skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The real world data has shown that the death rate among the vaccinated, if infected with COVID, can be 3 to 5.7 times higher1 than the death rate of the unvaccinated.

Okay… but how much less likely are you to get “infected”?

How are you even defining “infected”, here? If virus gets in your body and then your immune system kills it before it does much damage, were you “infected”? If the answer is no, you've got pretty serious selection bias, because you're completely ignoring everyone who was completely protected by the vaccine in the “vaccinated” group, but paying attention to everyone who didn't really need a vaccine in the “unvaccinated” group: basically ignoring all the really-healthy, great-immune-systems, unlikely-to-die people in the “vaccinated” group so, proportionally, the sicker people take up more room. So you can't even say that the vaccine makes things worse for them! If it improves their chances by 100 times, as Dr. Tom said, but the selection bias is only paying attention to the 0.2% least immune people (those who got infected when exposed after vaccination), you'd expect to see a 5× higher death rate even though the actual death rate is 0.99× lower. (Made-up numbers.)
I've never heard it referred to as a religious debate in the US. When I hear about anti-vaxxers complaining, it's from a perceived freedom (not religion) standpoint. Maybe there are exceptions for some religious minorities, but I have yet to hear them.
Python wasn't designed with vectorised data structures in mind, `R` was -- and that's the origin of a vast number of issues.

Data Science happened to python largely against its will (ie., that of GvR) -- and language-level support simply doesn't exist.
This is exactly the kind of thing that is to be avoided: premature escalation, tying up resources, increasing costs, and raising the stakes and probability of bad outcomes.
When you’re 17 and many adults in your life say “follow your dreams,” and there is a low barrier to you and your classmates to taking out 200k loans, that skepticism would be low.
If you can squat on the ground, why would you be unable to squat in a chair? I'm 6'1 and I've squat in my chair as well, I frankly hate sitting.
This article fails to mention the BY FAR most significant benefit of the vaccine which is: achieving herd immunity

We should be as accurate as possible with when talking about vaccine but throwing around statics(or should we say "Vaccine Statistics") like:

> "the death rate among the vaccinated, if infected with COVID, can be 3 to 5.7 times higher than the death rate of the unvaccinated."

is not exactly providing the big picture context needed for a productive social discussion.

The article suggests focusing "real efficacy". Before the vaccine program started there were ~4000 deaths per day in the US, now there are ~100. Clearly it is very effective at reducing death.
Creating Beautiful HTML Visualizations
FWIW, for me, I find the delayed gratification just tempers it: I will almost never be more excited to watch a movie than the day I hear about it... if I can't watch it right then 1) I will almost certainly forget to watch it without a reminder (so they will have to pay for their ad at least a second time) and 2) I will have time to let my brain decide "well it probably will suck" (and it almost certainly wouldn't need to be advertising to me this hard if it were actually good: I'd hear about it from the first wave of people who see everything if it were!).
This is a really interesting idea! Audio definitely makes it easier to listen to papers on the go.

One thing that's missing in the paper curation space is understanding the knowledge state of the user. Once we have that we should be able to build generative models that synthesize text that can get people to read papers much faster.
lmao so random
>The author appears to me to be using motivating reasoning to push an agenda.

Just like the pro-vaccination arguments.
Were teenagers the target audience for Clubhouse though? It doesn't seem like it?
Haha nice, if ever there was a design decision worthy of the title "glorious bastard", this is it.
Somewhat tangential, but it's interesting that this is in St. Gallen. St. Gallen is known for the so-called St. Gallen Mafia which counted among its members the now defrocked sex predator Theodore McCarrick among others who negotiated deals for the Vatican under Francis in China and had a reputation for being pro-CCP in his leanings. Makes me wonder if there is some "Chinese representation" specifically in St. Gallen? Take this quote from the article:

"For the last eight years, St. Gallen has also been home to a «China Competence Center,» the aim of which is to «strengthen and deepen productive relations with China»."

