skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oxford measured differently than the 90% mRNA vaccines. In particular, the 60% was based on testing for asymptomatic cases, and 90% was not. The three vaccines work on similar principles. I’ll assume they are all the same.

So, expect them to cut symptomatic cases by 90% among people that get the vaccine, and to add up to (60% * the percentage of people that get the vaccine) to the herd immunity progress bar.

The vaccines will likely cut total deaths by less than 90%, because vaccines tend to be less effective on more vulnerable people, and of course, less than 100% of the population will get it on time.

We could get lucky, and they could cut deaths of immunized people by more than 90%; no one knows yet. However the dosing screw up in the Oxford study inadvertently showed it is much less effective on old people.

The new variant speeds up the clock, which means more people will catch COVID before receiving the vaccine. It’s an exponential curve, so if the current R value is 1 (optimistic), and with new lockdowns and the new variant it’s 1.7 (taking the doomsday “add 0.7” from the headline), then cases will increase ~1.7x every two weeks. There are 18 two-week periods between now and fall, when Fauci says we’re likely to return to normal. 1.7^18 is ~14,000x.

There have been 83M confirmed cases globally according to Johns Hopkins, 83M * 14K >> the population of the earth, so the vaccine will be rounding error if the headline and Fauci’s warnings are correct. (It will allow frontline health workers to keep working, but that’s about it, and the hospitals will still be overrun).

If we assume the roll out takes 6 months, and the new variant increases R value by 0.3 (in range according to the article), then 1.3^12 = 23x. There’s some
time lag while the new virus is mostly in the UK, and more stringent measures could reduce 1.3 by a little bit. In that scenario, the vaccine will still save many people.

I suspect the second scenario is more realistic.
I would argue some media outlets are more reliable than others, as can be established for oneself by looking at their track records and following the money. I think this ^ applies as is to mainstream media in general, pick your flavour, but some organisations are trying to do journalism right. You ought to be careful before defaulting to not believing anything you read. I think using your discretion in selecting trusted sources goes a long way in ensuring some level of information integrity. Add to that a layer of fact-checking resources, using your common sense and trying to read between the lines, and you might end up with a coherent world view that you can use to interface with other people. Getting your propaganda from multiple sides can also add scope to your experience of the world from what other people write about it. That being said, I reckon it's a complex mess ... my $0,02.
Excess deaths aren't entirely useful since they also include deaths caused by the covid mandates. Those deaths will also be occurring over the next several years which will make it more interesting.
For various reasons (mainly auditing purposes, but it also reduces any incidental infrastructure churn, and makes it easier to guarantee a rollback happened as expected), we need to ensure reproducibility, so it's a bit more important for us that we guarantee the artifacts produced are exactly what we expect.
Interesting:

> As it can be appreciated, that voyage followed the opposite direction to those that the Portuguese would do centuries later: instead of sail south the Atlantic Ocean and round the Cape of Good Hope to the east, they had to sail from Egypt in summer, cross the Red Sea (the Arabian Gulf which Herodotus says) taking advantage of the north wind and leaving behind the Horn of Africa.

So it is possible/likely that the Phoenicians circumnavigated Africa in a clockwise direction while the Portuguese solved the harder problem of circumnavigating Africa counter-clockwise.

Back to the original question: how did shipworms get to ancient Greece? Both narratives support the idea that shipworms were most likely carried from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean Sea. The question is how early the Canal of the Pharaohs was operational. The shipworms may actual help set this date.

I wonder if a Phoenician equivalent of the Roman/Byzantine Periplus of the Erythraean Sea existed in Carthage and was lost after the Third Punic War.
Papers don't usually talk about cost, so I wouldn't count on it.
What is the advantage of a proprietary SaaS SRS webapp as opposed to open source Anki? (note that Anki has support for, for example, LaTex, which makes collections in topics such as math highly useful).
Normally I am pretty anti- whatever california does. This time I'm super pro it. This is a great way to look out for the little guy getting bullied by the bigger ones. Would love to see 100x more of this.
Question from a technopositivist perspective: is there anything that's almost-but-not-exactly asbestos (e.g. asbestos reacted to complex with some other molecule) that retains its advantages without the disadvantages?

I get that one main reason we used asbestos was that it was cheap to produce (it's in the ground, it's plentiful) — but it also has some rather unique applications that are very hard to replicate (e.g. fire blankets.)

