Recent submissions

Comment · 4 months ago
https://www.cancer.org/content/dam/cancer-org/research/cance...

Page 2 has the figure. Getting people to not smoke has been the most effective treatment in our lifetime.

Public health is a really big deal, and RFK et al are a disaster for the nation.

Comment · 1 year ago
I think this is a major mistake for Zig's target adoption market - low level programmers trying to use a better C.

Julia is phenomenally great for solo/small projects, but as soon as you have complex dependencies that _you_ can't update - all the overloading makes it an absolute nightmare to debug.

Comment · 1 year ago
For better or worse, Fortran is still a popular language to write clever PDE schemes in, as it maximizes "time to first, fast-enough-running code".

But for anything with a userbase of more than ~15 people, C/C++ are widely preferred.

Comment · 1 year ago
Julia's choice to encourage people naming their variables greek letters is bad though. There's a whole group of students who struggle with the symbols, but understand the concepts (a residual). Julia, when used to its full capabilities, gains an enormous amount of its power from a huge amount of clever abstractions. But in the 1st-course-in-numerical-methods class context, this can be more offputting than the "why np?" stuff this article mentions.

For teaching linear algebra, MATLAB is unironically the best choice - as the language was originally designed for that exact purpose. The problem is that outside of a numerical methods class, MATLAB is a profound step backwards.

Comment · 1 year ago
Alternatively, any implementation of operator+ should have a notional identity element, an inverse element and be commutative.
Comment · 1 year ago
I can do it, and I do similar such things in C++ - but the biggest benefit of "safe defaults" is the standardization of such behaviors, and the resultant expectations/ecosystem.
Comment · 1 year ago
Please do this.

But first: we need to take step-zero and introduce a type "r64": a "f64" that is not nan/inf.

Rust has its uint-thats-not-zero - why not the same for floating point numbers??

Comment · 1 year ago
It's slightly less cynical than that - it takes about eight years to design a space mission and rocket, but doing the detailed design is expensive as hell, so in order to meet a budget, they then change the mission, so they can go back to the vastly more affordable task of talking about doing work, vs doing work
Comment · 1 year ago
its metabolic rate. im always cold.
Comment · 1 year ago
My actual co-pay is $10/mo for the good stuff, plus warfarin (eliquiis/xeralto were too weak for me :/) which is ~$12 for a 90 day supply from the mail order PBM pharmacy. I average about $1500/yr in out-of-pocket medical expenses. My company self insures, and has an extremely generous insurance plan.

Plan B is wait until 2028, when it goes off patent. I think I can keep my job til then. I've learned from the HR folks that they just signed another 3 yr contract with the insurance company, so I'm not forseeing any major changes to coverage. This drug is super pricey, as it was originally targeted towards people with acute cancers, but now the largest market is the chronic disease patients, but they never lowered the price.

I suspect the insurer/PBM are making a small fortune off of my care. They are also being sued by the pharmaceutical industry for using a "co-pay maximizer" which caps (patients) out-of-pocket co-pays, and goes after the pharmaceutical companies' "charities" which help patients purchase their products, which the insurer then takes a cut from.

And the weight gain isn't fluid, it's definitely body fat. I think the weight gain is from the "baseline" treatment being a mutagenic chemotherapy, and the likely fact that my (previously) enlarged spleen was impinging on my stomach limiting my appetite, and the lived fact that it massively slows your metabolism, as I'm always a bit cold.

Comment · 1 year ago
I take four pills a day and the primary side effect is weight gain. The earlier 1950s era treatment made me exhausted 24/7. There's a new trial that has a new target, and looks to solve the remaining symptoms of the disease, with effectively no side effects

The big problem is that it's a chronic blood cancer, so the pills have a list price of $180k/yr. Who knows if my insurance will cough up for a second big-money prescription/

Comment · 1 year ago
This is bad science. Patients schedule when they go to immunotherapy appointments. People who go in the morning are still working/doing things, where once you get _really_ sick, you end up scheduling mid-day, because its such a hassle to do anything at all.
Comment · 1 year ago
It's honestly surprising so many programming languages ignore the needs of "floating point" users. Rust has ints that aren't 0, but no std type for floats that aren't NaN? In some sense, ieee754 floats are better than ints, as the float error modes have NaNs are just HW supported error tagged enum types.

I think its from a CS education which treats the "naturals" as fundamental, vs an engineering background where the "reals" are fundamental, and matrix math _essential_ and people live on one side of this fence.

Comment · 1 year ago
Jonathan McDowell, the astronomer and debris tracker:

https://web-cdn.bsky.app/profile/planet4589.bsky.social/post...

They may be _meant_ to last a lot longer, but as you launch a larger constellation, you end up finding more and more edge cases which your original design missed. Even if it's a generous 10yr lifespan - 10% depreciation is pretty brutal, especially if your customers are expecting a certain coverage quality, as then you need more redundant satellites in orbit.

Comment · 1 year ago
I think it's also important to justify why VCs use EBITDA.

Excluding depreciation makes sense when you are dealing with assets with an unknown highly variable lifespan - e.g. software - some of which lasts decades without being touched, others of which experiences breaking changes on a monthly basis. Similarly, excluding interest on debt makes sense if you're borrowing heavily to feed your sales funnel, but otherwise making very real profits on your sales.

However - none of these are true for some of these "new-wave" startups, which are trying to justify an (internet-based marketing) hype cycle to juice their valuations via the "dumb money".

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