skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The disproportionate spike in reports in the VAERS database would suggest that we might want to have a more rational discussion about risk than continuing to take assurances from folks who CONTINUE to have blanket immunity from any side effects. That used to be called a sever conflict of interest instead of settled science.

I dunno - I got COVID and while it wasn't pleasant, it wasn't any worse than the worst flu I have had in the past. There is growing evidence that there are multiple side effects from these vaccines, including heart problems for males - particularly 18 and under or over 50. I'm in the latter so I have zero desire to roll the dice with the vaccines, especially as I've already had and recovered and now have as good if not better immunity than what is provided by the vaccine.

When you consider the ridiculous political and social pressure put on ANYONE who dares to question the vaccines, I'm frankly amazed the numbers in VAERS are as high as they are. If anything I would expect them to be underreported. Why not - the CDC director recently admitted that at least 40% of COVID hospitalizations were not because of COVID, but from people who went to the hospital for something else and happened to also test positive for COVID - despite being pitched as "COVID Infections" requiring emergency responses.

If that can be over reported for almost 2 years before we finally start to get clarification of what many suspected (or saw with their own eyes) why can't VAERS be underreported?

That's the real problem - at this point we still don't know, because very few are asking any questions. And those that do get quickly pounced on as being crackpot trash conspiracy theorists.

I'm amazed that so many people still seem to be puzzled that not everyone is unquestioning about if there are risks with the vaccines or not. Especially when there is still a blind push/rush to get everyone vaccinated, whether it is needed or not, whether it's medically advisable or not (quite a few people have pre-existing medical conditions where the vaccines are far more of a risk than mitigating COVID other ways). If such people aren't willing to have an inarguably rational discussion about real risk, then why should they expect to be taken seriously? Much of the uncertainty around the vaccines are self-inflicted wounds - and instead of altering their approach the usual suspects double down and just shout louder/more shrilly.

If they are so safe as to be unquestionable then why are they STILL operating under emergency use? Over a year later is it really still an an emergency? Isn't it beyond ridiculous to have an emergency for this amount of time - especially when the vast majority of the population has either been vaccinated or had COVID already at this point? Yes, infections are up with the latest variants - how could you miss it with the constant flogging of the infection numbers by the media and some politicians. But notice what has disappeared? The death counters that were oh so prominent, especially before a certain election. More than a little curious, eh?
Consider reading https://ai.facebook.com/blog/ai-rsc
Gotcha, not discounting your experiences either. Every desktop engineer I've met (10's or 100's of thousands of workstations) were well aware of this long-standing, dark pattern (esp. after a med-large upgrades), and gnashed their teeth whenever it was discussed because of the extra work/complications it caused. Hopefully those bad times aren't coming back. I'm not hopeful though. For example, Microsoft's tactics preventing Firefox from changing the default browser reminds me a lot of the nasty, underhanded Microsoft from way back in the day.

https://www.ghacks.net/2021/12/21/a-recent-windows-update-pr...
I (author) have a kid, a dog, an apartment and a summer house I inherited. I definitely speak from experience here and am not specifically against anything in particular, except rushing into decisions.

Houses have sizes, locations and whole spectrum of varieties that can be taken into account!
Short term damage as in death vs unknown long term impacts on people life expectancy and health. That last part is unknown but might be an issue that has cardiologists worried.

There is a reason vaccines take a long time to develop. Let’s not pretend that this straight to market approach does not come at a potential bigger negative down the road.

I would like to have a long term phase 4 follow up. And yes I got two doses of Pfizer and I had COVID as well.
Bikeshedding at it's finest!
Going through this gish gallop point by point:

mRNA technology has been in development since the 80s because there were and are a lot of challenges with deploying it on a wide scale. This Nature article [1] goes into it, but a lot of the foundational elements of the vaccines were only developed in the last several years.

The need for immunity for the makers is because these vaccines were developed very quickly and administered through EUAs, since the low chance of long term side effects was deemed less harmful than the time constraints that would have been required for normal approval. This need was codified into law back in 2005's PREP act, invoked by the Trump administration in February of 2020, and the legal immunity only lasts until 2024 [2]. If everyone who got an mRNA shot develops myocarditis in 15 years, Moderna et al won't be immunized from those lawsuits.

Pfizer/BioNTech is currently the only fully approved vaccine, but they aren't going to pull EUAs for other vaccines when supply constraints are still an issue. Pfizer is widely available, but it isn't universally available and keeping other options (themselves going through the process for full approval) available is not unreasonable.

