Hacker News: xapata

New comment by xapata in "Dog Aging Project"

xapata — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 14:47:11 +0000

Like elves in _Shadowrun_.

New comment by xapata in "Dog Aging Project"

xapata — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 14:40:30 +0000

And mentally. We never stop playing.

Note the popularity of memes about "adulting".

New comment by xapata in "'Visual clutter' alters information flow in the brain"

xapata — Fri, 01 Nov 2024 03:58:34 +0000

> esoteric

The legal concept doesn't feel esoteric to me. In contrast, "companies" creating governments is quite rare in my mind. The historical concept you're referring to was even more of a legal concept. Those companies were individually chartered by their host governments. They might have inflicted something else on their victims, but ... Let's take the East India Company as an example. It might have appeared sovereign at times, but was trivially dissolved by the British Empire.

New comment by xapata in "'Visual clutter' alters information flow in the brain"

xapata — Tue, 29 Oct 2024 23:14:33 +0000

When it goes the other way, would it be more appropriate to call those gangs, not companies?

New comment by xapata in "Dispelling Myths about Randomisation"

xapata — Tue, 29 Oct 2024 23:10:22 +0000

Just assumptions, not extremely strong assumptions. Ordinary least squares performs well in a large variety of cases.

New comment by xapata in "'Visual clutter' alters information flow in the brain"

xapata — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 08:49:02 +0000

A company is meaningless without a government and law enforcement. The existence of a barrier is necessary for a company to have practical value as a legal concept.

New comment by xapata in "Why conventional wisdom on health care is wrong (a primer) (2020)"

xapata — Sat, 19 Oct 2024 22:20:34 +0000

If I only earn when I treat, then I have an incentive to over-diagnose. Insurance thus forces me to document my diagnoses, and I spend much of my time on documentation and appealing denials.

New comment by xapata in "Why conventional wisdom on health care is wrong (a primer) (2020)"

xapata — Sat, 19 Oct 2024 06:12:37 +0000

It'd still occur in a single-payer system. The problem is fees for services instead of fees for results.

New comment by xapata in "Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)"

xapata — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 05:26:22 +0000

If not predictability, then regularity, and I believe that's a fundamental misunderstanding -- the system is chaotic.

New comment by xapata in "Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)"

xapata — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 07:11:49 +0000

If only that weren't called a "cycle" as if it had a predictable periodicity.

New comment by xapata in "Who is Marcellus Williams: Execution in Missouri despite evidence of innocence"

xapata — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 05:12:23 +0000

Isn't the jury responsible for determining what's reliable evidence?

New comment by xapata in "A wonderful coincidence or an expected connection: why π² ≈ g"

xapata — Sun, 11 Aug 2024 16:46:41 +0000

You're right. Thanks for being that guy!

New comment by xapata in "Joe Biden stands down as Democratic candidate"

xapata — Sun, 21 Jul 2024 22:37:56 +0000

Democrat leadership and large donors may have moved left, but the voters haven't. Which is why Biden was having trouble with some groups previously thought locked-in Democrat.

New comment by xapata in "PySkyWiFi: Free stupid wi-fi on long-haul flights"

xapata — Tue, 09 Jul 2024 14:58:49 +0000

If the author wrote, "This is satire," it'd ruin the satire.

New comment by xapata in "Price fixing by algorithm is still price fixing"

xapata — Fri, 08 Mar 2024 03:25:42 +0000

I'd bet that the median claim is quite different than the mean claim, because the outliers are so large. Much like the "shocking" statements you hear about wealth distribution -- the largest 10 are bigger than the bottom 50% or similar. That's how log-normal distributions work. Though of course the Gini coefficient can vary.

New comment by xapata in "Price fixing by algorithm is still price fixing"

xapata — Fri, 08 Mar 2024 03:23:26 +0000

It seems like the ideal plan is a high-deductible with no maximum, like catastrophic medical coverage.

New comment by xapata in "Price fixing by algorithm is still price fixing"

xapata — Sat, 02 Mar 2024 22:43:32 +0000

Liability is more about medical costs, no? If it were bounded to vehicle cost, I'd self-insure.

New comment by xapata in "R: Introduction to Data Science (2019)"

xapata — Sat, 02 Mar 2024 18:43:56 +0000

Why Polars and not Dask?

New comment by xapata in "Frugly vs. Freemium"

xapata — Mon, 26 Feb 2024 06:49:46 +0000

You can solve that with careful licensing agreements.

New comment by xapata in "Every model learned by gradient descent is approximately a kernel machine (2020)"

xapata — Sun, 25 Feb 2024 07:53:50 +0000

That was my guess, too :-)