Expez

The article doesn't cover this, but it's worth pointing out why the study asks this particular question. With a single-payer system the Nordic countries want to know what the ROI is if we sent letters out to everyone above a certain age offering a free colonoscopy. The study is well-designed to answer that question.

The study does a poor job of helping an individual asking a similar but different question: Is it worthwhile for me to pay out of pocket for a colonoscopy?

The latter question is very important in a system that isn't single-payer and so this has sparked a lot of debate in e.g the US.

The article says it will "diffuse away" which implies they just let it escape the device. It'll then move through the tissue / fluids, reach the blood and eventually be breathed out. I did a quick google search to see if we already had some level of hydrogen gas in our body.

It seems that bacteria in the human gut already produce some hydrogen gas and that breath contains measurable levels of it[0]. This was news to me, but means that dumping a tiny amount of H2 into the body is probably fine.

[0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00216-013-7606-6

One of the four parties in the ruling coalition has rural voters as their main constituency. This weirdness might be the result of them negotiating to keep the cost of driving a tractor around low. I'm not sure what they are doing on the local roads, but I see them a lot when driving outside the city.

How come they can lose more money than they raised?

The difference is debt they've taken on.

In his book Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi dives a bit deeper into what sort of "problems" we should choose for yourself if we want a happy life. The gist of it is that we should pick activities that we can loose ourselves in. Everyone's experienced this, where they work on something, look at the watch, and a surprising amount of time has passed. A few examples of good "problems": learning an instrument, coding something or learning a sport.

I highly recommend reading the book, as he goes into the key features that get us into the pleasant flow state, so you know what variables to tweak if you can't get there.

This is a good point.

In practice people (e.g. exchanges, that know who you are after KYC) still opt to wait a little because if something does go wrong it's a hassle to actually get paid. For the same reason, we are likely to check some of the bills in a large cash payment for authenticity, even though we have effective recourse through the police and the judicial system.

The block time is 2 minutes. You can choose to wait for 0 blocks or 100. The longer you wait the better the security of your transaction, because there's more PoW behind it. All crypto work like this. You also get more security behind your tx by waiting in a PoS system.

If you're buying a coffee the vendor is likely to let you leave the shop after no confirmations (as soon as their node hears about the transaction) but if you're buying a car the same is unlikely to be true.

CIDER, which the author of this blogpost maintains, has support for such metadata, under the style/indent key. The hope, when it was created, was that more editors would adopt this, but after years it's not caught on.

I use it extensively and it's both easy to use and super flexible (for the rare cases when you do need that).

Here's a link to the indent spec, if you want to read more: https://docs.cider.mx/cider/indent_spec.html

Get one of the apps with a sleep timer :)

The post has a good quote from Bill Murray:

I always want to say to people who want to be rich and famous: ‘try being rich first.’ See if that doesn’t cover most of it. There’s not much downside to being rich, other than paying taxes and having your relatives ask you for money. But when you become famous, you end up with a 24-hour job. . . . The only good thing about fame is that I’ve gotten out of a couple of speeding tickets. I’ve gotten into a restaurant when I didn’t have a suit and tie on. That’s really about it.

Scientists also developed a way of "carbon dating" mutations. They showed that more than a fifth of them occurred years or even decades before a cancer is found.

He added: "Unlocking these patterns means it should now be possible to develop new diagnostic tests, that pick up signs of cancer much earlier."

The journalist probably pressed this last point, because it can't possibly be true in a practical sense. Even if you can detect these changes early on in cells, we can't possibly test every cell in the body for mutations on e.g. a yearly basis, right?

I just listened to the book Bad Pharma, by Ben Goldacre, which deals with this problem. The author works as a doctor and so has a bit of an inside view of how the industry does 'science' and how this affects doctors and patients.

The lack of published negative results isn't a problem unique to pharma but the drive for profits and the actual life and death outcomes makes it particular severe in this area of science, I think.

I highly recommend the book, it was both hilarious and terrifying.

Guarding a refinery is at least doable in principle, but most oil is transported there by way of a pipeline. Guarding miles and miles of pipes in the middle of nowhere is going to be prohibitively expensive.