Is there yet a "synthetic asbestos" or "treated asbestos" that captures these benefits, without the drawbacks involved in asbestos production+remediation? Or are the benefits of asbestos inherently linked to its drawbacks, through e.g. its fine-scale shape, similar to carbon nanotubes?
I made a rule-of-thumb checklist for this sort of thing:

-Is the advice primarily based on every more finely delineated consumption? (e.g. the bikes or mills you mentioned) Then you can safely ignore it as the users responding are well past the diminishing returns curve in their obsession

-Are there any bits of advice that seem to pop up across various sources? → investigate and think about their validity

-What are the main "things I wish I knew before starting" that keep popping up? → investigate and think
Aren't plastics or polymer inert to salt water?
I figured someone in this thread should look at the terms of service. It says that Zynga owns the items and you're allowed to use them while the service is offered (5). It also says that their maximum liability is the amount you paid in the past 180 days (14). They make no promises or guarantees that the service will always be available and may withdraw services for business or operational needs (13).

Specifically, it says "you do not own any Virtual Items that you obtained through our Services, regardless of whether you “earned” those Virtual Items or “purchased” them. Your Account and any related Virtual Items are owned by Zynga. Zynga gives you a limited license and right to use your Account and the related Virtual Items while we offer the Services."

https://www.zynga.com/legal/terms-of-service
Emacs? Eight megabytes and constantly swapping.

Even today editor bloat is real. On my netbook VSCode is noticeably laggy sometimes, and it wouldn't take too much more to start paging out the editor! It amazes me that we still can't do instantly responsive editors. Even my dinky notebook still has a gigabyte of RAM and can do a billion integer operations a second. But VSCode can't show text instantly. I guess I'll stick with vi!
> I had well more than 2000 hours in the game. Which meant that my cost per hour of entertainment was less than $1.

I remember when one could buy a game for $50 and play it for 250-400 hours (unlocking hidden things, playing with multiple friends with just my purchase). Roughly a dime for entertainment. In some cases, it was sub a penny USD.

You have some expensive hobbies my friend.
You don't think they would make demands of the UK?
Wow i just learned that today
Thanks btw and it’s sad how this did got very little attention
Interestingly, in Trump's book How to get Rich he recommends taking up golf as a means to becoming successful.
I really love when I have strange dreams, especially when you go back into the same dream if you wafe briefly, giving you a moment to consider before it continues. I imagine it's unlikely there is any real meaning behind dreams, but I can't help but feel there must be sometimes, especially with some of the odder dreams.

The most disappointing thing about a good dream though, is how quickly memories of it fade away upon wakening - it's like trying to grab tendrils of smoke rising away.

Usually at best I manage to recall one or two small snippets, or something about the general theme, but every now and then - very rarely - more vivid details stick with me for a little longer.
It is also used as a purification filter, to this day, by consumer alcohol manufacturers. Although they don't like to talk about it.
What about looking at employment history: types of companies, position, length, languages used... the basics..
Personally, I don't mind take home assignments or even live coding challenges as long as they are testing skills I use for my job (front end web dev). I've spent a lot of time getting good at what I do, and I am actually happy to show those skills off to potential employers.

But hackerrank/leetcode don't test for those skills. They test your ability to memorize solutions to trivia questions, typically things you'd never be asked to do in the workplace.

There's enough to learn to be good at software without having to also memorize arbitrary trivia.
Food poisoning usually takes 10-15 hours from meal to symptoms. That gives you only a couple of meals to consider.

About ten years ago one third of the office (50 people out of 150) called in sick, it was pretty clear which meal and which restaurant was the culprit.
It's frustrating. Two of the most long-lived building materials available are lead and asbestos. Lead pipes last centuries.
What's the problem with the ethernet card? I'm guessing Linux has deprecated/removed the driver for it? Also I'm quite surprised that Linux still works on a 386SX, because support for 386 was removed some time ago (https://lwn.net/Articles/527396/).
Sure, I agree with you, it seems unlikely that fuel cell tech will overtake advances in batteries in the near future, and that compressed hydrogen doesn’t seem likely to become competitive.

My point is that there are many other hydrogen generation and storage technologies at various degrees of maturity and viability, and it doesn’t seem productive to write off a potential economical fuel cell system as a physical impossibility.

I do think there are many challenging engineering problems along that path, and I’m not convinced it’s tractable at all, much less likely to outpace advances in battery systems.
> There's a simple mathematical explanation for that. If we agree that a state diagram is a directed graph consisting of N nodes, then there are N^2 possible transitions (that's the definition of a completely connected graph).

A state diagram is usually richer than a directed graph—usually the edges are labelled. This multiplies the number of possible transitions by the number of possible labels.

(Also, for anyone interested in comparing with the graph-theoretic terminology, the term "complete graph" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_graph) is often used for undirected graphs with no self-loops, in which case there are only \binom n 2 possible edges.)
The funny thing is, Amazon is a terrible example, since lots of stuff there is actually being sold by 3rd parties, not by Amazon itself, and not with any authorization from the manufacturer.

example: https://www.amazon.com/Rolex-Datejust-126303-Silver-Bracelet...

would you shell out $13,000 for this watch from "AUTHENTIC WATCHES"? Are they authorized to sell Rolexes? Do they have any "arrangement" with Rolex? Would Rolex honor its warranty after this sale? Is the watch even new?
Copyright lasts way too long.
Interesting. What makes you say two years?
One might wonder if the EU has leadership capacity to be able to maintain domestic strategically important industries.

