on a program in Kenya from a company called GiveDirectly that tries to analyze that very question: https://files.givewell.org/files/DWDA%202009/Interventions/C...

Here is a more readable reference "Does it Work?": https://www.givewell.org/charities/give-directly#Does_it_wor...

New comment by kweinber in "What’s going on with Google and Facebook hiring freezes?"

kweinber — Tue, 02 Aug 2022 15:06:01 +0000

Apple. Do not track. Ad impressions plummet. Revenue drops. Hiring stops.

That’s why Facebook is trying to get you to stop looking at your phone and strap on an oculus….. there are no privacy guards there.

New comment by kweinber in "Action Plan for a New CTO"

kweinber — Mon, 20 Jun 2022 19:31:28 +0000

This comes up every few years and it is important to note that the opposite is true. Most unhappy families have drug abuse or interpersonal abuse at play. Most happy families are happy and fulfilled for a variety of interesting reasons.

New comment by kweinber in "Spotify podcasters are making $18k a month with nothing but white noise"

kweinber — Sun, 05 Jun 2022 13:13:51 +0000

Society values investment strategies and medical innovations. If society finds out it has been defrauded, then society tries to reclaim its investments and punish the fraudsters.

New comment by kweinber in "Ukraine calls on hacker underground to defend against Russia"

kweinber — Fri, 25 Feb 2022 05:17:11 +0000

Allies are dying today. Someone could help save them and you are talking them out of it?

New comment by kweinber in "Ukraine calls on hacker underground to defend against Russia"

kweinber — Fri, 25 Feb 2022 05:15:32 +0000

Defending an ally from an enemy is not something the US government punishes people for. If you want to help the people of Ukraine then #standwithukraine.

New comment by kweinber in "As JetBrains we condemn the attacks taking place"

kweinber — Thu, 24 Feb 2022 22:11:11 +0000

Nice defenestration reference. Slow clap.