Hacker News: ridaj

New comment by ridaj in "Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources"

ridaj — Mon, 25 Apr 2022 15:34:09 +0000

Then more bots come in undetected and you have to rebase again when you find them. It's a continuous process. You need very understanding investors to pull this off. At the same time there's only so long you can sweep inauthentic engagement under the rug until someone calls you out for it.

New comment by ridaj in "What Is a Major Chord?"

ridaj — Sun, 24 Apr 2022 17:10:16 +0000

As a tentatively more minimalistic explanation, the musical ear perceives specific geometric relationships between frequencies as strong stimuli, and a major chord consists of simultaneously striking frequencies x, x times the cube root of 2, and x times 3/2.

New comment by ridaj in "No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing"

ridaj — Sun, 24 Apr 2022 16:33:24 +0000

Why should we believe that the author's perceived value signaling by some class of society (which is debatable already in a somewhat puritanical society) is the primary responsible for other adults' behavior? This seems so infantilizing. The poor do have agency too.

New comment by ridaj in "Google’s AI-powered ‘inclusive warnings’ feature is very broken"

ridaj — Fri, 22 Apr 2022 23:28:25 +0000

A nudging system like this better have a much higher signal to noise ratio otherwise it really amps up the clippy-like annoyance. Keep in mind this isn't something you have to go turn on in a menu for "help me write inclusively", it's enabled by default for all; and while I might personally appreciate the reminders when they do work, I'm not sure as many users of the software think playing word police should be a priority.

New comment by ridaj in "Google’s AI-powered ‘inclusive warnings’ feature is very broken"

ridaj — Fri, 22 Apr 2022 21:33:20 +0000

What about when the landlord is a company? Or an actual man in fact? We're going from unnecessarily gendered to unnecessarily neutered word.

New comment by ridaj in "Stabilization of gamma sulfur enables 4000 cycle Li-S batteries [pdf]"

ridaj — Sun, 17 Apr 2022 13:45:56 +0000

Human bladder range can already be extended 10x by the use of Gatorade bottle technology.

New comment by ridaj in "Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private"

ridaj — Fri, 15 Apr 2022 21:20:51 +0000

And revenue will shrink accordingly. If that's his plan, he's right that it can only happen in a private company. Otherwise the resulting revenue deceleration will send Twitter into a stock price self-fulfilling tailspin as stockholders start seeing it as a doomed platform.

New comment by ridaj in "Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private"

ridaj — Fri, 15 Apr 2022 14:09:16 +0000

The cost of actually administering fairness in elections (maintaining voter rosters, verifying identities, preventing double-voting and providing public auditability while ensuring voter anonymity, prosecuting fraudsters...) is quite high compared with what an ad-supported global platform can afford. Just look at how tough it's been for Twitter to kick out inauthentic actors, eg Russian troll farms or spam bots. Spending more resources on botfighting is difficult from Twitter's standpoint since it doesn't by itself drive revenue or engagement, and they are fighting determined permanent attackers, some even state-funded.

Speaking of, the primary revenue feed for Twitter is advertising, which directly competes with fairness and transparency goals: ad business is predicated on the idea that more $ = more speech, regardless of the intrinsic value of the speech; and since there is no practical way to know where the $ came from, it does an end run around transparency goals.

New comment by ridaj in "Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private"

ridaj — Fri, 15 Apr 2022 13:52:50 +0000

That would also get rid of users. It's pretty clear that chronological ordering is non-optimal for engagement in a feed system.

New comment by ridaj in "How Swipe Typing Works"

ridaj — Sun, 10 Apr 2022 15:13:25 +0000

You can put Gboard on your iPad

New comment by ridaj in "NPM package event-source-polyfill compromised by political activists"

ridaj — Sat, 09 Apr 2022 01:14:04 +0000

Well, open source volunteering is a form of anti-capitalistic political activism to begin with. This is just adding a geopolitical angle to it, but all FOSS is political already. When you depend on an open source project, you depend on the politics of that project as well.

New comment by ridaj in "We’ve got a science opportunity overload: Launching the Wolfram Institute"

ridaj — Thu, 07 Apr 2022 05:53:37 +0000

The more I hear about Stephen Wolfram's schemes to name things after Stephen Wolfram, the more admirative I grow of Nicolas Bourbaki and wished he were publishing amazing math software these days.

New comment by ridaj in "The illusion of evidence based medicine"

ridaj — Fri, 25 Mar 2022 03:35:30 +0000

Yes this is a more plausible example of needed regulation to align capitalistic incentives on societally beneficial outcomes (vs cat UTI research)

New comment by ridaj in "The illusion of evidence based medicine"

ridaj — Fri, 25 Mar 2022 02:10:33 +0000

> Putting aside cats, there are plenty of diseases that impact humans which don’t get researched enough due to very rare, e.g. <1 in 100 million people.

Sure, and is that a problem? Should we as a society not apportion medical research spend to the most impactful areas? I'm curious to what extent the misalignment of incentives is due to capitalism as opposed to the actual need being lopsided

> It’s certainly a very big need to the people who suffer from or are dying from rare problems.

I totally agree. At the same time society cannot put all of its resources in support of very rare cases at the expense of common issues of similar seriousness

New comment by ridaj in "The illusion of evidence based medicine"

ridaj — Fri, 25 Mar 2022 00:03:12 +0000

> areas that need it

The premise of capitalism is that enterprising individuals and institutions will respond to the monetary incentive created by these needs.

Could it be that what is unprofitable to treat is maybe not that big of an actual need? Can I argue that I'm happy that there has been no research on feline urinary tract disease as long as human cancer isn't solved yet?

New comment by ridaj in "But life had other plans"

ridaj — Thu, 24 Mar 2022 07:18:06 +0000

Some fertility specialists will say on first consult, the odds that you could get pregnant naturally just went down as you walked through the door to my office.

All because the kind of people who visit a fertility specialist have lower fertility stats than the kind of people who don't (duh). The average practitioner doesn't really excel at distinguishing between correlation and causation.

New comment by ridaj in "Why income share agreements did not work out"

ridaj — Wed, 23 Mar 2022 19:56:16 +0000

> adverse selection problems

I gotta admit feeling some schadenfreude that people trying to revive indentured servitude end up being out-grifted by their own customers

New comment by ridaj in "Ask HN: Best keyboard-based productivity software?"

ridaj — Mon, 21 Mar 2022 20:41:40 +0000

What do you recommend for calendar management?

Ask HN: Best keyboard-based productivity software?

ridaj — Mon, 21 Mar 2022 20:05:21 +0000

I've been looking to increase my use of the keyboard, primarily for the productivity gains that I find myself able to reach by consistently sticking to the keyboard. Since I started though, I've noticed fairly uneven support across applications. For example, reviewing my day's worth of meetings and responding to each invitation using Google calendar is very painful to do on the keyboard.

What are people's favorite recommendations of keyboard-based productivity tools?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30759033

Points: 1

# Comments: 3

New comment by ridaj in "How Zillow's homebuying scheme lost $881M"

ridaj — Fri, 18 Mar 2022 18:35:15 +0000

Re opendoor etc

> A less competitive market is less dynamic and worse for sellers, but it is better for the iBuyers that remain.

If they can avoid taking on the bad deals that Zillow was previously shielding them from. I've seen how in some markets the disappearance of a provider that falls victim to this kind of adverse customer selection merely moves the problem to other providers in a cascading fashion. It's not clear that there are that many profitable deals to be made on the iBuying model