skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>There's not enough evidence [to prove it doesn't happen]

What is your idea 'enough evidence'? Do scientists have to gather up every possible reverse transcription gene in the known universe and test them?

In principle, anything can happen. Specific cosmic rays can hit my desktop's memory/CPU in such a way that my computer will display a giant smiley face for the next 10 seconds. After all, cosmic rays are known to corrupt computations in plenty of other contexts.

I can even propose more than 1 possible pathways for that to happen!
Some class of vaccine hesitancy boils down to miscalculating expected value.

The expected value of getting a vaccine is very high, but people choose not to anyway, presumably due to misinformation or miscalculation.

Lotteries here are exploiting miscalculations of expected value to incentivize behavior (0.1% of saving my life? phaw, but $100 expected value?!).

It feels a bit like patching a security bug with its own vulnerability.
https://americasvoice.news/video/DHUF0DZxs4KXyGX

Jump to the 5 min mark. Dude explains some other stuff that works but is being suppressed.

For reference, I’m pro vaccine, but not one that hasn’t been tested for 10 years. Especially not for a disease that has a 99.99% survival rate in my age range. I’m appalled that anyone with an opinion (who’s educated!) can’t share that opinion, they’ve been banned.

For reference, I have a minor in bioengineering and read papers on this stuff. My wife works in genetics and I’ve assisted on and off. This virus and the vaccines are still active areas of research and what the NIH, CDC, WHO, etc act as fact is in fact just an unproven and likely correct in some and incorrect in other respects for virtually everything — from origin of disease to vaccines. We haven’t had enough time to study.

That being said, stop talking about vaccines when you’re developing the Linux kernel
>I have no idea what on earth you are trying to say to me.

I can explain: that whether the m stands for 'messenger' or 'mars' or 'male' doesn't make a single difference pertaining its behavior in nature.
All that guarantees is ransomware attacks morph into existential threats. You're locked out of your data with no recourse.
Ok, I'll bite.
I was willing to assume he might have some legitimate concern.
A quick Google hoever reveals he was a Covid denier from the start.
There is plenty of evidence that the pandemic is real. Why should the oppinion about the risk of the cure of someone who denied the risk of of the pandemic, be relevant?

How does a credentialed person go off the rails so badly??
More like asking an microelectronics engineer how 3 phase motors work. She probably took a course in school although it may have been awhile and it's not her specialty.

It's a feature of engineering and scientific education that there is a corpus of knowledge that every person in a discipline (say EE, or medicine) is expected to have learned (if not retained). I imagine all doctors learn quite a bit about the immune system in medical school.

Given that a "random software engineer on the street" may have a CS degree, an MBA, a 6 week bootcamp, or be totally self-taught, the example isn't analogous IMO.
We want leaders, not managers.
Arguably they usually are. Nvidia comes to mind.
I have been accused of it in another context, so I sympathize with your frustration, but this concept is not bullshit. It is important that we have a taxonomy of fallacies and troll tactics because that makes it easier to detect them. Regrettably, it also makes it trivial for bad-faith actors to just accuse everyone they dislike of some named troll tactic. The cure is not to stop using names for bad behaviors. Rather, we should have rigor when accusing someone of bad behavior: do not just name the behavior, but describe why the name fits.

Sure, this is no fun, but this whole discussion exists because trolls exist: can we really expect anything pleasant to come out of that premise.
> I am eagerly awaiting my vaccine, however we are all alpha/beta testers. A real concern is about safety of those vaccines as typically they require ~3 years of testing and a single fatality aborts their use.

I wouldn't say alpha testers and probably not even beta testers. They did clinical trials for these vaccines in 2020 with tens of thousands of volunteers long before these were approved by the FDA and other regulatory bodies! And as I will explain in a second, these clinical trial patients were actually more like beta testers than alpha testers.

The short version is that mRNA vaccines have been around for ~40 years with pretty well identified side-effects and risk profiles. The use of an mRNA vaccine for COVID is a new application of existing technology. One comparison might be the flu vaccine. You get an annual flu vaccine that has <1 year of testing for that specific vaccine because the flu mutates every year. But the underlying technology is the same across all major flu vaccines, so you don't need multiple years of testing to ensure the safety and efficacy of it. You really only need to make sure that certain risk profiles aren't exacerbated and that the efficacy remains within reasonable expectations. In short, the mRNA vaccine that powered the COVID vaccine has already been well-tested, and the testing Moderna, Pfizer, and others did in the last 18 months were more about testing the safety and efficacy of the specific version of the vaccine than the overall technology.

