HN user
That night my family watched a war movie on the VCR, maybe saving private ryan or something similar, and the helicopter struck me.
If there was a helicopter in the movie, then we can confidently exclude Saving Private Ryan.
As the patient's temperature approached 22 °C (72 °F), low-frequency and low-amplitude sinusoidal electrical deflections were noted on his electrocardiogram.
Dunno about you, but this does things to me.
I think this fits into some "Commoditize The Complement" strategy.
I said build on top of wlroots, not DWL.
Turns out, the wlroots API is so volatile atm that even the developer of the super small compositor DWL has to throw in the towel for now.
DWL is more interesting as a learning exercise than something to use.
The same is said about DWM, its xorg counterpart, but I, for one, am a happy user of DWM.
Current status:
2025-08-16: dwl IS CURRENTLY UN-MAINTAINED. AT THE PRESENT TIME, I (@fauxmight) DO NOT HAVE THE TIME OR CAPACITY TO KEEP UP WITH wlroots CHANGES.
FTA:
[Einstein's General Relativity] tells us that the universe is expanding
Does GR really tell us that though?
The way I understood it, GR's differential equations will produce solutions for many different constraints and initial conditions you throw at them. Including the constraints & conditions informed by astronomical observation.
You're ignoring the elephant in the room: frozen mammoth dung.
To restore the gut health of humans, there is this thing called "fecal transplant" [1]: use another person's poo to bootstrap the growth of your own gut microbiome.
There is an abundance of mammoth dung in the northern permafrost. When thawed, its microbiome becomes active again, producing methane. [2]
So resurrecting the woolly mammoth as a species is the hardest part. Equipping the first individuals with a proper gut biome will be really easy.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fecal_microbiota_transplant
[2] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/melting-permaf...
the assumption that every non-white person hired is a "diversity" hire before even looking at their qualifications is incredibly racist.
That's not an assumption that GP makes.
So this is about epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff being fired by Harvard for doggedly sticking to the evidence regarding covid immunity.
Some excerpts:
With a genetic condition called alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency, which leaves me with a weakened immune system, I had more reason to be personally concerned about Covid than most Harvard professors. I expected that Covid would hit me hard, and that’s precisely what happened in early 2021, when the devoted staff at Manchester Hospital in Connecticut saved my life. But it would have been wrong for me to let my personal vulnerability to infections influence my opinions and recommendations as a public-health scientist, which must focus on everyone’s health.
Since mid-2021, we have known, as one would expect, that Covid-acquired immunity is superior to vaccine-acquired immunity. Based on that, I argued that hospitals should hire, not fire, nurses and other hospital staff with Covid-acquired immunity, since they have stronger immunity than the vaccinated.
For scientific, ethical, public health, and medical reasons, I objected both publicly and privately to the Covid vaccine mandates. I already had superior infection-acquired immunity; and it was risky to vaccinate me without proper efficacy and safety studies on patients with my type of immune deficiency. This stance got me fired by Mass General Brigham—and consequently fired from my Harvard faculty position.
You can find a meta-analysis to prove anything you want.
I'm not trying to prove anything. I just rely on the judgement of domain experts.
In this thread I cited Cochrane, The Lancet, SciAm and Science Magazine. If you have more reputable sources, please share them here.
You'll need to come up with a physical basis for this unintuitive hypothesis if you want to be taken seriously.
It's only unintuitive if you stick to the droplet model. SARS-CoV-2 however spreads like smoke through the air, as I documented already extensively in this post:
You sure? https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/article-abs...
That's just one RCT. The Cochrane meta-analysis looked at a bunch of them.
When the medical field phases out masks because they "have no benefit" I will believe that masking was useless.
You're putting the cart before the horse. In an ideal world, guidelines for the medical field are based on scientific evidence. But there's always a delay.
You better consult the scientific evidence to make up your mind.
When it comes to covid and masking, policymakers will wait as long as possible before aknowledging the evidence, because they know the public hasn't forgotten the draconian masking of school kids yet.
literally quoting from that meta-analysis, which does not include many clinical trials that have demonstrated an impact:
Yes. To their credit, they only looked at randomized controlled trials.
"Key messages We are uncertain whether wearing masks or N95/P2 respirators helps to slow the spread of respiratory viruses based on the studies we assessed."
In other words: the RCTs don't show an effect to a significant degree.
This isn't complicated. You can just look at any COVID thread and see what a shitshow it is.
I hardly see any covid threads here. I happened to see the one of this week. It got 8 comments before being flagged into oblivion.
That's not for lack of COVID expertise, though most of that expertise is probably Homer-melding-backwards-into-the-hedges when they see the thread.
