skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/bangladesh-mask-study-do-...

https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/5/19-0994_article

"At present there is only limited and inconsistent scientific evidence to support the effectiveness of masking of healthy people in the community to prevent infection with respiratory viruses, including SARS-CoV-2 (75). A large randomized community-based trial in which 4862 healthy participants were divided into a group wearing medical/surgical masks and a control group found no difference in infection with SARS-CoV-2 (76). A recent systematic review found nine trials (of which eight were cluster-randomized controlled trials in which clusters of people, versus individuals, were randomized) comparing medical/surgical masks versus no masks to prevent the spread of viral respiratory illness. Two trials were with healthcare workers and seven in the community. The review concluded that wearing a mask may make little or no difference to the prevention of influenza-like illness (ILI) (RR 0.99, 95%CI 0.82 to 1.18) or laboratory confirmed illness (LCI) (RR 0.91, 95%CI 0.66-1.26) (44); the certainty of the evidence was low for ILI, moderate for LCI."

https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/337199/WHO-...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7546829/
Thanks for the reply, I tried this but it seems like anything below around 6% (.06) doesn't actually brightness anymore. This matches the behavior of when you press function+shift+option+F1, where if you set the brightness to anything below the first bar (1/16th = .0625), there is no difference.
Honest question - how do you all cope with this? Do you ignore it because it is painful? Do you donate to environmental groups like the EDF or NRDC? Did you quit your tech/advertising job to work on renewable energy?

I personally have been donating to environmental groups, but it feels like a cop-out. I'm using money to pay-away some of my guilt and my unwillingness to put more substantial effort towards such an important cause as this. It weighs on me daily though.

So honestly, how do you all cope? For those of you who have had the willingness/bravery to go "all-in", how did you do it? I'm addicted to my comfortable, wealthy lifestyle as a software engineer and I'm ashamed of it.
Eh. Maybe I’ll invest in real estate in Greenland, as it might turn more green.

As long as air quality remains ok where I live, I don’t really care about the climate warming, and I feel it is something put into motion long ago, that our stupid “carbon credits” won’t do a damn thing to stop.

If it gets really bad, well, human agency is a marvelous thing.

The last thing we need is politicians with investments in “green” technology forcing us to use “green” technology. (Same goes for those with investments in fossil fuels, shouldn’t be forced to use those either)
I tried and failed to use Google Coral about 8months ago. The dev experience was terrible. Our company just went with deploying using openvino on cpu, which was fast enough.

I’m not sure coral has enough of an edge to make it worthwhile relative to simpler edge deployment options like cpu
Maybe build more hospitals? I mean, in march of 2020 we expressly locked down to build up healthcare capacity. Where is it?
Stephen Wolfram is highly regarded, but it's not due to his humbleness.
This is good too! I got books from the library.
Coffman's truck was, and the DNC and RNC where the bombs were placed are, all near the Capitol.
But has this been true in practice? Was any variant successfully stopped with lockdowns? I suppose hypothetically if there’s a new strain with like a 10% fatality rate there will be new extreme measures where that could be the case, but it hasn’t happened yet. Even the extreme early 2020 measures failed to stop the virus.
Whats the best way to contact them/you?
I'm on that boat. Tensorflow.js is the only decent ML library for JS. Google support for TF.js has been dwindling, but new versions are still coming out AFAIK and we've just got Apple Silicon (M1) support.
Evidence so far:

- Pathogenicity: Virtually no hospitalizations or deaths. There's only one reported death so far "with" Omicron, about which there are absolutely no details released whatsoever and which was rather suspiciously announced by the UK PM just before a vote.

- Pathogenicity: all reports from SA say the symptoms are not only extremely mild, but don't actually match COVID symptoms at all. The first person to get it thought they'd simply been in the sun too long. Muscle aches, a slight headache, etc. Basically common cold symptoms.