(Frankly, this sort of content is being censored in the US by BigTech also, so...)
Let's propose Amazon announced all Alexa devices would start scanning everything it hears for illegal activity. This new feature has the same security semantics as Apple's CSAM detection: on device hashing using a government controlled audio database of known illegal activity, violations are only reported once a threshold is met, etc.

Would you be comfortable with this? Would you be comfortable with a company searching our physical lives in the way Apple intends to search our digital lives? How are these 2 things any different?
dont miss the bit on "remotely beamed microwave power."

"silly idea" it may be but now i want a mega-maser as described for my own sporting purposes.
"values" here being basically a proxy instrument of the CCP and a surveillance network to keep Chinese nationals in line.
> this all entirely depends on your pov on yellen and the current senate

Or the next twelve...
Smalltalk with the GraalVM (2019)
Data never speaks for itself. In this case, openvaers has chosen to massage raw data in a misleading fashion.

The VAERS dataset vendors explicitly warn against doing exactly what openvaers is doing because of the likelihood of drawing false conclusions.

https://vaers.hhs.gov/data/dataguide.html
Agreed. I also read it carefully, and could not seen any inaccuracies.

Thanks for vouching for it.
The post has been up for an hour. The people who will write those comments pointing out errors are probably taking their time to read it and write those comments.
> It almost doesn’t matter which power plant they’re closest to because we have a power grid that ties everything together. This idea of miners being isolated from the grid and consuming clean energy that would otherwise go to waste is pure myth.

It's not a myth it's exactly what happens. Stranded power is a real thing and not every country has the same power grid infrastructure that the US has.

As soon as China actually built out a high voltage grid that can make use of some of their stranded power they kicked out the miners, who moved to other areas with near free power.
I highly recommend this video, where CaptainSparklez (one of the YT millionaires) discusses his decision to turn down an offer to pay 70K a year to get a CS degree in gaming (starts at the 15 minute mark).

https://youtu.be/TexLwzN_PiU
I want a smart home that is isolated. Given that i know all the ways a computer system can fail, I want my smart home to function even when Amazon/Google/Microsoft cloud goes down. Also , I dont want my smart devices to send or receive ANY data from external servers. Of course that's incompatible with current business models. So I prefer my home to stay dumb.
Right, and installing those systems may be a huge project.

I had to look into things from your statement and links. They were of course different when I was replacing an old oil fired boiler in a home I purchased. Pretty much a gas fired boiler was my only option. IIRC heat pumps weren't there yet in colder environments.

I went with a 93% efficient unit as opposed to a traditional 85% (at twice the cost) as the savings were supposed to be realized over a few years, paying for itself. Now, I can only hope things aren't as bad as the omen in the article. I'm sure there are many out there hoping same.

Given that, the HE boiler may still turn out to be a godsend in this.

I do appreciate you pointing it out - I see heat pumps can run hydronic systems now. Interesting, and something to look at.
Does it make your head go Boom like an H-Bomb? That would be one hell of a marketing campaign
While I don't want to see HN devolving into political arguments about what sources are and aren't good, I do feel like it's worth noting that

1- this site is full of ads, with terrible information density

2- it's just summarizing an official press release [1], on a site that does not have ads (the site itself is sort of an ad I suppose)

I can't see any reason why you would want to post this Blaze link instead of the NASA link, especially given the high flamewar potential

[1] https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-is-recruiting-for-yearlong...
I have a US phone bill and an NL one. My US phone bill with 3 phone payments and 3 lines is about $400 per month. The same in the NL is €100 a month.

I’d love to drop my US carrier, it’s just tricky because US banks are obsessed with SMS auth.
Huh, I looked it up and that's sort of the case. But I don't think they "upgrade" your degree, they just award you the rank of "Master of Arts". This would appear to be entirely different from earning a Master of Engineering/Science/etc, or even an MA at any other school, which is an actual degree.
Reee!
This is a great post and you can immediately see where they are going with this as soon as he quotes Dr. Tom Frieden.

