Alpha3031 (u/Alpha3031)

Alpha3031 commented on How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup blog.zactownsend.com/know... · Posted by u/zt

tiffanyh · 9 months ago

> Meanwhile: to break into a highly-regulated, commoditized market like insurance, you need both a truly differentiated product that incumbents can't easily replicate and an associated distribution strategy that leverages their blind spots.

Having worked in highly regulated industries, I’ve learned that the best way to disrupt incumbents is by creating a product that assumes more business risk than is typically accepted. Large, regulated companies are extremely risk-averse—so if you can take on that risk in a smart, innovative way, you’ll win.

Alpha3031 · 9 months ago

What if you take that risk by putting "crypto" in it? I think it might work out for our founder here but I am not so optimistic about the results for any of the poor schmucks suckered into this scheme.

Alpha3031 commented on Wikipedia article blocked worldwide by Delhi high court en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asi... · Posted by u/intunderflow

EasyMark · a year ago

I can understand shutting it down to Indian IP ranges, but the whole world? I think they should have stood up to the Indian court and took wikipedia offline for India, otherwise soon there will be avalanche of demands to take down anything negative about modi, trump, xi, and putin.

Alpha3031 · a year ago

A comment from Jimbo Wales on WMF Legal's reasoning for the temporary takedown can be found on the on-wiki discussion on the topic, the reason given is to preserve the Foundations ability to appeal:

> Hi everyone, I spoke to the team at the WMF yesterday afternoon in a quick meeting of the board. [...] note that I am not a lawyer and that I am not here speaking for the WMF nor the board as a whole. I'm speaking personally as a Wikipedian. [...] I can tell you that I went into the call initially very skeptical of the idea of even temporarily taking down this page and I was persuaded very quickly by a single fact that changed my mind: if we did not comply with this order, we would lose the possibility to appeal and the consequences would be dire in terms of achieving our ultimate goals here. For those who are concerned that this is somehow the WMF giving in on the principles that we all hold so dear, don't worry. I heard from the WMF quite strong moral and legal support for doing the right thing here - and that includes going through the process in the right way. Prior to the call, I thought that the consequence would just be a block of Wikipedia by the Indian government. While that's never a good thing, it's always been something we're prepared to accept in order to stand for freedom of expression. We were blocked in Turkey for 3 years or so, and fought all the way to the Supreme Court and won.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Permalink/1253528244#C...

Alpha3031 commented on Wikipedia article blocked worldwide by Delhi high court en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asi... · Posted by u/intunderflow

moralestapia · a year ago

>Wikipedia doesn't currently have the technical ability to block a single article on a country basis.

I can imagine. That's too much to ask to a company that's been on business for 20 years and have received 1.3B USD in total.

I could come up w/ a solution to that in an afternoon on my $5/mo server but yeah "you don't understand the scale of wikipedia" or some bs.

Not "donating" a single cent ever again.

Alpha3031 · a year ago

There have been only about 6 office actions involving content for that 20 years, so one can imagine it might not be much of a priority to spend an entire afternoon doing something they don't expect to use even once a year.

Alpha3031 commented on Wikipedia article blocked worldwide by Delhi high court en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asi... · Posted by u/intunderflow

pclmulqdq · a year ago

> It’s also worth pointing out that it could be you who has blind spots, not the contributors. And if you’re certain they are wrong you can always try to correct them, or create a competing topic?

No, it's not me who has the blind spots in the cases I have seen, sorry. Also, they are not worth the work to correct, since the overlord of the niche is usually someone with far too much time on their hands to argue, even when presented with incontrovertible proof. They also often have "Wikipedia editing" as a hobby, and know all the nitpicking rules of the site that they will use against you if you encroach on their domain. And yes, I tried this once for an obvious error in a math article (with no citation in the original article, mind you).

> So it’s a good source for topics with the largest audience.

Also not for topics of any political bent, but sure, if your target audience is at a high school level or below and you can separate out the facts from the editorialization, it's not bad.

At this point, I want Encyclopedia Britannica back. I would take it any day of the week over Wikipedia. The golden age of Wikipedia, when that was reversed, seems to be over.

Alpha3031 · a year ago

Britannica still exists. You can find it at https://www.britannica.com/

Alpha3031 commented on Wikipedia article blocked worldwide by Delhi high court en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asi... · Posted by u/intunderflow

tga_d · a year ago

In order to maintain some semblance of process, Wikipedia has to approximate what is true by relying on the consensus from reputable sources, not reality itself. This means that experts are often not who you want editing an article, because experts are often poorly positioned to know what the general public knows, and what consensus is from outside their area of expertise. E.g., I have published research that contradicts information on Wikipedia, and while I am of course convinced I and my co-authors are right while Wikipedia is wrong, I would much rather have that state of affairs than a world where Wikipedia is written by everyone with a paper on a subject, and the line is drawn at whoever was the most recent editor.

Alpha3031 · a year ago

> experts are often not who you want editing an article, because experts are often poorly positioned to know what the general public knows, and what consensus is from outside their area of expertise.

I would argue the opposite, since consensus from reputable sources is not the same as consensus of the general public, and unless it's a subject of study in multiple fields, the consensus in their field is their area of expertise.

