hmwhy

Thank you very much for taking the time to respond. I would like to see the world in a better light, and I do try most of the time; but it's pretty difficult for me when it comes to academic misconduct.

> It doesn't even have to be fraud...

I absolutely agree -- we all make mistakes and scientists are no exceptions. In my case, I honestly believe that nobody except for the student who manipulated the said NMR spectra initially committed any fraud.

As for what my PI did (or didn't do for that matter), that's really up to interpretation. Even in the unlikely case that nobody had told the PI, in the 10 years prior to my arrival, that the reaction doesn't work as advertised, there really aren't any excuses for not responding to my e-mails and simply brushed it off when I had told him what the issue was face-to-face.

> ... there are so many factors you often can't fully control, and reactions can depend on very subtle details or minor impurities.

I also agree. I left out the technical details earlier, here are a few other things I haven't mentioned:

  * I had friends and colleagues check my calculations.
  * I had friends and colleagues check the analytical data of my substrates and catalysts.
  * I borrowed the same catalyst that a coworker made for her own reactions, which was made recently then, and it didn't work for the reaction I was trying to reproduce.
  * I hunted down previous batches of the same catalysts in the entire building, none of them worked for the reaction I was trying to reproduce. It is worth noting that the catalyst is very stable under ambient conditions.
  * I used my own batch of catalyst on other types of reactions reported in the literature and it worked as expected.
  * The reaction is not supposed to be water/light/oxygen sensitive. I did try the reaction with and without Schlenk conditions, with and without light excluded, and combinations of them. Nothing worked.
  * At some point I even had a few coworkers looking over my shoulder to see if I was doing anything wrong.
  * When I used 10 times the amount reported in both the relevant paper and the PhD thesis, the reaction profile I observed was then consistent with what was reported.

> I'm curious what kind of artifacts you saw there, did they just remove or add signals?

Those artifacts happened in multiple spectra, there were three main types:

  * In proton spectra, signals were just removed without much effort made as in noise simulation at the baseline. In addition, the signals removed were not just solvent and water signals. This is back in the days when signal removal wasn't so prevalent and accessible in everyday spectrum-processing software. Signal-removal in synthetic chemistry should never be allowed in the first place.

  * In carbon spectra, there were regions that looked like signal truncation at first glance, but were definitely signals that got edited out (~0.3 ppm wide regions) and replaced by a straight line.

  * In carbon spectra, in my friend's (who was an NMR practitioner then) words, "it looks like someone has DRAWN A VERTICAL LINE IN BLACK AT [multiple regions in ppm]". For context, I sent her high-resolution images for comments without telling her what they were or the issues I was dealing with.

There were other kinds of artifacts that I was less sure about, such as inconsistent phasing across different parts of a spectrum that hinted at parts from different spectra were stitched together.

I should note that not all of these spectra were related to what I was doing, but the spectra relevant to the reaction I was trying to reproduce had all of the artifacts listed above.

> It would be nice if someone published that this method doesn't work, but that doesn't seem to be how this works. The amount of effort to actually demonstrate that it really doesn't work is so much higher than the reward.

I think at that point the effort has usually been made and it's fear that stops people from disclosing such misconducts. My then PI was not a typical scientist, and "powerful" is the first word that comes to mind to most people when describing him (before "brilliant", "charismatic", etc., which also apply to him). Even though I had decided that I didn't want to do chemistry anymore pretty quickly after that, I never had the courage to try to correct any of it for the following reasons:

  * I wasn't sure how it would affect my ex-bosses.
  * I wasn't sure how it would affect the careers of those who are associated with the group.
  * I wasn't sure how it would affect the status of my fellowship. I had already decided that I wouldn't do chemistry anymore after my contract was up, but I didn't want the extra burden of having to explain to future employers about what happened.

> Science is supposed to be self-correcting.

I admire the author's belief, not least because I used to be like that, but I personally think that couldn't be further form the truth for contemporary scientific research, and it's no better in evidence-base physical sciences. I personally know many people who used to be, or still are, in scientific research who wouldn't hesitate to agree with me that scientific research is mostly just a job for most people that's not too different to any other job that earns you a salary.

I always ended up not posting my comment in related topics, but since this is getting so much traction, I might as well try not to appear to be bitter about my own experience and give my anecdote another go. If nothing else, at least this will become (albeit insignificant) a piece of history that stays on the Internet.

