oneiftwo

I've always assumed array iteration is more expensive you don't know the size of the objects and/or they aren't contiguous.

Never in my life have I found these totally generic advice collations useful.

They're always vague, unfalsifiable, borderline platitudes. They "work" for the same reasons horoscopes work, and I think a sizable minority, if not majority, of people publishing such work are just sociopathic profiteers.

This post is an advertisement, but sadly that seems to be the origin of most content on the internet now - at least the SEO optimized results that fill the first (1-10?) pages.

Here is the first study[0] which correctly looked at the combination of HCQ with zinc sulfate ionophore, as per the original theory, which originated from a Dutch researcher who predicted the mechanism by which HCQ was shown to be in vitro effective against SARS and/or MERS. Further, this is the first study I've seen which gave the trial drugs early as recommended based on the mechanism of action.

HCQ cocktail was floating around the internet long before Trump tweeted about it and the media politicized the treatment by bending over backwards to prove Trump wrong, even at the possible expense of passing up a promising treatment.

Every single study before this linked NYU study either administered HCQ alone, and/or waited until patients were critical - but none of that stopped the smugness and eagerness with which the trials were reported on as proof that HCQ doesn't work.

If literally anyone other than Trump mentioned the drug in the public eye it would have been correctly treated as a promising avenue - but because it's even vaguely associated with Trump suddenly everyone wants to see it fail.

This HCQ fiasco is a manifestation of further anti-right bias and the fact that this behavior is not just implicitly condoned, but eagerly supported and simultaneously denied by the majority media and majority of commenters online makes it very difficult to have a presence as an independent on the internet. The bottom line is that we have a cheap, safe drug, in common use for decades, with a direct known and proven (in vitro and not in vivo) mechanism, and people are content to ignore all of this or worse, embellish the dangers and downplay the efficacy, just to stick it to Trump. The collective pettiness is unbelievable.

0. https://news.yahoo.com/zinc-hydroxychloroquine-found-effecti...

that all matter has some associated mind or consciousness, and vice versa. Where there is mind there is matter and where there is matter there is mind.

That doesn't make sense. We know that humans (and probably most if not all conscious animals, in fact sleep may be a prerequisite for consciousness) spend about a third of their lives unconscious. This assertion doesn't hold, unless you want to tell me that all these rocks are just asleep.

This is a fantastic resource. I've long lamented the difficulty of finding textbooks. Since colleges buy them back every semester to control demand, it's actually hard to find something that should be cheap and common. It's tragic.

Good to see they're at least here online, though it's also shameful that I didn't find this on Google when I searched for it a year or so ago. Tried to buy a calculus textbook to teach a friend - only overpriced latest editions by and large were available.

There are no shades of gray here. We're weighing human extinction against an economic system here. These things are not comparable. The whole point of an economy is to facilitate human existence.

Again, you don't seem to have any actual experience with risk assessment, because all risk assessment is grey. You weigh probability of outcomes and cost of outcomes and come up with a value. That's literally my point, that the you are at one end of a high dimensional extreme. That's what this entire argument boils down to.

Science is a high-d gradient descent search. You can easily get stuck chasing a local optimum, and bias and dogma like the kind that blinds your judgement can send groups of scientists in the wrong direction and, more importantly, keep them there for decades. Your exploration constant is far too low if you respond with such blind hostility to anyone with criticism. You're hindering progress and when your policy is guided by such one sidedness, that's dangerous. This doesn't just apply to climate science. We couldn't even get the nutritional pyramid right, and climate science is hard for the same reasons - non-expert mental, data and model driven and only verifiable in hindsight.

Not all scientific fields are equally rigorous. An appeal to a climatologist on the subject of climate is far weaker than an appeal to a physicist on the subject of physics because of the nature of the fields. Climate science by nature is extremely uncertain, i.e. you search the high-d space with less gradient information, and personal/institutional biases can converge to fill in those gaps nicely enough to have you trapped in a local minimum.

And idiots will continue parroting this exact line as billions of people are dying. Exactly the same way idiots are protesting social distancing, lockdowns, and mask wearing in US right now

There is no purpose to have a discussion when your thinking is so narrowly black and white. Your worldview doesn't seem to allow for the shades of grey necessitated by uncertainty.

