skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
mRNA vaccines have been undergoing active research for decades, and in particular the lipid nanoparticle delivery mechanism used in both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines was first used in 2018 in a (non-vaccine) drug called Onpattro[2]. Without this technology, Moderna in particular was having issues with excessive side effects as late as 2017[1].

As such, the Covid-19 vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna could not have been developed pre-2018, and - absent a deadly pandemic that requires taking extreme measures (such as using very large trial groups) to hasten the timeline - normally vaccines undergo development over a period of many years[3] to collect sufficient data to ensure effectiveness and to ensure that the long-term side effects are well understood. Moderna in particular was, prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, working on developing vaccines to target cancer using mRNA technology[4]. Had the pandemic not occurred, one would therefore not expect to have seen any approved therapies until the mid-to-late 2020s at the earliest (and probably later, given how often vaccines and other drugs fail in human trials).

In short, the issue was not that pharmaceutical companies were disregarding the technology, so much as simply the last remaining breakthrough needed to be made - and now that mRNA vaccines have proven themselves to be safe and effective, there'll be no shortage of effort to apply them to new diseases.

[1] - https://www.statnews.com/2017/01/10/moderna-trouble-mrna/
[2] - https://www.statnews.com/2020/12/01/how-nanotechnology-helps...
[3] - https://www.historyofvaccines.org/content/articles/vaccine-d...
[4] - https://www.statnews.com/2017/01/10/moderna-trouble-mrna/
A lot of the value is the access control part of that. You can set up a role hierarchy and/or groups and only see the records you're supposed to have access to when you query. Plus configuration of what fields different user types have access to.

The downside of that is it means every query, no matter how simple, is a join against multiple internal tables to enforce those rules.
They will read it when they get kicked out of the channel for violating the rules that they haven't read.
Wicket stuff, loved it. Not sure if this will ever be “production ready” or merged by sql.JS-like projects but cool proof of concept.
Trading Facile
Not true, those things are deliberately designed to blow as soon as possible after warranty expires. Open any device, look for the capacitors near the energy supply.

Those do not like heat, and if you model the heat correctly, you fit the bell curve of expiration exactly after the 2-3 years after the warranty expires.

If you improve the cooling of the area, most devices lifetime can be doubled.
I always wondered why no repair shop takes advantage of this, by offering a doubled warranty, for defusing planned obsolescence ahead of time.
And what is wrong with that? What the hell does DEI have to do with being competitive?

What you do brings value to a company. Not some immutable aspect of your being (race, color, sexual preference, etc.).

It's amazing to watch people who are supposedly anti-racist working feverishly to enact policies far more restrictive than Jim Crow laws ever were.

Anyone who tries to talk about anything other than merit is a charlatan. Hell Martin Luther King would be excoriated from Twitter for declaring that he dare dream that people be judged by they character and not their skin color.
The thing is that it is impossible to compete with a chinese made appliance just by selling a product that will last. You have to sell it for the price significantly lower in hope to return investment by selling locked cartriges. That is where such perverted business schemes come from. The more we allow chinesium to penetrate to our homes, the less room we left for other better products to get developed and find their way to the market.
That won't work. For google to take over the signing of existing apps they need the existing keys.
Please don't take HN threads into flamewar hell. We're trying for just the opposite here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

p.s. If you would please stop posting unsubstantive comments, we'd appreciate it.
Yes - but not necessarily in the way you want. That can just as easily create a sense of unease and a culture of fear.
"The area of" is important there. If you're going by what wikipedia says, perhaps you could keep reading to the part where it also says "As a unit of measure, an acre has no prescribed shape; any area of 43,560 square feet is an acre."
The wallets full of plastic remark doesn't really apply in Spain, where tons more people carry real amounts of cash.
In its own way quite a cool and valid vision... For a Lisp machine, or some other future micro-kernel (and pretty much micro-everything?) operating system.