I long time ago I received a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship to work with someone very well-known in the field on studying the mechanisms of a then relatively new type of chemical reactions. I spent a couple of months to meticulously prepare everything I needed for the study, and when finally I got everything ready, I began by reproducing the first break-through that was produced in the group that started it all -- and it didn't work.

Since I was new to that particular type of chemistry at that time, I spent the next few months trying to reproduce the reaction while getting others, both within and without the group, to check my work. Nobody seemed to be able to figure out what I did wrong but one particularly thing stood out at that time: nobody I have spoken to actually tried to reproduce the results of the "first" reaction, ever, which was super strange to me. I had also spoken with my advisor then, who basically became well-known because of that first reaction, and he couldn't offer any solutions and the conversation always ended up being something completely unrelated to the irreproducible results. I spent most of that time blaming myself and suffering from some form of imposter syndrome, too, simply because I have the tendency to do that.

Up till that point I had been following the procedure published in a journal article, but I thought I would dig up the first author's PhD thesis to check what I had done wrong. I started by casually scrolling through the experimental section and an C-13 NMR spectrum of the catalyst that I was working with caught my eye immediately because of some very unnatural signal truncation that I thought was only possible with data manipulation, and sent the data to a few of my friends who are experts in NMR and they also confirmed that those "artifacts" are most certainly unnatural. I immediately e-mailed my advisor about it, but he never responded -- and that was the only e-mail from me (which obviously required a response) that he never responded to.

I did find a few manipulated spectra in the same PhD thesis, but none of that really helped because I still couldn't reproduce the results that nobody has ever mentioned anything wrong about. Then one night, when I was drinking with the group, someone working on a different floor I don't usually talk to about my work asked me how things were going; after I told him my problems he immediately said that he'd met someone from industry at a conference complaining to him that the reaction doesn't work. He also said that a few people who came before me also tried to reproduce that reaction but none of them got it to work.

At that point I was just angry because *I thought "science is supposed to be self-correcting"* and there is no way that this stuff was in the literature for 10 years and nobody ever said anything about it. In fact, it's impossible for my advisor to not know that something is wrong with it because he is very well connected to both academia and industry, and so many people in the 10 years before I arrived must have worked on it.

During the time I was unable to get anything to work, I was constantly assigned work that seem somewhat related to what I do but wouldn't help me with my career in any way. In the end I had a hunch on what was really happened and determined that the procedures in the original paper and the PhD thesis that first reported the reaction were all out by a factor of 10. I was already on anti-depressants at that point and was drunk every night but was working 10+ hours a day, which was well-known in the group. When I had finally gotten the reaction to "work" (and had explained to people I trust and had them double check my work) and brought it to my advisor, he said "that's great"; I don't remember too well what else he'd said in between because none of it was neither an apology nor a solution, but he said at the end that maybe I should have deferred my fellowship because of my depression (which, frankly, wasn't affecting my ability to work).

This is not an isolated case, and not the only type of academic misconduct. The thing that upsets us the most is that at the end of the day, it's not about how good and meticulous you are: for most of us it's mostly about how well you are at gaming the system. The way we fund scientific research is mostly broken, the way we disseminate scientific research is mostly broken, the way we assess potentially great scientists and appoint them is also mostly broken. It's only natural that, for most people, the experience is nothing but shit.

Edit: typo.

This story really stuck with me when I came across it here[0] last year because of the way it's written.

As a few have pointed out, the Twitter messages are just "paraphrasing" the article if you put it nicely. Putting a few references after doing the original sources injustice by telling just half of the story doesn't make it okay either.

Is this some kind of new tactic to grow your audience? I was raised to be honest, I worked in industries the consequences of being dishonest is supposedly absolutely unacceptable, but in most cases people who are dishonest usually get further ahead than most with little to no punishments. Seeing this get so much attention is very demoralising.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20227175

I can't comment too much on the zero-G washing part (but I tend to agree), and I think the comment about solvent is actually very interesting.

