ausername42027

There is robust data that the risk of first-hand smoke is not a linear relationship between cancer (and other bad stuff) and dose--no amount of smoking is safe.

To be frank you are uninformed on basic statistics as well as medicine.

You are doing the standard thing that many educated people do when they think they are smarter and more informed than they are. You dress up a bad take as if you found some secret (CDC's hypocritical language) and assume that a mathematical relationship exists ("obviously exposure to bad stuff carries linear risk"), when it is actually more complex than that (if we can call a binary relationship more complex than linear lol).

who is unwilling to pay to get said state ID

Voting ID's are free in all states they are required.

or does not have the means to get to an office.

This could be said for anything...it is funny that the liberal American solution to lack of access to ID offices is to get rid of ID's...not, you know, improve access to said offices (subsidized Ubers that link into an ID appointment, maybe only available every year/whenever you need to renew).

I never mentioned mutation rate so your gotcha is not as crafty as you might think. Also a mutation in the sense you seem to be implying (random base pair changes due to lack of proof reading) is not really what I am talking about. I am talking about HIV-1 genome being incorporated into SARS-CoV-2 by the host cell or either virus during replication. That is not that crazy when you have quadrillion of replication cycles and a selective pressure to mutate and incorporate new RNA.

Because they clearly are not qualified in the field based on the quality of the analysis, yet claim as if they have to hide even as a "PhD". Their blog post reads like someone who works on the backend for BLAST but knows nothing about genomes or proteins.

How are you calculating those odds? And then once you have calculated them, what are you using to determine your threshold for "low" odds? The odds that a bunch of atoms ended up turning into you and me and the rest of humanity are extremely low or extremely high depending on what your criteria for "low" odds are.

Given the number of bats in the world, the number of human hosts, and probably most importantly, the number of individual virions within each infected host (and therefore the number of replication cycles) is...astronomically high. There are somewhere between 1 and 100 BILLION virions of COVID in each infected person. Now imagine a few thousand bats infected...we are already talking about maybe 1 QUADRILLION different virions (1,000 trillion). It only takes one virion to incorporate some very handy and fitness-increasing HIV-1 RNA into its genome and it is off to the races.

This is a semi-interesting piece (because of how poorly written it is and how hilariously confident the writer is), but it is embarrassing that the person writing claims to have a PhD in at least something semi-related to molecular biology, yet is trying to convince people that we can use independent probability when dealing with protein amino acid sequences. Certain sequences are seen time and time again in nature, just like certain traits visible to the naked eye have evolved independently. More importantly, this author dismisses natural mixing of SARS and HIV1 as "ridiculous" and provides no other explanation. It is possible that SARS-CoV-2 was created in a lab, but it is also possible that HIV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 co-infected a host.

Edit: to elaborate, certain amino acid sequences are seen again and again, and others are practically impossible to see in nature because amino-acids fold into 3D proteins...and each amino acid is like a Lego piece. There is a lot more detail needed to understand fully how tertiary and 4try protein structures form...but it is also possible to understand it decently well after an undergraduate degree in biology, chemistry, biochemistry, etc. A PhD in the field knows this inside and out. If I had to guess, the author of this post has a PhD in something like statistics or computer science, and thinks that they can apply high school level math to two fields (molecular biology and biochemistry) that they do not even have a high school level of understanding of.

To make a very stretched analogy (I am a doctoral student in the life sciences and a hobby programmer), this blog post is like saying that some Java source code is stolen because four of the class names are the same between two projects, and then using the number of possible characters in the class names and the length of the name to run some statistics. The problem being that no one has class names like "AeNOQ92bA"...in fact the vast majority of 8 character sequences will never be class names. Just like the vast majority of amino acid sequences (likely) do not exist in nature. And then you dig deeper and find out the class name is something like "MainDashboardSupervisorTree" (I do not know Java so forgive me). Then you also find out that the author of both classes...is the same guy who moved companies and likes particular naming convection, but never meant to copy stuff word for word. Similar to how SARS-CoV-2 could have naturally incorporated HIV-1 RNA into its genome when co-infecting a host.

exactly. it is really interesting that service even exists. Canceling a privacy.com card does not magically cancel a contract. Privacy.com seems like a great way to trick people into tanking their credit ranking when they think they are getting back at a company for being hard to cancel.

You are majorly in a tech (a.k.a HN) bubble if you think that. People whose jobs have been 100% in person the entire pandemic are not using video chat for work, so that leaves family and friends. Many people just talk on the phone or see people in person.

How do the nurses know where to send the triage without a broad medical education? This has been tried and fails, and when it is fails it is not pretty. Nurses will just refer their patients to 2-3 specialists in a shotgun approach, while at the same time missing "can't miss" diagnoses that never get a referral.

Medicine is not tech support with tier levels :( I would stick to talking about things you know, because medicine is not one of them.

Is it 5 pounds and 2 inches thick? The fact is is that my M1 Macbook Air that was $1400 would cost at least $2000 from HP, Dell or Lenovo to even approach similar performance, and still have a worse screen, worse battery life, AND would still be slower. I have not seen a laptop chip from AMD or Intel in fanless, thin laptop like the Macbook Air that even gets close to the M1.

Sounds like a mess but I don't know how else you would do it without introducing huge security vulnerabilities.

Downplaying is being "only" 2% of currency in circulation is really strange. It is 2% of currency in circulation of the world's largest economy and the de facto international currency. The US accounts for almost 16% of the GLOBAL GDP when adjusted for PPP.

I guess people just love to be contrarians on HN.