skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Another massive factor is we have no idea how fast the virus will mutate.

Sorry, what? We've been sequencing and tracking variants and lineages reliably since the pandemic started. This is very well travelled science. We've seen multiple notable variants arrive already, something that was predicted form the very early days of the pandemic and that surprised no one in the field.

Literally reality is the opposite of what you're saying. The virus is in fact "mutating" in more or less exactly the way that virologists would have expected, given decades of research on the subject.

One of the weirdest angles that the anti-vax/anti-mask crowd tend to take is to somehow argue that covid-19 is simultaneously "just a disease"/"not that bad" and that it's somehow some crazy unpredictable thing that defies the expectations of all of science. And both are wrong!

It's a very conventional novel disease behaving the way novel diseases do. There's a "global pandemic" among some species or another every few years (e.g. 90% of the pacific sea stars disappeared to a novel virus like 15 years ago and they're just now recovering). And that's bad, and requires action!
Just curious, what are the safety numbers for other commonly deployed vaccines like the ones for influenza, etc...?
I saw the headline and I thought, "Why do I care what Linus has to say about vaccines? He's just a programmer!"

But then I clicked the link and realized that it was a classic Linus rant! As much as I support codes of conduct and Linus curtailing his asshole behavior regarding technical matters, I think there should be a loophole for anti-vaxxers and other nut jobs who don't care that they might transmit a deadly disease to the immunocompromised or children.
Funny how different people are on this.

When I worked in an office I never worried about being the first to leave, and didn't even realize other people do.

For me, the biggest downside of working from home is how easy it is to get distracted by non-work. I go grab a coffee and end up putting dishes away, cleaning up, etc. and next thing I know an hour's passed by so I'm working late or feeling guilty.

I've been working on my time management, in general, and that's helping.
Yes: https://www.wiley.com/en-us/How+the+Immune+System+Works%2C+6...
> Like, having this magic, absolutely mind boggling potion that prevents serious illness and death isn't already the lottery win of our lifetime

A lot of it boils down to people not trusting what they're seeing. Frankly, governments have done the world a disservice by speaking before they really had all the information at the start of the pandemic. In Canada at least an insane amount of what was said turned out to be completely false, or worse harmfully false (ie: no masks, isn't airborne, ect). As a result, lots of people see what looks like the "story changing", and distrust anything coming out of their government, and experts, at this point. I think if we approach the problem with that in mind we might win more people over than telling them "listen to experts", since for the past year and a half experts have been wrong almost as often as they have been right.
I assume you're freelancing? An order of magnitude faster delivery is not a huge priority to many such clients. Most of them don't have deadlines that are date sensitive (i.e. they don't have TV/radio ad campaigns lined up). What they care about is that their pet features work. And features may or may not be things that exist within the Bubble.io toolset. If a requested feature does not exist or only exists in a limited/unsatisfactory capacity, how long is it going to take you to familiarize with the generated codebase and implement it properly or glue in an existing 3rd party solution? This is essentially the issue that freelance wordpress folks go through: What inexperienced freelancers often miss is that the client feedback is what destroys your estimates.
Typically a vaccine is aborted if it kills just a single person during its clinical trial.
The outlier being Austria where everyone is required to wear FFP2 (N95 equivalent) masks when indoors (shopping, public transport, etc). And the government mandated the price of masks to be less than 1 Euro each. Not to say they are handling things great, but that was at least one step in the right direction.
Do you have anything on the Astra-Zenaca vaccine and how well it works against the do called "South-African" variant. There was a story that they'd stopped a trial because the results were so bad. Do we have any harder data?
> explaining how traditional vaccines work, how mRNA works, how DNA works, and so on.

1) You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.

2) Lots of people do not have the brain power to understand vaccines and they will simply follow the herd.

Part of the reason anti-vax gets such a boost is because it is considered an "acceptable" position to follow by "respectable" people like the "natural is the only good stuff" dipshits in Marin county (who regularly give us Measles and Pertussis outbreaks).

Yes, you can try to reason with individuals. However, you also need to make stupid positions socially unacceptable so that the part of the herd who don't have the capacity to understand don't go following people willing to lead them off a cliff.
I & others tried about 6 months ago in this thread that asked a similar Q.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25319117
> There are a LOT of anti-vaxxers who disingenuously couch their advocacy as "I'm only asking questions"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning
> there's an awful lot of people on the pro-science bandwagon who don't actually support science, but simply don't tolerate dissent or questioning

I think the problem is that its 10-100x as expensive to refute a misinformed statement than it is to make one. So the plea for the small pool of genuinely authoritative / informed people to invest two orders of magnitude more effort patiently and kindly explaining misinformation to people just isn't practical in any meaningful sense.

