quantgenius

Stealth is somewhat overrated, especially 5th gen. Sure you get a lower radar cross-section which means you are less visible to X-band radar but near-peer adversaries or even non-peer technologically advanced adversaries don't rely only on X-band radar, to say nothing of distributed array radar where the transmitter and receiver are not in the same location. More than one networked war plane in the air are essentially distributed array radar. There are other bands which admittedly as not as good as X-band in terms of how much energy you need and how accurately you can locate things. But you can send a missile in the general direction using say S-band and have the missile turn on it's seeker once it's closer. Once the missile is close enough, a stealth plan can no longer hide. This is what the Russian S-400 and S-500 do for example.

Even when Serbia was bombed during the Clinton years, American stealth bombers escaped not due to stealth but because they used decoys towed by fiber optics which transmitted what the missile seeker expected to receive from the plane while also aggressively jamming the missile seeker so the missile hit the decoy not the plane. One stealth bomber was hit anyway.

Safran and other European manufacturers arguably produce decoys that are as good as anything US planes have, arguably better because they decided not to go all in on stealth and focus on other measures instead. Stealth is certainly better to have than not but stealth also means somewhat worse aerodynamics and much less serviceability. You need to apply stealth paint and cure it any time you work on the plane. The plane needs more work and is harder to work on because of the tradeoffs made to achieve stealth. So instead of 75%+ of the planes being available at any one time, you only have about 50% of the planes available at any one time and total operational costs are much higher.

Given these disadvantages, it's not completely clear how much of a benefit 5th gen stealth is in a near-peer conflict. If the US is fighting Iraq fine. Now, if you can actually achieve what defense manufacturers say they will achieve with 6th gen stealth, where you have much lower RCS to all bands of radar from all directions, that could be a game changer but we don't actually know yet. The F-35 still doesn't do everything it was supposed to be able to do when the program started, so I would take these claims with a large grain of salt. And stealth countermeasures will continue to evolve.

I don't know the situation at MIT in particular but overall creating some budgetary pressures for universities is probably a good thing. Every since it became near impossible to discharge student debt due to legislation in the Bush presidency that was designed to make student loans more easily available, the money spigot has been opened far too wide and this is largely funded by debt taken on by 18 year olds who aren't particularly good at making decisions. The result has been a massive amount or real-estate acquisition and a crazy growth in the administrative staff. I recently saw a Brown undergraduate talk about how they pay 90K a year because they have one administrative non-teaching staff for every two undergraduates. I went to the college directory of my own college and was amazed at the number of administrative staff relative to teaching staff. It was absolutely nothing like this in the late 90s. And the teaching itself is being eviscerated with adjunct professors and grad students being asked to do teaching and getting paid next to nothing. And you have universities complaining about how they don't have enough funding for research and they need MOOAAR. Like many government interventions, no matter how well intentioned, the Bush era legislation has led to much bigger problems existed then. It think it's a great that universities are being forced to tighten their belts and I hope this continues for at least a few years until some sanity prevails again in US higher education. Making student debt, particularly that taken on by 18 year olds who graduated with something like an English literature degree would do a lot to rectify the problems that have been created.

The idea that simply having a lot of parameters leads to overfitting was shown to not be the case over 30 years ago by Vapnik et al. He proved that a large number of parameters is fine so long as you regularize enough. This is why Support Vector Machines work and I believe has a lot to do with why deep NNs work.

The issue with Vapnik's work is that it's pretty dense and actually figuring out the Vapnik-Chervonekis (VC) dimension etc is pretty complicated, and one can develop pretty good intuition once you understand the stuff without having to actually calculate, so most people don't take the time to do the calculation. And frankly, a lot of the time, you don't need to.

There may be something I'm missing completely, but to me the fact that models continue to generalize with a huge number of parameters is not all that surprising given how much we regularize when we fit NNs. A lot of the surprise comes from the fact that people in mathematical statistics and people who do neural networks (computer scientists) don't talk to each other as much as they should.

Strongly recommend the book Statistical Learning Theory by Vapnik for more on this.