Academic scholarship is generally preferred over lay sources, though there are caveats and individual instances of primary research are rarely considered indicative of consensus (usually review articles and other secondary sources are significantly preferred). However, if you do disagree with any information on Wikipedia, even if it's based on only your own primary research, I would strongly encourage you to at least tag the statements with a {{dubious}} or {{disputed inline}}[1] tag so that it can be discussed, or make an edit request[2] if you're not comfortable making the change yourself.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Disputed_inline [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Edit_requests

Alpha3031 commented on Emergency rooms are not okay yourlocalepidemiologist.s... · Posted by u/EndXA

amy-petrik-214 · 2 years ago

The core philosophical truth of healthcare is you can never have a system that prioritizes care above all. Such is economically intractable. Imagine millions of immortals with artificial heart/lungs (called ECMO, exists for a long time), artificial kidneys (dailysis), etc, costing LOTS Of econonmic resources per day, living for years. The truth of this transcends government. A communist or socialist government still must confront resource allocation.

What we need is something that looks at that efficiency-care-quality tradeoff curve and finds something like the markowitz efficient frontier. Now.. that hospitals operate at such efficiency ought to be a consequent of capitalistic competition even in a for-profit context. The american health system is so crooked and bureaucratic and overpriced, perhaps the most we can do is demand our hospitals be non-profits. Many "non-profit" hospitals seemingly have megabooms in growth, which makes me wonder where the money is coming from to fund the growth, if not profit.

Alpha3031 · 2 years ago

The "prolonged" when used to describe ECMO means days or weeks. Economics are not the problem here, it is currently technologically impossible to provide ECLS for an indefinite period of time without escalating risks of complications, including immediate failure as well as issues that result in death post-decannulation. There have been individual cases where patients were put on such treatments for months and have survived, but it is in fact medically extremely risky and should not be done unless there was absolutely no other choice. "Immortality" through such a means is almost certainly going to kill you within years.

Quality of life while undergoing treatment is also entirely non-existent, trust me, you to not want to be "immortal" if it required indefinite ECMO. Unless you enjoy living in hospitals I guess.

Alpha3031 commented on US revokes Intel, Qualcomm licenses to sell chips to Huawei bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/xgdgsc

ein0p · 2 years ago

Not with $140B in a country where literally everything is cheaper, and not when they know it can be done (and likely also have at least half the technical documentation). It won’t take a “decade”.

Alpha3031 · 2 years ago

Apparently they're working on a DUV 3nm process, which is a little insane if you think about it. Would certainly be interesting to see it working, if it does work.

Alpha3031 commented on What contributing to Open-source is, and what it isn't suchdevblog.com/opinions/... · Posted by u/thunderbong

beckthompson · 2 years ago

Unless I missed something the article never really explained how to contribute to open source software the "right" way so its kind of silly. According to the article there are four ways:

1.) Use open source software (Fair enough but not helpful)

2.) Take over a unmaintained package (If your a brand new developer probably not the best idea!

3.) Make your own thing (Not really what most people want to do...)

4.) Get paid to do it (Not really possible for new developers)

I don't feel like any of those are reasonable solutions. I'm not a particularly good programmer but I have just recently been trying to contribute to an open source project (Apparently doing it the "wrong way" according to the article!) and its going amazing! Everyone is very helpful pointing out issues with my PR and helping me understand what to do better.

Is it the most efficient use of the maintainers time? As of right now, probably not! However, if I continue to help develop the project them training me now will certainly be worth while as I become better at contributing.

Alpha3031 · 2 years ago

I feel like the article documents the author's own experiences (which, to be fair, is a valid thing to do) without emphasising, or really even trying to emphasise, the how. Which really makes it less useful for anyone looking for learnable takeaways.

But hey, it triggered this HN discussion, and I see a lot of replies here which seem more useful for that kind of thing.

Alpha3031 commented on Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets theverge.com/2024/4/12/24... · Posted by u/rntn

nickpsecurity · 2 years ago

“Facts are not copyrightable”

Does anyone have any good pages on that which go into how to extract facts without copyright infringement? And for purposes of creating independent, educational works from those facts?

Alpha3031 · 2 years ago

Sure. Copyright is something that Wikipedia has to deal with, so there's a guide for contributors (which also links to the article on the relevant legal doctrine) here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Close_paraphrasing#S...

Alpha3031 commented on JetZero: Ultra-efficient blended wing body jet jetzero.aero/why-jetzero... · Posted by u/belter

api · 2 years ago

People made the same arguments about reusable rockets. If there’s one thing that saga taught us it’s that traditional aerospace is incredibly conservative and risk averse. “If it hasn’t already flown it can’t fly.”

Not saying this design is the answer but it’s quite clear that the opinions of the big players about novel ideas are to be taken with a certain amount of salt.

I’m not sure where this mentality came from. My guess would be many boom bust cycles and shifting political winds causing project cancellation. That probably burned people too many times on new projects. Combine that with a safety at any cost mentality and a lack of incentives to innovate.

Alpha3031 · 2 years ago

> People made the same arguments about reusable rockets.

NASA could have totally gone forward with developing the DC-3 if Nixon didn't cut their funding. The lower cross-range and payload were dealbreakers for the USAF but perfectly acceptable for civil spaceflight purposes.