jmoss20 (u/jmoss20) - Readit News

jmoss20 commented on Eight Feet Jolted a $180M Real Estate Deal nytimes.com/interactive/2... · Posted by u/jbredeche

noah91734 · 2 years ago

> Ensuring some minimal level of architectural consistency on a dense city block is a good thing.

Check zillow. Of the 32 units for rent in Brooklyn Heights, the cheapest is a tiny $2,600/month studio. The median rent is $4,500/month, and that's for an apartment with one bedroom and one bathroom.

No, I don't think allowing a 200 year old private rule to reduce living space in an age of incredible housing scarcity is good. I could not care less about your architectural consistency when it is part of the reason why people are sleeping on the streets and others are paying most of their income on rent.

jmoss20 · 2 years ago

"sleeping on the streets" and "living in Brooklyn Heights" are hardly the only two options here.

jmoss20 commented on Tips for linking shell companies to their secret owners gijn.org/stories/tracking... · Posted by u/chippy

kmod · 2 years ago

I think it's fascinating that when the topic is "shell companies" that the HN discourse is essentially "if they have nothing to hide then they don't need secrecy". I think that if the article were about linking "tor users" with their secret owners then we would see the opposite stance being taken.

I'm not taking a position here, and I'm not saying even that these stances are necessarily contradictory, but just that the blanket argument "X shouldn't get to be secret because I don't think they have a legitimate reason" doesn't differentiate between these two cases.

jmoss20 · 2 years ago

To be fair, I don't think the rationale is really "if they have nothing to hide...". More something having to do with whether privacy is something that should come along with the legal arrangement of, say, an LLC.

> just that the blanket argument "X shouldn't get to be secret because I don't think they have a legitimate reason" doesn't differentiate between these two cases.

Not only these cases -- that argument won't differentiate between any cases ;-).

Better I think to make sure we really understand the arguments being made. Good chance the real argument isn't quite _that_ bad.

jmoss20 commented on Against learning from dramatic events astralcodexten.com/p/agai... · Posted by u/feross

d_burfoot · 2 years ago

> I did fake Bayesian math with some plausible numbers

This is actually a great example of the deepest and most intractable issue with the Bayesian viewpoint: different observers with different priors can come to radically different conclusions, even if both did the math correctly. One can easily compose priors under which the jump in P(Lab-Leak) is much greater than the 20 - 27.5% jump Scott mentioned. And there's no principled way to argue that one prior is better than another, especially in cases like this, where there's no good reference class.

(update: I think this is a great essay and I strongly agree with the overall point)

jmoss20 · 2 years ago

It's only a problem if you want to use Bayes to take some credences + evidence and prove them irrational (indep. of prior).

Bayes is great for verifying self-consistency: given some priors and some evidence, it produces exactly one set of credences. If you've somehow got a different set, you've gone wrong somewhere (and can be Dutch-booked).

What it won't give you is a full theory of rationality--but IMO this is not a problem with Bayes in particular. No theory will. There /must/ always be some free variable that prevents landing at exactly one set of credences. All theories that disagree come with very strange (and not very believable) implications.

jmoss20 commented on United finds loose bolts on plug doors during 737 Max 9 inspections theaircurrent.com/feed/di... · Posted by u/etimberg

spike021 · 2 years ago

I know of a pretty famous car tuner in the US (I won't get too specific for various reasons) and despite most people in my community going to him for service over the years, multiple people have come out and proved he rarely if ever torques anything to spec. For the longest time he even allowed customers to watch in the shop space as he worked on their cars and he'd hand-torque many things that the car manual was very clear needed to be specifically torqued for safety and operational reasons.

The fact that people would share this and it didn't curb the amount of business and referrals he got just proved to me what you've said for the longest time.

People don't like to be troubled with details and they'd rather be ignorant of them.

jmoss20 · 2 years ago

I imagine at least part of this is that specs (and documentation generally) just suck now. It's nigh impossible to sort out which bits are CYA legalese, and which bits are "no, actually, do this or else <terrible outcome>".

That obviously isn't the problem with airplane manufacturing, and maybe not for car mechanics either. But it's totally endemic in the consumer world.

"Do not operate while driving" on car HUDs. "Do not consume if pregnant" on perfectly safe OTC medications. "Do not continue to ride after a crash" on bike frames.

It's not surprising most of this is just ignored now -- there's no information content. The documentation is nothing more than a list of things for which the manufacturer would like not to be liable, and the marginal cost of adding to that list is ~0. It will grow until we run out of room in the manual / space on the packaging.