You cannot have it both ways. Either you flag covid threads preemptively [1] along with a bunch of other users [2], or you try to learn from domain experts in these threads.
But making assumptions about what these experts would have thought of these threads, had they not been flagged down prematurely, is a weird leap of reasoning.
It's "self evident" yet a large Cochrane meta-analysis finds no benificial effect of masks whatsoever:
https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...
Here's some serious research, spanning one year. Note how the confidence increases throughout time. You can't blame nvm0n2 for taking for granted what is already well-established since three years.
--> May 2020: "How Coronavirus Spreads through the Air: What We Know So Far"
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-coronavirus-s...
For months, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization have maintained that the novel coronavirus is primarily spread by droplets from someone who is coughing, sneezing or even talking within a few feet away. But anecdotal reports hint that it could be transmissible through particles suspended in the air (so-called "aerosol transmission"). And the WHO recently reversed its guidance to say that such transmission, particularly in “indoor locations where there are crowded and inadequately ventilated spaces where infected persons spend long periods of time with others, cannot be ruled out.”
Even if aerosols do not travel farther than most droplets, the oft-touted “six-foot rule” for social distancing may depend on the circumstances, Cowling says. If there is a fan or air conditioner, infectious aerosols (or even droplets, as was suspected in the case of that restaurant in China) could potentially sicken someone farther away who is downwind.
--> October 2020: "Airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2"
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abf0521
Viruses in droplets (larger than 100 µm) typically fall to the ground in seconds within 2 m of the source and can be sprayed like tiny cannonballs onto nearby individuals. Because of their limited travel range, physical distancing reduces exposure to these droplets. Viruses in aerosols (smaller than 100 µm) can remain suspended in the air for many seconds to hours, like smoke, and be inhaled. They are highly concentrated near an infected person, so they can infect people most easily in close proximity. But aerosols containing infectious virus (2) can also travel more than 2 m and accumulate in poorly ventilated indoor air, leading to superspreading events (3).
Individuals with COVID-19, many of whom have no symptoms, release thousands of virus-laden aerosols and far fewer droplets when breathing and talking (4–6). Thus, one is far more likely to inhale aerosols than be sprayed by a droplet (7), and so the balance of attention must be shifted to protecting against airborne transmission. In addition to existing mandates of mask-wearing, social distancing, and hygiene efforts, we urge public health officials to add clear guidance about the importance of moving activities outdoors, improving indoor air using ventilation and filtration, and improving protection for high-risk workers (8).
--> May, 2021: "Ten scientific reasons in support of airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2"
https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(21)00869-2/full...
First, superspreading events account for substantial SARS-CoV-2 transmission; indeed, such events may be the pandemic's primary drivers. [...]
Second, long-range transmission of SARS-CoV-2 between people in adjacent rooms but never in each other's presence has been documented in quarantine hotels. [...]
Third, asymptomatic or presymptomatic transmission of SARS-CoV-2 from people who are not coughing or sneezing is likely to account for at least a third, and perhaps up to 59%, of all transmission globally and is a key way SARS-CoV-2 has spread around the world [...]
Fourth, transmission of SARS-CoV-2 is higher indoors than outdoors and is substantially reduced by indoor ventilation.5 Both observations support a predominantly airborne route of transmission.
Fifth, nosocomial infections have been documented in health-care organisations, where there have been strict contact-and-droplet precautions and use of personal protective equipment (PPE) designed to protect against droplet but not aerosol exposure.
Sixth, viable SARS-CoV-2 has been detected in the air. In laboratory experiments, SARS-CoV-2 stayed infectious in the air for up to 3 h with a half-life of 1·1 h. [...]
Seventh, SARS-CoV-2 has been identified in air filters and building ducts in hospitals with COVID-19 patients; such locations could be reached only by aerosols.
Eighth, studies involving infected caged animals that were connected to separately caged uninfected animals via an air duct have shown transmission of SARS-CoV-2 that can be adequately explained only by aerosols.
Ninth, no study to our knowledge has provided strong or consistent evidence to refute the hypothesis of airborne SARS-CoV-2 transmission. [...]
Tenth, there is limited evidence to support other dominant routes of transmission—ie, respiratory droplet or fomite. [...]
The six foot rule was based on what the best understanding of the experts was at the time, and probably saved thousands of lives.
You can't just make up the beneficial effects of something as you go. Can you cite some randomized controlled trials that support your claim?
Just like forced masking up probably saved tens of thousands of lives.
One year ago, a huge Cochrane meta-analysis of the available RCTs regarding masking has put that idea to bed: https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...
It seems to me that the quality of any public discussion tends to increase when it’s relevant to the expertise in the room, and decrease when it involves people’s casual reads of complicated stuff about which they have vague but emotionally-charged impressions. HN folks have great, nuanced discussions about a wide range of technical questions, but we’re much less likely to collectively know what we’re talking about in questions of the latest hot-button political mudslinging.
The expertise on HN is indeed unrivaled.
If I want to learn about the quirks of a variational autoencoder in some neural network, I read the discussion between experts here on HN [1].
If I want to learn about protein folding, I can find relevant domain experts answering questions here on HN [2].
But why do you and so many others think that there is a covid-shaped hole in the expertise on HN? Do you really believe that out of all domain experts, the covid ones decided to stay away from here?
I'm not interested in expending extra effort to rescue marginal stories with a low likelihood of generating a good conversation.
I didn't ask you to expend effort in rescuing stories. I took issue with the way you expend effort in burying stories, even before the comment section turns out to go sideways:
I didn't flag (or see) that story, but I would have.
lots of people flag stories based on their experience of what the threads are like
IMHO story submissions should be judged based upon their own merits. Toxic commenters can be downvoted/banned but the story submitter shouldn't be punished for the misbehavior of others.
I didn't flag (or see) that story, but I would have.
You mean purely based on the expected awfulness of imagined future comments, instead of the actual comments? If so, with a precrime mindset like that, you're fanning the flames of controversy.
The top comment complains that the title submitted to HN is both not the original headline, and not an accurate characterization of the content of the article.
What do you mean: "not an accurate characterization of the content of the article"? The title pretty accurately describes an admission by the former NIAID director in a House Select Subcommittee, according to the WSJ. That admission is the topic of the article.
And it's disingenuous for you to pretend that the issue is HN users being unwilling to reexamine the public health response to Covid-19, when the submission is clearly flouting HN's rules.
From HN's rules:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait;
I think using the clickbaity original title ("Anthony Fauci Fesses Up") would be flouting HN's rules.
I think reading the top comment on that post provides plenty of explanation why users would flag that post.
That top comment complains that the HN title is WSJ's informative subheading instead of its clickbaity headline.
In fact, I don't see a single story that I personally feel should not have been removed.
I don't understand why this story was removed: "It turns out the six-feet social-distancing rule had no scientific basis", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39200511
On a forum with an overwhelmingly science-minded audience, it bothers me that an important topic like that is deemed untouchable.
They vaccinate for all sorts of diseases. Covid is no different.
But the covid vaccines ARE different:
Vaccines typically take 10-15 years of research and clinical trials before approval [1].
The covid vaccines OTOH got developed, "tested" and approved within the timespan of less than a year. They literally had to invoke a sci-fi trope ("warp speed") to justify this timetable [2].
It’s a risk and threat to them being functional as an organization.
The injection poses a bigger threat to them as an organisation than the disease itself: men below 40 are 6 times more likely to get heart damage from the mRNA shot than from the disease [3]. And this for a disease that has a lower IFR than influenza among people younger than 60 [4].
Pre-2020, decades of research into vaccines for (other) coronaviruses only resulted in vaccines that either didn't work at all or led to enhanced disease [5].
After a gain-of-function experiment went south in Wuhan, all that hard-earned wisdom got thrown out of the window (along with the Nuremberg code [6]) for a panicked and rushed vaccination program.
Yes, these vaccines improve the short-term relative outcomes for the elderly, the obese and the sick. About six months after vaccination you still are somewhat protected against symptoms, but are more likely to get infected than the non-vaccinated [7] [8] [9].
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/basics/test-approve.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Warp_Speed
[3] https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.122.0...
[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9613797/
[5] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4369385/#Sec12t...
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Code
[7] https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.2022...
[8] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.11.14.22282103v...
[9] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
I don't understand your goal. Why are you doing this sort of comment? Taking the time to dull peoples minds against whats happening to the world?
Is it for yourself? Are you scared and it makes you feel better to try and control other peoples' perceptions and reactions? Do you believe you're doing a service and creating a nuanced worldview that helps people make better decisions? You're not. I don't understand you.
Are you in a position that this com ment is useful? Is this a place where it is useful? If it's not, is the purpose of the article to solicit the sort of response you've provided?
You are going to die asking stupid questions in meetings.
“Of all the offspring of Time, Error is the most ancient, and is so old and familiar an acquaintance, that Truth, when discovered, comes upon most of us like an intruder, and meets the intruder's welcome.”
― Charles Mackay
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/227837-of-all-the-offspring...
Thank you so much for this!
Yes, and that retraction was itself political in nature:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/i-cited-their-study-so-they-dis...
