skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, what you just said is seriously wrong. The CDC even coauthored a paper that found during the SARS-1 outbreak that among contacts of known cases, those untrained people that regularly wore surgical masks had a 70% reduced risk of contracting SARS. 60% for those that wore them intermittently. And in fact, research suggests that masks are actually MORE protective for the people wearing them.

Note the following points, with sources (The context is a bit off because I did this research in response to another question, but the points are still pretty much relevant here):

1. Regular old surgical masks (not N95 respirators), when worn by the public without training, had a strong protective effect for the people wearing them during the SARS-CoV-1 outbreak. They reduced the risk of infection by ~70%. (Source: https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/10/2/03-0730_article)

2. Despite being very different in their ability to actually filter out fine particles, N95 respirators and surgical masks actually show no significant difference in their ability to prevent diagnosed respiratory infections including influenza, when worn by healthcare workers according to two large meta-studies. Though both had a protective effect over no mask. (Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4868605/) (2nd source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5779801/)

3. Improvised, homemade masks have only a marginally lower filtration efficiency than surgical masks (which we established are about as effective as an N95 respirator anyway). (Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2440799/) (2nd source: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258525804_Testing_t...)

4. There is evidence in the studies linked in item 2 that hand hygiene alone did not demonstrate much of a protective effect (for civilians caring for a sick family member) against transmission of influenza compared to use of any type of mask.

5. When infected people wear a mask, it helps reduce the amount of viral shedding which occurs, presumably making them less likely to infect others. (Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3591312/)
>Surgical masks are not effective at preventing infection. They are effective at spreading infection.

This is a common misconception, for which CDC is also partially the one to be blamed.

Laboratory tests find that improvised cloth masks block 60 – 80% of virus particles

Most experts in the early 2000s agreed that these masks were probably better than nothing.

https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/bmjopen/5/4/e006577.full.pdf

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/c...

http://akkie.mods.jp/2019-nCoV/images/c/c0/%E3%82%B5%E3%83%B...
DNA is made out of nucleic acids. Each sequence of 3 DNA nucleotides codes for an amino acid. There are 21 amino acids.

How DNA -> proteins is well understood. Protein folding though is incredibly complex to model.

It is easy to know the amino acid sequence, but hard to know how the protein will end up folding.
Very good comment!
Well, placebo doesn't work if you know it isn't real.
Jarrett Heather presents: Word Crimes (2014)
Unfortunately, I think you are on the wrong side of the science on this one.

First, you're implying that the data is new, but it's been around for a long time:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HLrm0pqBN_5bdyysOeoOBX4p...

> Surgical masks are particularly helpful in stopping _infected_ people from spreading the disease.

One of the ways the CDC twisted the information was to pretend this is only about surgical masks. There are also N95 masks, but the advice from the CDC and Surgeon General was generalized to all masks, not just surgical masks. Like this tweet:

Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS!

They are NOT effective in preventing
general public from catching #Coronavirus,
but if healthcare providers can’t get
them to care for sick patients, it puts
them and our communities at risk!

Nothing in there distinguishes surgical from N95 masks, which really do block 95% of pathogens.

Furthermore, even surgical masks block 60-80% of pathogens. And if you seal the sides with tape, they block as much as other respirators.

And for the public, 60-80% is wayyyyy better than nothing!

So although it's true that there is a shortage of medical-grade masks for healthcare workers, and it's true that we should give them priority for any masks we have, it's absolutely a lie to say that "masks" in general are not effective at stopping the virus for the public.
Khan Academy's internet traffic increased 250% over normal on quarantine.

Unreal Wiki must be experiencing similar trends. The real reason it was shut down.
The first thing you'd want to implement is perft: https://www.chessprogramming.org/Perft_Results
It actually doubles as a performance test(like it's name) and a debugging tool to verify that you can generate moves correctly by comparing your numbers vs the positions given on the website and a few large suites.

I'd encourage you to get involved with the passionate community at talkchess: http://talkchess.com/forum3/index.php

And join a small group on IRC at Freenode ##chessprogramming where we discuss chess AIs, libraries and often other games like Ataxx and Go.

I myself am an author of a chess library: https://github.com/Mk-Chan/libchess !
Great to see development for Java as well
This doesn't just magically remove the latency.

* I presume the case here is the proxy is close to the server so the handshake is faster and thus the single benefit of this setup, although that's not at all what's illustrated.

* The illustrations show the request taking longer with the proxy, although maybe the two diagrams aren't to scale

* The originating UDP packet could get lost and the client would never know

The author could improve the latency by prepping the TCP connection before the request comes in, giving a significant reduction in latency.
Bit off topic wrt robocalls, but on topic wrt FCC mandates.