Another comparison for the HN crowd might be that it's more like the difference between the iOS 14 and iOS 15. That is, the vast majority of the OS hasn't changed that much and has been thoroughly tested, and most of the testing is focused on the new features/major changes. You don't need 5 years of testing to uncover every bug in iOS 15 -- one year should be plenty to find the major offenders. When Apple releases iOS 15, they do so basically saying "based on our testing, this is stable enough to be a benefit to >99% of our users and we think you would be best served by upgrading from iOS 14 to iOS 15." They are not promising no bugs at all, but rather saying that the major vulnerabilities and side effects have been patched/mitigated. Similarly, the pharmaceutical companies and the regulatory bodies like the FDA are suggesting "this is safe and effective, with the risk of side effects A, B, C, D..."

(Source: my wife is a microbiologist who works on vaccines for pharma companies)
What about the giant portion of overweight Americans? Should we forcibly restrict their calorie intake?
> If there is a mechanism that will cause side effects on mRNA vaccines, then such mechanism will also be presented in the virus.

You're forgetting about the lipids the vaccine mRNA is put into.

One big reason it took so long to create mRNA vaccines was finding a suitable lipid mix. They need to have a specific property, they need to be electrically charged in a certain way, and pretty much all lipids with that property are extremely toxic.

The equivalent lipids in the virus don't have this problem because they come from the human cell membrane and they use the spike protein to fuse. Since the vaccine doesn't have a spike protein, it needs that special charge property to be able to spill it's mRNA.

The question now is, if it took sooo long to find those lipids, just what the safety margin on them is?

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27433582/

https://cen.acs.org/pharmaceuticals/drug-delivery/Without-li...
That's ridiculous. We don't expect people to get flu vaccines before extending medical care. We don't even expect basic sexual hygiene and extend extremely expensive HIV treatments to people who have tempted fate much, much more seriously than skipping a vaccince.
If you have academic curiosity about that vaccines that's fine, but it is irresponsible to be voicing that in a way that could discourage people from getting a vaccine in the middle of a global health emergency.

Qualified people agree that the vaccines save lives. People should get them. Unqualified people expressing their curiosity about the details is something like the guy in the backseat of a crashing car loudly wondering how brakes work. It's an interesting question, but now is not the time for it. If you aren't helping, keep it to yourself. And if you don't have any relevant knowledge or background in a related field, you should assume you aren't helping.
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Why wouldn't it make sense in your view?

By the way, when I ask about "the browser" I'm also thinking of stuff like electron apps and progressive web apps.
I agree, but I understand why they are doing this. I think it's a counterproductive strategy, and dislike it. But I'm too tired of being pissed at this point to say much more on it. People in the US, at least, just don't seem to trust others to make good decisions, and this particularly goes for elite academics who dominate public health organizations and government. They treat us like toddlers because, in their minds, compared to them, we are.
The breed doesn't matter, it's the owners that influence the temperament of the animal. The nonsense statistic you ask for simply causes people to associate certain breeds with attacks when in reality it's the owners who do not keep their dogs restrained who need to be analyzed.
One of the thousand unfalsifiable “troll” accusations.

There is no way to differentiate a troll from either a fool, an extremist, or simply one who happens to not share the opinion of the reader.
This person seems to have a really cynical take on management. The best answer I have to it is that management becomes a fundamental necessity to have productive teams and that applies regardless of remote work vs not.

As soon as work scales beyond what a single human can do in complexity and / or size you need multiple humans. Proceeding forward without anybody actually coordinating what those humans are doing turns out to be a disaster for multiple reasons, many of which if this person was subjected to the situation, they would immediately invent an equivalent of a "middle manager" or boss to solve.

I actually don't see the need for this decreasing with remote work, in fact I think it might increase.
This is the best thing I've read today, by far.
Being as good as the desktop experience would be amazing. Realistically it will be much, much worse than the desktop experience because the auto companies are far, far worse at software than even 1990s Microsoft. You are talking about an industry where OTA updates are considered a major and challenging technology and multiple instances of bricking have occurred.
Originally it was about storing the vaccination history on the person's skin:

https://news.mit.edu/2019/storing-vaccine-history-skin-1218

Who turned that into microchips? Either the anti-vaxxers or people who want to discredit the anti-vaxxers.

In any case, the original idea is repulsive enough.
I don't really understand the science here, so I'm hoping you'll clarify for the lay-people like me.

Setting the technical issues aside, what's the bottom line? I think OP's general point was: "This is not dangerous in the way some people believe it to be dangerous".

Do any of your corrections change that outcome/conclusion in a meaningful way?