Not for Linux, though, because that's not the kind of operating system Linux is.
Should be punished as false advertisement.
What is Salesforce?

JAVA BY AVON
At the time at least, the extent of working on mobile devices seemed to be catching up on emails and messages, and calling into meetings.

Google doesn't allow source code to be stored locally on mobile devices including laptops for security reasons. IT managed laptops can at least connect to some internal systems, and while I was there they rolled out tools to make it productive to code from laptops. As far as I know though, no one codes on an Android device. Maybe that's changed since I left.

Google does in general do a pretty good job dogfooding, I think. All the things about Google services that drive folk crazy tend to drive Googlers more crazy by 10x. I still have a special hate for Drive's search functionality, for example...
I had a compost bin but I eventually just dig a hole in the ground and bury my food wastes.

Every since doing that, our weekly trash has been reduced pretty significantly. Instead of filling up our trash bin, we only fill up half.

Its been about 1 year, I've dug more than 300 holes in the backyard and I'm having so much fun.
I took it as a "conceptual abstraction". It presented a mental model focused on the relationship between variables' lifetimes, intentionally glossing over the implementation details of any particular compiler.
recently I spent a month looking through the Debian EXIF tool source code along with a substantial set of pics from several real people who travel .. after a "gasp" (or three), I realized that "photographic evidence with time stamp, GPS and hardware ID is a spies' playground" .. it actually is..

ps- keep up with your patches
Also "askew" and "do a barrel roll"
Back when phones were built to survive the outside world without a case

You mean: Back when phones had screens made of plastic instead of glass. And yes, sure, that does make them more likely to survive a drop, but also means the screen becomes a scratch magnet. That of course is the right compromise when the screen is tiny and the pixels are enormous, but not so much when it’s the other way around.
Tesla Continues to Walk Back Full Self-Driving Claims
I don't understand this avocado obsession of recent years. What's the sudden interest? "Avocado on toast" - what's that about? Some sort of dig? Or people genuinely think this is exciting? I grew up with a couple of avocado trees in my garden from '80-ish, but it's not like it was a rare earth mine. This makes as much sense to me as people getting excited about oranges; genuinely confused.
Yes that's the entire point of `planned` obsolescence. The word itself quite clearly signifies a requirement for intent to be there. If you make your product as cheaply as possible and because of this it does not last long does not mean it's planned obsolescence. It's just a cheap product.
I know nothing about physiology (apart from up to high school level, so... Nothing), could you expand on how smokers and women relate to ACE-2?
(m)RNA is inherently unstable in our body: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messenger_RNA#Degradation
Well, that is why it comes 50 years later than, say, Kernighan and Ritchie standard of C.

The know-how and hardware of today are just enough for the 1.0 of mRNA vaccines, so to say. How will the fourth or fifth generation look like, is probably beyond our imagination right now.
I recommend Rotten on Netflix [1] that has an episode about Avocado farming. The whole series is super interesting anyway and explores modern day issues such as lack of water, climate change and globalisation.

[1] https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/80146284
Google imposing their own root keys on every device seems like a much much bigger overreach than wanting to repackage apps in their store.
In my city (Italy) composting is mandatory (i.e. you might get fined if you an inspector discovers you put too much of it in generic waste bins). We have separate brown bins for curbside picking. It's simple to separate organic matter from non-organic matter, and reduces how much waste ends up in landfills. You can pick up bags of compost from the municipal utility, and you can then use it as mulch.
I will say that I feel better about our clients underusing a $2500/quarter HubSpot account than I do about our clients wasting $100k+ on Salesforce Pardot.
The worst I’ve seen was Nord VPN. Three or four modals / screens where the action to stop your subscription was the smaller, secondary UI element, almost not even noticeable. How a dev or PM can live with themselves while implementing that I have no idea.
The world of CRM is so weird.