What do you think about the 'Free Press' group asking FCC to sensor Trump's corona virus updates?

Does FCC have authority to do that?

https://thefederalist.com/2020/04/02/far-left-media-group-as...
I’m far from a newbie developer, and every time I see something like this, I think “why bother”?

Modern front end development is a shit show and pays less than any other area of software development. I know enough HTML/CSS to build a workable internal website and I know Javascript like the back of my hand. But, given a choice between specializing on the front end and compete with “good enough” boot camp grads and specializing in backend architecture and infrastructure, I chose to do the latter.
For $20, you can get the MH Z-19, which is a NDIR type. You can talk to it over UART, and it comes in a 5000ppm and 2000ppm model IIRC. Decent documentation, and a good little sensor.

The S8-0053 looks interesting, but I have no experience with it. Also NDIR, boasts +- 40ppm accuraxy -- the room air might not even be that homogeneous...

The cheap ones are electrochemical, and they're not even that cheap.

https://sandboxelectronics.com/files/SEN-000007/MG811.pdf
> Persistent Borrelia Infection in Patients with Ongoing Symptoms of Lyme Disease.

This paper is from Marianne J Middelveen, who is well known for embracing quackery and producing questionable papers.

Her earlier claims that Lyme is a sexually transmitted disease were quickly dismissed, though not before generating a lot of noise in the media: https://www.aldf.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Lyme-Borreli...

She also writes papers about "Morgellons Disease", a delusional disorder in which patients believe threads and fibers from their clothing and other fabric are actually sprouting from within their skin. The condition is universally acknowledged as a delusional disorder, but MJ Middelveen treats it as a real disease with no real evidence.

> I'm not gonna bother digging up the others, honestly not worth my time to try and convince one random person.

This is my least favorite part of discussing Lyme online. So many people are deeply convinced of their chosen narrative that they unquestioningly accept any papers that support their claims, while refusing to acknowledge any evidence to the contrary. This has created quite the market for pseudoscientific researchers to peddle narratives and pseudo-research that meets the demand for what people want to hear.

In the end, it only sets the field back. I would love to see a magic combination of antibiotics that reverse PTLDS symptoms, but decades of high-dose, extended duration antibiotic trials have provided zero benefit to patients, despite the demand.
In the US, that generally requires being in obvious, continuing residence AND paying the property taxes for the entire lot.
This is an astonishingly contrived hypothetical. If it's drifting and for some reason you magically cannot board the ship, you get on the radio and ask for a tug.
It's almost as if choosing leaders based on whose soundbites generate the most media coverage isn't a good idea.
I had a similar experience. I had a tick bite on my ear and didn't think much about it. A week or two later I noticed a secondary bullseye rash on my leg. I am also very lucky that my mother knew what it was and I was treated quickly with no complications.
WFH newsletter from an ex-Google product manager
Human touch does trigger positive neurochemical cascades. We might understand how all this works much better in the future, perhaps we big improvements in in vivo imaging of biological processes. Maybe some future version of CARS microscopy that does not fry the cell; better theory on multi-scale processes in human biology; and much better fMRI than what we have now.
Until you get some decent amount of load on the system. Then the background thread will still make progress. And the UDP/Proxy approach will only have failing requests, because the loss of any single UDP packet will make the request fail (there are no retries).

I can only see being interesting if you have a workload which requires sending small requests that fit into one or a couple of datagrams.
It will be really good to see a post on the roadmap you have in mind.
It can possibly work, if you open your mind to more then what's possible in the materialist scientific viewpoint.
Actually it does:

https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/placebo-can-work-even-kn...
I'm sure they had lifeboats.
A server requires energy and maintenance forever. A font does not.
His channel is a goldmine for anyone who plays around with ESP-32 microcontrollers or similar devices
Even tribes trade and combat between themselves. European diseases traveled quite readily between native populations in the Americas.
A belgian shop did a promo recently: Buy 2 Corona, get 1 Morte Subite for free

https://www.brusselstimes.com/all-news/business/98659/delhai...
A lot of people still have the mindset that the body is a system with clear inputs and outputs and predictable outcomes. But in many cases the brain plays a big role so things like people feeling good and getting attention helps a lot. A lot of regular medicine feels very rushed and if you have a complex problem it's hard to get anybody to listen. I bet for things like chronic pain or chronic fatigue they would get better results if they slowed down a little and listened.
You could see this coming days ago when it was announced these ships would be for "non-virus patients". Obviously there's no way to know for sure that someone doesn't have the virus, in any reasonable time, even if you do test them .
If they read tech news this week, but not if they happen to skip it until next week.
I assumed it was there for overflow of non-covid patients, is that not the case? Are NY hospitals over capacity?

edit: seems this is addressed later in the article but for some reason NYT is paywalling/registerwalling this after the fold for me.
The Brilliant Plodder
Great comment and I apologize in advance for going off topic.

