mbateman

8 ms·

31.
23andMe ceases providing health-related tests(businesswire.com)
2 points by mbateman 13y ago|0 comments
32.
by mbateman 13y ago
"Federal officials gathered the information from the customer records of two men who were under criminal investigation for purportedly teaching people how to pass lie detector tests." What? How is that illegal?
33.
by mbateman 13y ago
Also true! There's a small literature in philosophy that worries about paradoxes in this area. But regardless of how that turns out, it seems safe to say that you shouldn't avoid getting married because of divorce demography, and
34.
by mbateman 13y ago
Yes, divorce demography is complicated! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divorce_demography But I was just being illustrative; my point applies even if it's 20% or 80%.
35.
by mbateman 13y ago
Yes, this is like telling a newlywed that s/he has a 50% chance to eventually get divorced. True for the population, irrelevant for the individual. When one has a more direct knowledge of the relevant factors, it's crazy to make a
36.
by mbateman 13y ago
I don't see any statistics in the document you cited that are directly relevant to "the idea that people disable their smoke detectors permanently over nuisance alarms", in one way or another. Indirectly (on p. 8 of the first
37.
by mbateman 13y ago
> We turned to KnowEm.com, a website I often rely on to search for usernames, even though the site is primarily intended as a brand registration service. We certainly had a front-runner for her name, but we would have chosen something di
38.
by mbateman 13y ago
Overdraft fees are absurd, but so is complaining about them. Just go to your bank and ask them to disable overdraft. If you don't have the money and overdraft is disabled, the transaction will simply be declined. If you want to spend m
39.
by mbateman 13y ago
Those tests get false positives all the time. I failed an explosives test once in Denver. The TSA agent guessed correctly that I had been rock climbing. Apparently this happens a lot, no idea why. They let me go after 5 seconds of chatting.
40.
House Defeats Effort to Rein In N.S.A. Data Gathering(nytimes.com)
74 points by mbateman 13y ago|28 comments
41.
by mbateman 13y ago
Estate design in the colonial and antebellum Southeast, where malaria was a huge problem until the 20th century, was arguably designed to maximize breezes and drafts: be on hilltops, surrounded by mostly open lawns without much shade, with
42.
by mbateman 13y ago
This whole thing is such a farce. Ecuador doesn't care about human rights, and the US doesn't care that its enemies know that it's spying on them. It's diplomacy in the service of directing embarrassment.
43.
by mbateman 13y ago
What exactly is it supposed to mean that the NSA intercepts only data with one "foreign end"? That it intercepts all data that crosses e.g. a transatlantic cable? Or that it scans the IP header of absolutely everything and grabs a
44.
by mbateman 13y ago
Ecuador has an very poor human rights record. One of my colleagues is a former Ecuadorian journalist who was blacklisted for criticizing the government and had to flee the country. Strange choice for Snowden, given that.
45.
by mbateman 13y ago
Didn't Nixon get pardoned before he was tried?
46.
by mbateman 13y ago
The paper: http://www.andrewoswald.com/docs/finalmayHomeOwnershipUnemBl...
47.
Yahoo Scraps Dailymotion Purchase After French Pressure | Fox Business(foxbusiness.com)
1 points by mbateman 13y ago|0 comments
48.
Making rain(asymco.com)
8 points by mbateman 14y ago|0 comments
49.
by mbateman 14y ago
Burnout is accompanied by a drop in ambition. But not all drops in ambition indicate burnout.
50.
by mbateman 14y ago
Strongly agree. Equally tenuous is the converse idea: that if we did detect some features of the physical world that were also apparent in a simulated lattice, that the best explanation for this is that we exist in a simulation.
51.
by mbateman 14y ago
How is this the top voted comment? Anyway, working on software that takes abstract input to a camera as an interface is awesome, no matter what particular bits of functionality they start off with.
52.
by mbateman 14y ago
I have to ask, what was the song? Can we have a link?
53.
by mbateman 14y ago
I don't really know or care about the relevance of these results, and I don't know why it's at all relevant to Hacker News, but damn, Google consumer surveys look really nice.
54.
by mbateman 14y ago
You may have to parse HTML email, but you don't have to send it.
55.
by mbateman 14y ago
Well, I upvoted you. People who criticize the obviously beneficial actions of others on the grounds that they can't be classified as their favored form of (purportedly) good deed are... well, I'll stop there to keep things civil. You see th
56.
by mbateman 14y ago
Yep. Reading the article I was a little put off by how banal the hypothesis really is. Inflammation, including neuroinflammation, is involved in many pathologies. Whether it is a cause or a symptom is unclear, partially because it is unclea
57.
by mbateman 14y ago
I'm certainly not trying to imply any policy prescriptions. I'm strongly in favor of nuclear power. But if there's risk we should know what it is so it can be distributed/compensated for. I'm not saying it's not worth the cost (or even tryi
58.
by mbateman 14y ago
Maybe I was being ridiculously optimistic, but ~200 projected additional cases of cancer seems pretty bad.
59.
by mbateman 14y ago
ATMs don't scan a deposited check or cash. They wait for someone in the bank to open it and determine whether it is legit, then the account is credited. But after a while your account becomes "trustworthy" and any deposits are credited to t
60.
by mbateman 14y ago
You would have demonstrated that moral authority is on the side of the student who was wronged. It doesn't matter whether or not they change their policy, what matters is that you went along with excluding a student for no reason. EDIT: Sor

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