609venezia

Edit: it seems the idea is to possibly catch asymptomatic people so they can self isolate (if they otherwise wouldn't) or tell their contacts to keep an eye out

I'm skeptical of the value add when weighed against the risk of introducing unregulated / unverified medical tests with unknown false positive/negative rates during a crisis situation, but obviously folks disagree, and I'm sure I could be missing something.

I think Ioannidis included that very low number as an example of how ridiculous the statistics can look when using the Diamond Princess as a sample and factoring in the relevant sources of uncertainty.

<<Projecting the Diamond Princess mortality rate onto the age structure of the U.S. population, the death rate among people infected with Covid-19 would be 0.125%. But since this estimate is based on extremely thin data — there were just seven deaths among the 700 infected passengers and crew — the real death rate could stretch from five times lower (0.025%) to five times higher (0.625%). It is also possible that some of the passengers who were infected might die later, and that tourists may have different frequencies of chronic diseases — a risk factor for worse outcomes with SARS-CoV-2 infection — than the general population. Adding these extra sources of uncertainty, reasonable estimates for the case fatality ratio in the general U.S. population vary from 0.05% to 1%.>>

Mainly I think he wants more testing, but people are cherry picking his argument to try to downplay the risk.

His key point from the overall piece is something like "we need more testing, including randomly sampled data. Let's not give up on testing while we ratchet up the countermeasures."

Evidence:

Second graph- <<At a time when everyone needs better information, from disease modelers and governments to people quarantined or just social distancing, we lack reliable evidence on how many people have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 or who continue to become infected. Better information is needed to guide decisions and actions of monumental significance and to monitor their impact.>>

in the middle- <<The most valuable piece of information for answering those questions would be to know the current prevalence of the infection in a random sample of a population and to repeat this exercise at regular time intervals to estimate the incidence of new infections. Sadly, that’s information we don’t have.>>

concluding graph- <<If we decide to jump off the cliff, we need some data to inform us about the rationale of such an action and the chances of landing somewhere safe.>>

---

Coming from a different angle, the latest estimate from Wuhan is 1.4% (.9-2.1)

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0822-7?mod=articl...

>Is there some alternative direction available where testing and verification are easier and cheaper?

A plurality of physicists now work in condensed matter. See e.g.

https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/PT.3.4110

Oh, hey! You're the guy who posted the thing and is hosting the thing. Great stuff.

Don't know if the post title can be edited, but it would have been clearer to me if it had said "Charity fundraiser job fair to help quarantined students find jobs (mlh.io)"

I posted the clarification b/c I clicked on the link and was confused for a minute scrolling around to find the fundraising aspect.

To clarify, from the page: this is an online career fair that charges recruiters to participate and donates the money to CDP COVID-19 response fund.

<<COVID-19 is an unprecedented situation causing events all over the world to change format or reschedule. Students are being sent home for the semester, and recruiters are on a travel hiatus. We've been hearing from community members that they still are looking for jobs, and not being able to meet recruiters in person is another wrench in the gears. The MLH Career Fest is our way of helping. While we are charging recruiters to participate in order to decrease attrition, 100% of the proceeds will be donated to the CDP COVID-19 Response Fund.>>

Reading this review, I can't tell what Lindley hoped to contribute with this book or why Al-Khalili found it noteworthy enough for a NYTimes book review (which itself is so brief that it doesn't seem to say much beyond something like "despite the claim to the contrary, Physics is more than math, and maybe in the future we'll be able to test some of the untested ideas that came from mathematical beauty.")

What am I missing here?

Thank you. This closure makes sense.

"their strategy involved selling options on volatility exchange-traded products, which is essentially a bet that profits when markets stay calm."

Would this fund be considered "large" at 600mm?

There are also some older ones in the news e.g.:

https://www.ft.com/content/da193096-63af-11ea-b3f3-fe4680ea6... (March 11, Solus's flagship fund, 4.3bn, distressed debt focus)

Yikes.

Which funds is he referring to? Do we have any references more solid than a tweet?

In mathematical logic, yes--loosely speaking, higher order logic lets us use more layers of quantifiers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-order_logic)

Here, the blog is referencing Mark's book on investing (link is in the blog, but direct link here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0231162847/ref=as_li_qf_sp...)

The Amazon preview includes enough of the first chapter (Marks calls it "second level thinking") to get a sense of Marks's meaning

> The only downside is that someone has to take notes, which can be hard while walking, unless you can remember everything.

Not recommending that everyone try to learn this, but Wolfram has rigged up a laptop so that he can walk and work at the same time (scroll down to the photo of him w/ a hat in the woods and a walking desk to see what I mean):

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2019/02/seeking-the-prod...

I'm with you that surging stocks are more responsible, although the lack of trade costs probably pours oil on the slippery slope to irresponsible risk.

Favorite anecdata is the froth around the reddit user WSBGod, which pushed that crazy sub to near the top of /r/all and seems to have potentially given birth to another bitcoin-esque HODL guru.

Wow. I'm shocked. I had never heard of these controversies, despite spending some time interested in Frankl a while back.

