skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The page you reference is very weird because it's the only vaccine page on the CDC website that gives a range for the effectiveness numbers; all the others just give a percentage. I'm not sure what the range means, unless it's a 95% confidence interval or something like that; but I have great difficulty in believing that 95% confidence intervals would be that wide after decades of usage of the vaccine. But in any case, it looks like "effectiveness" has been used differently for the mumps vaccine (or the mumps component of the MMR vaccine) for some time.

IIRC, there was a mumps outbreak in Ontario in 2011 that raised some doubts about the effectivness of the mumps component of the MMR vaccine; possibly the ranges are from studies done of that outbreak. But again, if the ranges are 95% confidence intervals (and I can't imagine what else they could be), they are atrociously wide for a disease and a vaccine that has been around this long.

It is possible, I suppose, that almost all vaccines really are that uncertain in their effects; but if that's true, it should make us much, much less confident about the wisdom of vaccine mandates in general, and COVID vaccine mandates in particular. If we can still be that uncertain about a vaccine that has been around for decades, how much more uncertain should we be about one that was only discovered last year?
A good summary including many of the common techniques of how to learn something. One of the things I always ask myself at the beginning is why. I might see something that is interesting and get temporarily motivated to do it, but if I stop myself and ask why, I'll often discover I'm just riding someone else's interest.
I'm pretty done with this mentality:

1. Doing good is hard.

2. This is hard.

3. Therefore it is good.
I haven’t regularly commuted for most of the last 15 years. And while I probably wouldn’t buy an EV today, that’s in part because my 10 year old vehicle only has about 70,000 miles on it so it’s nowhere near needing replaced—and doing so would be both a poor financial and environmental choice.
I can't be objectively wrong unless we agree (or you decide, I suppose) on some firm definition of what wellness or illness means, such as "by self diagnosis" or "according to a quorum of doctors diagnosing against the DSM".

Like yeah, a lot of people have OCD-like things going on. It's often fine though! A good psychiatrist will heavily weight "is it causing you problems in your life" before handing out a diagnosis or thinking about treatment.

IMHO what counts as wellness or illness is mostly societally constructed[1]. In various places and times for example, hearing voices or having visions is, if not "normal", accepted as something that can happen to anyone at various times in their life.

A person can be superbly well adapted and functional according to the norms and values of one social context yet be seen as deeply mentally ill in another.

[1] I do agree of course there are problems (often organic) that render people dysfunctional in almost any context. The situation is much more fuzzy for most.
CA is the land of show, and things like banning straws and gas mowers don’t inconvenience the rich donors and voters - in fact it sounds good to them - and so it’s done.
that one does, thanks
As someone who has spent the better part of the last decade traveling I can unequivocally say I have almost never come across non Americans who feel this way. It is ALWAYS the Americans who are the the ones loudly talking trash about how terrible Americans are.

As Scott Alexander points out, these Americans counter intuitively are not being self critical when they say this, they are talking trash about the "other" Americans they don't like.
"What? I can't buy a gas-powered leaf blower there? I mean, I prefer electric, but, but...why those draconian, anti-freedom Stalinists!"

These "I hate California" digs are cartoonish by now (and boring).
I’m glad California is doing this. I don’t live in Cali so I don’t have to endure the initial scramble of figuring out compliance. I hate yard equipment gas engines. With a fiery burning passion. Most comments below think it’s either gas or battery, but plug-in equipment is great. Much quieter, more powerful than battery, cable management is kinda annoying but there’s an art to it.