The Trans-Arabian pipeline for example is a whopping 1214 km (754 mi) long[0]!

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Arabian_Pipeline

Here's the paper itself, freely available for once, if anyone else wants to take a deeper dive:

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.190327

No, it's cash in and cash out. That's the entire point of an ETF, that it's very easy to buy and sell yet still tracking something complex.

Imagine if you'd invested in the Russel 3000 index, which aims at tracking the entire US stock market. If the ETF manager transferred the securities as you exited you'd now have to manually sell 3000 securities across many markets. The ETF has tools and processes for this, you don't. You pay them a fee for the convenience of not having to deal with the underlying assets.

Another example would be something like the iShares gold or iShares silver ETF. They hold precious metals in a secure vault on your behalf, for a fee. You probably don't want a delivery from an armored truck every time you exit the ETF! :)

I think this is bullshit. It seems completely unrealistic to get everyone to reduce their meat consumption and cut down on e.g. holidays abroad.

I think it's much realistic to have people pay for their own negative externalities and use that money to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere. It should be the role of the government to tax all the shit we want less of, and use the revenue to remedy the situation.

In Norway the average person apparently has a carbon footprint of 9.27 tons per year. I'm carbon positive now after paying my way out, through the help of a local startup [0]. It's not that expensive, but it should be baked into the price of everything to drive changes in spending patterns.

An alternative would be to pay for reforestation. Off-setting 10 tons of carbon costs less than $100 per year [1].

Once we run out the incredibly low-hanging fruit (like paying to have coal plants shut down) and replacing forests that we previously cut down, we can start investigating more expensive technology.

[0] https://chooose.today/

[1] https://www.carbonfootprint.com/offset.aspx?o=10

Is anyone working on putting these ideas into a working product?

I'm taking guitar lessons over Skype and for the most part it works just fine. However, every once in a while we have to resort to recording and sending snippets over the wire to get the required fidelity. With digital amp simulators this is thankfully a trivial exercise, but it would be great to do without.

I've looked for other alternatives, but couldn't really find any that fit the bill. The last thing I looked at was a few Audio over IP products, but all of them were designed to be run on a LAN.

In-house product development of a SaaS platform. You can check out it out at ardoq.com.

The company is imo a great place to work, but this is also in Norway where it's pretty common for people (usually older ones, though) to work 80 or 60%. That probably made this a lot more likely to happen.

I'll add that there was some fear that everyone else would want the same arrangement and that we'd suddenly only have devs working part time, but nobody else has expressed any interest in this. Different strokes for different folks...

I work 60% now. Instead of having two days off each week I've opted to work 4.5h each day. I can only focus intensely for about 4h each day on coding, so this works out well.

It's always been this way for me and to get to 8 hours I'd go through the logs each day (important, but not taxing at all and something better left to an intern most of the time) and attend much more meetings (low intensity but 90% of them were completely pointless) as well as take more breaks for stuff like hn.

I'd guess that I'm producing about 90% of the value I used to, but putting in way less hours. This isn't a bad deal for my employer, I think.

The pay cut kind of sucks, but I'm still making the national median salary because developers are paid so generously.

A lot of people opt to take whole days off, when they work less hours, but I find this arrangement works much better for me. It gives me more time for hobbies, friends and family, working out, eating healthy etc in the day-to-day.

I recently finished Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker and this exact point was made in that book. I'll paraphrase a salient quote from the book: poverty is the greatest polluter.

Intuitively this makes great sense: when you're eking out a subsistence living you're not going to care about the environment, but when resources are plenty you can afford to consider other living things too.

Imagine a company has 100 shares and for argument's sake let's assume that company is never going to turn a profit but break even forever.

What would you pay for one of those shares? Nothing, right? The company is worthless.

Now imagine that same company has a bank balance of $100. Each share now also owns a 1% share of the bank balance (because it owns 1% of the company itself). How much would you pay for such a share? Anything below a dollar seems pretty good to me!

