Hacker News: sidr

New comment by sidr in "Maximum likelihood estimation and loss functions"

sidr — Sun, 15 Dec 2024 22:26:21 +0000

Cross-entropy is not the KL divergence. There is an additional term in cross-entropy which is the entropy of the data distribution (i.e., independent of the model). So, you're right in that minimizing one is equivalent to minimizing the other.

https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/357963/what-is-the...

New comment by sidr in "Extreme Value Theory (2009) [pdf]"

sidr — Mon, 22 Jan 2024 15:13:01 +0000

The first slide makes the disclaimer that one is not "able to identify if an event was due to climate change", only likelihoods of certain events occurring under various conditions. People might treat those two things the same due to our mental heuristics, but they are not.

New comment by sidr in "30% of All Rural Hospitals in the US Are at Risk of Closing [pdf]"

sidr — Tue, 23 May 2023 19:24:10 +0000

Obamacare won't fix it because it's a gutted compromise. Universal healthcare (which is the only way to get around private insurers not paying out, and not tying healthcare spending to income) is a non starter in this country and it's entirely due to one political faction. It's accurate to blame them for this.

New comment by sidr in "30% of All Rural Hospitals in the US Are at Risk of Closing [pdf]"

sidr — Tue, 23 May 2023 19:14:44 +0000

Those colleagues were very wealthy by Indian standards to begin with and have only increased their purchasing power by being abroad. India does in fact have free care at government facilities and they are certainly not "low overhead and high skill". I'd pick rural American healthcare over rural Indian healthcare 10 times out of 10.

New comment by sidr in "30% of All Rural Hospitals in the US Are at Risk of Closing [pdf]"

sidr — Tue, 23 May 2023 19:10:57 +0000

It used to be. https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/press/press-releases/british-so...

New comment by sidr in "The school that grants your PhD thinks it’s too good to hire you"

sidr — Mon, 12 Dec 2022 18:30:28 +0000

I have a PhD and this is absolutely not the reason universities don't want to hire their own. In the modern day, there is no reason whatsoever that university affiliation limits the spread of ideas or collaborations. The reason is there is a funnel - only the top x% of students get the TT positions and students of prestigious institutions are just more likely to have the big name publications that forms the sole criterion for academic hiring. Even the prestigious institutions like to spread the mantra of "we don't hire our own" but this is just so that professors can avoid having the awkward conversations with their students along the lines of "you're good, you're just not better than candidate".

New comment by sidr in "reMarkable 2"

sidr — Thu, 27 Oct 2022 05:46:03 +0000

Is this subscription-based hardware though? It's an open linux device and you can write any software you want to work with it. There's no requirement to pay for their cloud storage if you don't want to.

New comment by sidr in "Why I'll never use Affirm again"

sidr — Fri, 08 Apr 2022 19:28:34 +0000

Why is this an advantage? The factors in assessing the risk are the creditworthiness of the customer and the amount. Also, I find it hard to believe that the creditworthiness of a customer actually fluctuates fast enough for Affirm to be able to do some arbitrage on it.

New comment by sidr in "I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears"

sidr — Mon, 21 Mar 2022 16:16:19 +0000

I went to one of these liberal arts college. They all (typically) have science and math departments. Engineering typically doesn't fall under the purview of liberal arts (though pure science and math certainly do). The problem tends to be availability of upper-level electives if you actually care about learning certain topics and don't want to just complete the requirements. Also, your exposure to research opportunities are typically external to your own institution (there are exceptions to this). I'd say the required courses in the first two+ years are a better experience than large research universities though.

New comment by sidr in "I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears"

sidr — Mon, 21 Mar 2022 16:07:20 +0000

Not really. A lot of these small liberal arts colleges date back to the 1800s. The more prestigious ones are often priced like private R1 institutions as well. I'm sure there are some two-year institutions that started offering four-year degrees, but it's not typically the case afaik.

New comment by sidr in "Cities should not pay for new stadiums"

sidr — Tue, 15 Mar 2022 15:03:21 +0000

How is this relevant to the pro sports bring value through children's leagues discussion though? It appears these kids leagues exist completely independent of the professional teams, and would continue to do so even if the pro team left.

