skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The goal is to minimize the amount of contaminated particles (droplets, dust, etc) that you exhale and inhale. If you're carrying the mask reduces how many particles your colleagues come in contact with, if your colleagues are carrying it reduces the amount of contaminated particles the you inhale. When both of you are wearing masks then the likelihood of transmission decreases further.

The likelihood of inhaling is then dependent on how frequently you breath in, and vice versa. So what matters is not just who you have contact with, but rather how long the contact lasts. If you're in the office let's assume you have a 10 hour work day, with 1 hour for breaks where you're unmasked in an area with other unmasked people.

Let's do some very basic maths, using some very dumb assumptions

* Wearing a mask reduces your likelihood of inhaling a contaminated particle by 50%

* Wearing a mask reduces your likelihood of emission a particle by 50%

* If you are in the vicinity of an unmasked carrier you have a 1% chance of inhaling it every hour

* If a contaminated particle is inhaled you have a 50% chance of catching the virus

This obviously ignores things like proximity, immune strength, real world transmissability, etc. The number are chosen entirely for the ease of maths.

Using these assumptions, if you spend 10 unmasked hours with a contagious coworker then your likelihood of inhaling a particle in 10 hours is something like

1 - (0.99 ^^ 10) = ~0.096

Or 9.6%, if you do inhale a particle you catch the disease 50% of the time, so you have a 5% of contracting the virus in ten unmasked hours.

If you are both masked all the time, then the likelihood of exhalation drops 50% and your inhalation drops 50%, so your likelihood of inhalation drops from 1% to 0.25%, the above math becomes

1 - (0.9975 ^^ 10) = ~0.025

Or 2.5%, the above maths again gives you 1.5% likelihood contraction.

If we go for 9 hours mask on, and 1 hour mask off you get

1 - (0.9975 ^^ 9 * 0.99) = ~0.032

Or 3.2%.

Now it's important to note that I'm pulling these percentages out of the air. I would guess that masks are more effective, likelihood of inhaling a contaminated particle in the vicinity of a carrier is higher, but your likelihood of catching it when you do inhale is lower (this is also the number impacted by vaccination).

The important thing is that the only thing we can control directly is mask wearing, so all other figures can change and the end result is always that masking lowers risk. If you must remove your mask (e.g. for eating) the less time you are unmasked the better.

This applies all the time, for any airborne disease, not just covid.
> as gimballed antenna can only rotate so far

That's a fixable design problem. Or you can rotate the telescope.

> stray light reflected from Earth would limit its field of view

What? The earth and the moon are nearby anyway. What about that reflected light? And heck, what about the sun limiting its field of view?
> For example, the recent fires in the Denver / Boulder. Have you been there? It's effectively a desert. Dry, very dry.

Not normally, so much, but yes, when the entire state ranges between “abnormally dry” and “extreme drought” [0], it probably seems desert-like.

But...how are those unusual and extreme conditions an argument against the events being a product of anthropogenic climate change?

[0] https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/CurrentMap/StateDroughtMonito...
From this article, it doesn't sound like Hari's books are anything unusual: most topical, with-the-times popular non-fiction is poorly sourced and relies on assertions instead of scholarly or scientific studies — and that's fine! It's okay to have an idea, think about it hard, and write about it, even if you can't prove that your thesis reflects reality. It's better and more worthy of respect if you can, of course, but what Hari's doing right now isn't wrongdoing; it's just expressing opinions that many people find interesting and insightful.

There's certainly nothing to justify the title of this article, at any rate.
:) Love this.
> * They mention their study hall as a "super spreader event". This feels...hysterical to me. Not just because it worries me that this kid is thinking about this in the way they are, but also because it's wrong. The risk this person faces is much more likely from the HVAC system in the school, not the study hall.

The kids were packed into an overcrowded auditorium so much that they completely ran out of seats and had cram even more people into the auditorium than it had seating. They did this for 3 hours, far longer than it takes to acquire COVID from someone sitting next to you. Kids were literally testing positive inside of the auditorium during this time.