Moderna was founded with the idea of commercializing mRNA technology. This is the first significant commercial use of mRNA technology. It doesn't really seem like a big mystery to me.

[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02483-w
[2]: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/16/covid-vaccine-side-effects-c...
It is the same in Quebec. It's not because they don't want to recognize infections, it's just that they don't have the capacity to do so, which is perfectly understandable, while not recognizing infection as a vaccine does isn't.
That's just extra data points that you give away for no good reason. Realistically it will not amount to anything (like, I'm sure, absolute majority of data collected even by sleaziest adtech). But worst case scenario? You data gets sold to a medical insurer, deanonymised, fed into ML models, then used to justify increasing premiums based on inferred health info.
This piqued my interest, but a few quick searches (using a search engine--the Oracle Cloud site search only turned up press releases...), indicate that quotas just prevent you from spinning up new instances. That's helpful, but I was hoping for some sort of way to cap my bill (for hobby projects), even if that requries deleting resources.

Oracle Cloud has an enticing free tier, but I'm too afraid to use it because it requires a credit card and I don't see any way to put a monthly cap on my budget. (I'm sure hobby projects with ~$5 - 10/month budgets isn't their target market, but I can dream :)

Edit to add the page I was reading: https://docs.oracle.com/en/cloud/get-started/subscriptions-c...
> What is the difference between “a supercomputer” and “a bunch of racks of computers”?

In addition to the other responses, I like pointing people to this talk[1] by Jeff Hammond for a comprehensive answer to this question (you can skip to the 11:15 timestamp).

[1] https://uchicago.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Embed.aspx...
+1

Way before COVID, I got vertigo for a weekend, caused by a cold. Apparently viruses can cause the fluid in the ear to change in viscosity.

For me that induced vertigo (really bad "spins" for two days), for you it could be less severe but longer lasting. As I understood it, it can be caused by any virus (unclear about COVID's relationship with it) and will likely go away.

While it was happening, I drank extra water and any time the spins got out of control, I'd sit down and take some deep breaths. It's easy to cope when it is just for a weekend. Best of luck to you.

P.S. Always best to check with a real doctor.
This is another case for only pushing encrypted files to storage hosts, unless it's against Google Drive's TOS or something. Has anyone tried it? Did Google complain?
> Crimea was a referendum

Ok stop. This isn’t intellectually honest argumentation.
AWS ML-Explain: A Visual Introduction to Double Descent
For people who are looking for complex tasks and notes, I recommend org-mode + Orgzly app. The great thing is that you can create short tasks in the app, and you can expand it with more details on your computer later where it is synced. I use it for a wide range of different tasks.
From the article:

"... an hour’s drive north from Shipton is a suburb of Rugby called Hillmorton, where at the time [the 1970s] the British government operated a very-low-frequency (VLF) radio station to send messages to submarines. It seems the powerful emanations from this nearby station, broadcast at a radio frequency of just 16 kilohertz (within the audio range), were picked up by the electronic equipment at [Richard] Branson’s studio [in Shipton] and recorded at a level too low for anyone to notice. After learning of this, I purchased an old CD of Tubular Bells, ripped a WAV file of one track, and piped it into a software-defined-radio package. Tuning to 16 kHz and setting the SDR software to demodulate continuous-wave signals immediately revealed Morse code. I couldn’t copy much of it, but I could make out many repetitions of VVV ('testing') and GBR (the station’s call sign)."
There are lots of things that I have the ability to do that I've never had the requirement to do. I call those things "bloat" because they are unnecessary features that add complexity and bugs to the system.
If you're at a university, drop this article into the queue at your grad school journal club. Give folks a week to prepare counterarguments. Attend, and see what you think.

prediction: this "article" contains 18 invalidating points in the first three paragraphs.
Those models are surprisingly tractable. You're nowhere near as interesting and unique as you might think you are at scale.

Evidence: actual work experience at building latent representations to characterize customer behavior at FAANG. It's hard to come up with something that really gets you, but it's not hard to come up with something likely to make you spend more. You're surprisingly predictable on that axis and even if you aren't because you put the hours into being a crazy outlier, almost everyone else is, and you don't matter.
I guess "AI in the metaverse" sounds a lot better than "machine learning in Meta Inc's new VR platform".
Pretty much every Founder thought that slavery was a huge political shit-sandwich that made Federalization difficult, and they all hoped that the Federal system would sow the seeds for its eventual abolition.

