HN user

eganist

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I'll largely use this account for talking about advice subreddits and forums specifically.

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/bryant; my proof: https://keybase.io/bryant/sigs/-R8Ky9MLcrIhyNpFXZWTI6B6qQdfdG5dt89OuG-Jxv4 ]

Posts17
Comments2,154
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www.congress.gov 2y ago

Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act

eganist
3pts2
www.facebook.com 2y ago

"[Facebook] Encrypted notification emails are going away soon"

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www.plainlanguage.gov 3y ago

Plainlanguage.gov (Plain Language Action and Information Network)

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news.ycombinator.com 4y ago

Hacker News [keybase] proof just broke

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news.ycombinator.com 5y ago

Ask HN: What structures exist to financially reward "investors" in non-profits?

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www.theverge.com 5y ago

OMG, BuzzFeed is worth 1.5B? WIN

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www.buzzfeednews.com 5y ago

BuzzFeed News Has Won Its First Pulitzer Prize

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www.nature.com 5y ago

Order in online extremism can be muddled by nudging collective chemistry

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en.wikipedia.org 5y ago

Adobe Atmosphere (2003)

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www.latimes.com 6y ago

Tesla tells workers to report to factory, cites ‘conflicting’ coronavirus orders

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diracdeltas.github.io 6y ago

Writing Custom Control Surfaces for Ableton

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3pts0
news.ycombinator.com 7y ago

Ask HN: What happened to Finsix?

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walmart.com 8y ago

Walmart.com

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observer.com 9y ago

Cryptocurrency Has Its Potato Salad Moment with the Useless Ethereum Token

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twitter.com 9y ago

I'd guess using the hotel's name to put the mark at ease was effective

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geer.tinho.net 9y ago

Prediction and the Future of Cybersecurity – Dan Geer

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www.blackhat.com 10y ago

First wave of Blackhat 2016 briefings now live

eganist
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The submission shows real world knowledge

Compared to what specifically? It helps to find relevant, comparable examples of electives in major areas of economic impact and demonstrating how these modern electives fail to do what you described.

vs a lot of folks coming out today without any practical knowledge, just theoretical.

This isn't a direct comparison. But if we were to make this comparison more direct (e.g "more people were prepared in 1907 for application of practical knowledge than today), it's also in need of substance. How much is "a lot"? What is practical knowledge, and how can you be sure that the knowledge taught isn't practical?

From the modern curricula linked elsewhere in the thread, it looks like quite a few courses are directly relevant to operationalization in their domains.

It's cute, but in quite a few industries, a lot of these are driven by outside e.g regulatory forces that have proven to be necessary ("written in blood" etc), so the better question to ask is how many of these process encumberments can be streamlined e.g with paved road approaches.

Security and compliance benefit heavily from this approach, and I'm sure it can be extended elsewhere as well (architecture reviews etc).

It's probably coming from frustration with non-contributive commentary, of which the topmost comment unquestionably qualifies.

It's in poor form to do citizen-policing pretty much anywhere let alone an internet forum, but I won't begrudge the user their frustrations over something that's undeniably a problem.

Heh.

https://economics.harvard.edu/sites/hwpi.harvard.edu/files/e...

which, if you're going into finance, consulting, public policy, or political ideology, look great. But if you want to understand or manage a real-physical-world company? Maybe Econ 1745 - "Corporate Finance" would be useful?

Are you saying that the "Railroad Practice" elective is directly comparable to the "Corporate Finance" elective of today?

If anything, I'd say that Railroad Practice is best compared to "Using Big Data to Solve Economic and Social Problems" in that they're both focused on some of the biggest economic facilitators of their respective days, rail and data science. And Harvard's other electives seem similarly tailored, allowing people to get a grasp of fields of practice that can yield them a substantial advantage in practice, e.g in leveraging globalization or serving underserved markets.

Your other points aren't comparative to the Harvard of the day but rather speculative ("a puny fraction" and its suggested impact), so there's not much I can do to speak to them.