It's likely that weight is probably not the biggest concern if such a washing system were to be implemented, as they would probably design a system to recycle the washing liquid. I think most solvents that are candidates as washing liquids post either additional health and/or fire hazards in space. In addition, and particularly for water-based washing, I think the error tolerance in engineering either (1) additional infrastructure to the existing water-recycling system and/or (2) a part that can confidently remove unwanted chemicals are challenging problems. the latter is probably the bigger concern because tolerance for error there would probably be substantially lower than urine recycling.

Just a guess because I thought it's an interesting comment, and it's quite possible that one can already design (if it doesn't already exist) a washing liquid that is safe for consumption at small quantities.

The article resonates with me a lot, and reminded of the couple of years of personal experience of applied machine learning in another field of science; because the points made are exactly what I encountered then and made me quit my job.

There is a lot of machine learning snake oil out there, even in the most prestigious journals. The issue is that most people wouldn't know about it until they actually try to reproduce those results (if they can at all in the first place).

It is a huge issue now that machine learning has made its way into every field of research, while almost nobody has adequate training to even gauge what is and isn't questionable. Even the grad students who end up doing all the "hard work" usually don't have much of an idea of what exactly they hacked together and how to access its validity.

The crazy thing is that, despite all of this, you can still get ahead if you have know just slightly more buzzwords than others and have a paper or two (don't have to be first author) to show for. At the end of the day, I suppose all of this is nothing new (machine learning practitioners are the new SEO consultants?), and I'm just venting my frustration for not being able to accept this is how things work.

Every time a thread like this comes up, I feel that I would like to read some comments that are not assertions on why JavaScript (or Python for that matter) is a bad idea to put on "everything".

If nothing else, it seems like a good idea to make microcontroller programming more accessible using one of the most used languages.

I'm not sure arguments regarding performance, or how readily available learning resources are for lower-level programming languages, are relevant here because those are likely not the concerns for anyone who wish to take advantage of frameworks like the one in question.

To many people the programming part is just a means to an end: for example, making LEDs blink for costumes. So why not celebrate when there are more accessible solutions available to them?

Ah! So that's what it is. :( I did the same thing in as you did and I'm now getting much fast times.

I feel a bit silly now for not having looked into it further before posting those obviously suspicious times.

Edit: and thank you for taking care of the bug report!

Hello! Many apologies for having taken a while to reply, I finally found some time to sit down and do some tests because > 200 ms vs. < 10 ms is too big of a difference, and also because of what london_explore said:

> and if that performs badly, open a bug with V8 or other JavaScript engines to optimize it.

Anyhow! Just to clarify before moving on, I also did the tests in the Web Console. All numbers noted below are for the same (first) test I initially mentioned.

What I have done in exactly the same order as follows:

1. I first tested with a clean profile as you suggested and the times haven't changed. ~240 ms was observed.

2. I downloaded Firefox and tested with a clean installation of 77.0.1. ~240 ms was observed.

3. I removed both Firefox (77.0.1) and Firefox Developer edition (78.09b), and manually removed the ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox folder. I then reinstalled Firefox Developer edition (78.09b) and, without restoring my profiles, I tested again. ~240 ms was observed.

4. I re-ran exactly the same tests on NodeJS and Chrome. ~6 ms was observed.

Assuming that it's just me, I can't immediately think of what is causing this.

Otherwise, if it's not just my setup, could it be related to the operating system? I'm currently running macOS 10.15.5. I don't have a machine with a different OS that I can test on at the moment, I should be able to try this in the next 2 hours and will update this post.

Edit: I have tested on Windows 10 as well and the issue is the same!

Thank you for taking the time to explain things!

> The margin of error is huge for 1, and 1 and 3 are within margins of error for the V8s, so my guess is that you ran them in the same order every time and the difference is just an artefact of being the first to run. You should wait for the page to settle down to start tests and try reordering or separating them.

You are absolutely right about the larger margin of error for 1 being artefact of it being the first one to run. In fact, the point I made about the difference between Entry 1 and Entry 3 no longer stands because the higher average (and error) is actually an effect of inflated times at the beginning.

I've learnt something new! Thank you! :)

I was a bit surprised by this. It could be because of a lack of understanding of JavaScript, but the biggest reason that surprised is because I was under the impression that the time it takes to access any element in a JavaScript Array is constant.

