acs5's comments | WingNews

acs5 | 4 years ago | on: The Economist tracks excess deaths

You're using "efficient" to mean effectiveness against death given infection, but the vaccines aren't close to 90% effective against that. [1] says they're 54% effective against death given infection, which actually predicts 78% of deaths being in the vaccinated if you plug it in to the formula.

[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

acs5 | 4 years ago | on: The Economist tracks excess deaths

> If the vaccine was 90% efficient, you would expect the vaxed death to be 40%, not 84% (84% implies a 15% vaccine efficiency).

I'm not too sure how you arrived at your figures, but here's my back of the envelope calculation for the percentage of either expected deaths or expected cases coming from the vaccinated part of an age group:

  V * (1 - E) / ((1 - V) + (V * (1 - E))

where V is the percentage of the age group that's vaccinated (~95% for >70yo) and E is the effectiveness against either death or symptomatic disease (which isn't exactly the same as a case, I know), i.e. only (1 - E) of the vaccinated population will face death or symptomatic disease.

Playing around with the effectiveness values, 87% of cases and 84% of deaths from the vaccinated in the >70yo group doesn't look impossible.

acs5 | 4 years ago | on: The Economist tracks excess deaths

The footnote on p33 and 34 suggests an explanation, namely that vaccination rates among the elderly (where most of the deaths are) are particularly high. E.g. if the unvaccinated elderly are outnumbered by the vaccinated 1 to 20, then if the vaccines have an 80% effectiveness against mortality you'd still expect deaths among the unvaccinated to be outnumbered 1 to 4.

acs5 | 5 years ago | on: Ask HN: I am a coder and I am thinking of buying Dell XPS 13. What do you think?

Considering how small it is, the XPS 13 is surprisingly heavy. Some of the ThinkPads are definitely quite a bit lighter.

acs5 | 5 years ago | on: Ask HN: I am a coder and I am thinking of buying Dell XPS 13. What do you think?

I've been using an XPS 13 with Ubuntu since 2017 and would recommend it but with some reservations.

The fans can get noisy when using more graphically intensive apps like video calls (or even just heavy DEs like Gnome or KDE) with my external 2K monitor. Mine has a lower end (i5) CPU even for the time when I bought it though so maybe this is less of an issue with a newer one.

The built in mic is barely usable (picks up too much noise from things like fans) and the camera and speakers aren't great either but good enough.

If you haven't used a 13 inch laptop before watch out for neck and eye strain - I wouldn't be able to use this as my work laptop without an external monitor.

acs5 | 5 years ago | on: London put in emergency lockdown as U.K. fights new strain

No statistically significant protective effect for the wearer, but as the study points out, it says nothing about protection of those around the wearer, which is the commonly accepted reason for mask wearing.

acs5 | 5 years ago | on: A free introduction to quantum computing and quantum mechanics

You're right that the spaced repetition questions are different from the really interesting questions, but that's the point. They're supposed to be aids in internalising the "lower-level"/"boring" terms, definitions, properties, etc., which is necessary to be able to follow along.

acs5 | 9 years ago | on: The Imposter's Handbook

Also, the description of the boolean satisfiability problem isn't the boolean satisfiability problem at all, but just what we might call the boolean evaluation problem, or a version of the circuit value problem, which is certainly in P.

I have no idea what's going on in the lambda calculus excerpt further down the page, in particular substituting (λx.x x) with (x x)? There seems to be a fairly big misunderstanding here. And lambda calculus isn't reduced in any particular order -- there are many ways to reduce the same term.