Nope. Abuse should never be accepted. The right solution for actual abuse of a policy like this as opposed to an error is to immediately fire the person conducting the abuse. The inability or unwillingness to make decisions like this fast is the root cause of a lot of nonsense that goes on at businesses.

If it's an error, you correct and accept errors as the cost of doing business.

A good strategy would be to have them be a lead on a minor project that requires technical chops and communication. Ensure there is a daily standup and grind them on details and timelines. Get them some juniors as direct reports to expose their lack of knowledge, then have meetings with these junior devs about project performance.

Do not do this. You do not need a “strategy”. Just do it! Rip off the band-aid. Either tell them the truth or give no reason even if asked. Reverse the mistake asap and get moving on your company’s mission. You don’t need one second more of this. Nor does anyone else at your organization. Do it today! Do it dispassionately. Do it as nicely as possible. You are going to feel bad because you are a good empathetic human.

Some people will have a reaction. Some people will “have a reaction” to try to get more out of you. You are not responsible for either. You are responsible only for your own actions. Figure out what you should give them to be fair and add a little extra so you are sure it isn’t unfair.

Plan what you will say and do in advance and have someone you trust with you in the meeting. Stick to your plan. Even the best hiring processes succeed only 50% of the time (though this goes beyond just a bad hire). Firing, and firing quickly is just as important as hiring well.

Also remember that if an applicant tailors to a hiring process to this extent, that’s not just a failure of the process. It’s dishonesty. Even if the applicant were competent, you absolutely don’t want to entertain someone dishonest in your company.

Has anyone tried Mikrotik routers? The one I tried a while ago was fantastic.

If you enjoy writing and love writing with a Vanishing Point, this is a question that is very, very dangerous for your pocketbook. :-)

Kakunos are awesome. Really good nibs. Awesome value for money.

You do need to cap fountain pens because the inks are water based.

If you need to take quick notes and drying out is a problem because the pens are uncapped and capped a lot, get a Lamy 2000, vintage (not new) Parker 51 or a Pilot Vanishing Point. The first two have slip caps and hooded nibs so cap and uncap really quickly and don't dry out due to the hooded nib. The Vanishing Point also has a hooded nib but you click it like a ballpoint pen to expose and hide the nib. Also don't use quick drying inks.

If drying out is a problem because you don't write frequently enough, there are two solutions. Solution 1: Buy a Platinum (Preppy for low end, or 3776 higher end). It has a really good cap. Both will take a long time to dry out. Or even better, write more frequently.

It's extremely rare to get a nib that isn't tuned pretty much perfectly if you buy a brand new pen made by one of the Japanese big 3, Pilot, Platinum and Sailor from an actual fountain pen retailer (online or brick and mortar). I've never gotten a remotely bad nib from any of those nor have I heard of someone getting a remotely bad nib from one of them.

If you buy from eBay or used elsewhere or for that matter Amazon, you do sometimes get a bad nib because someone has tried to tune one of these nibs and botched it and then decided to try and sell the pen new.

The Pilot Metropolitans sold in Europe use standard international cartridges. The ones used in the US use proprietary Pilot cartridges.

I haven't had this experience with TWSBI. They used to have somewhat more finicky nibs before they switched to using Jowo nibs. I've found the nibs on TWSBI pens to generally be pretty well adjusted Jowo nibs. They aren't the same level of quality control as Japanese brands but are probably better than any European brand.

Plus they have a really good lifetime warranty. If your nib has issues, call them. They will probably send you a replacement.

While I love many Noodler's inks and have many bottles from him too, while this used to be the case, this hasn't been my experience recently. In my experience the inconsistency has if anything gotten worse recently. Worse, the bottle will sometimes contain ink that is different from the label.

I recently bought a bottle of Noodler's Navy to replace a bottle I actually emptied that was bought maybe 5-6 years ago. The ink inside the bottle was almost certainly Noodler's Aircorp Blue Black, which I also have.

In my experience, and based on anecdata from friends who also use fountain pens, Noodler's inconsistency and quality control issues have gotten MUCH worse in the past 2-3 years.