- Irrelevance of vaccines: in Denmark the percentage of Omicron cases that are vaccinated is the same as the overall vaccination rate, i.e. there's ~no impact of vaccines.

There's really two ways to look at this. One is that the vaccine programme has now completely failed, but it doesn't matter because new COVID is mild.

The other is that really, Omicron isn't a COVID-causing virus at all, and that this marks the end of COVID. Because:

1. The symptoms are different. Different symptoms = different disease.

2. The severity is different. Both are mild but Omicron appears to be super mild. What it creates can barely be classed as a "disease" at all.

3. The virus is different. Much more heavily mutated than any other variant so far, in fact, so much so that some of the DRASTIC people are starting to suspect it may be another lab leak. Unfortunately, there have been scientists doing GoF research on SARS-CoV-2, their papers are public to view.

I think in a properly functioning and rational health system, it would be very hard to describe this new variant as COVID. Based on the evidence and reports so far it would be more rational to describe it as a common cold virus, of the type that occur every year.
We can’t even wear masks.

We can’t even agree to enforce the rule of law.
How much time has collectively been wasted on “Free Tibet” for instance? A person’s interest or disinterest was irrelevant to China’s policies.
Article dated September 13, 2013.
It's since been published in Science.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abi9069
Rough estimate is that there were ~30 million housecats in 1970 versus ~90 million today

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Growth-of-the-house-cat-...
But with so many things that could go wrong in such a tightly integrated system, it's impossible to predict which components or assemblies may be affected by a partial redesign.
> The work is figuring out if it's even possible, and what the bytes would be.

Easy.

4 string STAK\xff\xff\xff\xff
So did I but since they changed the input field on their website to the weird new “Math Input” UI, most inputs that would just work perfectly fine a year or so ago now don’t get parsed correctly anymore. It’s made WolframAlpha virtually unusable for me. No idea what happened there.
If you know of any well known CIA agents working in right-leaning media at that time, and you noticed that their show changed course at that time, it would be a pretty clear indication of what their agenda was don't you think? Anyway, name the show and the person and I'll definitely take a note of what message they are pushing.

>Also, what are your thought on the fact that Republicans held full control of Congress when the repeal was enacted?

My thoughts are exactly the same as when McCain's vote stopped the repeal of the affordable care act and all the main leaders of the Republican party on the floor cheered loudly before Mitch McConnell quickly hushed them up. The people in power see eye to eye on everything, especially the issue of control.
It really isn't as bad as I thought.

The Cortex X2 CPU in 8 Gen 1, on a Samsung 4nm which is more like TSMC 6nm+ ( Yes Samsung mess up node number again ) needs to be around 40% faster in order to catch up to Apple's TSMC 5nm+ A15. That is not too bad considering the X2 has 1MB of Cache per Core, compared 12 MB of Cache shared between two A15 Core. Yes. 1MB and 6MB difference. And a 4MB of System Level Cache compared to 32MB on A15. Six and Eight times the difference.

I would imagine a Cortex X2 with the same cache, and on a TSMC 5nm+ node would easily be 20% faster. The Power difference should also be level with same cache. Still not a fast as A15. But the gap isn't as big as many have thought.

The GPU is actually on par with Apple. That probably requires more testing in terms of energy usage.

This becomes interesting to see when Mediatek release their own X2 as well.
I believe you still can yes
> So there is little evolutionary pressure on the virus to be less deadly - by the time it kills people, we are spent vessels from its point of view.

A variant that infects more people from a single host (assuming everything else held constant) is a positive selective pressure. So increasing the contagious period is beneficial. But the length of the contagious period is inversely related to the timing and strength of the immune response. So we should expect the virus to become less deadly over time, assuming there's a hard limit to its ability to evade a typical immune system.
IMHO the #1 thing you can do is not use a car and help others not use cars, including working to get the infrastructure necessary in urban, suburban and rural contexts to make that possible. That is what I put my energy into on a local level.
It's certainly hard to describe the inner workings of one's mind with adequate detail to compare them to others. However I believe this anecdote may provide some insight.

