api

147 ms·

1. 8011.▲
   by api 6y ago

   Hydroxychloroquine is only controversial because Trump championed it. Otherwise it would be a detail of interest only to doctors treating COVID and researchers evaluating the success of these treatments. Political hyper-polarization and soc
2. 8012.▲
   by api 6y ago

   Someone needs to create a meme that will simultaneously offend everyone of every conceivable belief system or political persuasion. It would be the 2020 version of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBWr1KtnRcI Seems tou
3. 8013.▲
   by api 6y ago

   Very seldom is anything "always the case," and almost anything in the realm of drugs or similar interventions becomes bad if done in excess.
4. 8014.▲
   by api 6y ago

   Look! ^^^ Even these obscure cases just got an iota of precious attention! Do people who don't hate each other over things get attention?
5. 8015.▲
   by api 6y ago

   Someone with a phone camera just happened to record a video of the ideal case: a police officer obviously murdering a black man. It's brutal and pointless, with racism being the most obvious and likely explanation. The thesis of this a
6. 8016.▲
   by api 6y ago

   The parts of programming that are going to get automated are going to be the parts that require little skill, take a long time, and are boring as hell: writing boilerplate CRUD code, wiring up buttons to actions, etc. Automating the harder
7. 8017.▲
   by api 6y ago

   That can work but it has to be low friction and reasonably priced. Many people who do dual licensing charge waaaaay too much.
8. 8018.▲
   by api 6y ago

   I've seen the same phobia to a lesser degree around the plain old GPL. Lawyers think, and not unreasonably, in terms of risk. Is there a risk you might be dragged into court? If so, that's a very expensive risk. Is the library or
9. 8019.▲
   by api 6y ago

   I'm not arguing that our understanding hasn't advanced, only that our models are constrained by our internal conceptual and external verbal/written vocabulary. It's possible that brains are doing things that we have no t
10. 8020.▲
    by api 6y ago

    This being HN I'm surprised someone hasn't tried to train a neural net to read hard to read gravestones and made an app.
11. 8021.▲
    by api 6y ago

    Requiring all work to be in person is no better. It causes brain drain from most places and real estate hyperinflation where the jobs are. "No jobs, unaffordable housing, pick one."
12. 8022.▲
    by api 6y ago

    While I generally think more telework is a great thing for numerous reasons, the state of discourse makes me worried about people spending so much time online. The social media "hate laser" effect is I think the main force behind
13. 8023.▲
    by api 6y ago

    A favorite sci-fi speculation of mine is that all that goofy geomancy and similar "edge of seeming like it means something" stuff in occultism is some alien intelligence attempting to send us the knowledge required to come visit t
14. 8024.▲
    by api 6y ago

    There's not much money to be made in fossil fuel phase out either... some, but overall it is a cost. Halting deforestation and reforesting aggressively would be a lot cheaper at the macroeconomic level.
15. 8025.▲
    by api 6y ago

    Everything spies on you. There's money in it. I've come to believe that this can only be fixed with legislation and regulation. There are no technical fixes that could practically be deployed as there is far too much "attack
16. 8026.▲
    by api 6y ago

    When complex mechanical machines were big, we imagined pneumatic brains. Then we imagined electronic, digital, and now quantum computing brains. We also started to see the brain through the lens of these systems and how they work. Meanwhile
17. 8027.▲
    by api 6y ago

    There is a big difference between some labor and zero labor. That's the whole reason spam is a problem.
18. 8028.▲
    by api 6y ago

    I just got a mental image of a network of springs or something snapping back into place after delivering something.
19. 8029.▲
    by api 6y ago

    Writing propaganda is labor intensive. GPT-3 could do it well enough and almost for free. Think automated troll farms and spam that can be generated in unlimited quantity and that is close enough to real text that it can't be filtered.
20. 8030.▲
    by api 6y ago

    Code is a very different thing. It's possible to run code and objectively see whether it does what it says or not. Political speech and whistleblower type stuff is very different. Without a really deep investigation it's impossibl
21. 8031.▲
    by api 6y ago

    I've thought this for many years, but I've never come up with so succinct and perfect a way of expressing it. Anonymity prevents free speech by making it easy to just drown any legitimate speech or valuable information in a torren
22. 8032.▲
    by api 6y ago

    Meanwhile rapists and child molesters often serve only a few years, if that...
23. 8033.▲
    by api 6y ago

    LSD and opioids are very very different things, and a major driver of the opioid epidemic is certain companies in the pharmaceutical industry legally pushing it. IMHO if alcohol and nicotine are legal, then anything "soft" that
24. 8034.▲
    by api 6y ago

    Citizens United is also a threat to national security as it opens the floodgates for foreign money to directly influence American politics to an almost unlimited degree. It may take a constitutional amendment to fix it though.
25. 8035.▲
    by api 6y ago

    Sketchy fad diets are a constant thing since forever.
26. 8036.▲
    by api 6y ago

    This is the nature of regulation in general. Without it anyone who does shady stuff gains a massive advantage.
27. 8037.▲
    by api 6y ago

    From what I've heard, programmers that are as good as domestic (US/EU) programmers can absolutely be hired in India and lots of other places. Problem is they are not significantly cheaper than domestic programmers once you add man
28. 8038.▲
    by api 6y ago

    There are a few QC skeptics with various arguments. If you were the head of NIST (or the NSA), would you be willing to bet the entire security of your civilian and military communications infrastructure that these few skeptics are right? Th
29. 8039.▲
    by api 6y ago

    It's entirely possible that QC will arrive but will be more of a special purpose accelerator for certain algorithms (think of the way custom ASICs can accelerate specific operations) rather than a general purpose thing. Some form of ge
30. 8040.▲
    by api 6y ago

    True, but find me a member of the Fortune 500 that does not do this kind of thing.