Hacker News Reader

Ankaioson Vannevar Bush: A Public Sector Entrepreneur

Our user interfaces are still not as good as a memex for research.

Ankaioson What doctors wish patients knew about long Covid

Yeah, there's a limited window over which antibody testing is useful. I hadn't heard that it was only a few months, but that wouldn't be shocking, especially if you want a low rate of false negatives. Hopefully someone reading this knows more than me about approaches to testing that might work over longer time scales and not be confused by vaccination.

Ankaioson What doctors wish patients knew about long Covid

Your understanding is correct. PCR tests can only tell if you are currently infected. (Or at least have been so recently infected that enough remnant mRNA is still lingering in your body to be detectable.)

Antibody tests can determine whether someone was infected previously, and I have heard that there are some that look for antibodies that are associated with infection but not vaccination. I don't know anything more about them than that, but maybe that could provide a thread to help start searching if you are interested in finding out more about them.

Ankaioson What doctors wish patients knew about long Covid

At least anecdotally, the mRNA vaccines do appear to provide some protection against infection. I know three people who are mRNA-vaccinated who were recently extensively exposed to omicron. (They spent multiple hours in a single room or car with someone with symptoms who was later confirmed infected.) The exposed individuals are PCR tested at least twice a week and almost certainly never previously had covid. One of the three later tested positive, but the other two never tested positive.

Maybe by sheer luck two out of three could have remained uninfected by omicron without being vaccinated, but I'd be pretty surprised.

Ankaioson We must return to an economy fueled by innovation, rather than disruption

My understanding is that Moderna basically started as a result of a venture firm recognizing that mRNA drugs might lead to valuable new things (https://www.flagshippioneering.com/companies/moderna).

Ankaioson We must return to an economy fueled by innovation, rather than disruption

Another option to address the same basic issue is to fix estate taxes, which might be an easier fix. (Among other things, change the cost basis for the estate taxes to be the price when the asset was originally acquired, not the price when it was transferred to the inheritor.) Either way, I agree that it's critical to close the routes to avoiding taxes.

Ankaioson Internet Backbone Giant Lumen Shuns .RU

Everything and immediately, is generally how it works.

I think Ukraine should demand more than returning to the pre-invasion state. I don't know exactly what, but it seems like they should shoot for some verifiable changes in Russia's government, laws, military, or the like, and tie them to milestones for sanction reduction. If nothing else, that might help anchor negotiations in Ukraine's direction.

Ankaioson Ukraine calls on hacker underground to defend against Russia

RT is a well-known Russian propaganda operation. The fact that your response to it was "it never was anything that gave me pause" is a sign that you did not detect the propaganda and that it may have been working on you.

Ankaioson Joke written by an AI: “A basic program walked into a bar ”

A basic program walked into a bar...

... and the bartender asked, "why didn't you RUN?"

Ankaioson UCLA Study Finds Laughter in 65 Species, from Rats to Cows

As hard as it is to imagine a rat punchline, I find it even harder to imagine the tiny little cups they'd put the punch in.

Ankaioson RSS feeds are available for many U.S. Government collections

https://www.congress.gov/

As an example of the information on each bill, here's the entry for last year's American Rescue Plan Act: https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/1319

Ankaioson Webb flies Ariane 5: watch the launch live on 25 December

It's humanity's self-unwrapping Christmas present.

Ankaioson Aliens might just be too far away

"I think Fermi also had the unreasonable assumption that interstellar aliens would figure out how to get past the speed of light..."

The Fermi Paradox does not involve faster-than-light travel.

"We still have this problem of what DNA was doing for that approximately two and a half billion years—the overwhelming majority of the history of life on Earth. Why didn’t it evolve at all during that time? What’s going on?"

Those early single-cell organisms were evolving!

Ankaioson It's hard to overstate what a scam academic and scientific publishing is

And this page links to the executive order requiring open access for work funded by all of the major Federal research agencies:

https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2013/02/22/expandi...

Ankaioson Neal Stephenson reacts to Facebook name change

Maybe it's just me, but Facebook seems to have more in common with the Snow Crash virus than with the Metaverse.

Ankaioson Steve Wozniak announces private space company to clean up space debris in orbit

Good question—DARPA has asked it, too: https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/01/darpa-unveils-roboti...