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Tangent: it'd be an interesting analytic exercise to compare courses and curricula year by year and see what percentage of electives have generalized, what percentage have specialized, and to get a better grasp of how a school's programs are both adapting to and anticipating current and future economics landscapes.

Do you disagree? I understand the scolding and you may consider it irrelevant to answer my question but I am curious about the intentions of those who push back in this way.

Meta-question on the emphasis above: are you (uoaei) and bell-cot the same user?

How times have changed!

Have they? What's changed, specifically, in Harvard's various programs in the last 118 years that lead you to your implied conclusion that their business and economics curricula have worsened?

Why YC went to DC 2 years ago

I was hopeful YC coming to DC would've meant YC would've been tapping into DC's startup scene.

Wishful thinking. Linked is the more common reason (lobbying), but I'm looking forward to more institutions recognizing the talent we have in the DC region.

ChatGPT Edu 2 years ago

Wouldn't surprise me if schools go the route of forcing a cloud toolset (e.g Office 365 or Google Workspace) and measuring proof of work - in a very literal sense, not a cryptographic sense.

Ripe for being gamed but is probably the only way to do PoW without becoming wildly intrusive with personal devices.

I can't put my finger on it, but it seems more important than a mere "gimmick."

Let me see if I can articulate it.

You know how a human conversation can have multiple threads? And ten minutes in, you find the topic has totally changed and you're trying to figure out the original topic? Sometimes you can get back to it, sometimes you can't, right?

Obviously it's not quite the same when you can see prompt history, but the conversation is still pretty linear. This pre-empts that problem by letting you fork thoughts.

But why doesn't this happen to restaurants, or super markets or car mechanics?

Not sure, but the counterpoint is the housing crisis. So painting it as something exclusive to healthcare suggests that there's no possibility of it being a systemic problem with Private Equity.

https://www.propublica.org/article/when-private-equity-becom...

One of the other comments raised said "because you don't have to go to those places," and it intuitively feels correct that basic needs are ripe for price gouging when supply is limited. But I'm out of my depth. Happy to hear other comments.

Teachers should be compensated as much as doctors and held to the same academic rigor, but then we'd run up against the rude reality that those of us who are well off tend to hate the idea of paying for such a feature e.g through taxes.

Grants got me through school, so I'm content being taxed up the nose. But I'm an outlier in my tax bracket for that opinion.

Depends on the work. The suggested solution may very well fall on its face with any media & entertainment work, which incidentally is one of the industries with the heaviest Mac usage.

Bottom line: it wasn't hidden from you[1]. You made an assumption without reading up on your "$2.2k laptop" and it didn't work out for you. Fortunately Apple have a relatively generous returns policy, take it back and get on with your life.

Speaking of assumptions, looks like you made an assumption the OP bought this laptop themselves.

How does any of this detract from the absurdity that no MacBook Pro with the mainline M1/M2/M3 chips has been able to natively drive two external screens?

Being able to use two external screens is practically an expectation of any laptop at this point. I can understand the OP's point that this is ridiculous.

Honestly, if there ever exists a web-focused LLM that's hyper-competent in media literacy, I'd be happy to delegate to it the job of teaching my kids. We don't expect the most of our teachers, nor do we effectively compensate them for such an important role, so I'm more inclined to trust an LLM that can capably sift through all the data online and teach from what it understands to be true.

Which essentially means the hallucination problem needs to be solved, which is a ways off.

You certainly would, because not every case of obesity results from the same mechanisms. But just as with all the other what-about comments, this comment misses the point: this class of drug is wildly successful, and it's the most specific drug for this problem that's been developed so far

https://www.healthline.com/health-news/ozempic-glp-1-drugs-m...

Here's a good piece running through the failure modes in lay terms.

That GLP-1 agonists are as successful as they are and appear to modulate the reward center of the brain (per the latest research on the same class of drugs and smoking/alcohol cessation) suggests that it's certainly not just a psychological matter.

