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asgraham

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asgraham
·il y a 20 jours·discuss
To be clarify for everyone: both of the cited articles argue in favor of HPV vaccination. I assumed they would be arguing against since the comment is arguing against, but that is not the case.

In particular, you've mistaken the result of the second study.

> The vaccinated patients were even older, which makes it even worse, because those are older women who have had more time to be pregnant.

^ this is incorrect. Indeed according to the study, the vaccinated patients are younger (33.1) than the unvaccinated patients (37.4), which could easily explain the difference in gravidity. The authors do not report having controlled for age when computing the gravidity effect.

Note also that the entire study was conducted with a population of patients seeking fertility care, so the study can't support the general claim "gravidity is halved for the HPV vaccinated" even were the significance level to survive age-controlling statistics (which it likely would not).
asgraham
·il y a 27 jours·discuss
Sure, sure. I’m not arguing for removing drivers for uncommon devices, or even rare devices. But there’s a line somewhere. Maybe it’s at “devices that no longer exist.” But I think it’s somewhere before that. And I have no idea how you’d figure out which devices fall where around this hypothetical line. I can only hope that they had good justification for these removals.
asgraham
·il y a 27 jours·discuss
Is the parent really being sarcastic? I read it as genuine.

There’s presumably plenty of code bloat in the kernel, and while no human would ever scan for bugs in a corner of the kernel that hasn’t been used or touched in decades, AI 100% will. And while those bug reports might be useless as bug reports, they seem promising as “why is this code even here?” flags.
asgraham
·il y a 29 jours·discuss
> They can determine how much each work contributed based on those weights, so it's dishonest for them to argue it isn't possible.

I don’t know about impossible but it’s definitely not a straightforward read from the post-training weights as you’re implying, unless you’re aware of some technique I’m not aware of.

The closest you could get would be the weight differential from training with a given work. But that’s massively dependent on training order, so that it’s certainly not at all a good measure of “contribution.”
asgraham
·il y a 2 mois·discuss
My first impression when the Leaf image loaded was that you were being overdramatic. The Ferrari website created the impression of a similar but fundamentally more elegant car (not elegant, just more elegant).

Then the Ferrari image loaded. Wow.

It really is a game of spot the difference. A difficult game.

edit: I don't want to reduce hypercars purely to their "Wow!" factor, but a huge huge part of their value is definitely the feeling they evoke when you see one out of the corner of your eye and your head snaps around. This Leaf/Luce side-profile similarity is completely antithetical to that "Wow!" factor.
asgraham
·il y a 2 mois·discuss
Ignoring the spiritual part, emotional state does have a well-known feedback loop with physical state. There’s a (largely incorrect) idea in pop psychology that just as happiness leads to smiling, smiling leads to happiness. It’s not nearly that simple, but there are some more straightforward examples: lots of tense emotional states (anger, anxiety) lead to tense muscles (jaw being the classic example). Relaxing your jaw can lead to a (temporary) relaxation of your emotional tenseness. I’ve never heard of a similar result for the lower back, but it’s not hard to imagine. If nothing else, they must be correlated through sedentary lifestyle.
asgraham
·il y a 2 mois·discuss
Requires the MacOS desktop app. Windows "coming soon," but still no word on an official Linux app.
asgraham
·il y a 3 mois·discuss
The good is hidden: court systems are already overwhelmed. If the arbitration cases were added, then it’d take even longer to get a court date.

(Which isn’t to say I think the system as it is is good, just that there is a good)
asgraham
·il y a 3 mois·discuss
Are you arguing that eventually a competitor will emerge that does support OpenClaw with a subscription model? Wouldn’t that just be more expensive for the exact same reason Anthropic is banning it?
asgraham
·il y a 5 mois·discuss
I know for a fact [1] that the neuroscientific discoveries were not independent of physics: the people doing the developing were largely former physicists. They likely didn't cite anything because why would you cite phase transitions or criticality? You learn about them in class as a physicist. I strongly suspect the ecology results weren't independent either, but all the theoretical ecologists I know are relatively young (if mostly former physicists) so no first person accounts.

The part of this that could totally be true is that a clinical application somewhere along the way "independently" "reinvented" it. There's a hilarious collection of peer-reviewed journal articles out there inventing a "new" method of calculating the sizes of shapes and areas under the curve. The method involves adding up really small rectangles. (I think a top comment already mentioned the Tai article [2])

[1] source: my doctoral advisor was a really really old theoretical neuroscientist who trained as an electrical engineer and mathematician. If you want a more concrete example, the work of Bard Ermentrout on neural criticality starting in the 70's or 80's. He read a lot of physics textbooks.

