Hacker News Reader

angelzenon Germany hits record new Covid cases in 24 hours

This appears to be the (1st?) Delta wave, hitting NorthWest Europe a few months after UK. Interestingly enough Sweden is doing better, though God knows for how long.

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

angelzenon Faced with soaring Ds and Fs, schools are ditching the old way of grading

"Research increasingly implies that homework is probably harmful in elementary; of dubious value in early middle school"

You are citing research that apparently is stating the obvious, namely that good students are faster at completing homework than poor students. Not sure how that supports the statement that homework is harmful for either group.

Skimming the lit review you linked, homework appears to have a moderate positive effect on the immediate measures of achievement, e.g. grades. Though the effects of lifelong habit of completing one's homework are more interesting than short term grade improvements, and a quick skim of the 60 page lit review you quoted doesn't seem to attempt to quantify this effect.

Food for thought: attempts to scientize every aspect of life, even if the measures used are obviously limited and shortsighted, is perhaps not a good way to steer an entire society forward.

angelzenon Faced with soaring Ds and Fs, schools are ditching the old way of grading

"Research increasingly implies..." Which research?

angelzenon Florida, Center of Covid Mandate Resistance, Has Lowest Infection Levels in U.S.

Given how the single largest predictor of covid death is age, a state with the 6th largest median age in the country is bound to stack high on the raw covid death rate metric.

That being said, the OP is too early to proclaim victory. Covid flows in waves. Florida had an unusual late summer wave, which has fortunately receded. Alas, the winter season is long, plenty of room for another one. Time will tell.

angelzenon Making the dislike count private across YouTube

Helps to know who are the people that don't buy whatever it is that Google is pushing. At the very least serve them carefully selected content to change their ways.

angelzenon Covid vaxx efficacy after 8 months

I found a Feb 2021 piece from Derek Lowe a good 30k ft overview of how the immune system works. tl;dr it is stochastic, with a wide range of antibodies having different effects against an infection, some of them even negative (OAS). Usually the aggregate effect is positive, and the infection is cleared out.

"It's important to realize, though, that all immune responses to a viral infection generate a mixture of neutralizing and non-neutralizing antibodies. That's one of the things about the immune system - it revs up production of a wide variety of antibodies, selected from the untold billions of them circulating around in your bloodstream. Some of them bind to one part of the pathogen, and some to another. And they bind in different conformations, sticking to different parts of the surface of the invading virus from different directions."

It is conceivable that a targeted vaccine is more effective at shutting down an infection than natural immunity by focusing the immune system to produce a narrow band of very effective antibodies. The tradeoff is that a virus mutation can create a catastrophic situation where the same antibodies are less effective, possibly having negative efficiency enhancing the infection. The risk is amplified by vaccinating the entire population with the exact same protein sequence, creating hundreds of millions of living incubators for the virus to learn how to evade the narrow antibody response.

We are creating a biological landscape prone to black swan events. Good luck convincing any total vaxer that this is a very real risk. They will laugh and sneer and maybe call you criminal because obviously the data shows the vaccines are safe and effective. "Hahaha, I've been told that we're all going to be dead by now, look at those peddling conspiracy theories." Just like the Wall Street crowd created the run-up to the 2008 crisis. Who could have possibly predicted that CDOs were prone to a black swan?

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/antibody-dependent...

angelzenon October had the biggest U.S. inflation surge in more than 30 years

Housing sticks out like a sore thumb. 2% increase? Over what period? Case Schiller is double since the last dip (circa 2012), and a solid 45% up since the peak of the 2008 bubble. It has a sharp uptick in the past couple of years, sharper than the 2006 run up. Sure, 2% housing inflation, nothing to see here.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CSUSHPINSA

angelzenon October had the biggest U.S. inflation surge in more than 30 years

Whether prices or wages are the true measure of inflation is a class marker. If you are a (0.)1%er making most of your money from stocks, it's wages. If you are working for a living, it's prices. Guess which side dominates the US public discourse.

angelzenon October had the biggest U.S. inflation surge in more than 30 years

We also literally printed trillions of dollars. What are the longterm trends in your opinion?