Commercial equipment is a tough deal though, you can’t get enough amps on a 300 ft extension cord for a commercial-quality powered motor, which makes me wonder if this legislation could push foreword innovation to, maybe, create higher-grade plug in equipment that either utilizes a flywheel to increase cutting power at the expense of torque, or uses a combo battery and cord to temporarily boost power as needed.
I moved from Python to Haskell, when I had had enough of debugging runtime failures. Excellent choice, go for it.
It's one thing to visualize, another to recall at will. Your friend is someone whom you've spent sufficient time with on at least a semi-regular basis to form emotional and mental bonds with, deep memories. How many times does a CS undergraduate re-implement sort algorithms? Not that most interviews actually ask one to regurgitate that from one's memory.
It's like... a handful of 18650 batteries and a metal tab. Legitimately, we should be able to make our own with a 3D printer and Amazon.
Amusingly enough many cities and most HOAs in California will get very angry and even fine you if your yard isn’t a lawn to match everyone else’s.
It's sometimes a bit more nuanced than that.

For example: For a number of years Palo Alto has had a law about gas leaf blowers (Ordinance No. 4634, I think). The "easy" way around it is to use an electric leaf blower. Where do you plug in an electric leaf blower in Palo Alto? Probably the same place as where the public trash can is: Nowhere. You've got to use the customer's house. Not every customer has an outdoor socket. Try explaining that to a customer: The city you live in voted to 1) Make me plug in my outdoor tool inside your house. 2) Use your electricity instead of my gas. 3) Make the job take longer. Helping a customer "understand" why they're going to see an extra dollar on their electricity bill and inconvenience every 2-4 weeks is harder than you'd think. The people of Palo Alto don't like being told they're wrong or what they have chosen costs more money. I have seen with my own eyes people forego service because of a $10 monthly increase after multiple of great service.

Long story short: People like to vote against themselves. People are not reasonable.
Making Entropy Production Work
yep we desperately need to move past such shallow aesthetic preferences
There was that time I went to a Christmas Party at the

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_USA

in NYC, took the bus to Boston, was walking around at 3 am and saw somebody driving the wrong way, almost have a head on collision with a police car and the cop only yelled at him.
> How many times does a CS undergraduate re-implement sort algorithms

You don't have to implement, you just need to know the theory of why it works. Then you just code it up based on that theory, it isn't hard to do at all.

For example, merge sort explains itself, you partition and merge. That is all you need to remember. Hashmap is the same, you use a deterministic function to label objects and then put those into buckets, then you find them in the bucket with the same label later. These are like the basics of the basics.
as someone who lives in a high cost area 10 minutes from sunnyvale and 15 mins from mountain view yes, they are overpriced
The benefit is that makes the vendor willing to send you a copy of the software you want.
Having done both, I’ll take the cramped public transport rather than the fucking commute in the bay. This car culture is sucking people’s soul. I’m so glad that we’ve all moved to a remote world.
I’ve lived in a few places for several years at a time. Based on my (still limited, but real) experiences, I think Jante Law isn’t unique to Scandinavia, but it’s definitely real, and it definitely isn’t a universal phenomenon.
Since it’s all mixed (which would be nice if done right because it simplifies the process) but so badly that it’s difficult to separate it seems more like a way to avoid clogged rubbish chutes.
All the modern batteries show that when super low - often if they’ve been really discharged or in the cold.

Leaving them on the charger or letting them “rest” for a day or two can also bring them back.
This is something people from countries where people drink primarily hard liquor (Russia, Finland, much of Eastern Europe) know pretty well even if they don't know how to explain it. Another trick is to watch _what_ you eat. Meat and fat stay in the stomach for much longer, so if you focus on that, alcohol won't hit your liver all at once.
> Japan had to make a post-war decision to either adopt the American automobile-focused city or to rely on public transportation. Of course, they chose public transportation