We don't need to persuade them. They aren't persuadable, and in many cases they aren't there in good faith in the first place. We do need them to stop spreading lies and causing extreme harm to their communities. The most effective way to do that is to teach them that their actions - spreading obvious misinformation - are as offensive as they actually are (in that they actively harm people).
Just to clear one thing:

Vaccines actually do edit the genetic code, but only of some select B-cells. And so does any other antigen that your body develops antibodies for. The process is very complicated and beautiful, and is pretty much exactly the same as in plenty of other multicellular life forms.

If you've ever wondered what's the "storage format" for all the recipes for all the different antibodies that your body produces, that is how does your body even remember infections from years ago - it's DNA, and the recipes are generated via a massively sped up internal evolution, mediated by T cells. The process of maturing B-cells is kind of similar to machine learning. The matured B-cells are then safely stashed away in the bone marrow. Really remarkable stuff.

(I understand that Linus meant that the vaccine mRNA is not reverse transcribed into the host DNA, and that is of course the case. Also, a side note: the human genome is littered with viral genetic material accumulated over time, god knows if it's for good or for bad, we're still too dumb to answer such questions)
And COVID is a printing press for scam letters.
It's already been the case that various countries require certain vaccines to enter, or other health clearances. These kinds of standards and even more exceptional for animals, and ultra protective for plants. Why is this any different? Why wouldn't you want someone protected from bringing a (newly) preventable disease into your country?
I read this headline and immediately asked myself, why don't you create an account and ask these people WTF do we care what Linus thinks about that? Then I read his post. It is actually a well reasoned response to another post on LKML. Now I created an account to say I agree with Linus, understand why post is popular, but I think the headline is a bit "click-baity". Although it did make me create an account.
Maybe I'm missing the point but could you clarify a bit more on APL's notation vs J's notation?

Speaking as someone who is not very well math inclined and as someone who was born in an Asian country, both APL's special characters for verbs and J's alphabetical characters for verbs are similar enough for me. Both languages use symbols for verbs, it's just that J's symbols happens to very closely resemble the characters of the English alphabet.

Although, due to the familiarity of the English alphabet, J's symbols might intuitively bring up ideas of the alphabet character, is it not possible to just think of it as a new mathematical symbol? For example, instead of seeing "o." as the alphabet character 'o' followed by a period, couldn't it be seen as a circle followed by a dot? Or if we lived in a world where the alphabetical characters of the English were swapped with the special characters of APL, would J's notation still be broken? Does familiarity of the symbols used in a notation make it any less powerful?

Maybe the reason why I don't understand is because I haven't tried APL and only tried J. And I eventually ended up quitting on learning J because it was starting to get too difficult for me. Would it be possible to explain the differences in APL's notation and J's notation is an easier or simpler fashion?
Come on, man...

Literally funding real-life, no joke, international criminals and terrorists. A private citizen would be in Gitmo for life for this. The economy keeps bending away from honest people, and toward varying degrees of collusion, deception, or criminality. Some of us don’t get a thrill from outsmarting the system or deceiving others. It’s just sad.
> and was wondering why we expected the immunity after the vaccine to last longer than natural immunity.

In the case of Pfizer and Astra Zeneca, the simple answer is that it is the second dose which presents a second challenge to the immune system which is designed to stimulate the longer protection, I'm quite surprised that none of your medical friends said that.