It makes tons of sense that those who are vaccinated and get infected are more likely to die, simply because it would indicate a failure to develop antibodies and mount an effective immune response to the virus.

That being said I’m not sure such a rant is justified over a tweet like this. Dr. Frieden is more or less correct if you slightly re-word his sentence to: “Getting vaccinated decreases the chance of dying by approximately 100x”.

What I take home from this is that everyone is human, can make simple mistakes, and that we take things written on Twitter far too seriously. I’m sure that Dr. Frieden would not have made such a mistake if he wrote an article that was published somewhere reputable instead of a tweet that could have been sent while waiting for his coffee at Starbucks, or using the toilet.

There is a trade off in communicating science to the public in that using social media, TV, and newspapers reaches more people but almost always distorts the message. I’m not sure how exactly to balance this trade off, but I also think that some amount of responsibility lies with the reader to seek the truth instead of demanding that every sentence they read on the internet be as accurate as a peer reviewed journal.
It should also be noted that Small Steps & Giant leaps has been able to create a really strong backbone/backoffice through the utilization of discord.
The post is conflating vaccine efficacy and effectiveness which are two different epidemiological measures.

It also fails to consider the false positive and false negative rates inherent in these studies. In particular, lots of asymptomatic cases in the vaccinated arm are not caught by efficacy studies (false negatives). So claiming that low death rates are solely a result of reduced infection(as opposed to fighting off infections better) is also a conclusion made hastily.

Death rates and symptomatic cases are much measured much more accurately, and claiming that effectiveness studies have little point once there's vaccine efficacy is available underestimates the challenges of epidemiology.

But the overall point that statistics are hard to understand, easily misused in online arguments is a valid point.
There's a natural predilection for some people that, when presented with bullshit (in this case "5g mIcROchIPS"), go in the complete opposite direction and start spewing bullshit themselves, but based on the opposite underlying truth.

This same phenomenon is easily witnessed in other contexts, including politics (Q-Anon vs. zany Kremlin theories), and science (climate change deniers vs. climate doomsday seers).

I'm unsure what the cause or solution to this is, but I think sage advice would be to approach always assume the worst for your side of the story. Don't try and stretch data to fit your worldview. If your position doesn't hold up under the harshest scrutiny that you can give it, it's not a position worth holding.
Do they expect to outdo the sun?
This was first reported back in January when a Qatar Airways Airbus A350 was in Shannon for a repaint. When the paint was stripped they found surface coating irregularities. This is apparently cosmetic and not structural.

This was one of the first A350s to be repainted.

Qatar has 53 Airbus A350 aircraft, so why these particular 13 is the question now.
By "car-dependent" I mean the style of US urban planning that has dominated since WW2, with huge tracts of single-use zoning, miles and miles wide. Usually dominated by cul-de-sacs with feeder roads. There is nowhere to walk to, distances are far enough that bicycles even become challenging, and it's impossible for transit to serve the road design, because density of housing is too low and the intentional lack of a connected road network makes it too difficult to ever run buses in a meaningful way.

Cul-de-sacs are used to minimize the danger of cars (the largest cause of child death) and keep traffic to a minimum where people live, at the expense of circuitous routes. And they shift car traffic to even more dangerous feeder roads, that have high speeds and few crossings, that serve as extremely dangerous barriers for pedestrians and bikes.
Netflix != streaming. You can generally stream almost anything, but it requires having the correct subscription: Netflix is just one of many many many. If you cobble together the 10-15 or so core streaming services, you effectively have re-built a cable television plan worth of networks, and there will be tons of choices, which you then access using something like the Apple TV app, which acts as the modern TV Guide and will automatically open the correct streaming service required to watch the movie/show you selected. Netflix was a disruptive service for DVD rental, but in the world of streaming it is only relevant because it saw the writing on the wall and used the money it had made to invest in building its own production studio. (Hulu has a slightly different way to bootstrap involving acting as the gateway infrastructure for networks while they built out their own tech; and Apple and Amazon exist only by shear force of cash combined with a level of competence Yahoo did not possess.) Off the top of my head, I have subscriptions with Apple TV+, Netflix, Hulu (with the Starz add-on), Peacock (NBC), CBS All Access, HBO Max, Disney+, and Amazon Prime Video... but I am certain I have something like five more that I am forgetting (does Adult Swim have one maybe? I am not sure as I just buy Rick and Morty from iTunes; I know Paramount+ exists, but I don't think I subscribe yet... oh, I must have AMC+, right?).
Just an aside as we all discuss iCloud storage of photos, etc. ...

I don't back up anything to iCloud. Instead, I connect my iPhone to my laptop and run the excellent "iExplorer" utility from Macroplant[1].

This allows me to browse my iPhone like a filesystem and copy off all of the photos/videos to a directory where I can then rsync them to my local fileserver.

You can also dump iMessages and notes and all of those other thing but I just export photos ...

[1] https://macroplant.com/iexplorer
Umm, no? If someone happens upon some funny cat meme that 4chan users made with an intentional hash collision then they're not guilty of anything.

A poor analogy could be trolls convincing a flash mob to dress like a suspect's description which they overheard with a police scanner. No one in the mob is guilty of anything more than poor fashion choice.
Not really, it mostly depends on ability to network. The main advantage some universities have is the degree to which they emphasize networking. Some fields I imagine do this as well.

If you didn't network in college, it's not surprising you graduated without one.
Not being able to go to your favorite cafe / restaurant as frequently != being confined in a windowless structure
Had shooting pain on my thighs and thought it was sciatic nerve issue but turns out I needed to stretch my it bands and ligaments and it went away. I mean it could still be sciatic nerve issue but at least I didn’t need pain killers or anything to fix it.

I find a lot of pain we have could be due to muscle overuse, misuse, underuse causing tightness. Everything seem to link and if you relief a kink in a different area, it could solve a pain in another area.
2 minutes papers on YouTube is pretty good for physics simulation and AI papers. Plus you get a dude giving a quick explanation why the paper is relevant and important so you don't have to go in completely blind.
I've been a long time carbon-fiber skeptic.

Only an armchair materials enthusiast but carbon fiber construction seems to lack the margin for fatigue that aluminum has. It seems to me that when carbon fails it fails catastrophically, while aluminum allows some "give".

Now it seems carbon fiber doesn't have the longevity either? I am aware the aluminum can "work harden" over time and become more brittle as well. No material appears to be perfect but carbon has always felt to me to not be going in the right direction.
I’m not. What I’m saying is that you can’t compare someone’s debt level to their expected earnings one or two years out. It still entirely possible that masters degrees are a very bad deal, but the figures they show don’t fairly demonstrate that.
I wonder... we used to use electrically heated stone as storage medium for heating homes, until it became uneconomical due to energy price hikes.

A lunar base could electrically heat up a lot of easily mined rock and use that to store enough heat to keep the base warm enough?
> Which alternative do you prefer?

It depends. How hard it is to write the generalized functional system and how many filters do I need to support initially? How much do filters really change? The "but what if you need to change something" objection comes up quite a lot. In practice it is often better to apply the knowledge and requirements I have and evolve the system as my understanding changes than to try to anticipate all possible scenarios up front. In the latter case, if I put a lot of effort into something and I make the wrong call I either don't have as many changes as I thought, so it's wasted effort, or changes happen in ways I didn't anticipate, so my solution activity works against me.
+1 … anyone looking for science, checkout this sample report from a testing service for mental health doctors. It explains the symptoms and the likely deficiencies (like Magnesium) which likely lead to them.