(I'm not asking to call your comment into question, but because I don't know how to adapt my understanding based on these two comments).
This feels like a pretty lazy anecdote to mention off hand without any context of how these two side effects compare in terms of lethality.
Uh, we're definitely going for herd immunity. The bar for that is actually quite close to being met in some countries, including the US (if you combine past infections and vaccinated people).
For the curious who were left a little lacking in an answer to OP's question:

For simplicity's sake, your immune system has two main things of concern here: antibodies and memory cells (B and T). Antibodies are the short-term "find and kill invaders" proteins. They're looking for a particular antigen to attack and do so well, but they don't last very long. Memory cells are basically blueprints which stick around for much longer than the antibodies (some studies indicate for decades), so that if your body ever encounters those same antigens again it recognizes them much faster and starts pumping out the antibodies much faster as well.

So, why would a mRNA vaccine result in better long-term protection than COVID-19 itself? Well, the thinking here is that because an mRNA vaccine in this case only results in the creation of the singular spike protein, the antibodies created to fight off the invader are very focused, as they're only ever going to be looking for that one protein. In the same way, the memory cells your body creates will also be very focused. Your immune system post-vaccine is therefore very well adapted at targeting that particular protein/antigen (could be an amino acid that is part of the protein).

Meanwhile an immune system fighting off actual COVID-19 might be creating antibodies and memory cells that are targeting slightly different antigens, as the overall coronavirus has 29 different proteins your immune system could be looking at to find antigens. This could result in a little bit more "overlap". e.g. You have two antibodies each keyed to a different antigen. They both find the same sars-cov-2 target and bind to their two respective sites. They're now doing "redundant work". Additionally, any antibody which is targeting an antigen that is not the spike protein is probably going to be less effective (the spike protein was targeted for the vaccine because it accounts for most of the outer surface area of the virus, which obviously makes it the best target for antibodies which must "bind" to something).

tl;dr: mRNA vaccines might be more effective than natural immunity because they are creating tools which attack only the most targetable of sars-cov-2's proteins – the spike protein. Natural immunity might give a more "diverse" response, but this is unneeded and could actually hinder secondary response if it is creating tools which are less effective.
This presumes that anyone on the Internet owes a troll their time and effort to discern between a fool, an extremist, a shitposter, a troll or a misguided but earnest individual who shares a genuinely held but scientifically false opinion.
> I'm not much into indulging the ridiculous whims of self important people.

Then you probably wouldn't be working at a concert venue / on a showbusiness production team anyway.

Edit: have you seen a Van Halen (or, really, any stadium-headlining) show? The entire performance is "the ridiculous whims of self important people". That's kind of why we like it.
The lipid nanoparticle is just lipids. Unless you happen to have an allergic reaction to the specific components you should worry a lot more about eating a cheeseburger and what eliminates all those chemicals from your system.

The mRNA delivery system is about as close to "nothing" as you can get.
I realize now that I should have included more of an explanation of what "notebook" signified and should have included the initial comment in the Readme (or some version of it). I had the impulse to keep things absolutely as simple as possible.

I learned about how to make it easy to try a webpage from github which is useful.

I don't really have a lot invested in the result of this, but I have the feeling that people who are really trying to make a product must find that the spotlight of YC moves awfully fast.

I wonder if there needs to be a website that is a catalog of interesting projects (organized by purpose). Looking at github, it appears that it contains some lists of projects on github.
What is ‘neoliberal’ thinking? Seems like a made-up word.
> Like, having this magic, absolutely mind boggling potion that prevents serious illness and death isn't already the lottery win of our lifetime??

No, because a lot of people trust their friends or personal gurus more than any scientist or research. It doesn't matter what crap their social bubble is filled with, they can relate more to it.
Come on, really!? In a discussion about how trolls use "I am just asking", you decided that doing the same is a good idea. I am not op, but I have been accused of sealioning in the exact opposite direction: I was defending some curriculum based on ideas from critical race theory.

Edit: Well, as the comment below alluded to, I probably missed a pretty obvious piece of sarcasm... This is certainly funny in hindsight.
He doesn’t need to because as he notes, the virus is waning because better people are getting the mRNA version, not just full blown covid which the non-vaccinated will be getting on random occasions many months or even years from now.
The person who posted the vaccine misinformation had undergone some personal loss for which he blames the medical system. While this doesn't excuse spreading misinformation, it helped me understand where his desire to sow doubt in organised medicine could have come from: https://patientsafetymovement.org/advocacy/patients-and-fami...
And it would give CEOs who want to do the wrong thing an avenue to destroy competitors under the table.
"get vaccinated" should probably be heard by that person but it's still really not as easy as in Germany to get vaccinated as it might be in some other countries. I look at the UK/US/Canada (many parts of the EU) like they are on a different planet, because they are slowly going back to normal for months now, while I still can't get vaccinated here, even though I want to since the start of the year. The prioritization of old and sick people has just been lifted 4 days ago and the state I live in says that I still can't get an appointment until the mid of the month. And even then I should not get my hopes up to get an appointment quickly, as the vaccination centers have allocated their supply for second shots for the whole of June. Right now it seems likely that my employer will actually be quicker in getting a vaccine for me than my government. Actually off-topic, but it annoys me pretty much every day and I felt invited to rant by Linus assuming it's just that easy here.
When I unsubscribe from a mailing list I know I didn't sign up for, I'll also hit the report spam button in the hopes it gives them some negative gmail juju.
I was surprised to discover one genuine anti-vax fact: if you're diabetic and you're taking a certain drug, you must be very careful before taking the COVID vaccine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26953326

That's not really anti-vax, but an acquaintance died a couple weeks after getting vaccinated due to diabetes complications, and I've always wondered if this was the cause.

