vannevar

64 ms·

841.
by vannevar 7y ago
It's a largely academic question, at least in terms of mortality and treatment. If you're asymptomatic, you're unlikely to get tested, and you'll never even know you had it. On the other hand, if you have enough symptoms
842.
by vannevar 7y ago
If South Korea and the UK, with fairly significant testing, have both found ~3% positives, then even if you assume the people tested were 100x more likely than the general population to have the disease, then in South Korea you'd have
843.
by vannevar 7y ago
“Globally, about 3.4% of reported COVID-19 cases have died,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a press briefing at the agency’s headquarters in Geneva. It seems likely that the number of reported cases grossly un
844.
by vannevar 7y ago
Aka, "Manifesto for the Solo Software Developer". Godspeed, Lone Ranger.
845.
by vannevar 7y ago
LOC is a poor way to measure progress, but it's not a bad sanity check on time estimates for a proposed project. Most experienced programmers have some points of reference where they know the approximate LOC count, and can make a rough
846.
by vannevar 7y ago
"Dilkina and her team used migration data from the Internal Revenue Service to analyze how people moved across the U.S. between 2004 and 2014." It looks like their analysis may have been skewed somewhat by the fracking boom in Ame
847.
by vannevar 7y ago
You don't see this kind of approach in large scale construction project with layers of contractors and subcontractors covering dozens of disciplines. You don't see this in car industry where they can do design, engineering, testi
848.
by vannevar 7y ago
While the author implicates Agile, it seems like their real problem is with software development at scale, or really, any production process at scale. Once you've come up with a design (the fun part), you are faced with the prospect of
849.
by vannevar 7y ago
No, of course not. But the effort on the right is much more focused and concerted, with a lot more money behind it both domestically (the arms and energy industries) and from foreign actors (notably Russia). And these agents, particularly R
850.
by vannevar 7y ago
In the US, the problem is less the sea of mainstream media noise than it is the carefully crafted puddle of right-wing misinformation, anchored by Fox News and bolstered by a variety of foreign and domestic special interests operating in so
851.
by vannevar 7y ago
Yes, I think Google reached "peak search" awhile back, and we're now on a downward trend. The search results are increasingly degraded by commercial intervention, by Google and its paying customers. There has always been a co
852.
by vannevar 7y ago
Larger houses are a symptom, not a cause. Wealthier buyers drive the market, and because of the inelasticities I pointed out earlier, the rest of the market is dragged along. If a builder makes more profit on luxury homes, that's going
853.
by vannevar 7y ago
Solving inequality isn’t needed to solve this problem, any more than inequality was solved in 1950... It may not have been 'solved', but inequality was much lower in the 1950s than it is today. When there aren’t enough units av
854.
by vannevar 7y ago
From the same article, "If you adjust for inflation, the median income of Americans has only increased by 33%. The median housing prices, however, have increased by 60%." The problem is not limited to the western US.
855.
by vannevar 7y ago
>How many % of available units do you think the top 10% of the population reside in? In urban areas, where the housing crisis is, a disproportionate share. Imagine a topographic map where housing prices are the relief. Thirty years ago,
856.
by vannevar 7y ago
It depends on who you consider "very rich" and where the condos are. In many cities, a modest 1- or 2-bedroom condo can go anywhere from $500K to over $1M. The people who buy them are not extravagantly wealthy, but are part of the
857.
by vannevar 7y ago
I would argue that failure to adequately address the power of the wealth-income feedback loop is the West's biggest economic mistake, and that this is at the root cause of rising housing costs. Housing is consuming a bigger and bigger
858.
by vannevar 7y ago
Since when is Google a "trusted company" when it comes to user-generated content? Their business model is literally to gather as much data as possible from their users in order to manipulate their collective behavior to Google&#x2
859.
by vannevar 7y ago
I think there is a very subtle point here worth noting. The people that Geek Boy was talking to obviously understood the similarity between a computer monitor and a television screen. But because of the context, where they were being addre
860.
by vannevar 7y ago
A progressive property tax might be a better option, simpler to implement and more targeted. And by suppressing the speculative return on real estate, it should have the additional effect of making housing more affordable in urban areas, be
861.
by vannevar 7y ago
I'll bet if you dig deeper into the data, you'll also find that most of the growth was driven by a handful of companies, and the cities were along for the ride.
862.
by vannevar 7y ago
It was not the same debate, because innoculation doesn't have as much capacity for far-reaching consequences. With regard to the notion of relying on the stability of a complex system, they tend to return to a quasi-equilibrium state
863.
by vannevar 7y ago
The notion that the government wastes more money than the private sector is a persistent myth with little evidence to back it up. Private capital wastes enormous amounts of money on failed ventures, inflated salaries, and profit-taking, and
864.
by vannevar 7y ago
And those billionaires did it with a fraction of the funds that the government could marshal... Did what? The billionaires haven't even put a single person in orbit yet, something the government did within a few years of starting a s
865.
by vannevar 7y ago
I think what people are trying to justify is an a priori assumption that gene editing (or germline editing if they're a little less cautious) is special and distinct. Gene editing is special and distinct, in the sense that the genome
866.
by vannevar 7y ago
What good will a superior understanding of gene editing be if we cease being a civilized society where scientific research can be nurtured in the first place? Ethics are not optional to science, they are integral to the social foundation up
867.
by vannevar 7y ago
It seems like a dead certainty that gene editing creates unintended mutations, since to do otherwise would require the technique to be 100% controllable and verifiable, and it is neither. So the only question is whether those unintended mut
868.
by vannevar 7y ago
I don't see the connection, no. There are lots of cases of feedback in the real world, where the output becomes an input to predicting the next output. What do you mean by "the logic breaks"?
869.
by vannevar 7y ago
It is also confounded by the element of ruin, the ability of a gambler to stay in the game based on their stake. It's reasonable to suppose that some of the lag in re-try times (particularly with regard to startups) is attributable to
870.
by vannevar 7y ago
Look at it from the candidate's perspective: the more voters they represent, the less any individual voter's opinion matters to them. Very similar to the utility of money, the more you have, the less a dollar is worth to you. An

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