I haven't had any trouble with TWSBI's bought in the last 2-3 years. Besides they have a crazy good lifetime warranty. I've had a pen stepped on, emailed them and told them so and they shipped a replacement barrel to me for shipping cost. Ditto a replacement wrench that I lost.

Love my Pelikans. But the M800 and M1000 retail for more than double the most expensive pen on my list. They are awesome but not necessarily a better writing experience than the pens on the list.

Still, they mostly didn't make the list because while Pelikans are awesome, their nib quality control isn't what one would hope it was. In addition, you don't really know what you are getting in terms of nib size. I've bought Pelikan extra fines that make a wider line than Pelikan mediums.

If you know how to tune nibs or you budget and extra 50 dollars for a nibmeister to get it the way you like, or you buy from a retail store where you try the pen out first and know what to look for great. I suspect most here will buy online and won't necessarily know what makes for a problematic nib and how they want it to work.

Totally agree. Properly restored vintage pens are absolutely awesome. You don't have to go as high end as a vintage Parker 51. Try an Esterbrook. They were the BIC of their day and are amazing.

Very important warning regarding Parker 51s or any modern Parker. Do not buy the modern Parker 51!! The brand Parker is now owned by a company that is choosing to take advantage of people who remember the Parker brand and foisting total garbage on them.

Traditionally, you are supposed to write with less pressure and even hold the pen with less pressure. Once you teach yourself to do this, it is much less tiring than writing with a ball point pen. I write a lot. It's how I think. I'm orders of magnitude better at thinking when I use a pen and paper to jot and doodle than when I do not.

I also find that writing to take notes is much better than notes taken electronically. You can't write fast enough to transcribe. So you are forced to pay attention, process the information, compress it into nuggets (that may only make sense to you) and write those down. The notes aren't the point. The process means you retain more and understand better. If I wanted a transcription (which is certainly easier with electronic methods), I'd simply record.

I injured my wrist and hand a few years ago and simply would not be able to write as much as I do if I had to use a ball point pen.

Give fountain pens another try. A lot of the things that make them "impractical" is only an issue with bottom of the barrel, cheap pens.

This list is certainly not classic fountain pens. They are mostly machined pens made by small batch producers with generic nibs and two with somewhat "different" nibs I wouldn't normally suggest most people get. These are pretty good pens but not what I would get as a first pen.

Here are the pens I would suggest you consider if you don't know a lot about fountain pens. If you are a fountain pen collector, I'm mostly ignoring a number of European brands who make great pens but have nib quality control from hell which are fine if you know fountain pens and how to adjust nibs etc but not if you are a beginner.

Budget under 40 bucks:

1) Lamy Safari: The grip section is triangular to support the traditional writing grip. It's one of the choices middle schoolers are require to use in certain European countries. If you have a traditional grip and don't have huge hands you will likely like it. If you don't, stay away. Lamy sometimes has quality control issues on it's inexpensive nibs but not as many as other European brands in my experience.

2) Pilot Metropolitan: Pilot has a reputation of really good quality control on what are very high quality nibs. The 20 dollar Pilot Metropolitan is no exception. Amazing writing experience for the money. Probably the best steel nibs you can buy. Competitive with many pens that cost over 100 dollars.

3) TWSBI Eco: Piston filler pen so you don't need a cartridge or converter. The pen is a demonstrator so you can see how it works. Comes in lots of cute colors. Uses Jowo nibs so the nibs are pretty good. Not quite as good as Pilot nibs.

I suggest most people skip the next level up in price. You don't get much more for the money and you are probably better off saving for the next level up.

Next level up from that. You usually get gold nibs at this level.

1) Lamy 2000: In permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Design hasn't changed since the 1960s and is timeless. It's designed for people who know how to use fountain pens, the right amount of pressure, the right grip and who don't rotate the pen, the aforementioned kids in the European school who grew up on a Lamy ABC and then the Safari and so on. It's absolutely awesome but not recommended as your first fountain pen if you've never used one before. It's different from other pens so if you get it, I suggest you try it for a few weeks if you don't love it. I've known more than one person go from "I hate it" to "It's my favorite pen" as they learn how to use it. Absolutely beautiful and very understated pen. Amazing nibs that have a feel unlike any other. Slip cap so great for short notes.