I took the code in that post, played around a little bit (code: https://jsfiddle.net/x7sz1fhr), and the results of a hundred runs performed differently are shown below (NodeJS 12.6.1; Chrome 81.0.4044.122; Firefox Developer Edition 78.09b):

1. "Local", original — NodeJS: 7.05 ± 13.54 ms; Chrome: 6.13 ± 13.91 ms; Firefox: 241 ± 6.

2. "Non-local", original — NodeJS: 52.2 ± 1.4 ms; Chrome: 33.8 ± 1.1 ms; Firefox: 294 ± 2.

3. "Non-local (sorted)", original — NodeJS: 10.3 ± 0.9 ms; Chrome: 8.58 ± 0.94 ms; Firefox: 200 ± 1.

4. "Local", array — NodeJS: 5.05 ± 0.90 ms; Chrome: 4.22 ± 0.87 ms; Firefox: 193 ± 1.

5. "Non-local", array — NodeJS: 51.9 ± 1.4 ms; Chrome: 34.7 ± 01.6 ms; Firefox: 252 ± 3.

6. "Local", object — NodeJS: 6.50 ± 9.84 ms; Chrome: 5.80 ± 10.31 ms; Firefox: 201 ± 2.

7. "Non-local", object — NodeJS: 58.1 ± 1.2 ms; Chrome: 42.1 ± 3.3 ms; Firefox: 247 ± 2.

8. "Non-local", using sorted indices stored in an array — NodeJS: 57.6 ± 7.8 ms; Chrome: 35.9 ± 6.7 ms; Firefox: 155 ± 2.

These numbers are inflated as an artefact of them being the first thing to run. Please see the comment of @minitech below.

The first thing to note here is that the results obtained for Firefox are not a mistake: I have repeated by copy-and-pasting the same code a few times and, unfortunately, in all cases Firefox performed approximately 4–20 times slower than both Chrome and NodeJS. That's a bit disappointing because a couple of years ago I switched back to Firefox for its performance (I did some tests back then for my use cases before I decided). It is odd that the time difference is between 4–20 times, so it is possible that I did some non-standard things by quickly modifying the author's code.

A̶n̶o̶t̶h̶e̶r̶ ̶i̶n̶t̶e̶r̶e̶s̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶p̶o̶i̶n̶t̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶n̶o̶t̶e̶ ̶h̶e̶r̶e̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶s̶e̶c̶o̶n̶d̶ ̶h̶a̶l̶f̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶a̶r̶t̶i̶c̶l̶e̶,̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶a̶u̶t̶h̶o̶r̶ ̶m̶o̶d̶i̶f̶i̶e̶d̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶`̶l̶o̶c̶a̶l̶A̶c̶c̶e̶s̶s̶`̶ ̶f̶u̶n̶c̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶a̶c̶c̶e̶p̶t̶ ̶a̶n̶ ̶o̶p̶t̶i̶o̶n̶a̶l̶ ̶a̶r̶r̶a̶y̶.̶ ̶T̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶m̶a̶y̶ ̶a̶c̶t̶u̶a̶l̶l̶y̶ ̶h̶a̶v̶e̶ ̶s̶i̶d̶e̶ ̶e̶f̶f̶e̶c̶t̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶a̶r̶e̶ ̶u̶n̶a̶c̶c̶o̶u̶n̶t̶e̶d̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶,̶ ̶w̶h̶i̶c̶h̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶c̶l̶e̶a̶r̶ ̶u̶p̶o̶n̶ ̶c̶o̶m̶p̶a̶r̶i̶s̶o̶n̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶E̶n̶t̶r̶y̶ ̶1̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶E̶n̶t̶r̶y̶ ̶3̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶a̶l̶l̶ ̶e̶n̶v̶i̶r̶o̶n̶m̶e̶n̶t̶s̶;̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶E̶n̶t̶r̶y̶ ̶2̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶E̶n̶t̶r̶y̶ ̶4̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶o̶n̶l̶y̶ ̶F̶i̶r̶e̶f̶o̶x̶.̶ ̶I̶f̶ ̶w̶e̶ ̶i̶g̶n̶o̶r̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶o̶r̶d̶e̶r̶-̶o̶f̶-̶m̶a̶g̶n̶i̶t̶u̶d̶e̶ ̶d̶i̶f̶f̶e̶r̶e̶n̶c̶e̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶f̶o̶c̶u̶s̶ ̶o̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶t̶r̶e̶n̶d̶s̶,̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶a̶p̶p̶e̶a̶r̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶o̶p̶t̶i̶m̶i̶s̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶u̶s̶e̶d̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶d̶i̶f̶f̶e̶r̶e̶n̶t̶ ̶e̶n̶g̶i̶n̶e̶s̶ ̶s̶e̶e̶n̶ ̶h̶e̶r̶e̶ ̶c̶o̶r̶r̶o̶b̶o̶r̶a̶t̶e̶s̶ ̶w̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶@̶l̶o̶n̶d̶o̶n̶s̶_̶e̶x̶p̶l̶o̶r̶e̶ ̶h̶a̶s̶ ̶a̶l̶r̶e̶a̶d̶y̶ ̶p̶o̶i̶n̶t̶e̶d̶ ̶o̶u̶t̶.̶