Ankaioson Miami orders evacuation of 156-unit as structurally and electrically unsafe

What would good regulation of condos and homeowners associations look like? Are there any locales that have models that are particularly worth emulating? What do they mandate?

Ankaioson Physicists observationally confirm Hawking’s black hole theorem for first time

Here's the paper:

https://journals.aps.org/prl/accepted/36074Y8aM291c462a4e264...

https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.04486

Ankaioson Researchhub: GitHub for Science

What does "GitHub for Science" even mean?

Personally, I think it means that the site is an attempt to centralize something that is currently decentralized.

Ankaioson Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content

Second blow should be a that any partially federal funded work would be required to be publicly available

Federal agencies with research expenditures greater than than $100 million annually (which covers most federally funded research) are required to make publications they fund publicly available. This press release links to the executive order, which is still in force: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2013/02/22/expandi....

The policy allows journals to generally have a one-year embargo, and agencies are allowed some latitude in how they implement the order, but most new federally funded research should become freely available on places like PubMed (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/) after embargoes expire.

Ankaioson All Python versions less than 3.6 are now EOL

Personally, I don't mind some inconvenience if language designers occasionally need to make breaking changes to allow improvements, and I've had to port enough scientific Fortran code to newer languages to limit my sympathy for porting from Python 2 to 3. Computer languages aren't static, and sometimes I need to do some work to keep up as they evolve.

Ankaioson Stacked images of the comet, photobombed by Starlink satellites

A major (the major?) motivation behind Starlink is to try to earn SpaceX vast amounts of money that Musk can invest in settling Mars.

See, e.g., this link for comments by Musk: https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-internet-satellites-ma...

Ankaioson Solar Orbiter first images revealed

Flying close to the Sun is hard, both because of the thermal environment and the difficulty of achieving trajectories that get close. A mission that launched two years ago, Parker Solar Probe, is actually going to get closer. Parker and Solar Orbiter have different objectives and should complement each other well.

http://parkersolarprobe.jhuapl.edu/

Ankaioson SpaceX successfully launches two humans into orbit

NASA recently selected three teams to start development of new human lunar landers. Boeing's proposal was not one of the three selected.

Ankaioson Will Trump White House tear down journal paywalls? Many anxiously await decision

Sounds reasonable to me. At the same time, I think articles about potential new government policies are somewhat different than software release announcements and the like. It's usually easier to influence government policy before it's announced than after.

(And I'm not a fan of the "anxiously" in the title, either. :) I considered trimming off everything after the question mark, but I wasn't sure if that was kosher.)

Ankaioson California’s Roadmap to Modify the Stay-at-Home Order [pdf]

That reference describes a separate antibody survey that Stanford ran on April 3 and 4. It's unrelated to great-great grandparent's test today.

Ankaioson California’s Roadmap to Modify the Stay-at-Home Order [pdf]

New York City's population is around 8.5 M, and more then 10,000 people there have died from from the virus so far (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/14/nyregion/new-york-coronav...). That puts the toll over 0.1 %.

Ankaioson Show HN: Tablist – a chrome extension to copy and paste lists of open tabs

I tend to give each major thing I'm working on its own virtual desktop, which has a bunch of open browser and other windows. Each of the browser windows tends to have its own theme, too. (E.g. documentation for a particular framework, articles from a particular journal, a news topic, etc.) That makes it relatively easy for me to keep a handle on things. If I feel like I can't find things on a virtual desktop any more, that's my hint to clean things up a bit.

My biggest source of grief is session management between restarts. Firefox thankfully remembers the windows and tabs, but it doesn't reopen windows on the same virtual desktops they were on when it closed, at least under GNOME defaults. (Nor do the other programs.) That makes me do a lot of manual rearranging whenever it restarts, which is a pain. Other than that, it usually works well.

Ankaioson Show HN: Tablist – a chrome extension to copy and paste lists of open tabs

Usually probably about 1000 tabs, spread over 100 to 200 windows on 10–20 virtual desktops. (I also block Javascript by default, so Firefox still runs alright.)

Ankaioson Airlines flying empty planes to keep flight slots during coronavirus outbreak

To deal with no-show airlines, I'd be (darkly) amused if airports sold somewhat more slots than their gates could physically accommodate.