Generalising from 40 years of EU history, I have little confidence. The top US and East Asian processor and semiconductor companies all are extremely successful in the marketplace, in addition to consuming government subsidies. Fostering a competitive market has not been the EU's forte. Indeed the EU narrates this funding as a need to address a "market failure" [1]. I feel that this is one-dimensional, bur entirely predictable from the structure of EU decision making.

Just today, at midnight, the EU lost ARM and DeepMind as domestic industries.

[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:52...
Honestly, I had thought that it was a partnership. For one, only a rather small subset of the restaurants in my area show up on Grubhub. I imagined that outsourcing the delivery function of their business would be a net win.
> What about tragedy-of-the-commons collective action problems, like pollution ...

I (and OP) wrote about (informal) duties defined by society as a whole, not (explicit) laws approved and enforced by government. Laws are necessary minimum to have functioning society and can handle these kinds of problems.
If you want a less interpretive translation, one designed to carefully reflect the original (IMHO, two different approaches for two different purposes; I don't favor either), another not mentioned is JRR Tolkien's, published for the first time in the 21st century.

He wrote it in the 1920s, never published it, and his son Christopher (executor of his literary estate) finally published it in 2014. I imagine that I'm reading the private translation not only of the literature's leading scholar but, by unique coincidence of history, the leading fantasy writer. What an opportunity. The language is at times florid, though I imagine that's the original. Through Tolkien's Beowulf you can hear the voice the Lord of the Rings author, or perhaps it's that you can hear Beowulf coming through in the Lord of the Rings.
Even if I agreed with you, we are talking about the cutting edge of optimisation, of driving down costs, of doing things in volume. The exact things you also say a market is needed for.

We aren't talking about a military research project like packet switching, or getting to the moon for the first time.
Wouldn't it be easier to first do your crawling and then construct the matrix in one go? But graphs more broadly sounds like an area where you might want to update the matrix yeah.
It’s not just about maximizing share value - it’s a prisoners dilemma.

If one company declines to do business, someone else will do it, and may end up with market power.

We can’t solve this problem by expecting individual companies to sacrifice themselves.

Even if they did, it wouldn’t solve the problem because it would open the door to even worse companies taking their position.

The only solution is at the political level.
What about cross linked polyethylene (PEX) ? Why use metal pipes at all?
Perhaps it's more like give someone a mask and they will tell you their psychosis. Is the disinhibited mind properly functioning any more than a drunk person is their real self or a disinhibited muscle contributes the most to a person's presence?
Perhaps not the most insightful, but definitely my favourite:

> I'd rate the news as "vibing" on a scale of clickbait to party for the world
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25035508
One of the things I've done is to hand a candidate some existing code and ask, "What do you think of this code? Do you see any obvious problems? Are there things that work but could be done better? Is there anything exceptional in there? Tell me what you see." This allows you to test that they know how to read code, which is what they'll be spending the majority of their time doing. You can ask them how they'd improve it, which should give you an idea of how they write code, too. And of course, you can see their experience by checking out their resume and if possible running some of the apps they worked on. And if they have any code on GitHub, etc., you can check that out, too.
Huh? It's a web app. If you set up https, no data is ever sent to the server unencrypted.

Likewise setting up FDE means your data is encrypted on the server.

> but this doesn't guarantee that your data will be safe

I don't get what you're trying to get at here. If you're taking about bugs compromising the encryption then I guess this applies to practically every software out there making this a moot discussion.
As such other wonderful outposts of peace as northern ireland, cyprus, israel, etc. show, back when it was Britannia who ruled the waves, they were fond of playing "let's you and him fight". To my eyes, the long-term drawbacks of these initially-attractive conflicts probably support the ancestor's thesis.

(any oceanic power will likely find making a mess of potential eurasian overland trade routes to be a feature, not a bug.)
> It also brooks no dissent: one of the EU's "red lines" in the negotiations was that they didn't want the UK to undercut their "standards", defined as regulation. Any country that attempts to deregulate gets taken to court by the EU Commission itself, in its own courts, which almost always rule in favour of the Commission regardless of what the law actually says.

This is standard practice is almost any trading agreement. No trading entity wants to enter a tariff free agreement with another entity which operates lower standards, and thus makes it easy for that partner to undercut their local market.

It’s the entire reason why the US and EU hold tariffs against each other. They don’t want the subsidies or differences in standards to allow one to undercut the other.