That leaves the question of how the single-dose jabs fair, and the honest answer is, I don't know.
Is Canada’s Mysterious Lab Security Scandal Connected to Covid-19?
Because people who are in the ICU because they refuse to get vaccinated are costing the taxpayer a shitload of money. I'd be all for "you can stay unvaccinated if you like, but you won't get an ICU bed if you get severe COVID", but that's a heavier hand than a passport.
I get what you're saying, but the logical conclusion of all this is that no one can know anything at all unless they're an expert in that specific thing. But that's why we have experts in the first place - so that we can determine what is most likely to be true without necessarily needing to deeply understand it first hand. So sure, perhaps there's some small chance that the vaccines don't work the way they're supposed to or the earth is flat. But "expert consensus is X" is a pretty good heuristic for "X is correct." And while I'm not defending random trolls on Facebook, this does happen to be a pretty sensitive subject right now because there is a pretty significant proportion of the population who won't get the vaccine precisely because they don't believe in expertise.
You don't have to default on anything. Just raise taxes and service debt with that revenue and stop or slow more borrowing.
No, I was making an empirical argument: most great scientists have been religious. It would not be too hard to quantify this if you scraped a few Wikipedia links.
Its actually a perfect example. But for the opposit argument.
A random software engineer has a much deeper understanding about the inner workings of GPU then the average non-software engineer. So its a perfect analogy for asking a nurse about a health related topic. He probably doesn't know much about the immune system but he definetly knows more then the average population.
He's not a doctor, but considered as a God by a certain crowd, which allow his to spread the Gospel.
I only got that he was arguing it won't make permanent changes to our genome, which was the claim he was replying to, and he's correct. The spike protein is damaging to cells when present at all, but still very apparently much less dangerous when exposed via vaccine than an actual infection. And, as you know, cells die and get replaced all the time. I think people who are aware of it sometimes gloss over how the spike protein does some damage simply because they don't want to stoke unreasonable fears.
I mean that the company would have to wire their yard to charge a fleet. One charging station at home is one thing, but 25 sounds like a much bigger project from an infrastructure standpoint
Cool. I lived in a vehicle (a car, another car, and then a can) for 9 years to save rent and then to live minimally. It took me 10 years to graduate between work and the echos of the dotcom era messing-up course availability. Doing alright now if anyone were wondering.
>The m in mRNA stands for messenger.

Whoops, you got it backwards. Nature does not really care whatever names we give to things. Come on, you can do better than that :)
Yes. https://www.amazon.com/How-Immune-System-Works-dp-111954212X...
I think we probably disagree on "cleaver"!
I think some linear algebra knowledge certainly helps a lot, so that's a good point. A lot of APL doc talks about concepts such as "Rank" and "Inversion" and "Transpose". That is a little math heavy.

The other problem is that I would bet that a lot of the early use for APL was done better by Excel spreadsheets on desktops. By the time APL moved off the mainframe, it was too late. Of course, I'd imagine as far as code maintenance goes, APL beats a very large spreadsheet with a lot of VBA. Excel also has built-in charts and other functionality that is far clunkier, even in the best APLs.
Can you point to a specific email that makes you hesitant?
> Unsafe does not allow unsound behavior, or rather, it lets you write unsound behavior but that is a bug. You still have to uphold various invariants in unsafe code. It’s there for when you know you can, but the compiler cannot, which is an inherent property of any sound system.

I don't understand what you're saying here.

Rust-without-'unsafe' is a sound language; i.e. any program which types will be unable to violate runtime invariants.

Rust-with-'unsafe' is an unsound language; i.e. there are programs which type but yet violate runtime invariants.

That is a bug in those programs—sure, yes, of course. It is not a bug in rust; it is the language functioning as intended. However the topic at hand is the relationship between rust's type system and c's; hence unsafe is completely uninteresting, because it is a tool for subverting rust's type system.

(It occurs to me now that I might have gotten a less generally defensive response had I made the original comparison between rust and a hypothetical rust without unsafe. Oh well)
I agreed with you until the last paragraph, where it seems to me like you just fell into the trap you were warning us about. Not sure if that was your intention, but that's what it looks like.

The first part is definitely true though. Calling somebody an idiot is probably one of the worst ways to get them to agree with you, even if they are spouting idiocy. I won't pretend I have a solution to anti-vax beliefs, but simply calling them stupid won't make them disappear.
Yes, and don't forget about gaslighting that this isn't actually happening.
Ivermectin and HCQ were shut down because people were promoting as an alternative to a vaccine.

It's not. It is a supplement to the vaccine for people who are already hospitalised.
I'm thinking Julia could be a good fit. It's garbage collected, pretty fast, and designed for numerical work.
Here's a pre print from today. Credible authors so I do expect it to go the distance:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.28.21258012v...

This expose on the suppression of ivermectin is telling: https://covid19criticalcare.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/T...

Lots of studies referenced in it.
You'd all but certainly be better going in the other direction.

Text is a more constrained state space than speech/audio.
I’ve been accused of this before and it’s fucking bullshit.
not a funny night for people working there.
Number 7 is also already true in some cars. You have almost zero gauges and just get an engine light when something's amiss. Then you need to use an OBDII reader to know what's wrong.
Good point. Also, the deaths involved to these vaccines are much higher than previous runs (think it was swine flu), where vaccinations were halted after 25 or so fatalities.

