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evandijk70

720 karma · joined March 14, 2010

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evandijk70··on Study estimates 75% of NFL players who died over 15-year span had CTE
Google gives 3-6% in non-athletes
evandijk70··on How credit card rewards became a $9.2B wealth transfer
A lot of places in the Netherlands (particularly the low margin ones like supermarkets) don't accept credit cards.
evandijk70··on Premier league bans gambling sponsors
I notice a big shift in my social circles the last few years. Non alcholic beer has gained a lot of popularity. I was advised by my doctor not to drink more than one beer a week due to an health issue O was having, and I was a little worried about the social implications, especially in places where I did not want to talk about my health. Hardly anyone noticed or cared that I went for non alcoholic beers for a year.
evandijk70··on Clinical failure rates over the decades: yikes
A full cure would probably have less side-effects, since a functional cure means a life-long dependence on drugs.
evandijk70··on Clinical failure rates over the decades: yikes
Lots of reasons.

The new drug could be cheaper to manufacture, fewer side effects, a full cure in stead of a functional cure.

evandijk70··on Show HN: I replaced a $120k bowling center system with $1,600 in ESP32s
The current situation is that the person that doesn't know programming will do it anyway. They will likely make more mistakes than an LLM will.
evandijk70··on Mathematicians still don't know the fastest way to multiply numbers
Not an expert, but I think the algorithm works for any base, not just 10. The python implementation uses base 2^30 for their multiplication. Base 10 is just a convenient illustration

The lookup table would not work for that case

evandijk70··on UK Biobank health data keeps ending up on GitHub
I had access to several health datasets for my research in the past. Date of birth was rarely given, especially for the bigger projects where there were more resources to allocate to privacy protection. Neither was date of death, location, or visits to a health facility with a treatment. Typically the relevant variables are age (in years), treatment type and possibly number of cycles. Probably insufficient to identify someone without access to hospital records. But if you have that, you have all these data anyways.

Most researchers likely would want to summarize these data in a similar way anyway, so this works out nicely.

evandijk70··on The American Healthcare Conundrum
It doesn't.

The Netherlands has a system with both not-for-profit and for-profit insurers, that works reasonably well.

- Transparent, identical rules for minimum coverage and strict rules on minimum and maximum deductible for all insurers and insurees. - Mandatory coverage for everyone (just like liability insurance is mandatory for cars in the US) - Insurers do not have the right to refuse any applicants based on pre-existing conditions - Insurers directly negotiate with hospitals on rates. Emergency care has to be covered regardless of whether hospitals are in network or not.

evandijk70··on I let ChatGPT analyze a decade of my Apple Watch data, then I called my doctor
During a 50 km hike you are not anywhere close to your VO2 max, so it makes sense that the VO2 max is not predictive for that distance.
evandijk70··on Prediction markets are ushering in a world in which news becomes about gambling
I would say that gambling with skill component is still gambling. For example, in blackjack you can limit your losses by following a basic strategy, which is a 2x2 matrix with rows containing the value of your hand and columns containing the open dealer card.

If you can obtain an edge through a skill component (card counting in blackjack), some people wouldn't call this gambling anymore, but I would still call it gambling myself. Someone doing this for a living is a professional gambler.

What for me would be a sensible definition is that a bet/gamble has no other goals. Putting money in the bank/investing in a stock reallocates capital, which can be invested by someone. The fact that it is a risk-taking endeavor is merely a side effect. I would say the same goes for selling/buying insurance for your car.

So for me, the difference between betting and putting money in the bank/investing is that the primary goal is something different than the risk-taking activity.

evandijk70··on UK's first small nuclear power station to be built in north Wales
Because there is little solar in the 3 winter months, so you would need a lot more storage for solar then for nuclear.
evandijk70··on Over $70T of inherited wealth over next decade will widen inequality, economists
Most net worths over $2 mil are created by growth in share value, not by income/salary.
evandijk70··on Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system
I think this would work for the summer months. Overnight storage is manageble/cost-effective by load shifting/battery storage/etc. This is now estimated at about $100/MWh ($0.10/Kwh).