I don't think I should post this without pointing out that I'm strongly pro-vax, though. It was just surprising.
There is also social pushback. I've had a few longtime friends who got angry with me for not remaining completely silent about this. They insist that it's just a coincidence, and since THEY got the shot and are OK, it must be safe, and I'm a horrible person for "spreading fear".

They aren't my friends anymore. I don't have room in my life for people who can't understand nuance or recognize their own cognitive dissonance.
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This article pretty much covers them all. It doesn't look good on him. Some of the redaections are due to ongoing investigations as well.

https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/fauci-emails-reveal-damag...
It's okay only when he acts like that towards people we don't like. But if it's me being stupid then he's unwelcoming and toxic.
at some point, you just have to say : well that's too bad.
> The dollar, as a money, should be a constant unit. Then people could value it as they see fit, some choosing to hold more or less of it for the proverbial rainy day.

Define constant. Do you want the value to remain constant? If so, why? And more importantly, how? You have to adjust the supply to offset for increased productivity, to offset increased population, to offset decreased spending.

If you just want a certain quantity then it's not constant because its value will fluctuate inherently with the economy around it. As a result, it will tend towards deflationary, which is generally a death sentence economically. If something is worth more in the future why spend it? Just look at Bitcoin. Nobody spends it. Nobody. Why would they, number go up? If that were the case with a national currency nobody would have jobs, they'd just sit home and watch number go up lol. We've never tried this because even with a gold standard the supply increased over time.

The fluctuations in market value would make it borderline impossible to maintain as a unit of account.

This is why the current system is ideal - you get your medium of exchange and unit of account, and you get store value however you want. This is maximum economic freedom. If you want to back your personal economy with gold, go to town! Steve wants to back his with Bitcoin - more power to him. If I want to back it with productive assets, that's cool too!

Don't force everyone into your preferred store of value, certainly not because you don't trust them to allocate their value towards an optimal vehicle.
Linus rants are bad and he shouldn't do them when it comes to the integrity of the thing he's spent his life working on... but when it's about something We Can All Agree With, Right Guys, then they're good? ok lol
Ask HN: Connecting USB Devices via WiFi?
I've been trying to find out how to connect some low bandwidth devices that require USB connection (a mouse) to connect to a computer via wifi. Sadly, googling this is hopeless as results end up being about wireless mouse, etc.

To clarify I'd like to know if there is a way to create a bridge of some sort that you can connect your USB device to and have it connect as a wifi device to your router. And on the computer side have the computer connected to the same wifi network detect the new device as a native USB device, as if it's connected physically via USB to the computer.
One of the difficult parts of text based debate and discussion is that it's impossible to determine from vocal inflection, tone of voice and method of delivery whether someone is genuinely a fool, simply cosplaying as one, being sarcastic or facetious, etc.
I didn't even think of this before but now that i read this, i'm curious too. So basically Linus say mRNA vaccine does not change your genetic but then he proceed to say that it does exactly that to fight foreign proteins and it's ok because your cell's mRNA do that anyway. Do you see the difference?

I guess there is a reason to raise concerns about the novelty of the technique, if this is indeed the first time artificial mRNA is used on the general public.
The "logic" employed here is:

"We were told or otherwise made to believe your industry should stop doing what it's doing. Therefore, you should stop doing what you're doing." ("I know the future. You don't exist. So you might as well stop existing now.")

The irony is this person has no idea of "the reality." If the reality was that the pipeline served no purpose, had no value, it would not have gone through the lengthy process it's already been through. And if tar sands oil had no value, it wouldn't be retrieved.

But it will be. It will be retrieved and it will be transported, somehow, for the simple fact that people and industries use it. And if you choose a costlier method of transport, then people will feel those costs. Simply saying "No, it's not gonna go by rail or go by ship. Because I said so." is blind arrogance.

https://www.climatechangenews.com/2021/06/10/tar-sands-compa...

The oil will still be extracted. It will still be transported to the entities who use it.
This is a clear cut case were the officer was wrong.

I understand that nobody's perfect, but this is a bizarre way of making a mistake. Shouldn't every officer be mindful of pulling someone over in a safe area?