The infamous Cornerstone Speech was an interesting view into the Founders' perspective. It was the speech given by the Vice President of the unrecognized Confederate States of America, describing the Confederate view of the Founders' philosophy: https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/1861stephens.asp

> ...the new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institutions-African slavery as it exists among us-the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson, in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which the old Union would split." He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution were, that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with; but the general opinion of the men of that day was, that, somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the Constitution, was the prevailing idea at the time. The Constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly used against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the idea of a Government built upon it-when the "storm came and the wind blew, it fell."
I don’t see how not wanting my friends and family to die in someone else’s far-away ethnic conflict makes me an “arrogant fool.” Were you also a fan of the democracy squad’s 2003 Iraq invasion? South Vietnam couldn’t “afford anything” either, and Ukraine’s democracy is at least as corrupt:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_Ukraine
Had one of these with my original NeXT Cube that I bought new while in grad school.

Still one of my favorite keyboards ever. And the Cube itself was so far ahead of everything else out there at the time that it felt like pure magic.
Updated!
Thank you - English is my second language and that sort of thing still catches me off-guard
Vaccine manufacturers have saved millions of lives. I support them not getting financially ruined for one-in-a-million adverse effects.
It matters because if it is just a currency then you shouldn’t be taxed on its appreciation. Right now if you say sold $100 in product and now have $100 worth of bitcoin, but then the price of bitcoin doubles and you have $200 in USD of bitcoin, then you have to pay taxes on the $100 appreciation if it is a security. The way it gets taxed will make it a currency or not.
A materialist take on this is also that advances in technology made slavery a useless institution towards maximizing the interests of capitalists and that permitted its withering away.

Slavery was a market for people in themselves, but the proletariat is a market for their labor power. Labor power is superfluous in form. This change in institutions brought about by the possibilities of technological advancements kept the rates of profit up and made slavery null in advanced countries. Similar to serfdom.
> Proposing something else that disabled people can do (I guess that's who 'them' is?)

I would guess that 'them' refers to nondisabled users, who are the only group mentioned in the headline.
> Actions reduce workflow steps by providing reusabe[sic] “code” for common tasks. To run an action, you include the uses keyword pointing to a GitHub repo with the pattern {owner}/{repo}@{ref} or {owner}/{repo}/{path}@{ref} if it’s in a subdirectory. A ref can be a branch, tag, or SHA.

Aside from the typo, I wonder how many packages could be backdoored at once, if an action maintainer went rogue, seeing as there's no pinning for actions by default, and (according to https://github.com/msys2/setup-msys2/blob/main/HACKING.md) moving a tag is the default way to push updates to an action. (Interestingly get-cmake/run-cmake/run-vcpkg are all operated by the same person.)
Highlights from Git 2.35
Yeah, the site seems to be some sort of SPA that uses pushState() to change the url. However, the server was poorly configured so if you refresh, you get a 404 (presumably because the SPA is only served at the root).
I grew up in Germany, where, for reasons I don't really know or understand right now, paying rent has been common and normal across a large part of the population since long before I was born. Buying an apartment or even house to live in almost seemed to be more like a "luxury" for rich people to me.

I moved to the US a decade ago, and (I knew this before) the mindset seems to be that renting is only a temporary situation, until you finally settle down buying "your" house to raise your family in. People talk about their "first house" or "starter home", terms that aren't really common in Germany at all. Buying property isn't totally uncommon there, but often happens much later in life, and many people are happy never doing so at all.

I always felt that differing mindset has been doing me a service, as I feel zero compulsion to buy property until the conditions are really fully satisfactory. I am aware that any rent I pay is "gone", while the mortgage ultimately pays into a principal, but so far the overall equation taking everything into account (also including those aspects without a directly gaugeable monetary value that the article mentions) did not tip over towards owning yet.
I feel that the best blockchains are those that do not allow for any publicly visible data, just random curve points and cryptographic signatures.
>but they sure like cash, and they get a lot more cash from developing a safe vaccine than an unsafe one.

If everybody is mandated to take one and they're immune to liability, they can make it as dangerous as they want as long as it's less dangerous than the other vaccines.
This article says more like VEI6

https://graphics.reuters.com/TONGA-VOLCANO/lgpdwjyqbvo/
phd in algae/oil production. So they'd have plenty of base knowledge about biology, but hard to say that they learned anything about human medical biology.
Ah, discriminates against the unvaccinated sort of like how they discriminate against smokers right now?...ya, I'm cool with that.
> Surprised that this journalist ended the article on such a weak note. Makes me wonder what other partisan spin was hid throughout.