Seasonal storage is a completely different story. For my own panels, production in Nov/Dec/Jan is about 20% of that in Apr/May/Jun, and this is typical. That means that you either need 15x solar capacity of what you need on a sunny day, or enough storage to bridge those 3 months, two orders of magnitude storage more than we would need to store electricity overnight.

evandijk70··on In Two Moves, AlphaGo and Lee Sedol Redefined the Future (2016)
They are indeed fair. The strongest poker bots are not AI in the way it is commonly defined. From my understanding they calculate the nash-equilibrium for a simplified game and extrapolate that to the full game.
evandijk70··on Tesla created secret team to suppress driving range complaints (2023)
In the Netherlands, there is street charging everywhere. It is indeed a bit more expensive if you do not have a dedicated parking place, but not more complicated. By law, public charging has to be available in 'reasonable walking distance' from any EV owner. 'Reasonable walking distance' is defined by muncipalities, and tends to be higher in rural areas. Therefore it varies between a maximum of 150-500 meters depending on municipality.
evandijk70··on Are electric cars that much cheaper to operate?
Normally a long payback time is fine, but I would expect that in ~5 years, faster charging will be prevalent and the current chargers will already be obsolete, or at least less popular.
evandijk70··on Antarctic Sea Ice Levels Five Standard Deviations Below the Mean (2023)
This article is from 2023
evandijk70··on Ketogenic Diet in the Treatment of Gliomas and Glioblastomas
Replace author 2 by reviewer 2 and this is probably what happened.
evandijk70··on Nvidia's Project Digits is a 'personal AI supercomputer'
This is, at least for now, a relatively small market. Illumina acquired the company manufacturing these chips for $100M. Analysis of a genome in the cloud generally costs below $10 on general purpose hardware.

It is of course possible that these chips enable analyses that are currently not possible/prohibited by cost, but at least for now, this will not be the limiting factor for genomics, but cost of sequencing (which is currently $400-500 per genome)

evandijk70··on mRNA Cancer Vaccine Reprograms Immune System to Tackle Glioblastoma in 48 Hours
Not just safety, but also effectiveness. FDA checks whether the trial(s) to prove the drugs effectiveness were run correctly (eg. the randomization, the control group, etc.), if the statistical analysis was done right, if the endpoints are appropriate (response to treatment is not always objective) etc. etc.

The FDA (and EMA in Europe) are the only thing that protects desperate patients from fraudsters, charlatans and pharma-companies just looking for a return on their investment.

evandijk70··on mRNA Cancer Vaccine Reprograms Immune System to Tackle Glioblastoma in 48 Hours
This already happens, it's called 'compassionate use'

https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/human-regulatory-overview/resea...

evandijk70··on MTA board votes to approve new $15 toll to drive into Manhattan
Why is that a better fix? Transit also has externalities (pollution, congestion, noise), just fewer than cars.
evandijk70··on An AI robot is spotting sick tulips to slow disease through Dutch bulb fields
Do you have any references to these claims?
evandijk70··on Harvard concluded that a dishonesty expert committed misconduct
They already do for a lot of publications. Check the 'reporting summary' in this random article https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07171-z#rightslin...
evandijk70··on Investigating immune response of a man who received 217 Covid vaccines
Purely speculating here, but perhaps omitting the reason was a condition of the hypervaccinated individual to cooperate with the study?
evandijk70··on The cancer that some doctors don't want to call cancer
AFAIK there is currently know way to reliably tell from DNA sequencing data whether a prostate cancer will become dangerous. That may change, but I suspect there may be some inherent stochasticity in the transition of a cancer from benign to dangerous that will make a perfect classification possible. I would guess some form of monitoring may be required for all the currently non-dangerous cancers.
evandijk70··on I used to not worry about climate change. Now I do [video]
Not a biologist, but won't the tropical amphibians migrate away from the equator? It seems to me that polar bears and penguins have bigger problems
evandijk70··on Meat intake is positively correlated with life expectancies
What effect size is big enough for you to worry about? A quick google search shows that smoking reduces life expectancy by 5-13 years depending on the study. Let's say that for smoking, the 'true' reduction of life expectancy from smoking is somewhere in the middle, 9 years. Then, the study I found with the 5-year estimate, is wrong by 4 years.

So, for some lifestyle change to reliably be reproduced by observational studies, it would have to be a 'true effect' of 4 years. I would say that 3 years, or even 1 year, is something to worry about.

evandijk70··on Electric scooter company Bird files for bankruptcy
Actually, if you would park illegally with a rental car, Hertz would get a ticket. They would just hold you accountable for it.
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