There is also a difference between the times for array and objects across different environment, with an object generally taking longer. This result isn't directly related to our primary interest here, but I thought it was interesting and worth pointing out because of object-related concept in JavaScript.

Finally, if we use a pre-sorted array of indices to access elements in the original array containing instances of `Boom`, we see a substantial reduction in the time for Firefox but not NodeJS and Chrome. This result was a bit "unexpected" but, again, this comes back to the point @londons_explore made.

Edit: updated code to allow the environment to be changed. Edit 2: Edited according to the of @minitech's comment.

I personally think there is a lot of value in these things, particularly in cases where it's just impractical to go back to school/university or that tuition is unaffordable. Quite a few years ago I learnt software engineering and basic computer science through free, online resources (a few of which have already been mentioned in this thread), it got me a few successful interviews and eventually a job.

That was actually the first time I have self-taught myself anything with the aim of breaking into a field that had no experience with. It was difficult at the beginning because I had just quit the job I had back then and fell into depression for a personal, unrelated reason; but perhaps that was also the reason that I eventually had the drive and focus to get through what I would normally have found "boring" at the beginning — I had nothing better to do. The experience turned out to also be one that is empowering because now I feel like I could learn a lot of things by myself.

Not sure if it helps, but here are a few things base on personal experience of going through this type of syllabuses:

* Assuming that they are written by people who are good what they do and know what they are talking about, these syllabuses are usually to be followed through step-by-step unless explicitly stated otherwise.

* Different people benefit from different modes of learning. There is nothing stopping you from using auxiliary resources to help you to get through a syllabus.

* More often than not it takes a few reads of some text/attempts of an exercise for me to really understand something. In one particular case I read through a book three times, about half a year a part each time, before I felt that I really understood it; and when I finally understood most of it, I was only glad that I decided to try it again for a third time.

* I think it helps to have someone to talk to about what I was doing, it could be a close friend or family who doesn't understand anything about what you are studying. Alternatively, if what you are studying is "popular" enough and there are communities of people doing the same—get connected. Emotional support helps.

* I always try to interact with people who are at different skill levels. There is always a lot to learn from people who are much more experienced than I am; and explaining what you have learnt to someone less experience helps to consolidate what I have learnt.

* Focus is very important. Find what works best for your through experimentation: if you can sit through some given material for a couple of hours straight, great (but do take care of your health and at least get some stretches and water); if you regular breaks, that's also fine—just make sure you set an alarm clock and commit to getting back to it when it goes off.

On a somewhat related point, for freely available resources, I would buy a coffee or make donations where possible to people who devote their time to help others. :)

I hope you will find something that works for you! Good luck!

Not trying to prove you wrong, but I really don't think anyone has enough facts to claim either way confidently. I don't necessarily agree with all of the data presented, but I think your response to it is emotional and unwarranted—the authors haven't said anything about cover up as far as I can tell.

Also, I think just because it's circulating doesn't necessarily mean that there is a good chance of it being brought to other countries. If it really started off in a wet market, I can imagine that the people who are most susceptible to catching the virus initially are not those who can afford/have the opportunity to travel.

If I'm not mistaken, August is about when people return from summer holiday, and there aren't really holidays until Chinese New Year. There a week of holiday in October for National Day, but people typically travel back to their home town instead of overseas.

It feels possible that the virus could be limited to just transmission within China for a while, which gets spread with every festival between August and late December/January, eventually reaches a critical mass and spread to the rest of the world with people travelling due to Chinese New Year in early 2020.

