imcoconut (u/imcoconut)

imcoconut commented on The effect of physical fitness on mortality is overestimated uu.se/en/press/press-rele... · Posted by u/gnabgib

_dain_ · 4 months ago

>Next, the researchers examined how fitness was associated with the risk of dying in random accidents such as car accidents, drownings and homicides. They chose random accidents because they assumed that there ought to be no association between the men’s fitness in late adolescence and the risk of dying in random accidents. This method is called negative control outcome analysis and involves testing the validity of your results for a primary outcome by comparing them with an outcome where no association ought to be found. If, however, an association is found, it may indicate that the groups studied are not actually comparable, and that the study suffers from what is typically referred to as confounding. The researchers found that men with the highest fitness levels had a 53 per cent lower risk of dying in random accidents. Yet, it is unlikely that the men’s fitness would have such a big effect on their risk of dying in random accidents.

I haven't read the underlying paper so maybe they addressed this, but: couldn't this just be because sedentary/unfit people tend to drive everywhere? So they're involved in more car accidents than healthier people, who walk places more.

Also if you're fat and don't exercise, you've got a lower chance of surviving emergency surgery after a car crash, or swimming to safety after falling in water, or dodging a knife ... I don't think it's a given that physical fitness is unrelated to surviving those things.

imcoconut · 4 months ago

I agree completely. Also definitions matter. Currently in the US one of the leading causes of death, if not the leasing cause, is opiods which the CDC classifies as “accidental overdose”. The healthiest people in the US are probably abusing opiods at lower rates and therefore less likely to die from the leading cause of “accidental death”. The study is from sweden but just pointing out that the assumption they make is flawed - “we should not expect a relationship between fitness and accidental death”.

imcoconut commented on Helen Keller on her life before self-consciousness (1908) scentofdawn.blogspot.com/... · Posted by u/ahiknsr

smeej · a year ago

I think it's central to the story that it was highly unusual. My dad couldn't believe I could do that, so it doesn't surprise me that you can't either. Many children aren't speaking clearly at 3, much less reasoning about what is likely to be in another person's mind. I do remember he reacted by growing cold, which surprised me because I thought it was a great cool new thing I had discovered. But as I said, I didn't interpret at the time. I only realized why he reacted so differently from how adult me would react to a 3-year-old today because I know so much more about him now.

I was an unusual little kid--and a girl, not a boy, though that's not terribly relevant to the story. Not really sure what else to tell you. I don't think I progressed intellectually any farther than most people do, but I did progress faster, which was especially noticeable when I was young. I have the handwritten list my mom made of the 100 words I could use correctly by my first birthday. My earliest vivid memory is of my 2nd birthday party. For all I know, I may also have been very close to turning 4 at the time this story took place, but I know my being 3 contributed to his unease, and I know I was reading at 3. It's not a brag. Being an unusual little kid (honestly I usually just say "weird") just added another perspective to the parent comment.

imcoconut · a year ago

I thought your anecdote and commentary were relevant and extremely thought-provoking.

The person you're responding to here was clearly emotionally triggered by your anecdote. I wouldn't spend too much time trying "convince" them that what you wrote is true.

imcoconut commented on Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself? · Posted by u/l2silver

imcoconut · 2 years ago

it's pretty simple but on various consulting jobs I've had to build SQL databases sometimes with lot's of tables with lot's of columns. Sometimes we switch from on prem to cloud, or vice versa or switch from postgres to sql server, etc. I have this toolkit that automates a lot of the tedious stuff. it allows me to take pandas dataframes and do the following:

- auto detect and convert column types

- save as a parquet file in a folder

- then autogenerate a sqlalchemy table/metadata file in python for all tables with sensible defaults for column types (e.g. 2x the longest string in a column for varchar)

- build the db and all tables

- load data from the files into the tables

this makes it really easy to bootstrap the entire db from a folder of parquet files for testing with sqlite and then makes it easy to move to prod on postgres/sqlserver etc. Before I go to prod i still have to add constraints and keys and indexes but that doesn't take too long. and for dev/testing the data's not too big so performance doesn't really suffer from lack of keys/constraints then we can use something like alembic on the big sqlalchemy tables definition file to do db migrations.

it's kind of like this: https://github.com/agronholm/sqlacodegen but solving an inverse problem.

basically it bootstraps the db and schemas and gets me like 95% of the way there. my quality of life is better with it.

imcoconut commented on Show HN: Customizable, embeddable Chat GPT based on your own documents libraria.dev/... · Posted by u/bealuga

imcoconut · 2 years ago

This looks awesome. I'd be super interested in testing this out and providing feedback on it. I'm going to make an account and is there an email/link to submit feedback as I use it?

imcoconut commented on Weedkiller ingredient tied to cancer found in 80% of US urine samples theguardian.com/us-news/2... · Posted by u/mindracer

user3939382 · 3 years ago

As far as I’m concerned Bayer and Monsanto are like evil incarnate and last time I brought up this lawsuit on HN I was shocked people were defending them. We’re talking about the company that intentionally sold HIV infected blood to people. If it was legal and they could increase profits by lighting people on fire they would do it. Yet people trust corrupt research that they paid for showing their product is safe.