I worked with Real Estate Agency (<20 employees) and they were looking into CRMs. After trying out half a dozen CRMs they ended up commissioning a custom one. There is no single CRM out there that is designed for you.
Also xoshiro generators are enough cheaper than MT that even if you couldn't simdify it, you could keep 4 and get run the 4 together in SIMD to get 4 outputs way cheaper than 1 SIMD MT.
I want to add. Not 100% non transferrable. I was able to deliver a project on Service Now without any Service Now training, using my Salesforce architecture background.
Every function. Shipping/receiving, field service, mailing, facility management.

Cruddy apps like Servicenow and Salesforce are goldmines for process management. All you need to do is be marginally better than Oracle/etc.
Yes, that's already in the title.
This website is aimed at people in the United States (note the shipping form), for whom an acre is still the most common unit of land measurement. Most people in suburban/rural areas in the U.S. are likely to have a sense of what an acre is, while few would know what a square kilometer looks like.
>Javascript bloat exists because of a social problem

JS bloat exists because HTML Working Group along with the whole industry believes JS is the solution to everything. They believe everything on the web should be Web Apps, and completely neglect Web Page development. It was only in the recent 2 two years did we start seeing discussions to reverse course.
This is an ideological flamewar hell comment and we will ban you if you keep posting them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The links I shared have a chart breaking down the co2 cost by land usage, transport, feeding and even the worst vegetables transported the farthest have an order of magnitude less of an impact than local beef.
But it tends to work out better, when we guide them through what's needed to participate. Sometimes, their presence is something we want; just not their behavior.
> you are forced to download the app and wait to check to see if it's compatible or no

The App Store doesn’t let me download apps that are not compatible with my device.
When I say "the customer is always right" I didn't mean they are right about everything in the observable universe.

Absolute words such as "always" are used for dramatic effect in most human-centric contexts. That's why the phrase is also generally accepted as banal: it does not convey much meaning without deeper analysis.

Customers are not "right" about everything and they will not determine the product direction in every sense. That's the job of the company leadership.

"The customer is always right" can also mean that "the market is always right". Ultimately, people will vote with their wallets. They will either buy your product, or they won't.
Next you'll tell me to type "zerg rush" and hit "I'm feeling lucky"
> If you read more carefully this is mostly explained.
> Decay in landfills is anaerobic and produces methane, which has a higher impact on warming than CO2.

It's not clear to me where you're getting that from. The page neither mentions the word anaerobic nor say that composting doesn't also release the exact same gasses just somewhere else. At best it leans on the reader feeling an emotional difference between the words "decompose" and "decay".
Now that mRNA is productionized (or at least on the path towards it), and has been used in hundreds of millions of people without apparent major negative short term effects, the barrier is lower for other targets which no longer have to prove the whole technology is safe, effective, and producable.

We have two examples of safe (so far), effective and mass produced mrna vaccines; so it's probably easier to get funding to research and test other targets. HIV is a popular target, although it's also very difficult.
https://itch.io/jam/a-game-by-its-cover-2020

There's a yearly game jam for making games based on these covers.
Don't Americans run 100 m and 5 km and 10 km distances? I would have thought that would give most people an intuitive understanding of what a km is. Even the US military now uses kms.
A throwback to when Google used to be fun and had an energy about it. They wouldn't do that today. I genuinely miss those days.
Funny to see this mentioned. Just this morning I was struggling to get ffmpeg-wasm working on Firefox. It should theoretically be possible with HTTPS and configured headers:

Cross-Origin-Opener-Policy: same-origin
Cross-Origin-Embedder-Policy: require-corp

Related links:

Does not work in Firefox 79+ because SharedArrayBuffer is undefined - https://github.com/ffmpegwasm/ffmpeg.wasm/issues/106

SharedArrayBuffer: Planned changes to shared memory - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
About 10yrs ago NBA did this to me. They made it impossible to cancel a $99/m sub.

Their instructions were login and go to the cancel button but the cancel button was broken and said call this number. But no one ever picked up the number.