> * The way they talk about the other kid asking questions "with their mask down". To be obsessed with this sort of minutiae as a kid is scary to me.

That kid with the mask down had literally just tested positive for COVID. That's not "minutiae". It's baffling that you think the problem in this scenario is that he's concerned about a COVID-positive person in close quarters having a mask down, as opposed to the fact that a COVID-positive person has their mask down. You must be harboring some major biases.

> * Kids thinking about test...and apparently being given something like 5 tests in a single day? This seems wasteful and hysterical on behalf of the school.

Did you miss the part where so many of the faculty and staff were out sick that they were struggling to coordinate everything? I agree it's uncoordinated and wasteful, but the point is that they're being forced to try to run a school when a huge number of the faculty are too sick to do so.
It's not quite the same thing, but as an analogy: should we have built two LHCs to "find" the Higgs boson faster?

Depends. Is experimental time at the LHC anywhere near as competitively-rationed as it is for a space telescope like Hubble or Webb?
> the transition was fully imperceptible

A normal user will never really link the features they see or do not see back to the init system. I'll draw a parallel with the worst subsystem being cut out of modern Linux - X Windows.

As far as I can tell Linux is missing good macro systems that can record actions taken by a user, then replay them. For loops for non programmers, basically. This isn't because the idea is radical, but because implementing the vision historically needed a programmer to understand X - which is too hard. There is a hidden link between the subsystem being awful and programs not existing.

Similarly, the monoculture created by systemd is influencing how the future of Linux evolves by making some things easier and others harder. End users won't be able to detect those influences though, and unlike X's problems systemd is likely a net positive. Systemd easily improves on the old init scripts.
@tlhunter Are you a pirate who likes a good treasure hunt? Nice!
> With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract: all observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody.

I find it too verbose. How about this alternative: "Every undocumented behavior of a system eventually becomes a contract."
We're talking about "see the faintest light from stars millions of lightyears away"-dark (for that reason you also can't shine a light on it), with our sun in the background. To see something on that side, you'd basically need the vision capabilities the telescope itself has and that's obviously not going to happen.
That guidance is pre-omicron. Someone talking in your face seems like extremely high risk these days.
Replace ‘extreme weather’ with ‘lung cancer’ and ‘climate change’ with ‘smoking’ to see the soundness of this reasoning.
Planetary orbits. Stability is important there. But 3 and greater body problem in Newtonian mechanics is inherently chaotic. Add in spin-orbit coupling, relativity and other effects, and its a real mess, with no exact closed form solutions.

That said, we can predict, with some level of accuracy the stability of of orbits in a number of cases. Approximate solutions can be managed with various levels of theory, perturbations, and numerical simulation.
Plenty of us who appreciate Linux and Unix are very, very worried about Wayland, which breaks a lot of things we have relied on and used for literal decades, and also seems to have some dubious lacunæ and misfeatures.

I am actually optimistic that in another dozen years or so Wayland might be pretty nice, but I certainly wouldn't consider it an examplar today.
Students shoudn't be tested for COVID. It should be allowed to spread until localized herd immunity is established.

Most of the public over-estimates the risk of COVID, by 10 to 100 times:

https://kekstcnc.com/media/2793/kekstcnc_research_covid-19_o...

These over-reactions, and anxiety, along with all of the testing that is caused by, and contributed to
the social obsession about it, does more damage to students than the COVID-19 virus.
You might want to consider mapping an index to an ets table-based data structure instead of an immutable object managed by a GenServer, it will give you a way to share it between processes without having to awkwardly copy a potentially huge data structure all over the place.
> It has zero provenance

Sorry, it absolutely has provenance. It's better provenance than any traditional art asset has by far.

> Ah yes, that's why art isn't counterfeited en masse because community something something. Oh wait...