2) Pilot Vanishing Point: Clicks to expose and hide the nib. No cap. So feels like a ball point. Nib is long and narrow so slightly bouncy. Really nice writing experience. There is clip near where your grip goes so some people won't like that. Very comfortable if you hold it with a traditional grip. Right up there with the Lamy 2000.

3) Platinum 3776: Really nice nib. Designed to give you feedback as you write so you have more control. It's very smooth but has feedback. Having the extra control is really nice if you write a lot of mathematical notation.

4) Sailor Pro Gear Slim or Sailor 1911 (not 1911L which is more expensive). Amazing nibs. The non slim versions are described below. These pens and nibs are a bit smaller, stiffer and very good but not as good as the large versions. Note that the Pro Gear Slim and Sailor 1911 (not 1911L), may be too small if you have large hands. Many of my female friends find these very comfortable. If you are all about the nib, Sailor probably makes the best nibs in the world today.

Another level up:

1) Pilot Custom 823. Vacuum Filler. Amazing nib. Used by Neil Gaiman and other famous authors who like writing the first draft of their novels with a fountain pen. Used by other famous people as a signature pen. These pens are wet, i.e. put out a lot of ink. If you haven't graduated to fountain pen friendly paper, get a fine nib or maybe skip it for one of the others.

2) Platinum President. Like the Platinum 3776. More refined nib. Slightly thicker grip. Often available very cheaply on Amazon. Not very wet so very serviceable on cheap paper with cheap paper friendly ink.

3) Sailor 1911L or Sailor Pro Gear (not the slim version). Note: The slim versions are also very good but not quite as good. Sailor is thought to make the best nibs in the world. Absolutely amazing writing experience. Writing with a Sailor nib feels sort of like writing with a pencil. It's very smooth but not glass like. There is just enough control. Probably my favorite nibs. Not very wet so great for cheap paper.

If you don't write on high quality paper, and I mean genuinely high quality paper, like Rhodia, Tomoe River, Clairefontaine etc. as opposed to overpriced junk like Moleskine, get a fine nib in anything but a Sailor or Platinum. You can get a medium nib Sailor or Platinum since their nibs run narrower.

You should also limit yourself to a cheap paper compatible ink. You could try Platinum dye-based Blue Black, Diamine Registrar's Blue Black, Sailor Kiwa Giro, Sailor Seiboku or Sailor Souboku etc. You could get also get Noodler's Black. However, Noodler's hand mixes inks and the quality control is off a lot of the time. Nathan Tardiff's (owner and sole employee of Noodler's) political statements may not be compatible with a lot of the crowd on HN either. If you go with Noodler's, get regular Noodler's Black, do not get X-Feather.

(edited: formatting and minor changes for clarity)

They would have gotten their principal back but missing out on interest for 10 years is a huge cost, particularly if you have to pay out interest in the interim to your depositors.

The divergence in AIG occurred to a large extent in 2010. However, this effect is present for most stocks and the indices as well and has existed for pretty much as long as we have reliable data without survivorship and lookahead bias.

Is it surprising to you that the effect was larger for AIG around 2010? As AIG was going bankrupt and the common stock holders were effectively getting wiped out, individuals were willing to hold AIG during the day to play crazy intra-day volatility but unwilling to hold AIG overnight because most announcements around restructuring were happening overnight.

Of course at the time short sales on a list of stocks including AIG were forbidden. So even if you ignore the fact that most day traders etc prefer to play things on the long side, you have the issue that they couldn't play the short side even if they wanted to.

In the US the stock market officially opens at 9:30 and closes at 16:00 NY time every day. The day return is the return from the first trade (the official opening price but it would take too long to explain the the difference) at or after 9:30 to the last trade at or before 16:00 (the official closing price) and the night return is the return from the closing price to the opening price the next trading day.