"Store between 68 and 75 F." Or what? Is that a "must follow or else death", or a "it may reduce efficacy 0.5%" or a "we've never run a sufficiently powerful study under any other conditions, but there's no theoretical reason it should matter"? It matters quite a bit to me which!

I don't see how we can hope to have good-faith communication under such a heavy threat of litigation. I would not be surprised if /that/ turns out to be relevant to the Boeing issue, even if the rest is unrelated.

jmoss20 commented on Four Kinds of Optimisation tratt.net/laurie/blog/202... · Posted by u/ltratt

mejutoco · 2 years ago

I am happy (good) science does not take the "is obvious" claim as sufficient, and instead focuses on proving things with objective facts.

I am not saying these cannot be plain to see in the code, but the best standard IMO is still to measure before and after the optimization. IMHO, again, you can skip that step, but then other people might rightfully ask you what proof you have that the optimization is faster (I would).

jmoss20 · 2 years ago

It's a matter of economy-- if you spent all day measuring obvious things you'd never get anything done.

Clearly which things you choose to measure should be a function of how certain you are about them, and how much you stand to lose if you get them wrong.

jmoss20 commented on Four Kinds of Optimisation tratt.net/laurie/blog/202... · Posted by u/ltratt

lmm · 2 years ago

Anything that can't be objectively measured will inherently be controversial. You claim you can see poor locality via code inspection; will other people who inspect the same code reach the same conclusions? Why should we believe you rather than anyone else?

jmoss20 · 2 years ago

Agreed with the general point, but it doesn't apply here. Memory locality can be objectively measured (e.g. with last level cache miss counters), and parent comment is correct besides -- it's usually plain to see in the code.

There are mysterious boogiemen in performance optimization, but this isn't really one of them.

jmoss20 commented on Detroit wants to be the first big American city to tax land value economist.com/united-stat... · Posted by u/lxm

saxonww · 2 years ago

Someone created the improvements on it, though. Which is most of what you're paying for when you buy or rent a place to live.

This isn't going to change much about landlords. If anything, it will increase the amount of housing rented through landlords, because the land value tax will make it uneconomical for more people to own their own homes. In a high value area, the only people who would be able to do so are the very rich.

jmoss20 · 2 years ago

The problem is exactly that the improvements are not most of what you're paying for, at least in many locales where this sort of policy would make a difference.

jmoss20 commented on Schools for children of military achieve results rarely seen in public education nytimes.com/2023/10/10/us... · Posted by u/LastNevadan

eYrKEC2 · 2 years ago

If you cut off the lower tail of an IQ curve, no matter how little, you've just raised the average IQ of everyone remaining.

If they're in that low IQ tail and they go through the hoops for a waiver, you've just selected for a modicum of conscientiousness.

jmoss20 · 2 years ago

How certain are you that the upper tail is not impacted just as much, if not more?

jmoss20 commented on Schools for children of military achieve results rarely seen in public education nytimes.com/2023/10/10/us... · Posted by u/LastNevadan

Spinnaker_ · 2 years ago

There are many schools where over 70% of kids live in single parents households. I'm sure you have bad stories, but it's not comparable overall.

jmoss20 · 2 years ago

The claim here is that the military families are /so much more stable/ that it explains their kids (collectively) performing better than every other state in the country.

Obviously the military provides some sort of economic lower bound. But it also applies a pretty harsh upper bound, and has all sorts of other effects that you would expect to push the mean down.

jmoss20 commented on Schools for children of military achieve results rarely seen in public education nytimes.com/2023/10/10/us... · Posted by u/LastNevadan

red-iron-pine · 2 years ago

> I'd suggest taking a look at what the military pays before you make the claim no poor....All the kids will be well fed

to this point, there are a lot of military families on food stamps.

plenty of hillbillys and hoodrats. plenty of bad areas near military bases, too.

but living on base or around base leads to a pretty strong monoculture. you also have a motivated cadre of military spouses -- who are often nurses and teachers -- and who often have to work hard to get jobs at a local school or hospital. you often get qualified teachers and nurses far exceeding the level you'd normally find in the rural areas near bases.

jmoss20 · 2 years ago

Yes, in my experience rural areas around bases tend to be more well-off than rural areas not around bases -- the base stimulates the local economy quite a bit, if nothing else. (Otoh, the revolving door population is not great for stability.)

But FWIW I do not think the effect is even close to strong enough to explain the results in the article.