chunky1994

Note: This is not related to any activity relating to the gamestop/meme stock trading restrictions earlier this year, and was predominantly for their violations regarding proper trading controls and communications during 2018 to late 2020. This is a rather substantial fine in terms of those violations.

While I agree with the larger sentiment, there is a rather substantial amount of diet and nutrition science with the core being quite an agreed upon set of foundational principles.

If I were to summarize:

1. We derive energy from three major macronutrients (protein, fat and carbohydrates)

2. Our body has certain macronutrients it cannot synthesize and NEEDS for healthy functioning (essential fatty acids and essential amino acids)

3. Our bodies are largely energy efficient (by which I mean the processes to produce energy are readily actionable with average hormone levels of insulin/ghrelin/leptin etc.) when consuming carbohydrates, but can turn to other nutrient sources when they are not to be found.

4. Our body composition can be manipulated by manipulating our energy expenditure either via manipulating the caloric content of food or via the preferential production of body tissue from horomonal influence (this is why muscle mass increases when using testosterone even if caloric intake is kept constant but above a certain macronutrient threshold).

5.There are a certain set of micronutrients we need on a continuous basis (the exact amounts of which are up for debate but the ranges seem to be reasonably agreed upon).

6. Our diet influences our gut fauna and this further influences how much nutritional value we get from our diet, it is quite a symbiotic cycle.

7. Barring certain specific horomonal imbalance diseases, everyone's body largely abides by the above principles, (i.e as special as everyone thinks they are, they're probably more average than not when it comes their metabolism).

If she wants to learn math in the classical fundamental way, Spivak's calculus is actually a fantastic resource. It begins with nearly no pre-requisite number theory and has a very axiomatic approach, which while pedantic makes things much more accessible to someone without any prior training.

I don't think a "hello world" type of program/circuitry(?) needs to be unique to a quantum computer. It just needs to be expressible with a quantum circuit.

Similar to how you can have hello world in both ruby and python, but arrive at them with different syntax and compilers.

I think the article basically makes this point implicitly: Thus far, quantum computing has been mis-explained, so to truly explain it properly requires disabusing the reader of certain notions first.

That being said, QM and QC is not particularly hard to explain, but the explanation sounds as believable as something else that could be completely made up, without some underlying knowledge, that intrinsically is seen as harder to understand than something that just leads logically from familiar experiences.

If I'm reading the article correctly, this is allowed by HIPAA already and is already happening (for research purposes and by third party healthcare companies?).

I would much rather google handle this data rather than unknown third parties with their own agendas, at least with google, the data comes with privacy risks that are relatively well known and might actually be useful for clinicians due to google's expertise on AI/pattern classification work which is primarily what medical diagnoses is about now (IANAD so perhaps this is incorrect).

We are in agreement that the article is broader than that specific point. I disagree that GP was making the argument you are making in your second paragraph (or if he was, it was needlessly circuitous and somewhat mean).

To demonstrate that, supposing that the author of the article was Einstein and he had written the exact same content but instead substituting relativity for Oumamama and reaction to such by Abraham etc. the GP's comment would have no substance, but the content and argument of the article at hand would be little changed.

Then indeed there would be nothing to take issue with. However to make the analogy extremely tenuous (at best), one needs to show that there is no baby, rather than just claiming there isn't.

> I can tell you that the author's name has become synonymous with, shall we say, fringe ideas.

This person has bad ideas (going further, this person is synonymous with bad ideas and therefore only has bad ideas).

> I won't say crack pot because he is a legit tenured astronomer at Harvard, but I have seen his papers roundly critiqued on the merits at too many journal clubs to count

Some of his ideas have been proven to be bad although he has an expert understanding of the subject.

> Its a bit outrageous to claim he's Galileo ... against the weakness, and untestability, of his ideas.

This person is making a spurious analogy because Galileo's idea was a good idea and his ideas are bad ideas (some of which have been proven to be bad ideas).

It is ad-hominem in nature because GP is disposing of the content of the article by claiming the above analogy is spurious by pre-supposing that Loeb only has bad ideas.

There is nothing to be read here about the reaction of the scientific community to unconventional ideas which is the content of the article, especially if you pre-suppose that Avi Leob only has bad ideas and therefore was rightfully dismissed by the scientific community (which is what the GP is doing).

If the argument was in fact about whether or not Loeb's ideas are being unfairly dismissed (or in the weaker case, rightfully receiving pushback), that would directly be talking about the content of the article and generate a good discussion. (In fact I disagree with what Loeb is saying in the article and have posted a comment as such below)

Again, there is nothing wrong in critiquing his scientific ideas.