New comment by sidr in "Cities should not pay for new stadiums"

sidr — Tue, 15 Mar 2022 12:42:40 +0000

That's what these economic studies look at - is it worth paying for the stadium in order to prop up those businesses? The answer appears to be overwhelmingly "no".

New comment by sidr in "Cities should not pay for new stadiums"

sidr — Tue, 15 Mar 2022 12:37:03 +0000

By that logic the government should subsidize/fund Netflix, Amazon and Apple because they deliver and produce content that entertains me.

New comment by sidr in "Cities should not pay for new stadiums"

sidr — Tue, 15 Mar 2022 12:30:30 +0000

> just how important big teams like say, Chelsea or Barca are for a huge chunk of not just the people who live in their home cities but also across the world.

Here "important to" is equivalent to "liked/entertained by", as a form of entertainment. The question here is what forms of entertainment should tax payers pay for and your comparison with art museums, operas and orchestras is apt.

> let's say barca wanted to leave Barcelona, do you think the city shouldn't do anything about it because it helps billionaires?

If barca were extorting the city of Barcelona by demanding they pay 10s or 100s of millions to upgrade Camp Nou, then the city should tell the team to go to hell. This exact scenario has played out in multiple cities in the US and with the IOC and city bids.

New comment by sidr in "Cities should not pay for new stadiums"

sidr — Tue, 15 Mar 2022 12:15:38 +0000

And they visit, have a couple of beers, and leave. This influx is accounting for in the analysis of "is it worth it?" and the answer is a resounding "no". Well, it's a "no" for most large, dense cities, Green Bay could be interesting because it's not in a dense city. Green Bay is also a particularly bad example for this conversation, being a non-profit community owned team and all.

New comment by sidr in "Cities should not pay for new stadiums"

sidr — Tue, 15 Mar 2022 11:49:13 +0000

It is played, almost exclusively, by said immigrants from the Indian subcontinent. So only in a handful of cities where there's a critical mass of them that are somewhat recently immigrated (and there is room for grounds).

New comment by sidr in "Cities should not pay for new stadiums"

sidr — Tue, 15 Mar 2022 11:39:53 +0000

> why cities keep on bidding for the olympics, which is otherwise hard to rationalise.

There was one bid for 2028 and one for 2032. Compare with 8+ bids in years past. There are fewer and fewer new cities that have never hosted before putting in bids (ostensibly due to insane construction costs/demands by the IOC). 3 out of 5 cities bidding for 2024 withdrew their bids and the other two got 2024 and 2028. 2032 seems to have gotten only one bid. What's happening is that this "intangible benefits" theory is dying as more and more of the world realizes that there are none. On the other hand the olympics and the world cup does seem like a good venue for authoritarian regimes to create spectacles.

New comment by sidr in "Tell HN: Udacity dark pattern to cancel a subscription"

sidr — Tue, 08 Feb 2022 03:35:15 +0000

> Where are the companies that don't pull this shit?

Netflix? Amazon?

New comment by sidr in "WhatsApp has removed answer to “how do I choose not to share data with FB”"

sidr — Mon, 06 Dec 2021 17:58:06 +0000

The people in the sports club will roll their eyes at you because [they think] you are a tin-foil hat wearing lunacy who is paranoid about surveillance from the boogeyman. They will refuse to switch their mode of communication that works for them and everyone else for one person (you) who is just causing trouble for no reason.

The vast majority of people don't think Facebook is the abhorrent service it is, and an even larger majority don't realize WA is owned by Facebook.

New comment by sidr in "Accepted and ghosted: interviewing for a leadership position at Stripe"

sidr — Tue, 30 Nov 2021 07:14:18 +0000

At a company there's a reporting chain and an HR department to ensure that even in this situation, the candidate isn't left ghosted - offer to shop the candidate's resume around and switch teams, or at the very least inform them. There is no valid excuse for a company ghosting an accepted candidate.