[2] https://science.slashdot.org/story/10/12/06/0416250/medical-...
asgraham
·il y a 7 mois·discuss
The irony is that youth are simulatenously the biggest consumers of (new) social media, and the staunchest haters [EDIT: this is directly contradicted by the research article I found below…]. I can’t find the source so take it with a grain of salt, but I’ve read that something like 80% of TikTok users under some age think they’d be happier if it didn’t exist and/or wish it didn’t exist.

I don’t think this is really an issue of censorship to a lot of people (though that may be how it shakes out in the government) but rather of control over their digital environment and sanity.

EDIT: I don’t think this is what I’m remembering, but it has concrete numbers somewhat lower than I thought (48% of teens think social media harms people their age, but only 14% think it harms them personally) https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2025/04/22/teens-social...
asgraham
·il y a 7 mois·discuss
I was so with you the first half of that. But the notion that everything should be capitalism is just as wrong as the notion that nothing should be capitalism (or, that capitalism only leads to bad things; obviously wrong but somehow a broadly accepted truism).

Capitalism works when a market works; capitalism fails when a market fails. Healthcare is a great example, because there’s an obvious and inherent imbalance in demand vs supply. Firefighting is another great example. These also have externalities to the community as a whole that everyone gets, even when you don’t pay/need the service; so it makes sense to make everyone pay (taxes). Even if you never have a child, even if you send your kids to private school, you live in a society that could only exist because of a (formerly, relatively) high standard of public education. So everyone pays for schools.

The idea of government bureaucrats lining their pockets is also (formerly, relatively) ridiculous: who would get into US government bureaucracy to make money? They are all (formerly, relatively) doing it almost uniformly because they believe in the mission, because they would almost all make more money going private.
asgraham
·il y a 7 mois·discuss
Lots of good suggestions. However for Svelte in particular I’ve had a lot of trouble. You can get good results as long as you don’t care about runes and Svelte 5. It’s too new, and there’s too much good Svelte code out there used in training that doesn’t use Svelte 5. If you want AI generated Svelte code, restricting yourself to <5 is going to improve your results.

(YMMV: this was my experience as of three or four months ago)
asgraham
·il y a 7 mois·discuss
Those prices seem geared toward people who are completely price insensitive, who just want "the best" at any cost. If the margins on that premium model are as high as they should be, it's a smart business move to give them what they want.
asgraham
·il y a 7 mois·discuss
Interesting! I imagine speech-related motor artifacts don't help matters either, even if noise starts mattering less at scale.
asgraham
·il y a 7 mois·discuss
Really cool dataset! Love seeing people actually doing the hard work of generating data rather than just trying to analyze what exists (I say this as someone who’s gone out of his way to avoid data collection).

Have you played at all with thought-to-voice? Intuitively I’d think EEG readout would be more reliable for spoken rather than typed words, especially if you’re not controlling for keyboard fluency.
asgraham
·il y a 8 mois·discuss
This isn’t really “Show HN” so you might want to remove that, but looks really awesome!

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
asgraham
·il y a 8 mois·discuss
I was initially skeptical of this claim because I’d previously learned that to cross the blood-brain barrier particles need to be ~200nm (PM2.5 = 2500nm). However, PM2.5 does seem to be an important category of particles for brain damage: somehow these particles can access the brain [1]. Obviously, yes, it depends on exactly the particle whether it will be “neurotoxic,” but generally “unnatural” particles in the brain are not going to do good things. (I am not an expert in particulates) it seems like things larger than this don’t penetrate the blood-brain barrier, so they can’t be neurotoxic. So PM2.5 is probably at an intersection of large enough to be unhealthy but small enough that the blood brain barrier doesn’t help (probably some evolutionary argument to be made here).

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9491465/#:~:text=PM...
asgraham
·il y a 10 mois·discuss
Doesn’t this mean browser sandboxing is secure, not JS? Or are you referring to some specific aspect of JS I’m not aware of? (I’m not aware of a lot of JS)

It’s maybe a nit-pick, since most JS is run sandboxed, so it’s sort of equivalent. But it was explicitly what GP asked for. Would it be more accurate to say Electron is secure, not JS?
asgraham
·il y a 10 mois·discuss
It’s partially that for sure, but I think it’s also a kind of “common sense” feeling of the public that if people use technology to commit a crime, there must therefore be a record of that crime and therefore the police should be able to use that record to easily stop technology-crime. See: every police show ever.

That was never possible before. Historically, conversations didn’t leave records, and when they did, they were trivially burned. There was no sense that the police should have access to the records because there were no records.

The technical and ethical problems of this “common sense” are far from obvious to most whose primary exposure to and mode of thinking about policing and technology is what we see on TV.