A large trading firm, particularly one that had the capability to trade cheaply enough to take advantage of this effect would never do this simply because 50%+ of the return of a single stock is determined by the return of a common market factor. If you take a position in a long only stock portfolio, you may own many stocks but statistically, particularly if the portfolio is only held overnight, it's a large bet on the direction of the market plus some noise. So you are taking a massive binary bet that is going to go wrong anytime the market opens down. This is why most high Sharpe ratio equity trading strategies involve short selling even though equities have a strong upward bias. If you eliminate the effect of the market factor, you have a portfolio that is made up many statistically independent bets.

For example, if you take a bet that is expected to make +/-1000 dollars with an equity portfolio, and it's long only, it's like tossing one coin to determine whether you make 500-700 dollars of the 1000 and then tossing coins repeatedly to determine the outcome of the remaining 300-500 dollars one dollar at a time. If the portfolio was market neutral, i.e. long and short in equal amounts, it's like you toss the coin 1000 times, each coin toss determining only 1 dollar of the outcome. If you believe the coin is biased even somewhat in your favor, as it usually is when you are trading a high quality strategy, the second option is far better.

Given the kind of risk-adjusted returns achievable by a firm that could trade cheaply enough to take advantage of this effect by other means, even using relatively simple well-known strategies, doing this would hurt their risk adjusted return and the returns they could generate on their risk capital. So the odds that there is a large long-lived firm doing this to mark their book and causing this effect is likely close to 0.

Others have mentioned several explanations for the effect. To this I will add one more, which I think is at least, if not more likely than the rest. Retail day-traders, some of whom are larger than people realize have a long bias, ie they are far more likely to hold a stock long than short sell it and they tend to close out their positions at the end of every day.

Seems like the authors have an axe to grind more than a point to make. The paper reads like the kind of certainty a completely uninformed but (markets are made up of evil people) true-believing crusader has. To me it seems like the kind of situation where someone doesn't yet know enough about a subject to know how little they know, in this case buttressed up by the broken credentialing system we call our education system.

The claim in my opinion is complete nonsense.

Edit: Fixed grammar.

You don't get to major failures once a decade (or less) on systems this complex without understanding and in fact being on the cutting edge (likely ahead of what you read in journal articles written by academics) of the statistical foundations of resiliency, n-modular redundancy etc.

In real-life outside of a journal article, it's a lot harder than just deciding whether you want to prioritize operating margin or resiliency at 5000 feet.

In real life when these sorts of edge cases happen, you have to understand in minutes or sometimes seconds the tradeoffs in terms of costs to your own company and your customers of one of n specific possible failure modes and risk-manage so you minimize the probability of the catastrophic outcomes. This sometimes may involve increasing the probability of low cost bad outcomes. You can't reason about this stuff before hand. If you could, you would have designed your system to not fail in that manner.

It's very easy to talk about completely automated systems and LOTO and you need these when you have under-skilled staff. The NYSE likely does NOT have under trained staff. If you have LOTO systems etc, what do you do when a sensor fails and you can't figure out why your method for checking whether the other system is running incorrectly thinks it is. Do you allow the stock market to simply not open?

What if multiple sensors fail or it's an ambiguous situation like say you are deciding whether or not to fail over a power circuit and it's a brownout but not a complete power failure? What if there is a systemic problem and it's likely the backup power source is going to brown out too? At some point you need highly skilled individuals, like say trained airline pilots flying a plane who have the authority to override systems immediately without having to jump through hoops.

This is especially true for mission critical systems. Many of the mission critical systems we rely on are NOT built on the cloud, i.e. other people's computers because you want to be really careful about what hardware you are using, precisely how your data center is setup and want to make sure things like a noisy neighbor do not impact you.

Like it or not, these highly trained individuals are going to make mistakes every now and then. A failure like this once every decade or so really isn't so bad. The individual who made this error is likely not a "grunt". I suspect the individual in question will not necessarily suffer any major consequences as a result of this unless it wasn't a mistake but a flagrant disregard for the rules like say bringing a bottle of water into a data center that then spilled or something.