> likely because of Japan’s lack of natural resources like oil

Rather because of a strong socialist influence in urban planning. Also powerful worker unions in public transportation.
You can't really compare Japan to all of Europe. There are major differences in Europe on all of your points. As a German that lived 6 months between Osaka and Kyoto I mostly agree on the last one, but cleanliness and public transport is only slightly behind so that it doesn't really matter. E.g. Japanese streets are astonishingly clean, but I have never been disturbed by litter in Munich. Garbage doesn't pile up here. Also the public transport works really well, mostly in 5 minutes intervals in peak hours and 10 otherwise. The "Stammstrecke" in the center is also served in 1-3 minute intervals.
I completely gave up on giving whiteboard interviews after trying a couple of them. It's just so hard to get it right, and even if you do, I'm not sure you gain that much more useful knowledge as opposed to other interview styles.
I’m not sure why you consider that “specious.” Aluminum requires less electricity per ton because hydrogen is the least dense element. Per mole, hydrogen uses less electricity than aluminum. :)

And we don’t produce massively more hydrogen than aluminum. Global primary aluminum production is ~64 million tonnes per year. Hydrogen for ammonia production (which is the majority of hydrogen I think) is about 40 million tonnes per year out of about 75 million tonnes total pure hydrogen. Certainly the same order of magnitude.

But again, this is missing the point. Before around 1950 (when steam reforming became widely available), hydrogen for ammonia fertilizer was produced commonly by electrolysis, often using cheap hydroelectric power. It was done at massive scale and only stopped because steam reforming happened to be cheaper.

And what is your point, here, by saying we make more aluminum than hydrogen? “We can’t credibly do things that are any different, even if just different by degree, than what we happen to do right now.”?
Rick Beato did a tribute to him 4 days ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUfLZjIQigQ
How long does the train from Hefei to Wuhu take now?

Driving is 90 minutes, but Google doesn't have rail timetables for China.
They really are - at least for Milwaukee almost all the smarts are in the tool itself and not in the pack.

But never buy a pack - always wait for a sale or deal and get the batteries free with tool (or tool free with batteries).
> rest of your statement is meaningless drivel

To your sensibilities.

> I recognize you from other threads

Good. I keep telling folks to call their reps on Apple, Google, and the whole lot. These companies salt the earth for the rest of us.

Apple taxes 50+% of the mobile application development market with outrageous fees and prevents freedom outside of tightly set, draconian rules.

They're clearly bad for the market with their ever worsening device repairability and increasingly anti-consumer behavior.

Microsoft got handed a new one for behavior one tenth as bad.

The DOJ needs to break Apple in two.
ElasticON Global – Free Elasticsearch and Elk Stack Virtual User Conference
> As Scott Alexander points out

Would you mind sharing the link to the post?
very cool, i am going to check this out. we are converting our own yard to small scale farm / aquaponic system, and automating it is something i would love to do!
By writing an idiotic law that is impossible to comply with?
When the next guy comes and tells them the same thing, they're going to understand, and now neither they nor your father will be breathing the noxious fumes. People are perfectly reasonable.
Heh replace “lawn care companies” with “immigrants” and it reads much different.
An area won't improve in one year because you switch teachers, and this problem is really socially whole. You don't just switch teachers, you need to inject money into the local economy, invest in public spaces (green areas, children's playgrounds, etc.). And of course, in education as well.

But you gotta start regardless. We can't just shrug, though I feel like this problem is so complex it really requires a complete re-structuration of the way America handles its social structure.

I don't think the USA is going to solve these problems without a complete 180 degrees change in how you view the world, and that won't happen until the empire has completely collapsed. In that regard, I have quite a grim view of the future of America.
QB64 Game Programming
Declarative GUIs in Racket (gui-easy)
Imposing the same rule on small backup generators seems premature, but that might be my perspective, where losing power for an extended period during the winter here would be bad (not that I have a generator, there's just not anything that I see as a particularly viable alternative, especially dollar for dollar).
For something that small even a simple push unpowered mower would work.
And that’s my point. I wonder how they could be covered by section 230. If a human read through a bunch of sources online and decided to answer a query with the wrong persons photo, they’d be liable. Google search is not a platform that users post content to. They crawl content and then decide what to share with users in response to queries.
But of course they like large living spaces, most people do. The issue is how costly suburbia is on a societal level. It promotes car usage, fosters social isolation, prevents building walkable and convenient neighborhoods, etc. The worst part is that after the cat's out of the bag, nobody is willing to give up their spacious homes. Better to heavily restrict or disallow the option in the first place.
Tokyo is one of the worst places I’ve visited. The people there are so fake. They don’t help you because they want to. They feel obligated to help.