One test I have performed on myself in the past is to decide I will visually remember a specific moment. (I have done this several times). I could bring up that image in my head, and remember certain specific things (eg the color and shape of someone's hat). Like other visual memories it only has partial detail. I can still remember these instances, but most of the detail has now faded (~10 years ago). This seems to work similarly to how I bring up a visual such as the elephant or apple in the article.

I'm pretty sure not everyone would describe their own experience of visual memory the same way, but maybe that's descriptive enough to understand if there is a difference.
NASA Enters the Solar Atmosphere for the First Time, Bringing New Discoveries
I'd slightly trollishly say nobody has aphantasia, it's just that some people make a false distinction between remembering what something looks like and seeing it. Same as what you're saying really, but makes people feel better about themselves, rather than worse.

It seems clear at any rate from the way these discussions always go that aphantasia vs. non-aphantasia, as real as the distinction may be, is hardly predictive of anything else about a person, and the subject only attracts so much interest because people mistakenly assume it's more predictive than it is.
Depends on how the organization grew, and if they have unified processes across department.

AFAIK the IT security folks at a financial institution that I used to work at are living in hell at the moment. That organization grew internationally through acquisitions across more than 80 countries, and lacks unified structure across the entire organization due to legal and compliance constraints unique to each jurisdiction.

A web development shop I provide security guidance to (owned by one my TTRPG buddies) had to do a couple of searches in github and update some hardware as patches became available. We made sure he was sorted out over a couple of drinks before we played board games.

It varies.
Very cool!
I just designed my new portfolio website with a hand drawn “sketch book” style.
https://www.jdegrootlutzner.com/?utm_campaign=show&utm_sourc...

And this style could be great for Ben Stoke’s paper website project.
The person I was responding to claimed there were bombs.

I was just asking them to clarify.

The link you posted shows bombs around D.C. but not at the capitol and there's no clear connection to any organized group or the protests.

Any links that show there were bombs at the capitol building or grounds or that the bombs were confirmed to be connected to the protests?
C return code error handling strikes again.
I would be happy with "find anything with Google search"
size, vm-itude, etc. aside, i've seen (albeit very high end) laser printers that can render text on paper faster than this scrolls. yikes.
If I had to guess, they probably don't care about home usage of Hex-rays. Businesses have more to lose when using cracked versions of Hex-rays.
I don't think bundle size is a legitimate/relevant criticism of a modern graphical application, unless we're talking double- or triple-digit gigabytes. I have 8000GB in my portable machine.
Can't tell if this is a joke — the arctic is floating ice, not land.
What I suspect is that the bureaucrats use fire safety as an excuse to justify their work; if a structure really is dangerous for fire safety the owner will get a visit from the fire department rather quickly as soon as they notice it.
USPS built and secretly tested a mobile voting system before 2020
It is the only endgame. The covid virus is not going away. Even if everyone on the planet suddenly got vaccinated simultaneously, the virus has an animal reservoir.

Good news, selection pressure is for more-contagious and less-deadly. It will happen eventually, and then covid will be just another common cold.
Quick Typography Jargon Buster Part 3
i remain really confused about this notion of 'creating value'. i mean I know the little microeconomic stories...but in the real world how do measure 'value' without recursively describing it in terms of dollars?
Good point. Let's fire half of all the black people again like we did 2020. You're so empathetic and really looking out for the little people out there.
You missed the last part of the story, where the true crux of the matter was that Analogue promised that the work for them would not impact her open source project...and then tried to demand that she delay the next release of her open source emulator until at least 6 months after the release of the Analogue Pocket. At the time of negotiation, that was initially scheduled for Summer 2020...but ended up actually being Dec 2021, so the author's next release would have been delayed more than 1.5 years.
It’t not just that—they also overstate the severity of the event covered, in each report, even as they inevitably follow that by “well, no cause to really worry yet, we’ll have to see in coming weeks”.

I wish for a solid news source that did unbiased reporting in a way that doesn’t offend knowledgeable viewer/reader’s intelligence. Just assume I already know what happened up to this point; then add links/annotations as appropriate. Don’t drum up sensational headlines and speculations. Save your effort, save my time.

This isn’t something that can be found on YouTube, as it wouldn’t generate grand amounts of ad revenue.
Etalab implements NLP-driven website search for French government
Depends on your definition of require. The flu doesn't require a vaccine, but if we had much higher vaccine uptake each year we would save hundreds of thousands of lives a year. It's possible that with really high vaccine uptake and other measures we could make the flu a lot more rare.

If we end up with a version of COVID that is less deadly and then we decide to not take vaccines seriously, we'll end up with endemic hundreds of thousands or millions of people dying every year. In the U.S., is an extra 100,000 dead a year something we should be OK with?
Well, logically speaking, we never needed vaccines, since some percentage of the human race will survive COVID regardless. The question always was just whether you can improve your own odds of staying healthy. And so far that data seems to have been strongly in favor of vaccination of yourself and those around you, with further increased benefit demonstrated from opting for a booster shot. But still never being essential or necessary for survival.
Yes, and of course I am playing devils advocate. After all I am here on HN commenting on the news of the day. You are hitting on exactly the issue here though and think it’s extremely healthy to tell a person who feels overwhelmed and besieged by the news cycle to take a break from a 100% optional activity.
Trump being into fighting air pollution is a new take I have not heard before. Policy-wise, his administration was vehemently anti-regulation[0] and rolled back many air quality regulations protecting us from toxic substances like coal ash[1], which contains heavy metals like mercury and arsenic.

The most egregious example in my opinion was the attempt to end California's legal authority to set its own, more stringent, emissions standards[2]. The edict was even opposed by a majority of automakers.

Luckily many of these rulings have been rolled-back or are in the process of being reversed.

Air pollution even from tires and brakes, let alone from gasoline, is a large health problem and should be discussed more.

[0] - https://www.brookings.edu/policy2020/votervital/what-is-the-...

[1] - https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/2017/12/coal-ash-rule/

[2] - https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/26/22404403/california-tailp...
Viruses that evade the PCR test for Covid would be a different species almost by definition, and with enough mutations that could happen. These tests don’t detect other common cold causing coronaviruses for example.
When you're living life on the edge, every short-term problem can turn into a life-threatening disaster. If it wasn't the pandemic, it would be something else. The rental car industry is living paycheck to paycheck. Hertz (and Avis and Enterprise and Dollar Thrifty and ...) have endemic and structural problems.

Indeed, read this article, which was originally written in 2012 and updated in 2018... before the pandemic: https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2012/07/13/surprising...

"... this interferes with the ability to develop a moat around their products and/or services. And on a practical level, it impedes margins and profitability. Avis and Hertz, for instance, have been profitable in only one and two of the last five years, respectively."
The ride up emitted 82.5T of CO2 per person.

A single Bitcoin transaction emits 1T of CO2.

An average American home emits 5T of CO2 per year.

One round-trip flight from New York to London emits 1T of CO2 per person, and seats about 300 people.

So for perspective, it produces about as much CO2 to fly 4 people to space as a 777 from New York to London round-trip. Now there are 233 daily flights from New York to London - or 85,000 per year. And that's just New York to London.

There have been 18 Blue Origin launches.

It's a campfire. A pricy luxury that a few folks take advantage of. Should everyone do it? No. Can everyone do it? No. A carbon tax will sort all this out.

But saying we shouldn't address the 85,000 flights from NYC to LHR per year because Bezos blasted off a few times is a really poor way of framing the conversation.
Dude that article is saying its due to underlying immunity according to the source vaccinologist:

> Professor Shabir Madhi, a vaccinologist at Wits University in Johannesburg who ran trials on AstraZeneca's COVID vaccine, believes it is the substantial percentage of the population in places like Gauteng province — which includes the urban hubs of Pretoria and Johannesburg and has seen a dramatic uptick in new infections — with underlying T-cell immunity that is preventing the disease from becoming more severe.

It should bring deep shame on people to see their own source material used directly in contradiction to their claim.
The debate over the limits of acceptable speech on social media is a discussion worth having, but the claim in the article does not match the wording of the policy at hand. The policy states that users will get a strike if they claim that “the vaccines will cause you to be sick, spread the virus, or would be more harmful than getting COVID-19" (emphasis mine).

The vaccine causing the spread of the virus is different than the known fact vaccinated people, infected elsehow, could spread the virus.
Yes it's the same project
The 'big flaw' in the SA observations lie in in the fact that they have huge seropositivity rates, I believe well over >50% of the population has had COVID, many of them contracted multiple strains. And - they've had quite a lot of people die already from it.

So that Omicron is not hugely lethal among a population with 'natural' tolerance and where a good swath of the ill have been killed ... is maybe not so surprising.

Maybe there is a good answer to this but the SA reports I have seen don't seem to directly speak to this issue.

FYI CDC's seroprevelance data for SA [1]

[1] https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/27/12/21-1465_article
Via the hub.

https://yewtu.be/watch?v=0iiXUeil5fQ

https://yewtu.be/watch?v=nxeMoaxUpWk&t=11m6s
> the marginal costs of launches to space unfortunately don't go down

Until recently, neither launch nor satellites had economies of scale. With reusability, launch does. And with common platforms and constellations, satellites are beginning to.
Some reading for you: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempts_to_overturn_the_202...
One advantage is that a cargo bike is more social; you can keep eye contact with and talk with your kids.
Inkdrop?
Strange why they didn't put it on a recovery ship. Perhaps the reactor needs a large supply of cooling water that could not be made available when out of the water.
Climate change has destabilized the Earth’s poles, putting the planet in peril
Looks like 95.5% success rate. I don't know if there is anything better with that much payload capacity and as long a track record.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_5
> Universities and companies paid stupid amounts of money for digital real estate. Wired ran profiles of Second Life speculators who got rich in the bubble.

A lot of dumb things happened in the past, especially with companies that tried to substitute virtual scarcity speculation for an actual business model.

It's easy to mock them for how ridiculous it all is, but I don't see any evidence that Meta is charging down a path of repeating all of the failed business models of years past.

I think a lot of the old timers who have seen hype cycles of past businesses are projecting too much of those old, failed businesses on to this new wave of activities. Everyone is so busy speculating that Meta is going to fail that it's hard to actually understand what they're doing or what their business model really is.

Regardless, it's trivial to see that video games and VR of 2021 are nothing like the Second Life of almost two decades prior. Back then, video games and even computer-based entertainment were a niche hobby. Today, video games are everywhere, VR is cheap, and everyone is already attached to their phones 24/7. I'm interested to see where this goes.
Look, I'm not qualified to evaluate a study like this, but between Science and "el gato malo" published on Substack, I think I'm going to have to go with Science on this one, pending some recognized expert in the field with a human name saying otherwise.
> My girlfriend watched me, puzzled. After convincing her that I hadn't gone crazy

Now _there_s a startup idea for you! How did you manage to do that? Much more interesting story :-P
We really need to stop placing the burden on the individual. You and I not using cars or minimising our use may help but cars are a necessity of life for many. This is true in urban and rural contexts alike.

What we should be doing is getting governments to band together and penalise industrial-scale polluters. It would do more good to take shipping and trucking electric than for you to rely on public transit and for me to drive one fewer kilometre.
My main concern with something like this is the fact that it advertises an "ssh client". I've spent years refining my ~/.ssh/config and integrations with OpenSSH client. I think the best way you can implement a good and compatible ssh experience is by shelling out to OpenSSH, always. Reinventing the wheel usually results in a worse wheel.
You've obviously never worked a service job.