If all skepticism was met with the same belittling as climate science, we'd still be stuck in the dark ages. Don't think it's possible for an institution of sciences to be very wrong for a very long time about a very important topic? Look at the forces that caused us to fruitlessly pursue the amyloid plaque hypothesis for decades.

Consensus has a strong normalizing effect, but that does not necessarily mean that a given consensus is correct.

Anyway I'm being rate limited by sanctimonious downvoters so this conversation is effectively over.

Edit: by the way, with respect to the lockdown controversy, did you hear about the atrocious academic modeling code that informed the lockdown policy? A single 15k line C file which, among other things, does not seed random number generation and cannot be reproduced. So bad that I just found there's an entire website dedicated to a teardown[0]! But I'm an "idiot" for showing skepticism. Do you think climate modeling code is any better? Have you worked with academic code? I have. It's universally bad. But, again, I'm an "idiot" for expressing any degree of skepticism.

0. https://lockdownsceptics.org/code-review-of-fergusons-model/

The big difference here is that the risk of climate scientists being right is that billions of people die.

That's literally an absolute worst case prediction. You cannot guide policy exclusively with worst case predictions.

We're not longer talking about hypotheticals here, we're observing these events happening right now

No, we're seeing warming and minor sea level rise right now - and even this is less certain than people would have you believe, we only recently realized for example that the mismatch between expected and current warming could be explained by the ocean acting as a heat sink. Imagine how many other similar phenomena we have yet to discover.

Physical systems tend to be nonlinear. Even a high rate of warming now does not preclude a comfortable maximum due to nonlinear restorative forces.

That's why nothing, literally nothing that we've observed to date, can significantly reduce the uncertainty regarding doomsday predictions.

Being a geoscintist does not make you a climatologist. It's amazing to me that people who are experts in one domain think that gives them the authority to talk about other domains.

I literally consume the same data. It's a sister field. We have the same problems with the exact same uncertainty because we use the same instruments for collection. My opinion is valid but that doesn't matter because anyone who take a position remotely critical of climate science can expect an immediate, vicious, purely dogmatic response.

I keep seeing this nonsense repeated, but China reported cases very early on. https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/27-04-2020-who-timeline....

The only difference was that Vietnam and Taiwan took it seriously and prioritized people's lives over the economy

It's easy to dismiss other peoples' arguments as "nonsense" when you misrepresent them. The question isn't whether China reported cases or not. It's the fact that China deliberately underreported cases and contributed to an underestimation of the pandemic by laymen and professionals alike who are too naive to understand the dishonesty typical of authoritarian regimes like the CCP. The peoples who have been dealing with China for millennia hold no such delusions.

The ability to deny facts is absolutely surreal. We're no longer talking about predictions here. We're talking about actual events that are happening around us

This is only true if you cherry pick your literature. I'll remind you our discussion is about future predictions of which only catastrophic outcomes are suitable for (one sided) discussion. The fact that some minority of models agree with current measurements does not resolve the uncertainty regarding the predictions that spawned this entire discussion.

You underestimate the complexity and chaotic nature of science. Certainty in doomsday climate predictions is hubris.

Do critics of government hold other prediction "markets" to the same standards?

You realize that modern economics is basically divination for the same reason that climate science is uncertain? Structurally the two sciences are actually similar in critical points, namely that the domains are non experimental and purely model driven. Yes, you should be extremely sceptical of any economist who tells you that he's certain about anything.

People predict sportsball outcomes. A much smaller problem domain, with far more historical data, insane audience engagement (interest), and ample expertise

You can't seriously compare the complexity of climate science with sports betting.

I'll buck the apologist trend here and mention that artists by and large are not technical people and are only concerned with the superficial pleasant appearance of pixel art, and not a faithful reproduction even assuming they were capable of understanding all of the optimization tricks that made pixel art technically beautiful.

Another example of laymen latching onto and ruining a "nice thing".

Vietnam currently has no deaths from covid-19 precisely because scientists were in charge

Vietnam was prepared because they, like Taiwan, knew from the start that China was lying and took proactive steps that western countries failed to take.

Yet, idiots who have absolutely zero understanding of this domain continue to insist that there's nothing to worry about because they read something on Facebook that one time

I'm a geoscientist. The fact that climate dogma is righteous dogma doesn't mean it isn't dogma. You claim that none of us have the qualifications to question climate change, but somehow we are equipped to call "deniers" idiots?