But wow if you get out of Tokyo, people are so nice and friendly. Kyoto is my absolute favourite place. People are so kind and helpful and friendly, and they want to help you and recommend places to visit or eat at etc.
Cryptocurrency is backed by the same thing as any other currency: popularity and consumer confidence. Whether such sentiments are "warranted" or "deserved" is a subjective matter, but that is irrelevant to determining its economic influence - enough people have invested in it for network effects to all but guarantee its continued relevance.
> The biggest brands in the various "alternative" tobacco products like e-cigarettes are already owned by the conventional incumbents.

My own observation is that most e-cigarettes in Canada and multiple countries in Europe are various Chinese devices and liquids sourced from vape shops that don't have anything from the incumbent combustible tobacco providers.
Agree with you on the string trimmers and mowers being quieter in a way that’s meaningful. (I particularly love my battery string trimmer since I spent more time working on than using my gas one.) I have a plug-in chainsaw and it’s also quiet but it’s Fisher-Price sized so I can’t fairly say either way.

The blowers I’d encourage you to look up the specs and make sure your quiet electric has the power your loud gas one had before finalizing your conclusion on sound output per air output. I doubt it has even half the power (unless your gas blower was a particularly small four-stroke).

I bought two plug-in blowers (both were bad jokes, being limited to 1.4kW of input power by the outlet) before buying a gas blower. I’ve since tried two battery blowers of friends and one of those was okay but still noticeably slower and less powerful than my gas blower (the other was similar to the plug-ins: suitable for dry leaves on smooth concrete).

I’m not at all opposed to electric tools (especially since small seasonal gas engines are a pain to keep running well); in fact I prefer them. But I haven’t found a blower that’s competitive in power and I’ve got maple seeds to move from 3” bluegrass in the wet New England fall and I’ve not found an electric that can do it.
I live adjacent to two large institutional properties that have lots of trees. I'd really like them to consider alternate means of dealing with leaves that are not aggravating to their neighbors and probably are better for their trees, like mulching or something. One way to encourage this is to make it cost more for them to do traditional groundskeeping. I don't feel bad about placing a bigger burden on groundskeepers that makes them have to charge more on this situation

(One is a private college, one is a religious institution, I don't really feel bad about them being pushed to be better neighbors as they manage their leaves)
Even on their own road, they're still bumpy and rough compared to a tram or especially a train.
Reality doesn't matter to these people.
As someone who has been into cards and collectibles all my life, the past few years have been wild to say the least.

What we saw in 2020/early 2021 was really a classic bubble - FOMO buying pushing prices to unsustainable levels. Then throw in the grading shutdown caused by backlog of new collectors and investors sending in millions of garbage base cards for grading, clogging up the grading companies, plus profit taking from the insane prices, and we get the pullback we saw in Q2.

Like everything else, the collectible market comes down to supply and demand. Focus on rare cards - numbered cards, colored paralells, refractors etc…the supply is much lower and are generally safer bets because collectors are always chasing them.
> People are perfectly reasonable

Not really.
> Offering a more secure solution benefits everyone using these devices, even if you don't personally recognize a benefit from it.

It's a detriment to me. I don't need that level of security, so why should I pay extra for all my repairs which is effectively me subsidizing enterprise corporations and governments? Plus it's increasing the original development and manufacturing costs, so I'm paying a lot extra for something that doesn't benefit me at all.