We all have our mental models and it takes effort to re-evaluate and change them. And as the saying goes - there are no right models, only useful ones in some situations. Some are useful in more situations than others.
Take “flat earth” model of the world. It’s not right, but it’s precise enough for the purposes of living in a village. Nothing wrong with that, its when you want to venture out, then you have to find a more precise one. But if you live your life in that village - it’s very useful and you can be excused for believing that this is all there is to the world.

I once started learning some chinese martial arts, and the instructor was a true believer in more than the fighting techniques, but the spirituality that comes with it. Very easily debunked by modern fact based science. But if you followed the practices that the believes justified, you could help your health tremendously - meditation, physical exercise, calmness - it had a very neat system to explain everything.

Imagine being a practitioner several thousand years ago - you had a system and if you made people practice it - they got better. Even if the exact mechanism of why it happened is flawed, and failed in some cases, by the most part it worked. You just had to refine it a bit.

And it did help me as well. Had I just dismissed it as shaman mumbo jumbo and not went through with it, I’d be worse off for sure. No reason I had to adopt his model wholesale though - I just needed to attempt to reconcile his one with the science based one I knew, and see where I can learn a thing or two.

Anyway just wanted to say that from that I did learn to be more tolerant and not dismiss out of habit things that were not peer reviewed double blind tested, but rather look at the results first.

All models are wrong, some models are useful.
Hayabusa 2 visits asteroid Ryugu [video]
I'd like a source for that because it directly contradicts news reports I've seen.
Jarrett Heather is the artist behind Weird Al's "Word Crimes" video released in 2014 (at 48.4 million views now).

Word Crimes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gv0H-vPoDc

Weird Al's spot-on parody of Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines" with T.I. and Pharrell Williams: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyDUC1LUXSU

Weird Al contacted him after being impressed by "Shop Vac", his previous work with kinetic text (typographic animation), which he made using animation tools like AfterEffects.

Shop Vac: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4sOfO8Ei1g

This page on Jarrett Heather's web site tells the story and shows the art and technology behind the "Word Crimes" video. He's also published the Animatic storyboard-in-motion that took about 100 hours, to Weird Al's original home-made demo of the song! It's fascinating to compare them, and see how their ideas evolved from storyboard to final video.

Jarrett Heather presents: Word Crimes:
https://jarrettheather.com/wordcrimes/

>The Completed Music Video: In November 2013, "Weird Al" Yankovic asked me to direct an animated video for "Word Crimes", a parody of Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines" about the supposed abuse of proper language.

>The result of 500 hours of work in After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator and Premiere goes by in 3 minutes, 44 seconds. I hope you find each one of them entertaining.

The Animatic: https://vimeo.com/102959171

>This storyboard-in-motion took about 100 hours. Al signed off on this design on January 25th, 2014, only 3 weeks after he gave me his homemade "demo" for Word Crimes, which you can hear on the animatic soundtrack.

>If you watch very closely, you might notice a gag or two that didn't make it through to final animation or some very subtle changes in the lyrics.

Jarrett designed the Live Journal logo in 2000 or so, and parodied it in the video, with a broken pencil tip.

https://jarrett.livejournal.com/208198.html

Here's an article about Jarrett Heather from around the time the video came out, that was previously posted to HN:

Elk Grove animator thrives as ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic’s partner in ‘Word Crimes’:
https://web.archive.org/web/20140725043615/https://www.sacbe...
>Surgical masks are not effective at preventing infection.

Actually, they very much are.

1. Regular old surgical masks (not N95 respirators), when worn by the public without training, had a strong protective effect for the people wearing them during the SARS-CoV-1 outbreak. They reduced the risk of infection by ~70%. (Source: https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/10/2/03-0730_article) The CDC even coauthored this one.