In other words, the more valuable assets the company holds, the more we'd be willing to pay for shares of the company, all else equal. This is called the 'book value' of a company and is total assets - intangible assets (patents, goodwill) and liabilities.

Note that the real-life situation is slightly more complex because you can't always get at the assets, even if you buy the shares for cents on the dollar. But the general idea is that you can buy shares until you have enough voting rights to dole out the cash as dividends.

Yes, it's only captured until the tree dies. After that the tree rots etc and carbon is released again.

The clue to net carbon capture is to plant new forests and make sure the forest stays alive. While the forest lives, all the CO2 is safely sequestered.

I haven't seen this fact mentioned in this thread yet, but it's super important: This stack of money doesn't belong to any one generation. It's set aside for all future generations to enjoy.

Each year the government can choose to pull some of the money in to the current budget, but by law[0] they can't pull in more than 3%. This is the fund's estimated sustainable yearly return (It was adjusted down from 4% in 2017).

Some posters in this thread seem to think that this is all going to get spent on covering too-generous promises of pensions (yes we have those too!), but that isn't going to happen. It would be a travesty to rob Peter to pay Paul even if Peter hasn't been born yet. Everyone here generally agree on this.

[0] https://www.statsbudsjettet.no/Statsbudsjettet-2019/Statsbud...

Really lazy reporting. We need the total to know how much $2B really matters to Broadcom.

Putting the math on this here for everyone else:

Huawei accounted for about $900 million, or 4%, of the company’s overall sales last year. Broadcom, however, also said the forecast cut “extends beyond one particular customer.”

So total sales were 22.5B and a 2B hit is indeed pretty bad!

There's so much talk about the growing inequality that I tried to find out what would happen if the rich were mobbed and all the money redistributed.

According to [0] there were 73,110 ultra wealthy US citizens in 2017, i.e. individuals with more than $30m in net worth. The same article says that the average net worth in this group is $120m.

In aggregate this group thus controls 120m * 77 110 = 9.3 trillion dollars.

Since there are around 330m people living in the US this would amount to only a little over 28k per person when redistributed.

[0] http://money.com/money/4833875/ultra-wealthy-americans-milli...

Wonder if Hydro in turn will file criminal charges. They bought the business unit at fault here in 2000[1]. Surely they could hold someone accountable for fraud that way? They thought they bought a business capable of producing quality parts, but didn't end up getting that.

Like the other posters in this thread I feel like the $46m fine shouldn't be the end of this.

[1] https://www.hydro.com/no-NO/media/news/2019/hydro-reaches-ag...

If the extra cost is labor it's fine, but not if it's material cost. People have been know to melt down coins and sell the metal when the intrinsic value of the coin exceeds its face value. This practice is illegal most places, but avoiding the situation altogether is probably better!

It's when you send cryptocurrency to an address nobody has the keys to, or that is the cryptographic equivalent of a black hole (provably inaccessible).

The problem GP is addressing is that the regulators aren't really incentivized to make the bad behavior stop because they are collecting revenue by letting it continue.

What you're describing here is really what Ericsson refers to when he talks about 'deliberate practice' (from the 10 000 hours meme). You correctly recognized that instead of doing more laps some of your time was better spent on deep analysis.

If we stick with the racing analogy I think what the article talks about is that you would've seen solid gains if you had tried to run a single lap perfectly, stopped, stayed in your car, and just relaxed while your subconscious got some time to process everything that just happened, without your bombarding it with new information. If you were to follow the instructions to the letter you'd hang out for a time equivalent to your lap time, but they left it as an open question if this mechanic scales beyond the 10s repetitions used in the study.

I hope they do more of the studies because the required time of rest could plausibly scale in different ways:

1. Your subconscious can only remember so much stuff to replay and learn from while resting so a break beyond X isn't beneficial.

2. The rest time needed is linear with the stimulus.

3. Long action sequences are such a rich source that the subconscious can mine them for a long time. Beneficial rest time scales exponentially.

TL;DR quote from the article:

Why do parents continue helping children into their early twenties or beyond? It seems to be, largely, because they can.

Who said trickle-down economics doesn't work? :trollface: