skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> But from what I gather, mRNA vaccines basically inject your body with a coded recipe for how to manufacture the immune stuff it normally manufactures in reaction to an infection, only without having to first be infected.

The mRNA in the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines contains the instructions to make copies of just the spike protein from the outside of the virus. During the short lifetime of the mRNA, your body will follow these instructions and produce these spikes. Alone, this protein isn’t a virus and is pretty much inert.

Then, your body naturally recognizes this protein as a foreign substance and creates antibodies to attack it.

If the real virus enters your body later, your body will already have antibodies that recognize the spike and will immediately start fighting it off, faster than it normally would if you got infected without already having the antibodies.

It’s like a training program for your immune system.
He just screamed at them.

Getting angry is easy.

Persuasion is the hard part.
So what is the right way to deal with people using a technical mailing list to spread misinformation about vaccines in the midst of a pandemic?

Kittens and sweet tea?
This reminds me that we should get ChaosMonkey up and running. :D
So you are saying is that the solution is to just cram people into an office. They are forced to work or something, some part of the time, right? It's not like there's much to do after gossipping and smalltalk. No need for you to do anything, really. Easy work, smart!
Personalised ads imply data collection, privacy violations and tracking across websites. That doesn't sound like a good deal. Especially as personalised ads are just as annoying and unhelpful because the algorithms are simply useless. No, when I bought a game I don't want to buy the Collector's Edition one day later. And that won't change over the 3 months I'm getting the same stupid recommendation. Might as well show me literally a random product, I'd be more likely to buy it.
The versioning scheme of `pkexec` in Debian based Linuxes leaves a little to be desired.. `pkexec --version` in Debian 10 and Ubuntu 20 (server/minimal) both report `0.105` but according to the article it's fine for `0.105-25` (Debian 10) and vulnerable in `0.105-26` (Ubuntu >18).. but you can't find out from the CLI.
For-profit healthcare should be illegal and there should be sufficient doctor appointments to go around. Right now, Americans pay more than anyone, wait weeks or months for appointments, and receive much poorer care than equivalent countries.
You're making some very interesting and valid points. You've correctly identified that when receiving bundled services you lose the ability to negotiate or comparison shop on the basis of price. This is unfairly combined with a legal presumption that when the healthcare system generates a bill, the bill is valid until proven otherwise. Now, although we probably need more physicians, I don't think the limited supply of physicians is the primary reason for this situation - it's more due to increasing market concentration of health insurers on one side and hospital systems on the other, leading to regional monopolies that don't compete on price. In fact, with the decline of private practices and the rise of hospital systems, physicians receive less than 10% of all healthcare revenue. I can see that you'd like to unbundle your healthcare and regain control over prices, and I think that's a very reasonable thing to want.
Netflix Launches Its Own Online Store, Which Will Sell Exclusive Merch
Imagine paying to "like" someone online. A fool and their money...
Sometimes people need to be yelled at and shut down - antivax is one of them.
In other news, creepy totalitarian regime continues to behave in creepy totalitarian fashion.
I could care less about what happens to my bosses.

I’m never going back to an office unless they pay for my gas, mileage, time spent in traffic, office wardrobe, etc.

It’s unfortunate for these companies that they were so reluctant previously to allow anyone but a reverse-schedule off-short worker have the privilege of not having to be in the office. The cat is out of the bag.
This is probably true - the problem with modern post-industrial economies is weak demand, not supply. We've juiced supply to the absolute hilt, but people are too busy spending their time at jobs and not consuming. We could easily scale down to 20 hour workweeks and the economy would keep on growing.

It's a prisoner's dilemma situation though, as others point out. Some people are going to insist on wasting their new extra free time at another job. The solution would be to put a hard cap on labor hours per person, mandating an overtime pay requirement that follows the worker from job to job.
Finally, a Linus Torvalds rant that seems both justified and proportionate!
Ivermectin and HCQ sure got shut down hard even though recent studies are giving them some credit. If they had been a valid option, emergency use authorisation wouldn't have been granted.

I honestly don't know what to think about all of this. I've seen a lot of censorship and stifling of speech. Reading Fauci's emails also makes me hesitate. I think trust in the experts will really take a hit going forward.

I did get the AZ vaccine a few weeks ago. Yesterday I had a flame heme show up on a retina scan at the eye doc. Was it the vax? Perhaps, the Oxford UK study said these kinds of events are slightly more likely from what they've seen.
Why would those pings stop in office?
Not exactly. The mRNA fragments are instructions to build pieces of the virus. Your cells execute the mRNA instructions, build virus fragments, and _then_ the immune system notices all these unknown fragments and learns how to destroy them.
The "central dogma"[1] of biology:

DNA -> RNA -> Protein

DNA is read sequentially base-by-base (essentially like the read head on a HDD) by a protein called RNA polymerase. As it is reading, it produces RNA. If that RNA is meant to become a protein, it is post-processed to remove various bits and becomes a messenger RNA (mRNA). This mRNA is inserted into another huge protein called the Ribosome[2], and is read 3 bases at a time. Each set of 3 bases corresponds to a single Amino Acid. The string of amino acids produced by the ribosome is a protein.

So the mRNA in the vaccine simply contains the instructions to produce a copy of the spike protein from the COVID-19 virus. When your body produces enough copies of that protein, your immune system takes notice that a foreign protein is floating around and begins the process to recognize and memorize it for future use. (that last part is super simplified).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_dogma_of_molecular_bio...

[2] https://biologydictionary.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Rib...
You're probably missing some kind of "read more", or maybe block a paywall? https://outline.com/VALNKr
The mRNA in this case has chromosomes that cannot be replicated by nature. You might try researching the mRNA vaccine.
I mean, it's sort of great that now this is just a back and forth about the specifics of squab, but I assure you, most squab farmed today will taste far better than 'game' passenger pigeon.

Not to blow up my own spot, but if you want better metaphors against arguments like mine, the Ansault pear and Gros Michel banana are better candidates.
No worries, you're more right now than you were before. :)
> The half-life of mRNA is a few hours. Any injected mRNA will be all gone from your body in a day or two.

Can someone with more knowledge comment on whether this is true for components of the vaccine that aren't just the mRNA bits? I am not sure, but I assume there are various other components that form the delivery vehicle for the vaccine, stabilize it for storage, and so on. What are the actual mechanisms for those to be 'gone from the body'?
Sure. But if you strip those out, then the pixel itself no longer has any value to anyone.
"everyone" currently excludes a large number of people who would otherwise like to be immunized for a variety of reasons (age, medical risks), and vaccines are not 100% effective
The vaccine has saved far more people than have died due to the blood clots.
Why are there so many American homeless people? Lack of funds... not the drugs, mental, lazy, etc. excuses.

Why are there so many Americans with so little savings and yet hyperconcentration of wealth by a panoply of billionaires? Income inequality derived from the rich owning the political establishment.
Well, actually, with CP & AA there is more work, not less work, because they are perceived as an additional cool feature, not as a complete substitution to built-in "infotainment".
Linus is responding specifically to the allegations made that the mRNA vaccines change your genes "into a new humanoid race", which I think can reasonably count as a conspiracy theory.

Additionally, I don't believe the mRNA vaccines are the ones linked to blood clots (a big part of mRNA vaccines is that they should be safer and more effective!), but I'm sorry to hear about your family member's hospitalization.

I think vaccination is the best thing we can do cost/benefit wise and recommend it wholeheartedly, but I respect those waiting for more testing if they continue to take appropriate precautions. Good luck to you and yours!
It doesn't really take a rocket scientist to understand why people care about what Linus says on 'Hacker News'
Because it is one or the other. If office-first people are allowed to regain preeminence in a company, then that company will be back to abusing engineers by sitting them in hot-desk open office situations next to shouting salespeople in short order.
It’s not free if you’re paying with your health.
We have a fairly good idea about how it will mutate actually. COVID is probably one of the most heavily studied and sequenced viruses ever, and a lot of research has been published on likely mutagenic pathways.

The media as always has sensationalized every new strain found and their behaviour is cause for concern, but researchers have not been sounding the alarm over possible vaccine escape - the evidence points to the spike protein being highly conserved, and the mRNA vaccine antibodies have remained effective.
Linus is not in the wrong here. You have an anti-vax spouting BS on the Linux Kernel dev list of all places. It's absolutely not the right venue for that. He could have just expelled the idiot from the list. He chose not to do that.

Some people will listen to (perceived) authority. Linus has a large following. It's fair to say that a non-zero number of individuals may be persuaded by his strong stance. I doubt the person that he was replying to will listen to anything, but if anyone else does, it's a win.

If someone is claiming that a person is "shedding" mRNA, the point of education is gone. It's ok if someone says they are unsure about this 'new' technology - you can then sit down with them calmly and explain how all of this works.

However, if they are just parroting anti-vax talking points, they should be shutdown and quick. They have long stopped listening to reason, and are on the "vaccines cause magnetism" territory. They are actively trying to spread even more misinformation. This should be contained just like we contain viruses.

It's not really up for debate. Don't like a particular vaccine? Try to get another one if you can. Don't try to prevent others from getting it based on superstition.
Depends what you mean by “custom types.” Elixir supports structs, but they’re not really as rich as classes in another language, for example. If you just want to write type signatures for your functions though, this is a pretty good guide: https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/1.12/typespecs.html
That's not true across many of the languages I use, dict.pop returns a key error in python for instance.

By having a version that raises the standard library is basically saying not having a key is the error state.
The idea of tabulated reputation as a currency dates back to at least 2003 [0] (and I'd speculate is probably much older than I know about). It's an interesting discussion, independent of the coin-of-the-week trying to cash in on the idea of it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_King...

"Cory Doctorow: Wealth Inequality Is Even Worse in Reputation Economies" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11226549

Previous threads specific to cryptocurrency implementations:

"A New Digital Currency Whose Value Is Based on Your Reputation" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8053051

"Whuffie – how to build a reputation currency in Ethereum? (2014)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13427028
Same with the push for vaccine passports. Really gets my fur up and question why the need for heavy hands.
For society in general.

That said, there is no guarantee that herd immunity will ever be reached at least in the US. If herd immunity isn't reached then it's basically guaranteed you'll get it eventually as the disease becomes a "background disease".
Do you recognise how rare a reaction that is? Compared to adverse effects of the disease itself?
I agree with your second comment but not so much the first. Infectious disease control 101: Lock up the infected people but leave the healthy alone. Or else you may have a dwindling economy due to excessive spending, people too scared to work and a rapidly inflating currency... I may sound like an armchair epidemiologist but given that there are so many proclaimed 'experts' out there, the bar can't be thaaat high?
Why are there so many American homeless people? Lack of funds... not the drugs, mental, lazy, etc. excuses.

Thank you for saying that. I will add: The US has some sucktastic housing policies that are an underlying cause of this social cancer.
Sure there is potential for harm. Most mRNAs just tell your cells how to make certain proteins, and there are tons of harmful proteins. You could be instructing your cells to make potent poisons, or instructing them to make all of the proteins necessary for an entire functional virus.

But the person he's responding to is citing methods of harm that aren't realistic.
I met a girl at a coffee shop with nasal infusion pump and stage IV cancer. She was preparing for her bankruptcy hearing across the street because the doctors and hospitals were taking everything she had and she had to fight to keep some scraps. That's how America works: get sick, die and lose everything to vulture corporations.
This is a good point. Such comments (Linus') are much more for preaching to the choir than to try and change people's minds.

One thing I'd add (or hypothesize anyway) is that in these kind of debates, I don't believe the crux of the disagreement is a misunderstanding of the technical points of why it works. It's more a natural reaction to people being told they have to do something, that causes an adverse reaction in many people (for clarity, being told causes the reaction, I'm not talking about the vaccine). So people end up pushing back, which includes aggressively and sometimes even ridiculously questioning the underlying facts.

The same holds for climate change for example. People get caught, often untenably, in the minutia of the technical arguments, when it has much more to do imo with a debate over wealth redistribution or rolling back standard of living. Decoupling the political aspects about what we should do as a response, from the scientific aspects of cause and effect would go a long way. The problem though would be in that case, politicians would lose the "science tells us" rhetorical device, and actually have to have an adult conversation with their constituents about how we move forward
Mysterious fast radio bursts come in two distinct flavours
Not all vaccines are the same, so pro science and anti vaxx are not always opposed.

I am pro science, but science doesn't claim that all vaccines are safe.

And let's not forget that pharma co's have tried very hard to make vaccines mandatory, to the point of bribing academics and officials, forming unaccountable PR groups, and in the not so distant past they've done truly horrific and inhuman things.

After the lab-leak theory has gained traction recently, after being told for a year by Lancet and politicians and academics that it was "impossible", I would have thought that the idea of there being some "pro-science" monolith would have lost ground.
Actually, deplatforming, shaming trolls, and shifting the Overton window back probably works [0]

[0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/01/16/misinfo...
People who went to medical school may not know how to assimilate, read, synthesise and make conclusions about scientific literature. Yes, the average social media person wouldn't either but better ask the scientists.
Implementing eBPF for Windows
Nope, no need! Tax ID is validated when you accept the payment: https://stripe.com/docs/tax/checkout#create-session.
As someone who has done full time WFH for more than 5 years one skill you need to pick up is the ability to shut down around 5-6pm and avoid work on the weekends, which actually takes some self-discipline.
> Reading Fauci's emails also makes me hesitate.

Which ones, specifically?

I keep seeing people say this. There are thousands of pages in the PDF and no one seems to be able to quote anything actually concerning.
Right? These days it's so much more expensive to pay a doctor to bleed you to cure the evils in your blood, and trying to find an available apothecary to sell you medicinal mercury at a good price is darn near impossible these days.
Something odd here; he's investing a lot of effort into denying Kariko's role in mRNA and he looks like a very determined self promoter.
That's a reasonable start if you want to know and the best alternative is to ask a random person who doesn't know anything about computers at all.
But there's no reason to know they don't know that as a layman.
But compared to someone who isn't in CS, they'd at least understand that GPUs exist, might be able to speculate on what's needed, and have an idea of who to even ask.