I will never buy a NBA branded thing after that obvious bullshit scam.
Yes, Americans.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greta_Thunberg
"Tone" is the sum of many little things (and then some bigger things). There can certainly be differences between guitars that seem quite similar. Since part (most?) of "tone" comes from the player there can be subtle "UX" things that have an influence or even the mental state of the player and what they believe to be true.

I can believe that spring mounted vs solidly mounting to the body can make some difference (physics says there should be) but I can also believe the difference can be so small as to be negligible.

People gravitate towards combos that are known to be successful. Since they don't understand the exact mechanisms at work it's safe to say let's have a mahogany body, a certain pickup, mounted a certain way, a bone nut, certain fingerboard material etc. and expect certain results.
> SQLite databases of pure data usually aren’t over 10MB in size

Why do you think this?
> literal prison time

Yup

https://twitter.com/javan/status/1357800714018443270
The problem with international law is of course that there is no way to enforce it, the states are sovereign. But a state can’t violate them too egregiously and still pretend to be a first world lawful state.
The View from a Hill: Making Sense of Ras Dharbat Ali in the Archive
Right but when someone specifically says 'width' for acre then what do you do? Assume they mean the width of a traditional acre, or claim you have no idea what they mean?
Booking.com lost a court case over this from what I’ve heard. “Only two rooms left!” nonsense.
Five Tech Giants Just Keep Growing
We did not have this tool for a decade, it was still very much scientific work in progress, with a lot of practical problems to be solved. Those problems were only ironed out in 2017-2018.

You can absolutely kill or at least maim a new medical technology if you push it on the market too far and a wave of serious side effects hits you. As an example: death of Jesse Gelsinger [0] delayed genetic therapies by several years, possibly a decade or more. Scientists were afraid to touch the tools that killed a young man and produced a public backlash.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Gelsinger
People most certainly don't eat sodium hydroxide on their pretzels anymore than they eat raw egg in their cakes. Coating pretzels with lye before baking causes a chemical reaction that consumes the lye. You really, really shouldn't ingest any amount of lye, lest it react with the inside of your squishy organic matter like the surface of pretzel dough...
1 day ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27000570
Lottery Winner
If your flat is so small that you can't have a dishwasher, do you really want to occupy some (probably significant) fraction of your countertop with this thing? It looks like it could wash maybe a few plates and cups at a time. That would take maybe 2 min to wash by hand in the sink. The entire premise of this device seems ridiculous to me.
His demysfitication should have been followed up with "keep at it as much as you can, even if nobody else values as much as you do". I find it sad his message got lost; even you can't produce a master piece loved by anyone else (because it is objectively just "bad") your experience is important to you.

It doesn't matter if others like it or pretend as if it is likeable; you made a painting and that's all that matters. It doesn't have to live up to standarts, it doesn't have to be appericated or notice in history. I think encouraging people to feel "this oily matter stuck on bursh is now making shapes I can interpret on canvas" is more than enough.

(I am super drunk and voliating like 3 or more curfew law things, super sorry for the murder of engrish, but I love Bob Ross)
That's where the hand plane comes into play ;) I've also started building guitars during the pandemic. Lots of fun! I'm on my third.
Yes, it likely will (unless you drop it, or quench it). But if you're careful with it it will last longer than anybody reading this. But just like car batteries: cast iron skillets rarely die, but lots of them are murdered.
Fancy iPhone app that informs dishwashing finish by a twitter post ?
Fair enough. That being said, I think PlusCodes are basically the better worldwide "zipcodes", and while they don't have the "three simple words" property, they do have the property you speak of.

You can basically truncate the first 4 character of the 8 character chunk if you specify a city/country that's within one block. You can also add arbitrary precision after the + sign by adding more sub-blocks.
Ask HN: Anyone have experience quitting work to go back to school?
The more and more I research going back to school, the more I’m convinced that majority of undergrad online or programs designed to be “accessible” to non traditional, working adults are scams, even from otherwise well regarded schools. I’ve seen maybe a handful of decent online CS programs, but that’s about it.