Have you built a mission critical, distributed system that hasn't failed for 10 years? It's a lot harder than it looks. That's how often the NYSE has a problem like this, about once a decade. A lot of things that work in theory, don't work for the edge cases and things that lead to problems once a decade or so are extreme edge cases.

In the grand scheme of things a mucked up opening auction is a minor problem and anyone who did not take the precaution of sending a limit order and sent a market on open order despite it being standard practice to essentially always use limits and go hurt badly will be made whole.

It's not a gain even purely from the lens of consumer choice unless there is only one iteration of chip improvements ever. Why? Because if this is permitted, there will be no company A to do the research to create the next generation of chips and innovation basically halts.

Walking near a smoker on a sidewalk outside IS a risk to my health and the health of my children. I have asthma as do my children. Both my children and I have had asthma attacks due to second hand smoke, even limited quantities. As a smoker you may not notice this but the smell from even a whiff of second hand smoke persists for a long time and it's awful. Our family gives smokers on the sidewalk a very wide berth.

Nobody gets to create a hazard to others walking on a sidewalk. If a business wanted to dispose of an equivalently toxic substance out in the open, they would be heavily fined and shut down. Why should smokers have a special right to do this and, incidentally, litter cigarette butts all over the place?

I'm extremely grateful to live in NYC where there is a (frequently violated but still) ban on smoking inside all public parks. I would absolutely support a sidewalk smoking ban and better enforcement of the ban on smoking in parks and within 25 feet of building entrances in NYC and limit smoking to private property with the smoker responsible for ensuring second hand smoke does not affect adjoining private property.

The primary difference between smoking and alcohol is that with alcohol, there is no equivalent to second hand smoke. When someone who drinks alcohol creates a negative externality for those around, they are ticketed or arrested depending on what they did, everything from drunk driving laws to drunken disorderly laws. I'd love to see a laws on the books similar to drunk driving laws that addressed the issue of smoking around minors.

Now if the CDC said there was no safe level of exposure to nicotine and so we should ban all nicotine gum, that would be absurd.

Smoking by a person may or may not create benefits for the person smoking. However, secondhand smoke creates no positives and significant net negatives (the smell, the accumulation of black deposits on clothes of things around you) for anyone who encounters it even if you ignore the health effects.

It can also create pretty serious immediate issues beyond just the long term problems for people with breathing issues like asthma or certain allergies. If smoking and second hand smoke were everywhere, like it was in 80s and early 90s in the US, and you were one of the fairly large percentage of the population with these issues, you basically couldn't go anywhere without risking your health.

If the second hand inhaler were a child, it's an even more serious problem. Nicotine is highly addictive and does a real number on your brain. It makes addicted smokers justify things to themselves due to the sheer physical need and you end up with parents smoking around young kids etc.

Even if you are a libertarian, you should support restrictions on smoking consistent with the principle that each of us has freedom but your freedom to swing your fist only extends as far as my nose.

Alcohol is a bit different. Unless the drinker starts behaving badly after drinking, or there are long term issues like alcoholism that affect the whole family, they are really only hurting themselves.

If the data are so good, why hasn't the vaccine been approved. Mainly because it's not clear that you could replicate these results, partly because of how the data was analyzed, partly because of how the experiment was run, partly because AZ has (and openly admitted) been p-hacking their results.

If you are looking for 95% significance and you test something ineffective 20 times, you should expect to get one significant result.

AZ and the Oxford team openly did this this prior to this trial and actually admitted to it in a press conference. In fact they not only released data only from some trials but they only released some of the data from some of the trials.

In the real world, where you look at results from any trial in the context of other trials and available data, these results are not credible.

The AZ, PFE and MRNA vaccines were designed to combat the original virus. PFE and MRNA were over 95% effective in trials where they were tested against only the original strain but only about 90% effective against a mix of the new strains and the old strain that exists now. PFE and MRNA and all vaccines in general are somewhat less effective in over 65s. AZ was only 65% effective against the original strain in a population which included no over 65s in the original trials and the data from these trials were p-hacked and so almost certainly overstated effectiveness. AZ would have you believe that their vaccine is now magically 10% more effective in an environment where the variants are circulating and the 20% of the tested population is over 65. This when, real-world large scale population level data in populations where it's been widely used shows an effectiveness nowhere near that.