Well their crap poison is on almost all the produce in every grocery store in the country so I guess they get the last laugh.

imcoconut · 3 years ago

>As far as I’m concerned Bayer and Monsanto are like evil incarnate

Especially so when they were a subsidiary of IG Farben.

>The company had ties in the 1920s to the liberal German People's Party and was accused by the Nazis of being an "international capitalist Jewish company".[8] A decade later, it was a Nazi Party donor and, after the Nazi takeover of Germany in 1933, a major government contractor, providing significant material for the German war effort. Throughout that decade it purged itself of its Jewish employees; the remainder left in 1938.[9] Described as "the most notorious German industrial concern during the Third Reich"[10] in the 1940s the company relied on slave labour from concentration camps, including 30,000 from Auschwitz,[11] and was involved in medical experiments on inmates at both Auschwitz and the Mauthausen concentration camp.[12][13] One of its subsidiaries supplied the poison gas, Zyklon B, that killed over one million people in gas chambers during the Holocaust.[b][15]

The Allies seized the company at the end of the war in 1945[a] and the US authorities put its directors on trial. Held from 1947 to 1948 as one of the subsequent Nuremberg trials, the IG Farben trial saw 23 IG Farben directors tried for war crimes and 13 convicted.[16]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IG_Farben

imcoconut commented on Ask HN: What's is your go to toolset for simple front end development? · Posted by u/anakaine

imcoconut · 3 years ago

Not drag and drop but for a 100% python solution h2o wave is pretty cool. It has a focus on data-based dashboards but can be used to pretty easily create very good looking frontends for all sorts of applications. And you never have to leave python (whether that's a pro or a con is up for debate :))

https://wave.h2o.ai/docs/getting-started

imcoconut commented on Python for Data Analysis, 3rd Edition wesmckinney.com/book/... · Posted by u/mariuz

civilized · 3 years ago

Still waiting for Wes to admit that the pandas API is a mess and support the development and adoption of a more dplyr-like Python library.

Pandas was a great step on the path to making Python a decent data analysis language, Wes is smarter than me, I never could have built it, but it's time to move on.

imcoconut · 3 years ago

He has been saying exactly this for many years and has lead many efforts to improve both the implementation and API via projects like arrow and pyarrow.

Also, pandas was purpose built for a pretty specific domain of financial timeseries and cross-sectional data analysis at a time when the python ecosystem was much younger and very different from today.

It's not his fault it became so wildly successful! (actually it was - it's a great piece of sofware :))

imcoconut commented on Useful Python decorators for data scientists bytepawn.com/python-decor... · Posted by u/Maro

anu7df · 3 years ago

Which ones do you suggest/recommend?

imcoconut · 3 years ago

im a big fan of loguru.

imcoconut commented on Mito – Excel-like interface for Pandas dataframes in Jupyter notebook trymito.io/... · Posted by u/alefnula

narush · 3 years ago

Mito is open source, but using Pro features does actually require a Pro or enterprise license. You can check out this callout in the license [1], as well as the restrictions on Mito Pro features here [2]. We're in the process of fixing up the upgrade to Pro process a bit... as you can tell... :)

You can of course fork Mito and turn off telemetry as long as you open source your changes! Go for it - happy to hop on a call and help you get set up with the codebase, if you want. Yay open source!

[1] https://github.com/mito-ds/monorepo/blob/974091b455950c6c50e... [2] https://github.com/mito-ds/monorepo/blob/dev/mitosheet/mitos...

imcoconut · 3 years ago

Mito looks awesome.

Just want to say that I respect the fact that you built this library, are offering it open source, for free, and want the telemetry on. You are up front and open about it.

Sometimes I think people can get a little entitled with all the work someone else puts in to a project they want to use (not accusing GP of this, speaking generally). As you said, under the license anyone is more than welcome to fork, modify and open source. Yay open source indeed :)

imcoconut commented on Electric fields, not individual neurons, may hold information in memory: study picower.mit.edu/news/neur... · Posted by u/hhs

hosh · 3 years ago

I could say a lot more about this, but this would slip into what people would consider as woo.

So without treading there, I am just going to say, I think this field-effect of neurons will lead to discoveries about field-effect of all cells, not just neurons; that consciousness is not exclusive to neurons; and how acupuncture (at a mechanical level) might work.

imcoconut · 3 years ago

I completely agree with you