ckuehne's comments

"What’s going on here? Why is Postgres wasting its time, continuing to search even though it’s already found the data we’re looking for?"

Because Postgres has not already found what we are looking for. The query is

  select *
  from users
  where name = 'Capitain Nemo'
  order by id asc
  limit 1;

Only after Postgres has found all users with the name 'Capitain Nemo' it can sort them by their 'id' attribute and limit the result set to the first one in the sorted relation.

Otherwise very nice post though.

I think you are confusing things.

The problem is not to compute S=10^(3 * 10^10). In fact, we have already computed it. The problem that you originally discussed was waiting (at most) S steps until we can be sure that the finite state-machine either stops or runs forever. I assumed 10^9 steps per second. Thus, the waiting time would be approx. 10^10^9 years.

Wikipedia has a nice discussion on the topic with a quote by Marvin Minsky [1]:

"Minsky warns us, however, that machines such as computers with e.g., a million small parts, each with two states, will have at least 2^1,000,000 possible states: 'This is a 1 followed by about three hundred thousand zeroes ... Even if such a machine were to operate at the frequencies of cosmic rays, the aeons of galactic evolution would be as nothing compared to the time of a journey through such a cycle'"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem#Common_pitfall...

It is not "relatively easy" to solve. It is exponentially hard. For example, 16 GB RAM means you have about 10^(3*10^10) possible states. That is a 1 followed by 30 million zeroes.

So I guess I'll pick you up in about 10^10^9 years and you tell me how it goes. That is of course assuming that your program does not load new functions from your hard disk at some point which would add more state to you program thus stretching the waiting time even longer.

Those who cannot differentiate between life expectancy at birth and life expectancy at adulthood are doomed to draw misleading cartoons.

But this is exactly the point. How do you know that it is a correlation? To establish a correlation you would also have to look at all the founders who did not succeed. As far as I am aware, Jessica has not done this.

Maybe a quote by David Deutsch will ease the pain:

"Some people get depressed when they find out how huge the universe is. They feel tiny and insignificant and think that nothing matters in this world.

That makes no more sense than getting depressed when you find out that cows are bigger than you. What is the big deal about bigness? A cow is much bigger than you, but it is a ridiculous animal and you are a valuable person. You know it’s a cow. It doesn’t know anything. it just stands there eating grass (grass!) and mooing. And if it were bigger, that would only make it more ridiculous."

> In Africa, they even have a song about it

They also have a song about it in Germany. It's called "Whatsapper": http://youtu.be/Rxb2A4uASqc

Well, I was going to add "EDIT: Or are you just being sarcastic?". Twice. But I didn't. After all, it's Hacker News.

What exactly do you think "makes no sense"? That two groups could evolve different traits over time? If so, how would you explain differences in skin color between West Africans and Northern Europeans? Or differences in lactose tolerance between different ethnic groups [1]?

[1] http://www.foodreactions.org/intolerance/lactose/prevalence....

"This is perhaps more easily understood when you know that the Jewish culture places enormous focus on educating the next generation and on critical thinking"

Or maybe it is even better understood in terms of genetic differences: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence.

None of the results in this article warrants the conclusion in the title.

The fact that "children from affluent families were starting to speak after implant surgery, those from low-income families lagged behind." can simply be explained by genetics. I.e., affluent parents tend to have affluent children, even if those children are raised by other parents [1, 2].

All the cited study does is measure how much the vocabulary of the _caregivers_ increased due to linguistic feedback methods.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_versus_nurture [2] E.g., http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21425893

"In medieval Europe, an oath of fealty (German: Lehnseid) was a fundamental element of the feudal system in the Holy Roman Empire. It was sworn between two people, the obliged person (vassal) and a person of rank (liege lord)."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fealty

Not that I am aware of. But it is safe to assume that no one doubts the effectiveness of emergency care or most basic procedures in general. However, everything beyond that is likely on average not helpful and might be even harmful.

The overall result, namely, that at the margin medicine has net-negative effects (i.e., after a certain point more medicine equals worse health) has been replicated many times. See for example this meta-study from 2008 about what happens when health workers go on strike [1]:

"[..] mortality either stayed the same or decreased during, and in some cases, after the strike. [No study] found that mortality increased during the weeks of the strikes compared to other time periods."

The authors speculate about the reasons: "The paradoxical finding that physician strikes are associated with reduced mortality may be explained by several factors. Most importantly, elective surgeries are curtailed during strikes. Further, hospitals often re-assign scarce staff and emergency care was available during all of the strikes."

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18849101

EDIT: clarity

"Flights are much safer due to the amount of research done in air-travel safety, in general, and also after every accident."

Yes, of course. But why? Why is the amount of safety research so much higher after a plane crashes compared to when a patient dies? Why are simple checklists common practice for pilotes but not for doctors even though they could save many lives [1].

As for car travel. It seems to be inherently more dangerous for the reasons you mention. But lets introduce a principal-agent problem [2] for car driving. Assume that for example taxi drivers would steer the vehicle from a save place say as a drone. Would you want to drive with such a taxi?

[1] Gigerenzer: Risk Savvy - How to make good decisions. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal–agent_problem

I think you are confused what skin in the game means. Pilotes and startup founders are among the professions with most skin in the game. If they crash their plane/company they die/go brankrupt (or at least lose time and money) with it. That pilotes die in case of a plane crash is probably the main reason why air travel is so safe.

On the other hand doctors have, compared to their patients, no skin in the game. If the patients health gets worse or the patient dies the doctor stays unharmed. This is partially the reason for overtreatment in medicine (the other one being the asymmetry between the rewards for positive/negative effects of treatment vs. no-treatment.)

Arguing over sentences with the qualifier 'not mere' seems pointless [1]. Lets just say instead that I addressed the "hidden" implication of the statement. The quote continues: "The limits within which the preservation and self-expansion of the value of capital resting on the expropriation and pauperisation of the great mass of producers ...". Maybe this makes it more clear what he was going to say.

[1] Since 'not mere' does not exclude anything the means of production could be means for everything. But technically your point about the non-implication is correct.

Since the standard of living for the 'society of producers' has risen by a good measure since the time 'someone' said that, I guess 'someone' has been proven wrong by a good measure.