Ultimately, get it if you want it... your helmet doesn't require other people to wear theirs.
We do have a fairly good idea, but certainly not enough to describe it's exact relationship to exactly how long we can except vaccines to last, to OP's concern :)

I don't think the media has sensatialized any of the strains, and I am equally unconcerned as you. I expect I may need a booster in a year, probably in reality two, but one is safer under uncertainty.
Worse, maybe even an ill-informed opinion since they might feel like they should know how GPU drivers work since they're in the industry and start spouting off smart sounding techno-babble. I know a few nurses myself, they're not a good source for medical advice but people trust them anyway. Hell, my mom does clerical work in a hospital, and people ask her for medical advice.
But isn't 20 hours/week or 40 hours/week a negotiated agreement when you got hired? If you want 20 hours/week, get paid less and stop whining about companies should pay more for less amount of mandatory work hours. The discussion should have been more like employees should have more options on choosing how many mandatory work hours they are willing to offer a week when signing agreement with a company.
I am utterly surprised, though not all people here are from the capitalism driven world but majorities are talking like they are living in socialist world.
They are not "obviously safe". The mRNA vaccines just had an article today that exposed a link to heart inflammation. The AstraZeneca vaccine also has some side effects that didn't show up in their abbreviated trials. I understand why someone would be hesitant to get a vaccine that only has Emergency Use Authorization.

That said, I personally believe that the benefits outweigh the potential side-effects. If I weren't already vaccinated this news would not have have changed my decision to get a mRNA vaccine.

"Heart inflammation in young men higher than expected after Pfizer, Moderna vaccines -U.S. CDC" - https://www.reuters.com/world/us/cdc-heart-inflammation-case...
What other options does Linus have by your logic, then?

1) remove the person's comments
2) let the person's comments stand unchallenged
3) engage in a lengthy, potentially endless discussion with this person who is highly unlikely to change their mind

None of these seem like great options.

Linus probably recognizes that he has virtually zero chance of persuading this person's opinion. He probably also recognizes that a reader who comes across these outlandish claims unchallenged may get the wrong impression that these views are somehow being embraced by the community. As such he is absolutely correct in briefly explaining that the vaccines are safe and effective.

And being a pompous ass is kinda Linus' thing. :shrug:
You are right, not tolerating questioning is unscientific and harmfull. Asking questions is the one way how you can learn things and also, I find it extremely useful for myself to answer scientific questions. Becauses it forces yourself to review the matter at hand, sort out your own thoughts about the problem and refine them to a point where you can deliver a satisfying answer. Often enough that leads to deeper insights.

I am not a doctor, but some observations from my side, what might be reasons for a different behavior of vaccinations vs. an actual infection. One point, that the vaccine is very targetted, you already listed. Then, the vaccine doesn't make you sick. Suffering through the infection might impact the ability of your immune system to build up long-term immunity. I read some article which claims that getting sick of measels does give you good immunity, but lowers your immunity against other diseases for up to two years. Also, the numbers of the time span of acquired immunity of both the vaccinations and getting infected by Covid are varying a lot. Recently I saw some claims that the infection does give you some reasonable long-term immunity.
Genomes are much more than just their sequence. Their spatial organisation, their methylation, their fiolding, their packing etc, have no equivalents in a filesystem.
One never calls The Linus just a man.
I don’t know… we let people ruin their lives by throwing dice. At least in the US, it’s a country founded on chance over conformity.
Based on the other comment, it looks like it's another language that happens to shorten down to APL in name rather than APL "A Programming Language". It looks like some internal Java derivative language which sounds like could be rather painful if not done well.
Interestingly, came across this article where, in the comments, Robert and a partner provide evidence for their role in mRNA vaccines [1].

[1]https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2021/04/11/mrna-ip-competitive-la...
Sure, you can hold accounts in multiple currencies. However, if you're a sole developer or small business bringing in low-six-figure revenues, you're probably going to want to take much of that revenue out of the company to pay its people on a regular basis. That in turn probably means transferring it to your primary bank account and converting the currency to your primary currency in the process, which will incur a conversion cost again. So holding accounts in several different currencies mostly helps if you expect to both bring in and pay out significant amounts in those same currencies, avoiding a round trip of conversion to and back from your native currency.
Yet people like this who just don't want to inject anything that hasn't been studied for at least a couple of years, don't coach our opinions in anti-vaxx language. Stuff like "new species" is ridiculous and masks the actual rise of surveillance totalitarianism which uses Covid as an excuse.
I don’t know where this is coming from, but I can tell you is not at all what I’m saying.

I don’t need a truck because I don’t want 15mpg. I’m rarely limited by the cargo space of my sedan, and I much rather drive something that is easier to move through air and easier to park anywhere I go.

I also don’t go off-road to need ground clearance or 4WD.

But for 19k and 40mpg, this truck looks very appealing for those rare occasions when I could use it, since the downsides seem to be reduced. I could move my bikes easier, or load a kayak, or bring bags of dirt for the garden without overthinking it.