Bartweiss

10 ms·

31.
by Bartweiss 7y ago
What I think this underestimates is the exponential nature of big wins. If you make a lot of shots, you'll get some successes, and this can be a reliable path to some good outcomes in life. But founding a billion-dollar company or beat
32.
by Bartweiss 7y ago
"Once you factor in time" is a very good point, and one I shouldn't underestimate because it's almost always a factor in scams. Most people can avoid being scammed with enough time and space to consider, and most scammer
33.
by Bartweiss 7y ago
There's some debate down-comments about whether this specific policy is quantitative easing, but we can go back to a broader view. In 2019, the US government spent about $400B on debt interest payments. The overall money supply (M2) gr
34.
by Bartweiss 7y ago
Very true - I don't think I was told anything factually false, and that's hugely to the founders' credit. It's the distinction between caveat emptor and fraud, I suppose, and since some friends had gotten suckered by s
35.
by Bartweiss 7y ago
Thanks! I can't exactly take credit for being insightful, but perhaps well-read - a friend and several people on HN had stories getting jobs with essentially hopeless startups, and I figured that "what would a VC ask about this si
36.
by Bartweiss 7y ago
Over on the employment side, I got a summer job pitch in college from a hot new startup building some kind of app to help turn activity tracker output in actionable info. A startup of four people. "This sounds interesting, but I'm
37.
by Bartweiss 7y ago
> outside the VC world there are a lot of people in corporates who broadly understand use cases but don't have an in-depth knowledge of the tech whose job depends on saying yes to enough innovation initiatives Both inside and outs
38.
by Bartweiss 7y ago
I think at some level expertise does become a robust defense against scams; it's just that the level required is incredibly high. Scamming Cynthia Dwork or Wei Dai with a new cryptocurrency would presumably be a waste of effort, becaus
39.
by Bartweiss 7y ago
This ties nicely into the two questions I have about the article. First, have you seen clear, lasting changes in anxiety and depression? If the single-dose effect for cancer patients really is this strong, it seems like everyone who messed
40.
by Bartweiss 7y ago
Exactly. When I see just-so story used as a criticism, it's almost always because something isn't falsifiable, and more specifically, it's usually an argument from ignorance. The explanation slots into a space we don't
41.
by Bartweiss 7y ago
For the most part, SAR dogs (and similar working dogs) are trained to view specific toys as incredibly high-value. For whatever play they really enjoy - fetch, tug-of-war, etc - they'll have a particular toy which only comes out in con
42.
by Bartweiss 7y ago
Ironically, Ring's fairly low-key appearance undermines the only value it might actually have - as a deterrent. I suspect you'd be better off with a chunky 7/11-style CCTV camera over your front door. And if your goal is to a
43.
by Bartweiss 7y ago
Yep, almost certainly what's happening. It's very common to constrain your central "game loop" for several reasons. A game like Hotline presumably has some basic loop like "process inputs, process events, update AI
44.
by Bartweiss 7y ago
My favorite insight on clean code is that the metaphor of "technical debt" is incredibly deep. It's not just "we skipped X hours of cleanup" - you can meaningfully discuss the purpose and size of the loan, interest
45.
by Bartweiss 7y ago
I agree that the new permission doesn't seem worse as much as different. I already think of Sheets/Docs/etc as basically being the filetype UIs over a core of Drive. This change shrinks "see, edit, and delete" down
46.
by Bartweiss 7y ago
Normally this sort of thing is a mismatch between user preferences (easy, free), and developer goals (stable, accessible). But the Google Graveyard is getting so big that it might actually discourage users. First, Google has moved beyond ki
47.
by Bartweiss 7y ago
Foucault's work on this is fascinating and still well worth reading, but to some degree it's already been eclipsed by reality. The essential breakthrough of panopticon was using uncertainty as a multiplier, pushing people to act i
48.
by Bartweiss 7y ago
This gets at something significant, but I think there's a sense in which it's backwards. Religion promises to surveil you all the time . This stretches far beyond any one faith: the Abrahamic God is omniscient, karma is a direct
49.
by Bartweiss 7y ago
This is appealing, but I think it's important to recognize just how hard that is. Abstractions by definition lose information. If that information becomes important, to any user, at any time in the tool's lifespan, somebody has to
50.
by Bartweiss 7y ago
> Why isn't the next layer of abstraction simply what is being termed as "No Code" today? Cynically? Because people were also selling "no code" ten years ago, or even further back. I know that sort of inductive
51.
by Bartweiss 7y ago
It's a bit like the conspiracy that pharma companies suppress cures because ongoing treatments make more money, and it has the same main flaws. First, without a huge amount of collusion, somebody would release the cure to beat everyone
52.
by Bartweiss 7y ago
I think the better framing might be "directly observable impact on performance"? If Alice in sales lands a client by showing off a shiny new dashboard which Bob the programmer built, obviously they both had to perform. But it&#x27
53.
by Bartweiss 7y ago
I think the reported intended to differentiate "drinking in moderation" from "not smoking" because the drinking results are actually ambiguous at low doses. There are a lot of possible confounders, but a few drinks a wee
54.
by Bartweiss 7y ago
The study has a per-factor breakdown here: https://www.bmj.com/content/368/bmj.l6669 "Ever smoking" looks like "smoked any amount but doesn't presently" rather than "occasional smoker
55.
by Bartweiss 7y ago
I don't expect anyone to rehash the usual debates over this, but I have a question I've never found answered convincingly... How the heck do vegans eat high-protein diets? I don't mean "get enough protein to avoid defici
56.
by Bartweiss 7y ago
It is an unfortunate drawback, but I don't think it's an oversight. This data comes from cohort studies on nurses and other healthcare workers, so it wouldn't generalize well at all. We can assume eating veggies and smoking c
57.
by Bartweiss 7y ago
"You can have sex without getting STDs" also means it's a pain to study. Almost all mortality is statistical - you can smoke your whole life without getting lung cancer - but STDs are an even more random risk factor. There&#x
58.
by Bartweiss 7y ago
Bear in mind that the study looked at the combined impact of multiple factors: working out, eating healthy food, and not being overweight were specifically studied. So by definition, this "10 more years" population were the people
59.
by Bartweiss 7y ago
The study actually does show small positive effects to alcohol, but it's also trying to differentiate alcohol (minimal impact at low doses) from smoking (strong and strictly negative impact at all doses). You can see the study's a
60.
by Bartweiss 7y ago
The data is also an unbelievable mess. We can work towards drinking from two directions: self report consumption and alcohol sales ought to lead to the same number. Not perfectly of course - drinks get thrown away, saved as gifts, used to c

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