This is incorrect. E cigarettes are still in a very early stage of research. My partner works at one of the leading institutes in tobacco research and they are literally just kicking off most of their research on e-cigs. Most of the researchers (including one of the world experts on tobacco research) has a gut feeling that the health effects will be in the same magnitude as cigarettes. Early research confirms this, but again it's still a gut opinion. Literally the first major study on e-cigs affect on heart disease was released last year (and it does not look good): https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/03/190307103111.h...
I don't believe any e-cigarette research institute would agree with either of the claims that:
1) vaping is well studied. It is about 10-20 years from being well studied as most of the major research institutes are just starting (or are in grant application stage).
2) vaping is less harmful than the health effects of a high sugar diet (not to discount that a high sugar is very bad)
Public Health England published a review of evidence of e-cigs. They concluded e-cigs are about 95% safer than tobacco. So being the same magnitude as cigarettes seems an absurd claim, on the strength of all studies so far, anecdotally too.
Because a statement like "e-cigs are about 95% safer than tobacco" seems meaningless to me without any scale to reference it to, I dug out the paper that they based their estimate on [1] (which I got from [2]).
I'm just going to say that this looks like the least rigorous assessment that I've ever seen. As far as I can tell, they went to a conference and over a 2 day period collectively came up with a list of "evaluation criteria" which is not at all limited to health. It includes (among other things) crime, environmental damage, family adversities, economic cost, community,etc, etc).
Then they scored each product against each criteria on a 100 point scale. This is not an evidenced based approach. It was a bunch of people sitting in a room arguing with each other how they think it should be scored.
Then they weighted the results. Finally they gave each a final score of "harm" base on a 100 point scale. Cigarettes ranked at 100. Pipe smoking ranked at 21 (nearly 5x "safer" than cigarettes!) ENDS ranked about 4 (based on what I can guess from the graph). There's your "at least 95% 'safer'" tag line.
Oh and the committee included a consultant working with companies on tobacco dependence, another consultant working with smoking cessation products, and another consultant working for an e-sig distributor. Several of the committee received grants from the nicotine industry.
Doing a review of the current research isn't valuable for the reasons I outlined: overall research is immutare so an overall review isn't going to be that insightful right now.
Here's an example of a gaping gap in research on e-cigs: "To our knowledge, there are no relevant study in humans on carcinogenic effects from pure nicotine including products, such as NRT and e-cigarettes." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4553893/
It's really hard to summarize a body of research if there's barely any research been done in an area.
> After adjusting for these variables, e-cigarette users were 34 percent more likely to have a heart attack, 25 percent more likely to have coronary artery disease and 55 percent more likely to suffer from depression or anxiety. Stroke, high blood pressure and circulatory problems were no longer statistically different between the two groups.
> Cigarette smoking carries a much higher probability of heart attack and stroke than e-cigarettes, but that doesn't mean that vaping is safe
From the CDC (to get a sense of the magnitude of the health effects of smoking [0]:
> People who smoke cigarettes are 15 to 30 times more likely to get lung cancer or die from lung cancer than people who do not smoke.
None of these statistics talk about the base rate at all, which (imo) makes them very difficult to interperet, but I am too lazy to look up and factor in the base rate myself, so I just pretend that these statistics are meaningful without them.
To look at this from another perspective; we may not have studied e-cigarettes very much, but we have extensive studies showing the traditional cigarettes are very, very bad for your health. And, even absent empircal studies, we have strong theoretical reasons to believe that e-cigarettes are less bad; and the empirical studies seems to back this conclusion up.
I think my overall argument was that we have barely studied studied e-cigarettes so OP's assertion "Vaping has been pretty well studied (except for the flavorings" is false.
You are correct that it's entirely possible that e-cigarettes are not in the same magnitude of impact as tobacco. However, it's also possible it may be just as bad. The research is too early stage. What I do know (anecdotally), is that most of the researchers in the field have a gut feeling that it is a large issue. Specifically, early findings are showing the product has convinced an entire new generation of teens that vaping is cool even while they believe smoking is gross. It is reseting the gains made in the 80s and 90s on reducing teen addiction to smoking. There is also research to indicate it has a strong impact on health. Probably not as strong as tobacco, but if you are more likely to use it as a teen because you perceive it as healthy and cool, the net effect on public health is just as bad. i.e. the individual effect might be less, but the overall net effect on society is more since its a more compelling product (for young people).