It seems that if I wanted to go back to school, especially for anything outside of CS I would have to quit working.

Obviously there are a few issues here. Money is big things, and personally, I’d be unlikely to be able to afford full time school unless it were very cheap (some state schools around me qualify here if I could get my residency status straight) or has its own generous aid package (these schools will be unlikely to admit me). God knows the regular aid system won’t give me anything. Additionally it’s a huge time investment and a rather binary outcome. Either I will gain the valuable credentials I want that allow to to make the moves I want, or I will be stuck with a credential and knowledge that are basically useless to me. And then of course there’s a lost wages aspect, but that’s one of the least of my worries at the moment.

Has any dropped out of [whatever industry] to go back to school part time? How did it work out?
I believe this is less about hearing opinions and more about celebrating the next generation of hackers.

This is a fine example of a kid who has a strong opinion and, rather than shout it into their echo chamber on social media, they've taken the liberty of securing a domain name and creating a website capable of reaching a larger audience.

We here on Hacker News enjoy celebrating the initiative, the creative process, and the execution. Of course you'll find a wide range of opinions, but I think you'll find (and you imply as much by your question!) that most people on HN are happy to celebrate a the accomplishments of the next generation.
> Your comment doesn't describe any benefit for users

Read the question that was asked and then look at the address bar to see where it was asked. Most people on HN are familiar with Linux or are developers themselves.

But either way, I disagree entirely. On a platform like webOS or Maemo, users benefited greatly from running traditional Linux userlands. There were millions of users who got to enjoy a plethora of apps and the benefits of extensible, hackable hardware and systems.

Preware, for example, had thousands of apps, extensions, and scripts available to millions of users. Users were able to take full advantage of what their hardware and systems were capable of, instead of being limited to whatever Apple or Google allowed them to do with their APIs.
Ask HN: Mobile phone addiction help?
Hey HN

I’m looking for advice and/or suggestions on how to “lockdown/brick” my mobile (iPhone 8) phone to only be able to do a select number of things.

I currently suffer with OCD and anxiety, and my addictions to my phone is making me lethargic and causing regular migraines and eye strain issues.

I do have a second “dumb phone” (Nokia flip 2720) but due to having a “mobile only” bank account I have to have access to my iPhone.

I only really want to be able to text (not WhatsApp) call, and have access to 3 banking apps. I have tried everything, but when I’m feeling “good” or sometimes when I’m feeling rubbish - I will always end up downloading “scroller” apps - Twitter, Instagram, Shopping apps etc - and I quickly waste days and days hooked to it, before prying myself away from it again.

Any advice would be hugely beneficial.

Thank you
Right? All it's missing is a Posted from my iPhone footer
How can we fix that? Many of my family members and friends have little to no interest in reading or learning, although they do have strong opinions on just about every topic.

In my mind, demand for journalism and quality journalism is going to be difficult when folks don’t want or don’t care to read. They have enough things trying to grab their attention that provide an instant gratification — whereas journalism or reading some well researched or written article requires mental effort and investment and almost an appreciation. I personally didn’t appreciate good journalism or writers until I tried writing (mostly technical documents).

I learned two things quickly. Not only did I need to know the subject matter but I needed to convey it in some form that made sense, didn’t just lead to unrelated questions that derail what I’m trying to achieve, and didn’t put the reader to sleep. This is a hard problem, in my opinion.
>The App Store doesn’t let me download apps that are not compatible with my device.

Let's not split hairs over this.

I just got rid of my iPad that does. You tap "get" on the app and after doing something for 5-10 seconds it pops up a modal that says it's not compatible.

Why was the app store showing apps to me that are not compatible or, rather, why was there no way to filter out the ones that are not compatible?