henron

Man, that's really sad. Goes to show you how much of life is outside of your control.

I really prefer working with functional transformations over containers (including iterators).

The recent CDC study [1] suggests that vaccine efficacy against hospitalization for people 65+ is ~80% in the US. If we have reason to believe that a third vaccine dose would increase that efficacy, and the immunological data suggests that we do, then IMO it's clearly the right thing to do. Incontrovertible data will mean many seniors being hospitalized and dying in the interim.

There's so much we can do to increase the global supply of vaccines without sacrificing American citizens. Let's focus on those things to improve vaccine equity.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7037e3.htm

Monero looks like the best crypto for crime, so probably the most valuable crypto in the long run.

As long as the real rate of return is positive and wealthy people have a higher income or save a higher percentage of their income, inequality will increase. Hence inequality almost(?) always increases in times of stability. You don't need low interest rates to tell that story.

T bond yields are determined by auction, so the Fed does not have full discretion over long term interest rates. That's why the 30yr yield has fluctuated between 1.6-2.5% this year even though the overnight rate has not changed.

In case anyone wants to take a look at the actual data, I unrolled the weird summary files into CSVs: https://github.com/henrydavidge/redistricting-data-2020

It is so sketchy that one of the biggest crypto exchanges and one of the biggest trading shops are run by the same people.

My mental model is that in the next decade or so mRNA treatments could be effective if a disease can be treated through the expression of a small number of proteins. These proteins could either have a direct function or stimulate an immune response. I think your example works.

I'm not a fan of crypto as it exists today, but setting that aside, I feel like coinbase is at an unstable equilibrium as a business. If bitcoin becomes more mainstream, the high fees will not fly indefinitely, and margin drops. If bitcoin falls, then there's no growth proposition.

See the founder of Coinbase fail to name a single specific way that bitcoin makes anyone better off: https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=1073&v=Iiny6KBekSc.

This technique of using distributed storage for large joins instead of shuffling between compute nodes also helps make your job robust to spot instance kills. Until disaggregated shuffle services are widely adopted, it can be really handy.

There are enough people who were PCR positive that antibody tests aren't necessary for this kind of study.

I agree with many of the observations in the deck, but how would you go about prioritizing the most impactful improvements? Is there a best in class method of quantifying how UX hurdles?

Often people find it easier to reason about real life situations than equivalent formal abstractions. This passage from a novel I read recently demonstrated this principle well. No idea if the statistics are correct, but for me at least the first formulation required some reasoning and the second was immediately obvious.

https://books.google.com/books?id=_zQsDwAAQBAJ&lpg=PT54&ots=...

No book has made me question the reality of my surroundings like Ubik by Philip K Dick.

The problem is that no direct to consumer fintech company has found a legal way to make money other than 1) processing transactions 2) holding savings. The examples of struggling companies in the article underscores this point.

I support Quillette's fight for free speech and wholeheartedly agree that it's important that we can debate any idea put forth in "good faith" (subjective, of course, but a necessary qualifier) on its merits. However, I largely disagree with their assessment of the severity of the anti free speech movement in the US. For instance, Larry Summer's dismissal as president of Harvard is a commonly cited example as this backlash. But after Harvard, he went on to chair the national economic council and regularly publish columns in many major publications. So, he wasn't exactly frozen out of society, unlike many members of truly disadvantaged groups. Perhaps academia is sick and in need of reform, but we don't need to exaggerate the problem.

This is really moving stuff. In a similar vein, I found Joan Didion's "The Year of Magical Thinking" to be a deeply personal and illuminating exploration of grief and loss.