2. Despite being very different in their ability to actually filter out fine particles, N95 respirators and surgical masks actually show no significant difference in their ability to prevent diagnosed respiratory infections including influenza, when worn by healthcare workers according to two large meta-studies. Though both had a protective effect over no mask. (Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4868605/) (2nd source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5779801/)

3. When infected people wear a mask, it does help reduce the amount of viral shedding which occurs, presumably making them less likely to infect others. (Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3591312/)

In fact, if you dig into the research evaluating different mask types including homemade masks, one of them suggests that the masks are actually MORE protective on the way in than they are in preventing shedding of aerosols:
(Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2440799/) (2nd source: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258525804_Testing_t...)
These covers look great and fun. I would love to buy PDF version of these. Is this an option? I'm jus totally out book space at the moment.
Not sure why this is getting downvoted. Wearing a mask correctly, in a way that gets a proper seal, is something health care pros are trained to do and most people aren’t. If you’re constantly touching the mask (which has been concentrating particles in the air) and then touching other parts of your face, the mask is less effective.
From TFA:

> Ambulances cannot take patients directly to the Comfort; they must first deliver patients to a city hospital for a lengthy evaluation — including a test for the virus — and then pick them up again for transport to the ship.

> Ultimately, Mr. Dowling and others said, if the Comfort refuses to take Covid patients, there are few patients to send. And given the pernicious spread of the disease in New York City, where nearly 50,000 were infected as of Thursday, dividing patients into those who have it and those who do not is pointless, he said.
According to the article

> Mr. Dowling said he has had to tear his hospitals apart, retrofitting any unused space, including lobbies and conference rooms, into hospital wards. His facilities now house 2,800 so-called Covid patients, up from 100 on March 20, he said.

> Across the city, hospitals are overrun. Patients have died in hallways before they could even be hooked up to one of the few available ventilators in New York

I think it's safe to conclude yes
If you need a hacker for hire service, I think one of the best places to find one will be on the deep web HL forum . where you can find tins of hackers willing to hack anything for money . One of those with 89% positive review will be Barrysanchez AT hackermail DOtcom . I am a proud user of their services. and I am not ashamed to say this . lol
I remember when being a frontend developer meant having gone through most of the material on the HTMLGoodies site. Life was so much simpler in the 90s. :)
The author doesn't mention, in "Mental Vaccination", the possibility of learning from other people's experiences, or perhaps from accurately simulated experiences. That seems to me like the best way to mentally vaccinate: gaining the lessons through something other than the hard way.
This seems to be very specific to certain libraries and frameworks (mainly react and it's ecosystem it seems).

This I feel is a mistake.

Not so long ago AngularJS was the framework, and now it is basically legacy-/maintenance-only (...and before that jQuery-based things). React will suffer the same fate one day too ... the same way that it happens to all things in tech eventually. Plus react is not the only game in town either, and you may never even touch it in your work so you might be wasting time learning all the react ecosystem things on that list.

I think it would be better for new developers to focus more on the core fundamental techs (while cognizant that these techs may change in the future!) and transferable skills first rather than bothering to even think about react and it's ecosystem:

- know inside-out what happens front-to-back when you put in https://example.com in your browser and the page appears (so DNS, TCP/IP, TLS, HTTP, HTML, DOM etc)

- learn HTML + CSS (semantics, layout approaches, accessibility etc)

- learn how to run your own server (Apache, nginx, iis or whatever - doesn't matter) so you know how things get hosted and served. Do some basic server side "hello world" thing using PHP/C#/Ruby/Java/whatever + a DB to learn how server-side rendering happens, then try just returning JSON instead of rendered-HTML.

- learn JavaScript and then get really really comfortable doing lots of JavaScript. Also learn how JavaScript + HTML DOM work together.

- Optionally now learn typescript and if you're not from a technical background also learn about testing, build tools and source control (these are a given for experienced Devs from other disciplines)

- learn the OWASP top 10 security problems, and strategies/techniques to mitigate them.

- Don't forget basic UX fundamentals in case you find yourself being the designer as well as the developer (happens a lot for better or worse)

... now you are ready to go and use whatever the current flavour of the month library is both for today and for tomorrow.

Good luck to any aspiring Devs! Frontend work is really fun and satisfying work IMO. Stick at it! :)
deer breed like rabbits

A rabbit can have 60 kits a year. A doe averages two fawns a year, if she mates at all.
Many people are commenting that Reiki is like Meditation i.e. all mumbo jumbo placebo effect. This might persuade a lot of people to reject both without going through the experience.

I have been a very infrequent practitioner of meditation since 2009. I am now a very different person and there is no way for me to measure how or what has changed in me. I am way more focused, happier and might I conservatively add the word "successful" in my married life as well as financially.

As most of us have a very scientific attitude towards life, we all can atleast experiment with it. If it works for us, then good. If it doesn't, just move ahead. I have no instrument which can measure my experience but I don't need to google it to know if it has worked for me or not.

Again all I am saying is that please dont have the attitude "Whatever is not written in the books we studied or if there is something we can not explain with our logic, then it must be mumbo jumbo" is the ultimate ignorance. I am not saying that we stop doubting and accept Reiki at face value. I am just saying to keep a scientific attitude, experiment with it and see if it works