Much like this comment :)
Tell HN: HN clicked links are a not great experience
I routinely want to revisit clicked links on hacker news. The gray color of clicked links is too close to the color of the details and causes me to always (without fail) scroll past the link of interest. To me, it is by far the most frustrating thing about the website.
Curious where the estimate of 10^100 stars came from. I've seen the estimate of 10^80 particles in the observable universe thrown around several times. No idea how either is calculated or what assumptions are made.
A benign explaination would be that the feedback feature is really designed as a relief valve for the most frustrated users to feel better. Moderately frustrated users will find it takes too many clicks to provide feedback and just scroll to the next item.
I understand the first complaint but not the second

> The second flaw is that NixOS does not actually provide real isolation.

I thought this would going to be about security, but then it was about having to repackage the world. But Nixpkgs is current the biggest and most up to date package repository in the world (we finally beat AUR). Packaging enough stuff is emphatically not the problem.

What I want to see is development be easier with Nix, because winning over the hearts and minds of upstream developers is the final frontier. To that end I wrote https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/92 and https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/109.

As a side benefit, autogenerating more Nix means less handwritten Nix! I do think people give the language itself to much grief when the problem is more the library side with the copious override shenanagins and other stuff.
Precisely the opposite! Author is annoyed listening to friends complaining about mistakes that would have been easily avoided if they took time to think.
The Wikipedia page[1] for the event says a temporary drop of 0.1-0.5 degrees C for the next 12-15 months.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Hunga_Tonga_eruption_and_...
We're not all doomed, just the NPC's who embrace it.
C&D Grand Prix: If company on shirt is first to serve Cease and Desist, you win
It has nothing to do specifically with Firefox, but is all about the incentives. If someone puts a non-trivial amount of effort into developing a product, they could be motivated by:

1. Trying to make money off selling it to end users.

2. Trying to make money by selling the end users' attention to advertisers.

3. Vanity, if it's a side/hobby project.

4. Influence the audience (pushing things aligned with their values into the audience's attention span).

5. Being a loss leader of a sort. E.g., trying to grab a market share in expectations to make money later, or sell growth figures to investors.

So, specifically to web browsers:

* Chrome, the de-facto standard, is clearly sustained by option #2.

* Because Chrome is free-to-use, option #1 is not viable for any competition.

* Because web browsers are complex and require a lot of upkeep, #3 is also mostly out of the picture.

So, if Mozilla wants to stay alive, they have no other choice than to treat their end users as the merchandise. And, to differentiate themselves from Google, they will keep making bullshit claims that will have nothing to do with reality. Even worse, as long as the current approach to antitrust doesn't change, there won't be any long-term alternatives to this model.

All of this could be swiftly solved by deeming indirectly subsidized "free" products anti-competitive (e.g. cash flow coming from outside the direct users), and not allowing mergers above something like a 20% market share, but I can't see this happen anytime soon.
Globally event appears unlikely to have a significant cooling effect on temperatures globally, h

>"However, to date, it injected 'only' 0.4 Tg (400,000 tonnes) of sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere, which is not enough to result in significant surface cooling for this individual eruption. "Unless further eruptive activity occurs, we should not detect significant surface cooling. At present, hazards related to ash fallout are really the number one concern."

https://news.abs-cbn.com/spotlight/01/19/22/explainer-tonga-...

Local environmental harm:
https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/tongas-volcanic...
I don't see where you get your statistics. I would be elated if a tenant improved my house on his or her dime. With multi-unit rentals you just need to do what the commercial leases do: ensure that you also pay for returning the property to the original state (by posting a bond, for example) as nobody wants a multi-unit rental with different units in it.

In NYC or LA you can definitely find rentals which will do a remodel for your specs before you move in. Those are not, of course, $3K/m bare bones 2brs in multiplexes the 99% "professional renters" are looking for.
> But you're just assuming it is

Of course we are. We didn't consent to being experimented upon or to have our behavior analyzed, so we have no basis for trust.

> Set clear boundaries of what is and isn't acceptable

Acceptable depends on trust. Ask for permission, not forgiveness, and I am more inclined to trust. Without that, I assume the worst.
That's not as silly as it sounds I think.

You could improve the air quality to be better than if your car existed, if you weren't generating carbon pollution and were say removing pollutants from the air as you drive. In reality this would be really hard, but if you had solar powered car and removed nox or something. But then you get into the infinite tail of the energy and pollution used to make your car.