They seem plausible at first read, and should receive more attention. Thank you for highlighting them.

> I believe Julia to be the future but so far the adoption rate in house has been low.

Why do you believe it will be the future, and what do you see as the barriers to roll-out? I ask as someone who is curious about when/whether to start investing in Julia competence

You might enjoy Attia on distance cycling while in nutritional ketosis: https://peterattiamd.com/ketones-carbohydrates-can-co-exist/

(like you, he eats carbs when riding long distances--even with the aim of staying in ketosis)

Thank you. (For other readers, this is an interview about public transport issues)

It sounds like he had a relatively severe stutter. I hope the university didn't fail to renew his contract on that account.

Did anyone here get to experience one of Norton's lectures? It seems "Cambridge failed to renew his contract... citing his eccentric lecturing style which they thought deterred students," so I am curious what they might have been like

https://www.thejc.com/news/obituaries/obituary-simon-norton-...

I had the same first thought. The book is called _Notes on the Collection of Transfers_, and is available for free on the Sidis archives:

https://www.sidis.net/TransfersContents.htm

I live in a sun belt city. It's terrifying. People routinely run red lights and blast through turns even when pedestrians have the crosswalk with a green light. I am nearly hit at least a few times a month.

> Divorce, scandal, drug addiction and various other personal issues can all be financially ruinous.

This is well-said. James Hughes advocates families account their balance sheets on human, intellectual, financial, and social capital. For very-long-term (50-100+ years and >3 generations), the human, social, and intellectual components are arguably more important than the financial one, and it is essential to mitigate liabilities like divorce etc.

http://www.jamesehughes.com/articles/FamilyBalanceSheet.pdf

I ran a search and it looks like there hasn't been much HN discussion of legal tech since 2015 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10765654), but it seems like there has been a big push of funding into the space. But it's still way shy of FinTech funding, for example. I'm curious where this community thinks things might be heading given the ~4 years since the last discussion has seen such a large funding increase

Also: https://abovethelaw.com/2019/09/at-1-1-billion-its-already-a... (arguing "Will this investment trend continue? At this point, there is no turning back.")

https://www.forbes.com/sites/valentinpivovarov/2019/01/15/le...

(713% Growth: Legal Tech Set An Investment Record In 2018)

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/bloomberg-law-analysis/analysi... (ANALYSIS: Legal Tech Investments Top $400M in Q1)

I think it's a combination of PR and probably some genuine development as a person. He has been pretty open about being maniacally focused on Microsoft's success in the earlier years, even to the point where he views it as a mistake or at least a mistaken approach. My impression is that Melinda has done a lot to help him soften his edge and do some introspection and grow as a friend, father, and husband. Warren Buffet, too, who has also taken what I think is a pretty impressive trajectory of maturation as a person.

So overall I agree with you there is probably some of the titan of industry reforming his reputation kind of thing going on (like Carnegie, Rockefeller et al). But I think there is probably a little more than that going on, as well, and I think that deeper authenticity is probably what gives people hope, although that hope culturally may end up distorted through the infatuation with his power to get to the "world's greatest guy" thing. Which I think he would probably reject, himself, if you asked him.

This is another great example illustrating the need for reproducible research practices even in the hard sciences, in this case so that the papers in question could be easily checked after Luo's excellent finding.

For an earlier discussion on the same topic, referencing other discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17819420

(Top comment: "This article harkens back to discussions of the "reproducibility crisis" in science, as discussed extensively here just recently (see link below). Where, in this case, not coughing up the code used in the simulations in a timely manner led to an apparently unnecessary multi-year dispute.")

These phrases are probably much more popular among the Hacker News reading crowd than the broader culture, I would bet.

Well said. I didn't get them when I was younger and still had the power fantasies. Now "I've loved you for 5,000 years" is what really gets me.

For other folks who might have made the same misreading I did:

This thread is a new post from stack, not another link to 21153224 which has the similar title "update to our community and an apology"

The new post is @ 199 upvotes versus -1278, so the reception so far seems to be very different

Wow. That's a surprise. I wonder what kind of stick they had to beat him into that?

I agree it isn't apples to apples. I wonder if it is nevertheless the best comparison, though, because they're two fundamentally different beasts.

If I have a lump of cash I need to deploy, I can buy lump sum SPX at t=0. I can't call a VC and say "here's X money, invest it all immediately."

The fairest comparison probably would be lump sum SPX against a blend of VC IRR and money market, converted from one to the other at a typical capital call rate, but as the number of variables increases so do the number of assumptions, and given the low returns on money market funds I don't see how the extra complexity adds much to the story.

Am I missing something?

Those positions are still being valued according to some internal measure at AH, I think. So they should be factored in already.

Isn't the money in some sense tied up if it has to be ready for a capital call? At minimum it should be in some relatively low risk liquid investment. So there is opportunity cost regardless of whether the investor or the fund holds it until it is deployed?

Do you have a source for her abuse? A quick search didn’t turn up anything—your comment is the top google result :)