Hacker News: evandijk70

New comment by evandijk70 in "The American Healthcare Conundrum"

evandijk70 — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 09:05:27 +0000

It doesn't.

The Netherlands has a system with both not-for-profit and for-profit insurers, that works reasonably well.

- Transparent, identical rules for minimum coverage and strict rules on minimum and maximum deductible for all insurers and insurees. - Mandatory coverage for everyone (just like liability insurance is mandatory for cars in the US) - Insurers do not have the right to refuse any applicants based on pre-existing conditions - Insurers directly negotiate with hospitals on rates. Emergency care has to be covered regardless of whether hospitals are in network or not.

New comment by evandijk70 in "I let ChatGPT analyze a decade of my Apple Watch data, then I called my doctor"

evandijk70 — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 10:43:44 +0000

During a 50 km hike you are not anywhere close to your VO2 max, so it makes sense that the VO2 max is not predictive for that distance.

New comment by evandijk70 in "Prediction markets are ushering in a world in which news becomes about gambling"

evandijk70 — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 11:45:03 +0000

I would say that gambling with skill component is still gambling. For example, in blackjack you can limit your losses by following a basic strategy, which is a 2x2 matrix with rows containing the value of your hand and columns containing the open dealer card.

If you can obtain an edge through a skill component (card counting in blackjack), some people wouldn't call this gambling anymore, but I would still call it gambling myself. Someone doing this for a living is a professional gambler.

What for me would be a sensible definition is that a bet/gamble has no other goals. Putting money in the bank/investing in a stock reallocates capital, which can be invested by someone. The fact that it is a risk-taking endeavor is merely a side effect. I would say the same goes for selling/buying insurance for your car.

So for me, the difference between betting and putting money in the bank/investing is that the primary goal is something different than the risk-taking activity.

New comment by evandijk70 in "UK's first small nuclear power station to be built in north Wales"

evandijk70 — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 13:06:41 +0000

Because there is little solar in the 3 winter months, so you would need a lot more storage for solar then for nuclear.

New comment by evandijk70 in "Over $70T of inherited wealth over next decade will widen inequality, economists"

evandijk70 — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 12:58:51 +0000

Most net worths over $2 mil are created by growth in share value, not by income/salary.

New comment by evandijk70 in "Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system"

evandijk70 — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 11:41:24 +0000

I think this would work for the summer months. Overnight storage is manageble/cost-effective by load shifting/battery storage/etc. This is now estimated at about $100/MWh ($0.10/Kwh).

Seasonal storage is a completely different story. For my own panels, production in Nov/Dec/Jan is about 20% of that in Apr/May/Jun, and this is typical. That means that you either need 15x solar capacity of what you need on a sunny day, or enough storage to bridge those 3 months, two orders of magnitude storage more than we would need to store electricity overnight.

New comment by evandijk70 in "In Two Moves, AlphaGo and Lee Sedol Redefined the Future (2016)"

evandijk70 — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 08:52:39 +0000

They are indeed fair. The strongest poker bots are not AI in the way it is commonly defined. From my understanding they calculate the nash-equilibrium for a simplified game and extrapolate that to the full game.

New comment by evandijk70 in "Tesla created secret team to suppress driving range complaints (2023)"

evandijk70 — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 13:05:40 +0000

In the Netherlands, there is street charging everywhere. It is indeed a bit more expensive if you do not have a dedicated parking place, but not more complicated. By law, public charging has to be available in 'reasonable walking distance' from any EV owner. 'Reasonable walking distance' is defined by muncipalities, and tends to be higher in rural areas. Therefore it varies between a maximum of 150-500 meters depending on municipality.

New comment by evandijk70 in "Are electric cars that much cheaper to operate?"

evandijk70 — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 08:49:09 +0000

Normally a long payback time is fine, but I would expect that in ~5 years, faster charging will be prevalent and the current chargers will already be obsolete, or at least less popular.

New comment by evandijk70 in "Antarctic Sea Ice Levels Five Standard Deviations Below the Mean (2023)"

evandijk70 — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 15:07:11 +0000

This article is from 2023

New comment by evandijk70 in "Ketogenic Diet in the Treatment of Gliomas and Glioblastomas"

evandijk70 — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 09:35:35 +0000

Replace author 2 by reviewer 2 and this is probably what happened.

New comment by evandijk70 in "Nvidia's Project Digits is a 'personal AI supercomputer'"

evandijk70 — Tue, 07 Jan 2025 12:27:12 +0000

This is, at least for now, a relatively small market. Illumina acquired the company manufacturing these chips for $100M. Analysis of a genome in the cloud generally costs below $10 on general purpose hardware.

It is of course possible that these chips enable analyses that are currently not possible/prohibited by cost, but at least for now, this will not be the limiting factor for genomics, but cost of sequencing (which is currently $400-500 per genome)

New comment by evandijk70 in "mRNA Cancer Vaccine Reprograms Immune System to Tackle Glioblastoma in 48 Hours"

evandijk70 — Thu, 02 May 2024 09:49:00 +0000

Not just safety, but also effectiveness. FDA checks whether the trial(s) to prove the drugs effectiveness were run correctly (eg. the randomization, the control group, etc.), if the statistical analysis was done right, if the endpoints are appropriate (response to treatment is not always objective) etc. etc.

The FDA (and EMA in Europe) are the only thing that protects desperate patients from fraudsters, charlatans and pharma-companies just looking for a return on their investment.

New comment by evandijk70 in "mRNA Cancer Vaccine Reprograms Immune System to Tackle Glioblastoma in 48 Hours"

evandijk70 — Thu, 02 May 2024 09:41:45 +0000

This already happens, it's called 'compassionate use'

https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/human-regulatory-overview/resea...

New comment by evandijk70 in "MTA board votes to approve new $15 toll to drive into Manhattan"

evandijk70 — Thu, 28 Mar 2024 07:42:50 +0000

Why is that a better fix? Transit also has externalities (pollution, congestion, noise), just fewer than cars.

New comment by evandijk70 in "An AI robot is spotting sick tulips to slow disease through Dutch bulb fields"

evandijk70 — Tue, 26 Mar 2024 13:52:16 +0000

Do you have any references to these claims?

New comment by evandijk70 in "Harvard concluded that a dishonesty expert committed misconduct"

evandijk70 — Fri, 15 Mar 2024 10:01:53 +0000

They already do for a lot of publications. Check the 'reporting summary' in this random article https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07171-z#rightslin...

New comment by evandijk70 in "Investigating immune response of a man who received 217 Covid vaccines"

evandijk70 — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 08:02:40 +0000

Purely speculating here, but perhaps omitting the reason was a condition of the hypervaccinated individual to cooperate with the study?

New comment by evandijk70 in "The cancer that some doctors don't want to call cancer"

evandijk70 — Mon, 29 Jan 2024 07:46:52 +0000

AFAIK there is currently know way to reliably tell from DNA sequencing data whether a prostate cancer will become dangerous. That may change, but I suspect there may be some inherent stochasticity in the transition of a cancer from benign to dangerous that will make a perfect classification possible. I would guess some form of monitoring may be required for all the currently non-dangerous cancers.

New comment by evandijk70 in "I used to not worry about climate change. Now I do [video]"

evandijk70 — Sun, 28 Jan 2024 12:08:46 +0000

Not a biologist, but won't the tropical amphibians migrate away from the equator? It seems to me that polar bears and penguins have bigger problems