That's why I made the heroin comparison. People underappreciate the addictive properties of refined sugars.

Edit: people also looked at the opiate angle too, apparently. https://pennstatehealthnews.org/2024/04/qa-can-weight-loss-d...

Funding tends to be a constraint with larger studies, and it's best to keep studies focused anyway — less confounding variables.

Here, I'll pontificate a bit. For instance, study 1 finds that Ozempic is associated with a reduced risk of X. Study 2 is now funded to see if the association can be experimentally reproduced to establish a causative relationship. Competing institution gets Study 3 funded to test competing drug Mounjaro, reaches same conclusion. Study 4 by another institution finds same conclusion with a drug that acts in an entirely different manner, Buproprion. Study 5 by yet another institution finds similar results with amphetamines. Study 6 is funded on the premise that there's an underlying mechanism that needs to be explored, gets funding to study caloric restriction, gets similar results. Meanwhile, study 2 finds a causative relationship between Ozempic and X, concluding experimentally that Ozempic achieves X by inducing calorie restriction, which concurs with study 6.

I'm oversimplifying. But you see where I'm going with this. Much easier to both control and fund the smaller studies than a giant one, and you develop more knowledge in the process.

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Also, I'm not an academic, so I could be wildly off base. Would appreciate a gut check by someone who actually does this for a living.

Probably the latter, but "just eating less" is next to impossible for a non-trivial minority of people much the way "just stopping heroin" would be for someone battling addiction.

An aid to help clear the noise in the brain seems to be unsurprisingly useful, then, in achieving these outcomes.

I am still unable to find a single legitimate use.

Really? Nothing? Not even really clear-cut use cases that are already in production at a bunch of companies like rapid document templating or surfacing esoteric yet relevant internal documents and knowledge?

Those use cases alone have saved seven figure sums at companies where I've seen them implemented. And those savings allowed the positions to be repurposed in more useful ways e.g threat hunts rather than document prep.

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Lots of adjusted goalposts in the comments below. The fact that I can simply ask an LLM to bake me a template and adjust as needed — or ask it to fetch me an internal policy document describing compliance requirements I might need for a new mobile app — and get either of these answers in literally seconds makes them the best tool for the job by a wild margin. And the fact that I'm seeing hiring managers rework their positions for different roles as a result of implementing GenAI to obviate mundane job responsibilities supports this.

Many practitioners across many fields have their blinders on with regards to the risk of disruption to their own disciplines. Surprised I'm seeing those blinders on here too.

This is a loaded argument that requires citations. Since you're making the claim, can you please link specific articles from the Arabic site that make your point? As well as linking which Arab countries banned it and when?

It's easy to just claim something, but it's crucial to back your point up front when it's particularly sensitive so as to not inadvertently spread misinformation. You may be correct, but that's why the citations are needed.

Plus, say a nuclear weapon went off anyways and all the FM transmitters died. Is anyone seriously thinking a lone AM transmitter 2000 miles away is going to help? We had all the communication in the world during COVID and that did nothing to stop people from acting foolish.

This is an interesting assertion. Many, many people acted responsibly during the pandemic, and in a worst case scenario such as what you described, it's even more likely that a sizable population will gravitate to any source of reliable information.

The government is usually the source of last resort for many, many things. Whether it's as a lender (e.g bailouts) or as a source of information (emergency broadcasts), it's at the scope of the nation state where extreme contingencies exist and must be accounted for. I imagine AM radio is perfect for this precisely for worst-cases, e.g where someone might seek to make a crystal radio, but I'd be out of my depth thinking beyond this.

I actually was neutral on this until I read your comment and thought it through far enough to reply, so thanks for that.

categorical ≠ silly

In the sentence "See, I can do silly categorical statements too," the adjectives "silly" and "categorical" both modify the noun "statements" and are not themselves related to one another. That's why OP used both of them. If the two words were synonymous, only one would be required.

It's fun nitpicking nitpicks.