If those companies and governments really need those security features, let them pay for them. I don't care if their phones cost $5k.
good points, more wanted to express the idea that it may happen anywhere
Should be "shut down", two words. One word makes it a noun and makes the title confusing.
Try finding a house for half a million dollar in any major city around the world, good luck. Tokyo is actually very cheap because you can go to a cheap neighbourhood and still will have all amenities, safety and most important quick and easy transportation to all the interesting places. Many families live in apartment buildings which are cheaper, if it is slightly old it is even more cheap. It is also nice because the city got little parks and playgrounds dotted all over the place so kids just go there to play with other kids, you don't need the American suburban back yard. Once they are 6 they start to travel by train and bike to school so you don't really need a car to get them everywhere. Daycare are also very cheap, especially the public one but even privates that work during all working hours are relatively cheap and they give excellent care.
> Are you implying Tailwind is operating as the traditional startup?

No. I’m simply saying that the quality of a website does not indicate quality of the product being shown. The only thing that will indicate if a product is good or not is testing it.

Tailwind obviously has great marketing and a great developer base, but not everything is the same.
Say that to the acidic invasive Eucalyptus leaves eating away at the paint on your car, or leaving stains on your paved walkway, or choking out your pretty wildflowers.

Or maybe take it up with the Bigleaf Maples clogging up the storm drain front of your house causing water to slowly creep up your poorly graded property on Middlefield Rd.

Or maybe the pine needles that turn brown and look like garbage on your lawn.

A lot of leaves suck to deal with. Blowing is the what the property owners want.
COVID was easily the worst thing that has happened to the airline industry bar none. ICAO estimates that 2020 resulted in $371B in losses.
Whether someones profiting or not has nothing to do with it. A negative externality is simply any economic activity that imposes costs on an uninvolved party.
They missed a real good chance to instead just tax them - start at a modest tax that increases rapidly and everyone will stop buying them eventually.
The human mind requires practice to retain skill and proficiency. Period. People who were solid engineers and later become executives, 20 years down the line many say they no longer can code. I've seen this many times.

Where are you getting this concept that humans never forget skills? That's completely false.
Speculation of meme coins has dominated the news recently but there are some amazing coins with real utility. Ethereum tends to get viewed negatively because it can become so insanely expensive to do anything on the chain but in reality that means that the market is willing to pay for those transactions to occur which suggests that there is some real utility to the ecosystem that has real world value.
I started noticing this the past few weeks with the desktop app. Not sure if it's new, but it's sure a PITA to share a link from discord by first clicking it to open it (into browser) then copying the browser's URL. Even just pasting from one discord server to another server requires this extra nonsense.
> You could also triangulate ground stations with data from enough Dishys etc. what can all be used against them

The ground stations locations are public information since they require FCC licenses so this is a bit of a moot point.
But they didn't decree that "everybody will now use this technology". They just outlawed something harmful. You're quite free to hire a goat, use a rake, plenty of options.
I’ve lived in two places that were described as “everyone is nice and friendly to you”, Montreal and Texas. In Canada it is actually true I think. Most people were genuinely nice. But they showed that with actions not words (viz. a car almost always stops if they even think you might cross). In Texas for sure everyone smiles and is all •howdy” but boy have I rarely met someone who truly meant it. I’d much rather live in Canada (if they start paying better lol), but I’d rather choose to live in NYC than Texas. At the least in NYC people show what they mean and are actually friendlier in actions than Texans.
Why is calculus more important than statistics or data science? Frankly, I think that it’s far more valuable for people to learn stars and data science as they provide far more real world benefits over calculus.

Also, who is telling minorities that they aren’t smart enough? The argument made is that, despite their aptitude, they are not given the opportunities.

And again, this is indeed relevant regardless of race and should be a concern even if the schools disproportionately impacted weren’t minority majority.

All that said, I think your point about funding is the bigger issue. Even if this change happens, how will these schools suddenly be able to offer stats when they couldn’t offer calc?
Ask HN: Is nuclear power a practical short term solution to climate change?