Importantly the last few pages have example treatment for common conditions. You should still seek medical support though, with great power comes great responsibility. Don’t trust your powerful cloud data center to a junior sysadmin.

https://www.doctorsdata.com/resources/pdfs/Neurotransmitters...
This article does actually make an interesting point, but its graphs are all bunk.

The vaccine works by priming the immune system to work quickly against a disease. It is quite likely that if someone develops symptoms despite their body being at peak alert for coronavirus then they are in trouble. The graphs bear that out, and do not alarm me. If we only select for cases where the person is physically susceptible enough for the virus to break through the vaccine protections to cause an infection it makes sense that the cases will be on average worse.

But there is an interesting point here that if the vaccine were killing people (eg, heart inflammation problems have been detected in some cases) then the "COVID-19-related-death" stats, etc, would be highly misleading. It would be more interesting to see all-cause mortality and the cited tables don't do that.
Stanford researcher proposes tech to produce vaccines to stop the next pandemic
The religion in this case is US partisanship, which somehow the vaccine seems to be getting sucked into.
In one very specific frequency band, at one comparatively small place, yes. by a large amount. Ocean vs firehose.

Or, better: In the same way every "daytime headlight" you see is outdoing the sun.
that octahedral is neat but if u use it, add sth to raise the monitor height!
Meanwhile, trolls and staunch intellectuals demanding "enough" evidence think they can gatekeep what's acceptable to notice is already slipping and gaslight others for noticing and worrying, only to find that years later, the Overton window shifted and newer generations were none the wiser, bringing the things that were previously unacceptable into the mainstream with reckless abandon.

(edited for brevity, expanding more on this in a reply...)
> the liquid released could cover the entire state of Florida with 2 inches of water

Heat wave hit 74F
The author uses "evidence of infection" as the definition of infection, and labels all other definitions as misinformation, and writes at length about it as if it was not just a difference in definitions.

Obviously most of the people the author is criticizing are using "exposure that would cause detectable disease in non-immune individuals" as their definition, and I don't know if we have a better word for that.
A ‘better’ Atlantic article in this sense is https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/what-covid... subheaded “In the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct, and the U.S. was wrong.”
What’s surprising to me is that these are not fly-by-night for profit scams. This is Columbia purely monetizing the name “Columbia”.

I guess the feeling is as long as the undergraduate program is among the most competitive in the country and the PhD’s are high quality, it doesn’t really dilute the brand.

But it feels kind of scummy.

On another note I have a friend who was a professor of film studies at USC, who was truly very bothered by their masters program, that it was predicated on a lie, and that for god’s sake, you’re in LA already - if you want to work in movies, get a job working in movies. A USC masters degree won’t hurt you certainly, but it’s a hell of a lot of money to spend.
Embarrassed by Your Olympic Javelin: Did Cavemen Do It Better?
Pandas is marvelous. As is numpy, scipy, and all of that family. And they run essentially as C libraries, and approximate that level of performance. Someday I hope there will be golang analogues of these
One really has to ask why some one cares to write such a long blog post instead of simply publish the analysis to Lancet if it is so new and overlooked. Does the author expect to get careful reviews? I would care if I am publishing something that easily can also be misguide policy makers. If the author is correct from my understanding one should see more deaths and more hospitalised relative to the incidence in countries with high vaccination rates. We do see the opposite afaik. Did I get something wrong? But isn't that the claim: now mostly thoseppl just do not get infected which never would have died anyways?? Can someone please enlighten me, but there seems to be a major flaw in that analysis.
This would likely just lead to oversupply of in demand fields and schools creating shoddy majors.

If everyone with a psych major switched to comp sci tomorrow one of two things would happen.

1) we’d have more engineers than we’d know what to do with - wages would collapse and companies would stop trying to conserve engineering time. Innovation would slow and we’d head back towards the days of J2EE etc.

2) universities would create fake versions of the majors that are guaranteed, but easy to pass and unlikely to lead to employment.