nessup's comments

nessup | 6 years ago | on: Singapore to Open Source Bluetooth Contact Tracing

I’m currently working on a community-run contact tracing app in the open: https://github.com/epicollect/epi-collect

It is not a mobile app. You export your data from Google (thanks GDPR!), and filter out personally identifiable data points before submitting. We also let you know exactly who is about to use your donated data (we only allow academic researchers to have access), and give you advance notice so you can delete it if you don’t want your data to be used in a particular project.

We are MIT licensed and are figuring out how to make data donation safe via UX and engineering. We need all the help we can get - even if it’s just feedback. Feel reach out! [email protected]

nessup | 7 years ago | on: Mozilla WebThings

This is amazing. Finally Mozilla is sticking its nose into a growing market that REALLY needs their help!

I wonder how much of this will be Rust? :)

nessup | 7 years ago | on: AMP pages displaying your own domain

Does nothing for publishers' needs for deeper control and analytics. Just a "feel good" gesture that results in additional complexity for everyone involved. Google is not the only company in the world that knows how to load a page efficiently.

nessup | 8 years ago | on: Launch HN: Nutrigene (YC W18) – Tailor-made liquid supplements using health data

The people who can biohack are the ones who actually suffer from malnutrition the least. I love the experience your team brings to the table -- it is very well needed in such a shitty industry -- but please please please consider making this affordable from the get-go. Malnutrition is a self-reinforcing problem that hurts the United States' health care safety net in so many ways (the cost is obviously the biggest hot-button issue, which is why it's nearly impossible to change anything). On top of that, it's estimated there will be more 1099 contractors in the next 10 years than ever before -- meaning there will be more people who voluntarily choose to forgo health insurance than ever before. Until health care costs go down, decentralizing preventative care is needed more than ever. If you make this affordable from the get-go, you have an opportunity to make a real impact on those who are actually malnourished and have no practical way to fix that.

nessup | 8 years ago | on: Our Minds Have Been Hijacked by Our Phones

I've been following Tristan Harris's work since he released Time Well Spent. I think he has a legitimate complaint, but his proposed solutions are terrible. For example, he suggests to Facebook:

> Imagine we replace the Comment button with a Let’s Meet button. When we want to post something controversial, we can have the choice to say, “Hey let’s talk about this” in person, not online.

Why would Facebook, or any "attention seeking" Internet company for that matter, do this? You can even tell the interviewer is skeptical. If he had suggested, say, that we should take our business to consumer companies whose business models don't rely on attention grabbing, that would've at least been a start. Instead he suggests we "become more self-aware" and "transform design." Which consumers should become self-aware? Why would entrenched companies change their design? The idealism is nice and all, but so far I think this has been a wasted opportunity to fix a real problem. The messaging could be far more specific and realistic. But at least we're talking about it.

nessup | 8 years ago | on: Node 8.3.0 released

From the Medium post about speed improvements in this version:

> The size of a function, including it’s signature, the white space and even comments can affect whether the function can be inlined by V8 or not. Yes: adding a comment to your function may cause a performance hit somewhere in the range of a 10% speed reduction.

Uhh... byeee

nessup | 8 years ago | on: Show HN: DeepQuiz – free NLP question generator

This looks cool! As you probably already know, it has some ways to go. Simple English Wikipedia would have plenty of content with sentences that are easier to parse. Also, it'd be pretty cool to see general trivia quizzes autogenerated from Wikipedia using your algo.

nessup | 8 years ago | on: High refined sugar intake linked to a 23% higher risk of mental disorders

Men only. Quoting the article:

> The study found no link between sugar intake and new mood disorders in women and it is unclear why.

This, plus the fact that many socio-economic realities changed over the course of the study, makes it hard to believe there aren't other confounders at play here.

nessup | 8 years ago | on: High refined sugar intake linked to a 23% higher risk of mental disorders

While I am all for reducing sugar consumption, this one sentence lead me to completely distrust this paper:

> The study found no link between sugar intake and new mood disorders in women and it is unclear why. More research is needed to test the sugar-depression effect in large population samples.

There is literally no further comment on why this effect was not observed in women. Why? To me, this means it's possible that some confounder is at play here.

I'm also with Xeoncross (another commenter here) who observed that this study took place from 1983 to 2013. Quoting him:

> Sugar consumption has gone up, so has US inflation, less overall exercise, social media consumption, and a variety of other possible negative factors.

So you're telling me that the link was not observable in women, AND that many social/economic realities changed in the course of the study, and we're supposed to believe there was little room left for confounders? This reeks.

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