Being generous even if he's flat out wrong about Oumuamua, stating that "he has fringe ideas" as a response to an article about the reaction to fringe/fanciful ideas in science is doing him a disservice and not really discussing the article at hand or the points contained therein.

Let us not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Precisely this, he is perfectly within his right to explore these ideas, that can and in fact should be done. His reaction to the reaction of the wider community is rather odd, and has probably caused him more harm than good in the long run.

This is a rather ad hominem attack which does not really refute his point or lead to a good discussion.

If we're going to critique someone it does not do them justice to criticize their scientific pedigree just because some of their ideas are fringe (as you rightly pointed out they have sufficient scientific rigor and have published real work that shows they understand the subject matter at an expert level).

It would be much more fruitful to critique the ideas in question (as was done in response to his papers) which would be the correct way to go about it.

While I appreciate why Avi Loeb would author an article like this (for those unfamiliar he posited that Oumuamua was of an intelligent alien origin and hence garnered some pushback), it seems a bit ungenerous in spirit to how science is done these days.

He states that extraordinary claims do require extraordinary evidence so the thesis that skepticism is healthy is still embedded here, however I think he's unwilling to consider (or unconcerned about the idea) that the alien origin claim could very well be misinterpreted/lead credence to a lot of crackpot claims in the lay public which is the source of most of the pushback.

While we do not currently have an explanation for Oumuamua and I cannot intelligently speak on which of the four possibilities mentioned in the article is more likely, communicating science to the lay public is often better done once a theory has been absorbed into the general underpinnings of the larger scientific body of evidence at hand rather than when it is at the precipice to avoid inadvertently misleading people.

Thank you for sharing this, it's a beautiful expression of how uplifting emotion can be even in the face of how fleeting our lives are; especially during these times!

This was an extremely eye opening thread. Thank you for explaining it in such clear and concise terms.

I was making those statements in the context of those conditions being necessary for a failed state's currency to be replaced by a cryptoeconomic currency.

But to answer your specific point, even if you could convince someone else that they could trade it for something else valuable, you have to keep going up the chain or it is purely bilateral and no longer a currency but a barter good. > they can convert it into whatever they want. They can't convert to to whatever they want, unless the other people also engaged in this economy value the currency and are willing to trade goods and services for it, hence (2)

Not sure why this question is being downvoted, but possibly. However this is fraught with various complications and is a discussion around failed state govts.' regime enforcement, internal citizenries' access to external organizations and various other ways in which other economic actors interact with these, a very complex separate discussion on its own and it requires one too many assumptions for me to be comfortable providing any intelligent opinion on without starting from a common base of assumptions.

This is governed by which specific cryptocurrency's monetary policy you're talking about. For example ethereum's supply is decided by a committee with people from different groups [1], while bitcoin's is basically fixed incremental supply that's built into the protocol (as of writing this comment).

[1] https://docs.ethhub.io/ethereum-basics/monetary-policy/

No, the biggest promise of crypto is that you don't need to trust a third party (wether, govt., bank or your neighbour) to verify a transaction between two parties as valid and that somebody didn't just give you counterfeit digital coins (i.e it solves the double spending problem). That's pretty much it.

Everything else in a crypto economy is built on top of that as an analogous structure to regular physical currency/digital currency verified by a third party (i.e fiat) economy.

Not needing a third party to verify the authenticity of digital transactions does not automatically make you immune to regulation.

In very specific situations (i.e failed states undergoing civil war), if you lose the trust in your entire govt. you can now reliably still trade digital currency without it necessarily being backed by a third party, however everyone you are transacting with must buy into three things: 1) This new digital currency is now the dominant currency. 2) Everyone trades goods and services based off of this new currency 3) People outside your country respect that everyone inside the country values this at some specific value and honours trade in that currency.

It is extremely unlikely you can convince anybody outside a country of (3) without some intervening international body, so the "crypto economy" replacing currency to fight an authoritarian regime is practically never going to happen.

With regards to the article. Ultimately, if you trust your government to in general protect you, this is a good thing. If you don't trust your govt. to do so, this framework is a bad thing.

There was no argument made for ethnocentricity, nor for stopping a global exchange of ideas. This response seems very non sequitur.

> The international collaborations that it thrives on are largely formed via exchange of students.

1) Students are on F visas, so they are unaffected by H1B changes.