We are probably 5-10 years from knowing with solid peer reviewed research of knowing whether vaping is more like eating a few donuts a day or whether it's closer to smoking a pack a day.
Nicotine remains a vasoconstrictor, that doesn’t change - some increased risk of certain cardiovascular disease isn’t going to shock anyone. Sugar is terrible for your cardiovascular health too though, yet we continue to ignore that fact.
Most studies I’ve seen on e-cigarettes have had faulty controls or are designed with unrealistic scenarios in mind, I hope that changes because proper study is certainly warranted.
I think your job is to put money in companies with low valuations that EXIT with high valuations. Your investors won't give a crap if you do a good job of finding unicorns that eventually fissle out.
I think the basics of it (i.e. recognizing n vs n^2 vs exponential) is important for back end developers. After a few years of doing back end I've definitely had to have awareness in how I design things like my loops to optimize.
It's not a biggie for most companies, but you should have a general awareness. Unlike the author of the article, though, I do believe you can learn this on the job. Also, you don't have to necessarily know the big 0 notation, it's a good idea to write a load test which will give you a more relevant stat anyways. But sometimes its good to recognize "Oh I don't need a 2nd inner loop that will change this to O(n^2)".
I am a bootcamp grad with several years of experience now. I agree with the article that the two of the weakest areas for bootcamp grads are data structures and algorithms.
However, my advice would be to interview at places that have focus less on these areas instead of taking coursework. At the end of the day if you are bootcamp grad you are probably not in the financial situation to take extra coursework. It's better to lower your standards a bit to get your first job and then pick up these skills on the job.
You will still have to grind out algorithm prep by using sites like Leetcode and Cracking the Coding Interview, but it's probably a better idea to focus on companies that focus less on this area.
I don't think this is true; I come from a caste that is known for being scholars and hence had much better knowledge of imperialist languages (English, French, Urdu, etc.) than Brahmins since they traditional study Sanskrit and the Vedas. This allowed our caste to penetrate court & minister positions over the last millenium and surpass the wealth and power of the Brahmin community.
Even today our community is one of the strongest middle class communities in our region. This might not have happened in other regions, but at least in our region knowledge of languages help the community get embedded in the aristocracy and acquire wealth for generations.
Thanks for answering the previous person's questions; your answers were very helpful. Can you talk about how long it takes most people to reach staff level (or how long it took you)?
At what level do most engineers plateau at Google (meaning most people are unable to go past it)?
I came into Google as Senior with about six years experience at another large tech company (where I'd also made senior recently).
Senior (one level below Staff) is deemed "career level," and if you just want to build stuff it's a good place to stop. Staff involves a much more substantial leadership and coordination component, and that requires both the skill and desire to take on that sort of work.
This kind of behavior is why I recently steered a friend to a Roku. With any of the streaming devices (Amazon, Google, Apple) you risk losing out due to dueling between the major tech companies.. The major players tend to leave Roku alone since it's a 3rd party service that doesn't compete with them.
So I'm throwing my bet towards Roku since it's the only device that can survive a pissing match between all the tech companies.
To be honest, people like to extol the virtues of Bay Area liberalism, but to me the housing policy in the Bay is one of the most systematic (and regulated) form of prejudice. Cities like SF are losing their minorities, their middle class, all to fatten the paycheck of existing landowners. Almost the entire black population has emptied out of SF. It's one of the most pervasive form of class discrimination I've seen.
It comes down to incentives. With the current policies in place, there isn't much incentive for incumbents / existing residents to allow more housing.
If you are a home owner or landlord, reduced supply results in asset appreciation.
If you are a renter with rent control, then building more housing in your neighborhood may not seem like much of a benefit either.
Policy makers are always looking for piecemeal solutions, e.g. let's give teachers a rental subsidy, tweak the % of affordable housing that must be build, etc.
Lawmakers really need to create incentives so incumbents have a reason to want more housing.
"To our knowledge, there are no relevant study in humans on carcinogenic effects from pure nicotine including products, such as NRT and e-cigarettes." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4553893/