Also remember, this is in a context where they have openly, in a press conference admitted to p-hacking. The head of the Oxford team actually, for real, insisted that if the vaccine efficacy is seems significant in a sub-sample of the tested population at any point before the trial endpoint, it's effective even if it's not significant in the entire population at any point or not significant at the endpoint. There is something like a 70% chance that if you used his criteria, a saline injection would seem to be effective.

C++ is a systems programming language. Just like C, it allows you to do anything you want to do and be as close to the hardware as you want to be. This is completely unnecessary if you want to build something that displays pretty pictures on the screen in a web browser, and you really should not use C++ for a web back end unless you have really hard core performance requirements. But when you need to get close to the hardware and don't want to write assembly, your only real choices are C and C++.

To meet it's design objectives, C++ NEEDS to allow you to do things that are unsafe and it's up to you if you want to use them or not. std::span literally exists only to allow aliasing and the documentation warns you that it's up to you to to ensure that there aren't lifecycle issues. If you want lifecycle managed, don't use std::span, use copies but then you have the performance hit of copies. If you don't want either, use one of the libraries that handle reference counting for you but then you have the overhead of reference counting. If it's important not to have ANY overhead and are certain there are no scope issues, how else would you handle it? The difference between std::span and a raw pointer is mainly a) documentation for programmers reading the code and b) to make it easier for linters to find issues with how std::span is used. Similarly, if you want to capture by reference in a lambda, go right ahead but then ensuring that the underlying objects don't go out of scope is up to you.

Use something like Rust or <insert language de jour here>, and you either have to lobotomize the language and give up the "safety" benefits the proponents talk about. If you don't lobotomize the language you either can't get what you want done or you give up a massive amount of efficiency.

When the rubber actually meets the road, and you try doing things like introducing Rust or <insert language de jour here> to something like drivers for the Linux kernel, you immediately run into serious problems that show you why systems programming languages are needed. See for example the recent discussion about introducing drivers written in Rust into the Linux Kernel.

There are tools to do fairly hard core checking of C++ code and if you really must you can write your own for things specific to your project using the clang libraries which you can call even from python and which do much of the heavy lifting for you. These tools just aren't built into most compilers and aren't required by the standard. They are however part of most serious development workflows. Further, if you actually make the effort to learn the language, code that looks remotely like what is written for the blog post is going to set off your spidey sense in about a millisecond. Nobody said using C++ was easy. The fact that it scares of dilettantes, and that when a dilettante makes it onto the team, their lack of skill is immediately obvious in their code is a feature, not a bug. It ensures that code quality and team quality remains high.

C++ (and C) is designed to solve hard problems or achieve performance you can't with other languages. Hard things are called hard because it's difficult to do them. Otherwise they would be called easy.

If you aren't even willing to read the documentation for std::span or lambda captures or plausibly read them and choose to use them in ways the documentation tells you will cause problems for a blog post, you are just wasting everyone's time.

Note that there is in fact a recommended subset and set of code guidelines of the C++ language that it's suggested be used for new projects. Still under development and heavy revision but already very useful. https://isocpp.github.io/CppCoreGuidelines/CppCoreGuidelines. clang-tidy has options to check for conformance to these and much more. The Core Guidelines aren't going to allow you to start writing production quality C++ in a day or anything like that. There will still be a steep learning curve. But if you setup your linters properly and read the Core Guidelines (and a couple of good C++ books) you won't be quite as bewildered about how to start.

My original comment referred to the 95% effectiveness in PFE top line numbers from when we got the clinical trial readout rather than the 91% in the article. I was responding to the parent comment.

Further, the JNJ clinical trial data was from a population where the Brazilian variant, the most serious of the variants, was likely more widespread than this PFE data which seems to focus more on the relatively less dangerous South African variant.