2) There is no magical reason that students educated in another country in this day and age have a markedly different tradition of thinking about fundamental science. The internet has largely erased the differences in access to the latest research in top institutions around the world so the only thing that remains needed for high quality research is a pool of bright people. Perhaps there are some educational tradition differences between Europe and the US but US postdocs are largely educated in the US itself so those differences aren't really affecting current US research anyway.

3) Given the current labor and supply demand in academia, this pool of bright people can be satisfied by either US researchers or foreign researchers, and since there is ample choice between the two, the research of great import still gets done by just as many smart people as before, so once again, I fail to see the "problem" for great research being done.

I think we're making mutually reconcilable points here.

> Quality is distributed somewhat evenly.

Starting from that assumption (which I can agree with), here is a simplified (perhaps numerically inaccurate) argument. Assuming the top talent constitutes 1000 best researchers who have just graduated from their PhDs, and all relatively equally qualified, 500 US, 500 foreign.

There are 400 postdoc appointments. Currently if 200 postdocs are US and 200 postdocs are foreign and these H1B rules then inevitably disallow the next generation to have 200 foreign postdocs we still have 200 US postdoc candidates who are just as good and are still top talent.

Would this not still retain equal quality?

Citation heavily needed here. I find it hard to believe on face value that foreign researchers are necessarily better than US researchers; especially given the number of both foreign and domestic university graduates from U.S universities is much less than the available postdoc and professorship appointments in STEM.

Did you mean to respond to GP?

If not, that is a rather disingenuous reading of what I wrote. No one is saying it "should" be hard for foreign students to get a job in academia, my point was academia has ample domestic labour, so even if H1B salaries are raised, the research attempted is unaffected.

Wanting more researchers is well and good, there just aren't enough jobs and funding for them in the current STEM academic market (which is completely separate from any H1B related issue), hence the rather large number of people who move to industry.

I fail to see the "problem" here. Most academia STEM jobs are incredibly competitive, postdocs less so than professorships but for fundamental science it is nearly indisputable that academia is flush with labour. If universities deem it too hard to raise postdoc wages across the board (or for specific foreign students) due to a lack of grant funding then they will still have ample choice of American students who go onto do the same research.

Yes, it is unfortunate for students looking to move to the US that the path through the standard academic route is no longer easily viable but that does not mean important research does not get done. There are also plenty of other countries that are in fact seeking such talent that might actually look like better options for the now disenfranchised (for lack of a better word) foreign students.

Disclaimer: I am not a doctor, please do not take this advice as infallible and especially please do not mix medication that is self administered based solely off of the following paragraph.

I don't think OP is suggesting they be taken at the same time. The answer to the question however is that would depend on the stimulant being ingested. If it is an amphetamine like adderall, there isn't that much cross interaction in their pharmacology. Adderall (amphetamines) in ADHD medication based doses primarily act in increasing dopamine in between neurons while psilocin is primarily acts on serotonin and its receptors. While there might be some compounding sympathetic nervous responses at standard therapeutic doses it is unlikely to cause any noticeable side effects.

Perhaps I have a misunderstanding of the term McCarthyism but I fail to see how this can be classified as such.

I agree with your thesis and conclusion about electoral responsibility and cancel culture. However, isn't McCarthyism necessarily the use of spurious accusations to incite such tribal enragement, as opposed to the use of the proven claim of HootSuite actually having said ICE contract?

This made me cry, very suddenly and unexpectedly. I know it will probably not mean anything tangible but I am so sorry for your loss. I hope you and your daughter are able to come out of this ordeal stronger than you went in.

Could someone with your experience help me on where to get started if I want an in depth knowledge of the kind of stuff you use on a day to day basis? Would preparing for and writing the level 1 CFA be a good start? (I'm a mathematical physics graduate who's done quite a bit of software in finance but not specifically in trading).

I've read quite a bit of quant material, but I would also like to know what to learn from someone who is steeped in the industry as I'm sure my knowledge is quite a rough approximation of what I should actually know if I were to claim any expertise.

I don't think that's true of most people. People use IANAL defensively in an attempt to avoid embarrassment from being shown to be wrong in an ensuing discussion as opposed to a "free to present my opinion without scrutiny" statement. Most scientists have this too amongst a group of their peers (in conferences for example), they offer a lot of caveats in contributing to discussions that even though are primarily their realm of expertise, they may be out of their depth in the room.

If seeking validation is the prime motivation to contribute to a discussion, at the very least I think HN is the least guilty of this amongst most forums.

That's an appeal to authority if I ever saw one. He may be qualified to talk about it, but he certainly isn't showing that here. The parent comment shows what we're taking issue with.