I honestly don't think I'm right, and you probably spotted logical flaws in the example I have given above. I just want to point out that the problem is extremely complex, and even the facts that you have pointed out are only a small part of the whole picture that just happen to support your views and arguments.

I highly recommend working through YDKJS[1] if you have an interest in and/or a reason to "master" JavaScript.

I think you may find that some of those "bad design decisions" are actually not so bad, or at least manageable, once you will have read through the book.

1. https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-JS

I personally think it's only as overwhelming and confusing as one's predisposition to FOMO. I stopped worrying when I found out at meetups and interviews that it really doesn't work like that in most parts of the real world.

Glad to see that I'm not the only one triggered by the irony. :p

On a personal level, I tend to agree with you because of some traumatic experiences with collaborators in the past.

But I think there is at least one valid reason for using imprecise terms in scientific journalism: it makes the content more accessible.

To be fair, that doesn't appear to be a quote and the last few words of the sentence you quoted is important:

> ... offering a comparable energy capacity and cycling ability to some lithium-ion batteries already on the market.

Having said that, it seems they do claim in the paper that the performance of their "battery" (really, they only tested a single cathode composition) is "competitive to the commercial LiFePO4-graphite" base on extrapolation of their lab results "to practical large format cells".

I feel funny about that sort of extrapolation in an engineering context, but I'm not an electrochemist and also not a chemical engineer, and I have only skimmed through the abstract, introductions, and conclusions of the paper; so take this comment with a grain of salt.

Edit: typo. Also, I'm not out to trash the work in case my comment comes across as being harsh—marketing aside (which is, sadly, pretty common in high-impact journals), it does seem like a step forward.

I don't necessarily disagree with what you said, but for every person who pays attention to the difference between HTTP and HTTPS, and understands what it means, whenever visiting a website, there are probably many more who don't.

Until someone who is trusted, technically capable, and has a better and sustainable solution that optimises collective good, I'm not sure that the current situation we are in is really that bad.

Upon reading again I think it is clear what you meant, and I should apologise for jumping in to comment a bit too quickly!

I did a bit of research a couple of months ago when I wanted to set up Sidecar for illustration (but couldn't because my Macbook is slightly too old); it seems that, whether with Sidecar or other paid Apps, the iPad as a drawing tablet may not be ideal if you need fine control.

Just thought I'd note that in case this setup is very important to you before you buy your Mac Mini. I don't do any sort of graphics design and video editing, but people seem to be generally pretty happy with it for those purposes.

Also, many of the free drawing Apps in the App Store are actually very full-featured and feel fantastic to draw with (please support them if you like them), which is what I settled on in the end. The only thing that I miss about my Wacom Intuos is the textured surface.

Edit: removed repeated "a couple of months ago" and "in case", moved things around a little.

I second this.

I have some experience in both web development and scientific computing in various fields (not bioinformatics). Things felt just as hard at the beginning in all cases—I don't recall things being any better in scientific computing compared to web development.

I agree that documentation is terrible most of the time, but that's not something limited to web development in my own experience. (On the contrary, check out the documentation of the website in question in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23031408, it's absolutely fantastic).

Some things become second nature when you have developed expertise in that field, and it's easy to criticise something that you have comparatively less knowledge in and pass it off as "too difficult", particularly when the web development part seems to be a means to an end (which seems to be the case here).

Edit: missing conjunction, tidied up the last sentence for clarity.

I just want to echo what everyone has already said that this is indeed very cool in many aspects.

The API documentation is what really jumps out to me: it's an absolute joy to read, and makes me feel that the developer actually respects me as a potential user. Thank you!

Agreed. I care about privacy very much, and I do as much as I can to protect it with what little technical knowledge I have—I think most people I know would consider me an alarmist when it comes to protecting myself from "bad" things.

I think the point I failed to point point clearly earlier is that this is the first, if not one of the firsts, pandemic where we are well-connected enough to properly attempt the tracking app(s) proposed.

At the end of the day, would it not depend on what data (particularly those that are identifying, if any) is stored, whether or not other infrastructures that meet compliance requirements are readily available, if there are reliable contractors that already know these other infrastructures and can deliver quickly, etc.? And that's what I wanted to throw out there: I consider myself very slightly more knowledgeable in these things that are out of my domain expertise compared to my colleagues, and I still find it very difficult to make an informed decision.