People who actually study the climate are the ones who have the best idea of what will happen. Period. These people are unanimously telling the rest of us that all the best available evidence suggests that horrific things will happen.

Except if you actually read an IPCC report (not the made for headlines summaries, dig in a page or two) you'll see that in reality scientists are far less certain, and all this world ending talk is literally worst case. And historic data tells us that even the most rapid historic climate changes happened over scales comparable to human lifespans.

You're essentially advocating for playing Russian roulette with our biosphere

There's a grand irony here - once again, like the reopen controversy, the people have chosen the side of the majority of "scientists" and hunkered down, shaming others with worst case threats while ignoring that mitigation is also enormously expensive and pretending that anyone questioning the lockdown is a denier. Your dogma leaves no room for shades of gray.

I'm out of room to explain for the billionth time so I'll keep it short - climate change is one of the softest of sciences because it is purely model and backtest driven. That leaves a massive gap in capabilities to be nicely filled with unquestionable dogma. The fact that those ignorant Republicans don't understand climate change doesn't mean that the learned and capable among us shouldn't be free to question the narrative.

Look at how poorly we understand nutrition - that's arguably at least as rigorous of a science as climate change yet the difference here is at least the conclusions are falsifiable. Meanwhile the food pyramid has been dangerously incorrect for decades.

You put too much faith in modern institutions.

How anyone can continue to place so much faith into dogmatic science, after the global and nearly universal failure of these same institutions to properly prepare for and handle covid, is beyond me.

This post is pure fear porn. Environmentalists have been making these same doomsday predictions since literally the 60s and deadlines continue to come and go without incident.

Look, the papers that predict what's more likely to happen aren't sexy, so they don't get read much if they're published at all. The truth is that based on all of our evidence regarding the speed of climate change in the past, if there's any change from human emissions it will be slow and take on the order of 100+ years, during which time the only measurable indicator will be an increased rate of turnover and spending for infrastructure projects, maybe a slight uptick in immigration, as we have a bigger storm or a bigger flood here and there.

That doesn't even mention the potential benefits to climate change - there's nothing that says that the earth won't potentially have more fertile land area if the permafrost thaws, for example. But such an attitude is clearly not popular among alarmists.

Google is regularly accused of leaning left and has taken open steps to curate search results and other content in an ostensibly unbiased manner, but one which may disproportionately censor right leaning sources.

This is motive for a right leaning government lead by an infamous narcissist to attempt to rein in Google's power over information.

Getting a stupid ribbon in third grade is not going to radically inform your approach to life.

It's not a single stupid ribbon. It's growing up in a society where literally every competition results in everyone winning. Predicting performance (i.e. evaluating merit) is a skill that requires development, yet when you reward everyone equally regardless of success or failure you train that skill on noise. How do you expect children to learn to recognize when people are or are not skilled when you imply that skills don't matter because everyone wins anyway? Instead you raise them to believe that skills don't matter.

What happens when these children become adults after a lifetime of being taught that everyone is a winner, regardless of performance? Cognitive dissonance and a sense of entitlement, because there will always be true winners and losers in a world of scarce resources.

Children need to experience failure. Just like they need to experience pain and a multitude of other negative emotions that our modern society increasingly attempts to shield them from. Otherwise you raise a generation of childminded adults who fail to differentiate between charisma and merit, and all of society suffers.

which is the general level of mediocrity, even at the top levels of academia

This is not unique to academia. Our entire society has gradually degenerated over the last few decades for a number of constructively interfering reasons:

1. We told two+ generations of children that everyone was capable of anything, gave them all awards after every "competition", and that kind of upbringing makes it difficult to recognize merit.

2. We've lowered the bar for standards across education, in an attempt to bring our lowest up, failing to realize that the primary result was bringing our best down. That hurts merit at professional levels especially, where the pipeline effectively shrinks.

3. Our media has regressed to the lowest common denominator. The most popular sources of influence in our society are uncredentialed hacks who spread misinformation ("Dr." Phil, "Dr." Oz, Oprah, etc). Even our official "news" sources are primarily entertainment venues and are fully editorialized. This makes it extremely difficult for the average person to recognize merit.

It's like our entire culture has been consumed by charisma, such that incompetence permeates every sector of our economy and society. Things were too easy for too long, and now we face a reckoning - either we fix things or our nation collapses. There's no room for popularity contests, crony capitalism, or diversity initiatives during times of crisis.