Ok, go make a counterfeit CryptoPunk. Go make a counterfeit BAYC. Then try and sell it. Should take you 5 seconds to right click and generate a new NFT with the same image...
From the article, near the very top:

"A joint effort with the European Space Agency (ESA) and Canadian Space Agency, the Webb mission will explore every phase of cosmic history – from within our solar system to the most distant observable galaxies in the early universe."
Two examples of skills you can quickly obtain are speed-reading and fast silent running. And actually speed-reading is most similar to The Matrix knowledge download. The mind is pretty impressive at character recognition, we just don't use the whole potential. Also muscular programming allows defining the angle, speed, and strength/flexibilty sequence of each feet to run silently at full speed.
If you're willing to waste a stupid amount of plastic you can 3D print a stamp and stamp your letter. You could do multi-color printing if you used a paintbrush instead of a roller to apply the ink.
Google Cloud: US-WEST1 Networking Issues
home/community school. public schools are a death trap
I would have opted for "Fitter, happier, more productive"
> It's probably whatever was popular when you started using technology to stay in touch with your friend group.

Not really. My family and other Spanish circles largely use WhatsApp. That absolutely did not exist when things got started; heck, I remember when my dad got his first cellphone, which definitely couldn't do anything but SMS. Discord is also much more recent and a big subset of my generation has had no trouble embracing it; it is probably the messaging app I use most these days, by message volume. Way back we'd have been using stuff like MSN Messenger. And since moving to Japan I've seen things shift from Skype to LINE and now slowly to Discord.

Voice calls are still popular in my family, but they have no trouble embracing different apps and ecosystems for it; I recently got my immediate family to switch to Telegram from Hangouts for talking among us, since Google botched their messaging ecosystem again (I refuse to use WhatsApp because it's by Meta but that's a me thing; either way Telegram is also an increasingly popular alternative overall).

Americans being stuck with SMS when superior alternatives have existed for ages is something unique. Then again, so much of communications infrastructure/culture in America is bizarre (Paying for incoming phone calls on cellphones? What? That one shocked me when I spent 3 years studying in the US.)
“Dreck” is a German word.
> - Masking is highly effective and just a bit inconvenient.
- Lockdowns are extremely effective just very expensive.
- Vaccines are very effective even against transmission.

None of those appear to be true for Omicron, and we’re only sorta/kinda true for Delta. Vaccinated people are getting and spreading it at rates that are really quite shocking, and even pro-mask drs and scientists are admitting that cloth masks don’t seem to do much now…
Thank you for the suggestions. I also have same direction for the library. I don't mind if you recommend volunteers.

And don't forget to share the project with friends and colleagues who might be interested in contributing.
> I don't know why compression isn't built in to consumer media devices

As always, it depends on the device. Dynamic range compression seems to be a relatively common feature, usually as an option described (inaccurately) with something like "Reduce Loud Sounds" like it is on the Apple TV.
A rapidly growing opinion on HN that's approaching majority status is that tech titans should be able to tightly control what information people see in order to control their votes because otherwise they will vote incorrectly. This might not be your view, but it is incredibly common here and in the tech sector. Guess it's still technically a democracy if everyone votes after having their information highly curated by the tech industry but it certainly isn't one spiritually.
wow didn't know this, so why do 50,000 Americans die from lack of health care in America each year?
Simply because technology was slow back then, if the technology existed for faster than horseback/carrier pigeon communication and costs were not prohibitive would the world of teaching/knowledge acquisition have evolved a different form of society?
It obviously needs a selfie mirror.
It's not a lab leak. Seriously shut up with this conspiracy nonsense.
> It's an inability to deal with risk out of all proportion to the reality it actually poses.

Are we reading the same post?

The kids are going to school. The faculty is so sick that they don't have enough people to run the school.

> And children his age are not at a great risk to begin with.

Honestly, do people think children just exist in isolation? They have older parents at home. They have older teachers in the classroom. Many of them see even older grandparents and relatives frequently, perhaps also at home.

Where do kids go if they get sick? Home, where they are cared for by older parents.

Kids don't just live in isolated bubbles with other kids. It's dishonest to ignore the second-order effects of kids getting sick.
The wetter weather enjoyed by the past few generations of Californians was an aberration. California is usually even dryer than it is presently.

> Paleoclimatological studies indicate that the last 150 years of California's history have been unusually wet compared to the previous 2000 years. Tree stumps found at the bottom of lakes and rivers in California indicate that many water features dried up during historical dry periods, allowing trees to grow there while the water was absent. These dry periods were associated with warm periods in Earth's history. During the Medieval Warm Period, there were at least two century-long megadroughts with only 60-70% of modern precipitation levels. Paleoclimatologists believe that higher temperatures due to global warming may cause California to enter another dry period, with significantly lower precipitation and snowpack levels than observed over the last 150 years.[7]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_in_California#P...
one thing to note is that, generally, any comparatively calmer system with fewer extreme events is in a lower energy state. and that is exactly what we are moving away from.
"Vaccine effectiveness against symptomatic diseases". I got the data from the UK's "Technical briefing: Update on
hospitalisation and vaccine effectiveness
for Omicron VOC-21NOV-01 (B.1.1.529)
31 December 2021" https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/investigation-of-...
It's strange but we're still pretty bad at using more than a single computer core on average.
This review seemed rather vitriolic and contributes - in mood at least - to the angry and graceless culture of unforgiveness that seems to dominate some online discourse.

I don't know how fair it is on his current work and I was never a fan of Hari's own pre-reveal sanctimoniousness and obviously some would claim there is an ironic justice in this sort of thing

Personally though I find it all really unpleasant and would prefer a critique that assumed a good faith attempt by Hari to undertake his life's second chapter with more integrity.
i'n not sure what you're watching, but it's probably at least partly because you're not supposed to be looking there - VFX cost money, and if they can blur or darken a bunch of the frame that makes it cheaper.
Yea, I can agree to Midnight Mass. Best quality was the plot of “X discovered by Y who thought it was Z”. But now that I think about it, the cinematography was pretty good. I know some people were put off by the long monologues, so it wasn’t without some odd choices.
> and hardly ever works.

Technically, there are two desirable outcomes to a PIP:

1) the employee improves and no longer needs to be on a PIP (rare)

2) the company successfully fires the employee and doesn't get sued because they covered their ass with a PIP

From HR's perspective (and the manager's), it is indeed the reluctant last resort, but it's essentially a win/win for the company. Either the employee improves, or they can fire them while minimizing legal risk.

In other words, it fulfills its intent quite nicely. It just doesn't always end positively for the employee. So I guess in that sense, it depends on which way you look at it.
Can you explain what you mean by "the free internet we enjoyed" in regards of anonymous payments and encrypted messaging? Because I can't remember any of those in the "good old days".
Climate is a ~30yr moving average of weather. Climate models cannot attempt to model weather events. Such events can rarely be predicted more than a week or two out.
The above should tell you that using a climate model to predict anything about weather events is a pointless exercise. Particularly trying to derive the statistics of weather events. The stats are built in to the models!
To be fair, for someone who is not well-versed in either optics or space physics, calculating the answer is not that straight-forward.
It bothers me that the A/B in these models is between "pre-industrial" and now, seems like a better comparison over the timescales people are expecting to match up with their "perceived experiences of increased climate disasters" should be "20 years ago vs now" e.g.
This is verifiably false.

We can look at the predictions (inference) from older models and check how accurate they were at predicting the future. No back testing required. Those models have been very accurate. Current models have only improved and reduced error.

We can test the accuracy, you have to be honest about it.

https://www.science.org/content/article/even-50-year-old-cli...
COVID is an asymptomatic spreader - it's difficult to conclude that the school kids didn't end up spreading the disease to older individuals.
Actually yes people do die from pneumonia & staph.
We could at least manage things so hospitals are not overwhelmed. Lots of people are dieing simply because they are swamped.

Also, there are several promising therapies that should help this population. Even a few months for them to ramp up availability will help a lot.
Calculation of the future locations of astronomical bodies?

The difference is, Astronomical models can be simplified significantly, whereas climate models must be high fidelity to produce accurate results.

To me the critical question is at what fidelity are the models useful for our (humanities) purposes?

If our purpose is to predict climate and its impact we will need at least +/- 0.1C at a resolution of 100km at a timestep of 1 month. It must be possible to do mesh refinements to determine how accuracy changes with changing resolution, and then combine that with the prior resolution conditions to choose an appropriate mesh.

As far as I know most modern climate models are accurate to within a degree for at least a 30 year range. I haven't looked at the mesh sizes for a while but I'm sure someone has done something similar.
At this point vaccinated people are getting it at rates that are just silly. I know a ton of people with COVID right now, and the vast majority are vaxed.
I have a few questions about extending a tethered "selfie bot"

If you have a tethered camera which uses the tether as its power source which is out in front of the scope, wouldn't it be able to "stare" back at the Business Side of the mullet and stream the Party back to earth?

Or does a teathered bot risk messing with the orbit of the scope?

How much actual pull strength is requireed per kilo to re-orient something in space, meaning: How easily could say an astronaught pull on a cable and change the orientation of an object of much larger mass?

What if there were a gyro-ratchet:

Gyros that spin, and are tethered to a thing. There are multiple of them and they "yank" a small amount by spinning their gyro/flywheel a bit to initiate a pull... but there are many of these extending off tethers to orient something...

What if the tethers are like a flat ribbon cable of super thin solar collecting "flat noodles" - they provide power to the orienting gyros...

but how do you untangle things in space if stuff goeas awry...

---

Maybe the craft only deploys gyros, via tethers, when it needs alignment - re-pointing... and reels the gyro back in when done...

or reels them back out when the tether should use solar to trickle re-charge the gyro battery.
I think you're missing my point. It's not about avoiding COVID right now. It's about the fact too many teachers have it simultaneously and do not feel well enough to teach.
> When a virus is endemic, it means everyone will get it. Which means most of these precautions are ultimately worthless -

This couldn't be more wrong.

Even if everyone eventually gets it, you'd much rather get it as late as possible and outside of an infection spike like this one where rescue medications are depleted and hospitals are overburdened.

The medical knowledge and treatment options available today are far, far better than what we had at the beginning of the pandemic. And they continue to improve. Availability of the best treatments is also scarce, but continues to improve. The virus itself also appears to be slowly mutating to less fatal versions.

Even if you think it's inevitable, you want to delay it as long as possible.
Climate is not chaotic, weather is chaotic. Without any models at all we can predict that the Sahara desert will be hot and dry many many years out.
If you are using rails, pghero is a great gem to get better visibility on your Postgres performance

https://github.com/ankane/pghero
Great info: citation? More details?
The biggest Postgres related lesson I learnt recently is the importance of running ANALYZE and having up to date table statistics. In our case it was the difference between queries taking several seconds to run and taking <100ms.

We get much higher traffic during the daytime, so we now have a cronjob that runs VACUUM ANALYZE each night.

We also have some small metadata tables that are very update heavy as we sync these from another data store, replacing all rows each time. We now run VACUUM FULL on these after each sync (this locks the table but is fast (20-40ms) on such small tables) to avoid bloating them over time.
I think there's a gap in the assumption of good-faith somewhere in this chain.
Who are these people and why should I give a damn about what they have to say?
A couple of interesting links I've found so far on the technology of the telescope.

https://www.jwst.nasa.gov/content/observatory/ote/mirrors/in...

https://www.stsci.edu/~idash/pub/dashevsky0607rcsgso.pdf

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20080030196/downloads/20...
Absolutely. No disagreement here.