I was in a casual virtual meeting with a group of highly educated audience last week, and the question of whether or not we will install the app came up.

As far as I know none of them has a background in computer science or anything related to software development. At least a third of the group immediately said that the won't install the app exactly for the “American company Amazon’s Servers” reason.

I hadn't researched into the topic but I tried to offer an alternative explanation to why those choices were made, but I felt that nobody was even slightly interested in why it might not be as evil as they have been made to think it is.

From irresponsible journalism to untrustworthy governments with hidden agenda, there are too many things that I think lead to people making uninformed decisions. Just throwing this opinion out there because it's something that has been on my mind for a long while, and perhaps something that may resonate with someone else.

Edit: typo (explain --> offer).

I think the OP is pretty chill and doesn't mean that having a PhD is equivalent to being technically superior (see the following quote).

> ... Meaning, it is entirely possible to get expert levels on a topic without getting the PhD certificate.

If I'm not mistaken, for the part that you quoted, the OP is pointing out that there are many people who assess whether or not you are an expert they are looking for base on just a piece of paper, regardless of whether or not your skills in that area is that expected of an expert.

When you are looking for a job, whether you give a damn or not doesn't matter, it's whether or not the interviewer gives a damn that matters—and I feel that most of them don't.

> On that same note, The Economist article is a commentary on the study and not written by the authors of the actual study.

You are right, I completely missed that point when I commented and that is now an embarrassing mistake that I can only learn from and remind me to be more accurate in the future.

> Also, I wish people would stop doing such mental gymnastics just to complain - your comment is effectively attempting to amplify the shortcomings of the study that are pointed out in the article you are quoting by then quoting them and adding slightly snarky commentary.

I wasn't "attempting" to amplify those shortcomings, I was indeed amplifying those shortcomings.

Once you have acknowledged that there isn't sufficient evidence to make any solid conclusions then the only logical next step is to get more evidence to support or refute your hypothesis instead of coming up with "interesting" commentary.

It's not like the article is asking for help to get evidence to substantiate the study, or tries to give the reader any valuable, fact-based insights. So the fact that the author acknowledges that the study is "not entirely scientific" in multiple paragraphs, then proceed to use a misleading title and come up with conjectures to make the study seem more interesting/increase its value is a huge red flag to me.

Edit: typo.

Highlights and comments:

> These results are not comprehensive, however. Nor are they representative. EF’s index is based on the results of a free online test taken by 2.3m volunteers in 100 countries. Only people with an internet connection and time and willingness to take a test are included in the sample...

I almost stopped reading at this point.

> Such biases aside, the EF’s index produces results that are interesting...

I was taught that in scientific research one should never claim that her/his own research is interesting, not least because it's something that's up to the audience to decide.

> ... interesting, if not entirely scientific.

At least they are honest about it not being entirely scientific.

> This correlates with another factor: EF repeatedly finds that English skills are highly correlated with connections and openness to the rest of the world.

Openness...? By what measure?

Edit: typo.

I don't think that's a fair judgement.

The Wikipedia page that you linked to lists 192 very specific types of cognitive bias; even if the information of the article were directly derived from the Wikipedia page, the author still managed to distilled 192 entries down to 7 categories.

In addition, the article also has advice on how to avoid jumping to conclusions, and deal with people who tend to jump to conclusions. Those are clearly not derived from the link you provided.

Edit: typo (conclusion --> conclusions).

Came across your work by accident not too long ago and am a huge fan of it (no, not just StyleGAN). I'm too shy to send an e-mail or a Tweet, so given that here is the opportunity: thank you.

I'm not sure why this comment is downvoted (at the time I started writing this) without any comments at all.

To me it presents an alternative view and interpretation on the article. Even if I don't necessarily agree with some of the sentiments and/or how opinions are phrased, they do remind me that I should read things with caution, which is probably something that even the most cautious of us need to be reminded of every now and then.

I'm not entirely sure at what point one can start downvoting but I vaguely recall that it's a privilege that's given for having been recognised for a certain amount of contribution (presumably due to points). For this reason it seems irresponsible to downvote something, without commenting, just because it doesn't match your worldview and that you are too lazy to think of it as an opportunity to at least think about why there are people thinking differently.