Edit: what about this comment is deserving of being flagged?

Everything remotely related to adware is just gross. It's hard to believe that after 10 years of this nothing has changed and the tricks are as dirty as ever. Totally unethical industry and I can't wait for the bubble to collapse.

it’s essential that mainstream journalistic institutions reaffirm their bona fides as disinterested purveyors of fact and honest brokers of controversy

This hasn't been true for decades. Almost all modern mainstream journalism is activist journalism. I think it's been normalized to the point that even journalists are unaware of their institutional bias.

It's tragic to see how Music TeleVision was destroyed by vapid commercialization. A cultural icon was forced to blandify all of its content to appeal to the most common denominator and switch completely to totally unrelated genres in pursuit of viewership.

A microcosm of the decay of our culture. It's hard to have any kind of vibrance in a socioeconomic system which optimizes for efficiency and growth if the actors are not operating in good faith. No one seems to care about brands or images or building companies anymore - everything is purely margin driven and I blame MBA style thinking for eroding American culture and replacing it with conglomeritic corporate standins.

There was a comprehensive literature review posted on /r/coronavirus some two months ago that strong (and statistically robust in my opinion as a professional data scientist) indicating that smokers were less likely to be infected with the virus, with possible mechanisms from previous viruses like SARS and MERS.

In fact that was one of the earliest common sources to mention ACE2 receptors. A month or so later there is at least one study looking at nicotine patches as prophylactic and/or treatment for covid. I'm having trouble finding the reddit thread, standby.

What special knowledge do you think you need to interpret 5 months of COVID studies? That's almost two semesters of grad school.

You don't need a PhD to gain enough knowledge of covid from literature to speculate meaningfully on an internet forum, especially if you already have a graduate degree and practice research, as many people undoubtedly on HN do.

I absolutely agree with this sentiment. It's why I had difficulty reading "how to win friends and influence people" despite how frequently and casually lauded it is.

It's literally an instruction manual for using indirect methods of communication and influence to get people to do what you want. It's practically adtech for the self.

Ignoring the dangers of having charismatic power over people, I don't know under what circumstances it is ethical to manipulate someone, and I certainly wouldn't brag openly about it.

My best guess is that in the United States especially, it's a combination economic/socitial factors and vitamin D deficiency that's making the virus have higher mortality in populations of racial minorities with darker skin

African American communities are hardest hit because of genetic and especially cultural practices which predispose them toward obesity, high blood pressure, heart disease, etc. Further, let's not pretend that African American communities have the same level of respect for authority (i.e. following recommendations/orders) as other groups (though to some degree that disdain may be justified, but that's another discussion).

I expect we will see gradual conversion of roads to be more amenable to autonomous driving - barriers for pedestrians, special markings, etc - and autonomous zones will become more and more commonplace.

On the other hand I think with the collapse of the economy and skyrocketing unemployment, the price for a human driver may plummet. Remains to be seen if the increased demand in deliveries is enough to offset the voids left in the rest of the economy.

This is similar to the price of water. Yes water is essential but it is readily available and so the price is low. Same for many essential jobs. Turns out a lot of the work necessary to keep civilization ticking is menial and requires no specialization. This is not a statement of the value of the workers (though indirectly it unfortunately often is), only the work they they provide.

Have you ever actually had to hire someone to do something nontrivial?

Statistically speaking, hiring good help is difficult. Hiring good help repeatedly is a skill. Building an entire business in an unfamiliar domain is certainly easier with inherited money, but still requires rare talent. Which is why as another poster pointed out, the 1% has a 50% generational turnover.

Not all work is equally valuable. Not all work is equally doable. Some work requires decades patience and sacrifice before one is competent enough to perform it. Some work is physically or cognitively beyond the vast majority of the population.

It doesn't make sense to expect all jobs to have all the same benefits and privelegdes. Even if we pretend that all humans are fundamentally equal in ability, inequality will always exist, so long as humans are free to make choices in a world of finite resources and time.

Moreso, inequality is not intrinsically bad, for it is a great motivator for the kind of innovation that raises the common floor, which is the more important measure.

If you're able to eat, drink, and shelter during a global pandemic, while your entire country is on lockdown, and your economy has crawled to a standstill, then you're in a pretty good place.