The US has similar terms in all their trading agreements, its just that historically the US has sought to export its copyright, tax and drug laws. Hence why most of the western world has drug laws and copyright laws that are almost a copy paste of US drug and copyright laws. Indeed it’s why weed is still technically illegal in Amsterdam. It’s also how the US gets foreign banks to enforce FATCA.

Finally if you want to see some really repugnant trade agreement terms, look up Investor-state Dispute Settlement agreements that the US likes to put in their trade deals [1]

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investor-state_dispute_settl...
Coca cola is named after coca leaves, which is where cocaine is derived from. Coca cola still uses extract from the leaves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca-Cola

> The drink's name refers to two of its original ingredients: coca leaves, and kola nuts (a source of caffeine).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca

> Coca is known for its psychoactive alkaloid, cocaine.
Uninsured people are cheaper to provide service to, too. Don't underestimate the effort it takes to code things up for insurance consumption and navigate their bureaucracy and any routine denials of payment.
Could you mention / link one of these services?

I'm quite curious.
Users reporting moisture inside Apple's $550 headphones
Upvoting, maybe.
Price signals following the soviet collapse were non functioning ( see the current oligarchs ). It’s hard to know how many of these factories could have adapted over a slightly longer time frame or with some slight investment restructuring.

When the price of a corporation falls below their paper assets it tends to attract A certain kind of investor disinterested in long term value. I’d venture a good number of soviet parts suppliers saw their revenues dry up when their clients were dismantled, it wouldn’t have taken more than a few such links in the supply chain being dismantled to break the entire supply chain given the level of centralization.
I guess that doesn't apply to translations?
With vim's netrw plugin [0], I'm able to do this:

$ cd ~/tmp/foo
$ touch a b c d e
$ vim .

Then select the file(s) you wish to delete, press D (must be capital "D"), confirm the deletion, and Bob's your uncle.

[0] https://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1075
Luckily we have noble actors like yourself to prove that an unblemished character is possible!
Thank you for the reference. I have some reading to do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Game
"the complete API" is a bit of a misnomer, since there have been new APIs and runtime capabilities that aren't available to the Windows-only, older runtime (The .NET Framework). This has been the case since at least .NET Core 2.1 but has continued ever since.

There are several APIs in the older runtime that are intentionally not brought forward, and what I believe you're referring to is this announcement: https://github.com/dotnet/announcements/issues/130

The remaining APIs are (mostly) AppDomains, Remoting, Web Forms, WCF server, and Windows Workflow, most of which is either an acknowledged "this was the wrong way to do it so we won't bring it forward" (e.g., Remoting) or tied to Windows anyways (e.g., WCF).
> This is an opinion that Bitcoin advocates throw out every time someone criticizes Bitcoin's ability to be a currency.

This 'opinion' comparing Bitcoin properties to Gold appeared before Bitcoin antagonists appeared. It is part of a design.
Instead of A/B testing, why not try and figure out why the traffic is so low on the landing page? Seems like there’s SEO work to be done?

In my last job we struggled with this. It was more useful, frankly, to go with our gut and qualitative information from sales inquiries we got (questions like “how did you learn about us” or “what made you think to contact us”). We also had a PR firm interview clients to understand how they perceived our brand.

For better or worse we used these qualitative bits of info to try and build useful landing pages. But a lot of it was unfortunately subjective and involved debate over how our marketing actually worked.
> Again, no open source software can do what Matlab can. Why ignore this?

Can you list (or point to a list of) some of MatLab's features that are absent from other software?
It's not that complicated a concept and the flavoring of it doesn't matter beyond being a nice story. It's a simple logical conclusion that needs no additional justification. In the end, all of us here have been a victim of that sort of thing and we all probably became aware of it at least once while also completely prepared to make the same mistake at some other time.
> aerospace

Airbus is absolutely crushing Boeing in terms of quality. Granted, we are woefully behind on the 'space' part of aerospace.

> energy

CERN is anchored to the EU. ITER is anchored to the EU. We are world leaders in wind energy.

> telecom

Except for everyone in the West scrambling to replace Huawei with Ericsson tech.

> drugs / biotech

BioNtech made the first breakthrough on a COVID vaccine.

The EU has many issues, but losing leadership in the sectors you mentioned is not one of them.
There are a fair amount of people who think the LHC was not a wise use of resources since it did not give any clues to a new theory beyond the existing "Standard Model" https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-no-new-particles-means-f...

It's obviously easy to say this in hindsight and it wasn't necessarily obvious when this started, but it definitely cost more than it had to because it was an EU project that had to hand out work to all the funding countries.

I am curious what investments have worked out for the EU, but if the LHC is the pinnacle, it doesn't inspire much hope.