Indeed. The chronology is important:
1. Cesario et al [1] received some criticism [2], but they stood by their findings [3]
2. A student union / twitter mob was not happy with the findings of the study [4]
3. The resulting political pressure led to the ousting of Stephen Hsu from MSU, who had approved the funding for the study [5]
4. Only then retracted Cesario et al their study, while still standing by their findings [6]
______
There is a similar study done by economist Roland Fryer [7], while at Harvard.
Summarized, the two studies find the following:
Cesario et al:
Per interaction with the police, civilians have roughly the same risk of being killed by police gunfire, regardless of their ethnicity.
Fryer:
- Per interaction with the police, civilians have roughly the same risk of being the target of police gunfire, regardless of their ethnicity.
- Per interaction with the police, a black civilian is 1.5x more at risk to receive slight use of force by the police than a white civilian. This disparity gets smaller at higher levels of force. (See [7], Figure 1)
- Per interaction with the police, a perfectly compliant black civilian is 1.2x more at risk to receive slight use of force by the police than a perfectly compliant white civilian. This disparity gets smaller at higher levels of force. (See [7], Figure 5)
[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1903856116
[2] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1919418117
[3] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1920184117
[4] https://twitter.com/gradempunion/status/1270829004157849600
[5] https://lansingstatejournal.com/story/news/2020/06/19/msu-vp...
[6] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2004734117
[7] https://scholar.harvard.edu/sites/scholar.harvard.edu/files/...
That study (which was still a pre-print, not reviewed) was retracted.
That study wasn't retracted. It's still here:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.30.21262866v...
Maybe you're confusing it with another one. There was a Canadian preprint on myocarditis (sample size: 32) that got retracted by its authors:
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/university-of-ottawa-he...
To make the confusion complete, there is a study on myocarditis that got peer reviewed and accepted for publication in an Elsevier cardiology journal, only to be "temporarily removed":
The Publisher regrets that this article has been temporarily removed. A replacement will appear as soon as possible in which the reason for the removal of the article will be specified, or the article will be reinstated.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014628062...
Killing hosts isn't beneficial to the virus survival, quite the opposite in fact. An infection that super aggressively reproduces but due to antibodies fails to gain a foothold beyond the nasopharynx in vaccinated people doing little damage to the host but spreading effectively to both vaccinated individuals who largely have the above experience and unvaccinated who get miserably sick and sometimes drown in their own mucus could be very fit in evolutionary terms in a mostly vaccinated population.
Yes. This is what that Quanta article was all about. Here's the link once more: https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-vaccines-can-drive-pathog...
The odds are overwhelming that if covid does get worse despite our work in developing increasingly effective therapies the unvaccinated will have it much worse.
Agreed. There's a tragedy of the commons there.
In comparative studies of populations it has been shown to still be substantially effective at preventing infection even after antibodies wane.
Source?
You are trying to make a statement about a counterfactual what if ___ country didn't vaccinate the imputation being that the vaccines aren't effective
I linked to an analysis by a Harvard professor. Who uses official government data of the respective countries. So I think I have good reason to take that seriously.
because 2 different countries with dozens of confounding factors doesn't show a high enough correlation.
Yes there must be many confounding factors. But your phrase: "doesn't show a high enough correlation" is putting it mildly. How about: no correlation at all?
But I would love to see data that shows a population-level effect of mass vaccination on the covid infection rate.
The MRNA vaccinations are 95% effective at keeping you out of the hospital or the grave.
This is the sort of percentage that got thrown around a lot at the start of the vaccination campaign. But for protection against infection/transmission. Just one of many examples:
https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-israel-va...
The idea that the vaccinated have become (mostly) asymptomatic spreaders of the viruses, is nothing to celebrate. This is a scenario that can push the evolution of the virus towards more dangerous variants:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-vaccines-can-drive-pathog...
You can interpret this as either the vaccine not working (unlikely) or that high-income countries such as Iceland and Portugal test a larger share of their population than low-income countries such as Vietnam and South Africa (very likely)
You may interpret all you want, but I was just pointing out the lack of solid data supporting the claim: "The vaccine significantly slows the spread"
Almost 3 billion people have been fully vaccinated worldwide and yet there is still no evidence that the vaccines have any effect at all in slowing the spread of the virus. I find this rather remarkable.
This situation could very well push the evolution of the virus towards more dangerous strains. Like what happened with Marek's disease among chickens:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-vaccines-can-drive-pathog...
Your quote shows that the AstraZeneca vaccine loses effectiveness over time. However, the chance of an unvaccinated person passing on the virus is 67%, which is significantly higher than the 58% for a person who received the Pfizer vaccine.
Pfizer buys you a bit more time, but the downward trend in your immunity is unmistakable too:
https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/coronavirus/1626980447-vaccin...
https://www.gov.il/BlobFolder/reports/vaccine-efficacy-safet...