I don't work on operating systems but I had a CS education, so I know enough about the kinds of things it needs to worry about that I could answer about the building blocks of a kernel in a way that I feel would be largely correct.
And then trying to apply downloaded update and rebooting... in a loop. Or segfaulting. SW should make everything easier and more flexible, right? ;)
I think it's unfair to characterize people who are skeptical about mRNA and liquid nanoparticle technology as anti-vax, but this is what people (including Linus) are doing.

Most people I know are pro-vax, have all their other vaccinations, but are leery of new technology being distributed under the same label. I think that's reasonable. I'm one of these people. I don't plan on taking any mRNA vaccine until we have a few decades worth of safety data on LNPs, although I think the technology and its development is very interesting. [1]

Does the net health benefit provided by mRNA vaccines probably outweigh the consequences of Covid? Probably, even almost certainly. But I'll stick to more conventional biotech for now.

In general, I think the average person hugely overestimates how much we know about biology and how much experts really know - they know 100x more than me, but still 0.00001% of what there is to know. We have a lot of hubris when it comes to science and technology.

[1] https://cen.acs.org/pharmaceuticals/drug-delivery/Without-li...
And people think this lab grown meat and artificial meat is gonna be any better nutritionally...
> I think it's better to handle the Jason.decode error, and apply some sort of backoff strategy on re-requests.

What's keeping you from implementing a back off strategy in your init? You can return :ignore to the supervisor and try again later.

If you're backing off inside the process itself, you're gonna get some weird shit where your service exists but it's not in a truly available state, and you will have to handle that by basically halfheartedly rewriting logic that already exists in OTP.
Ever since the pandemic started, useful information was few and far between. I know that numbers scare people, but so much of this is basic risk assessment. The facts are extremely pro-vaccination, but good luck finding them!

For example, the whole thrombosis / Astra-Zeneca issue, which was a big deal here in Germany. Lots of articles and discussions. Everyone was saying "don't use it on young people", but I don't even remember if they came to that conclusion because only young people got thrombosis or because the risk of dying of COVID was so much higher in old people that it trumped all other concerns.

And that's because nobody bothered to even estimate those risks. Given your age, what's your likelihood of catching COVID and getting lasting damage (including death) vs. getting thrombosis from AZ? I'm guessing that based on that, it was probably still a no-brainer to get vaccinated no matter your age.

But I think one of the central issues is the trolley problem. Somehow dying from a virus is okay because it's "natural", while having any sort of potential complication from a vaccine (no matter how unlikely) is much worse because it follows a human decision. If I'm a politician and I pass some law that indirectly (but predictably) kills tens of thousands of people, I'll be fine. If I go out and strangle a single person with my bare hands, I'm in trouble.
I think it would just give CEOs who want to do the right thing (and not pay) legal cover to tell the board of directors "Nope, not paying — the company is going to be shut down for a month. Deal with it, I'm not going to jail."
This is the most appropriate tone you can use to deliver a message to anti-vaxxers, which is the only one they understand. We need more Linuses.

I have engaged many anti-vaxxers in different tones, and a polite tone usually does not resonate with them much because "political correctness" is perceived as a lack of authenticity.

Profanity and emotion resonates more with them, because that is the way you talk to people you trust.
I agree that the convinces of Paddle is hard to beat, especially for sole developer and small companies. Liability shift being indeed very powerful. But I also think the percentages thrown around are too sinistic. If you make ~5 figures a month in revenue it becomes very doable to hold a Euro and USD bank account in addition to your local currency, likely covering a fair amount of your customer base. Suddenly your cost are significantly lower (at the expense of now having to manage multiple accounts)
> but ironically not to the people who are medical experts in SOME way.

The dangerous thing about expertise in a very narrow area (which most medicine is these days) is that is bolsters confidence so much that you imagining yourself an expert in an adjacent area... not realizing that you might be missing very important fundamental knowledge.

You see this often in e.g. Nobel Disease[1], but also in more mundane settings.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease
what uniquely identifying info does the feature disable, in exchange for FLoC?
Persevere and be patient. You may not end up where you hoped to when you started, but by that time you may have other priorities or dreams.

Not all those wonder are lost, so take your time but have/find a goal.

Also, wrt to applying for jobs as a self-taught developer.. They always seem daunting and way over our heads - they are designed so. Most of the times (you need to just interview to get experience on that skill ad well) you'll find out that the person interviewing you is less experienced than you (overall) but more knowledgeable in their field of work (specifically). That goes to say, they stuck it out longer than you, they are not necessarily better or smarter.

Big up yourself, chin up, get movi g. And good luck :)
That's what you don't seem to get.

I'm not saying it does happen, neither am I saying it does not happen. There's not enough evidence, that's it. Why is that so hard to grasp?

And there's evidence of it happening in plenty of other contexts, so one wouldn't be crazy to believe that at least, in principle, it could happen here as well.