angelzenon 38% of US adults believe government is faking Covid-19 death toll

Possibly the OP does believe that. I used to live in that bubble. There is an undercurrent in US media and academia that "flyover country" is populated by inbred primitives clinging to obsolete superstition and impervious to reason and science. Perhaps thank Iraq war era Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert for kickstarting the phenomenon.

angelzenon Covid vaxx efficacy after 8 months

Or motorcyles. They have wheels and get you from point A to pint B, but maybe have a different risk profile compared to cars. Not necessarily in favor of the alternative tech.

angelzenon Covid vaxx efficacy after 8 months

Agreed, it's not a perfect resource. The other tool I know of is https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/region/us/minnesota, but its resolution is only state level, can't dig in at county or hospital level. Between 30% covid ICU at state level and red hospitals concentrated in Minneapolis, I'm making a guess that it's probably a covid wave hitting Minneapolis.

angelzenon Covid vaxx efficacy after 8 months

I immigrated to the country exactly once. I do not plan to immigrate again any time soon.

angelzenon Covid vaxx efficacy after 8 months

Good call. Turns out I did make an error, reading just the >80 column thinking it's 'total', because it happened that that line dominated the table. There are definitely more vax deaths than unvax covid deaths in week 40-44 in UK, but the ratio is smaller that 1:9. Brb, running excel to sum the whole columns. Table 4b, page 19 for raw data.

Edit: The totals come at 669 unvax deaths vs. 3011 vax deaths. The raw numbers ratio is roughly 2:8 unvax:vax. This is not VE, as it is not adjusted to vax levels in the population. It is just a sanity check of certain claims in the US media.

  age    unvax   double vax
  <18    7       0
  18-29  9       5
  30-39  24      9
  40-49  56      46
  50-59  104     126
  60-69  157     355
  70-79  131     822
  >80    181     1648
  total  669     3011

angelzenon Covid vaxx efficacy after 8 months

> we're still seeing a large influx to ICUs

The summer waves clobbered various hospital systems in the US on a region by region basis. Winter is likely to be worse. For example, right now Minneapolis is under heavy load, ICUs at >95% across the board. https://covidestim.org concurs, the Midwest is undergoing a wave.

https://datacentral.kitsapsun.com/covid-19-hospital-capacity...

angelzenon Pfizer CEO Says People Who Spread Covid Vaccine Misinformation Are ‘Criminals'

I'm not even sarcastic, just dark. I am at a loss at what is the space of not-criminal discourse about covid vaccines. This seems an attempt to make covid vaccines a taboo topic, in which only pre-canned proclamations are permitted, preferably uttered only by people dressed in white labcoats with seven letters after their names. Let's drop the pretenses and give us the plebes the damn list of what we are allowed to say.

angelzenon Covid vaxx efficacy after 8 months

https://www.leadersedge.com/brokerage-ops/the-risk-of-being-...

"Every professional knows the discomfort and fallout that go along with having to deliver bad news."

angelzenon Covid vaxx efficacy after 8 months

The 99:1 numbers are very strange. Latest data from UK, which admittedly has a higher vaccination rate than US, gives a death ratio of 1:9 unvax:vax. Caution, Simpson's paradox is at play, older populations where the bulk of the deaths are, are significantly more vaccinated than younger populations. Unfortunately it is really difficult to find equivalent detailed reports (breakdown by age, date & vax status) in US either federally (CDC) or at state level.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

Edit. Oh, I see now. From the fourth article: "99% of Alabama’s 2,379 COVID deaths from January to June were unvaccinated". Alabama had a covid wave in Jan, which then subsided. Mass vaccination only started in Jan, by the time the wave was over maybe 10-20% of the population was vaccinated. The numbers are dominated by the pre-vaccination wave, plus VE is high early on which limits the vaccinated deaths. Verdict: technically correct, but highly misleading.

https://usafacts.org/visualizations/coronavirus-covid-19-spr...

https://usafacts.org/visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-st...

angelzenon Covid vaxx efficacy after 8 months

Influenza vaccines have a rather poor efficiency record. In a good year 50-60%, in a bad one as little as 10-20%, i.e. mostly useless.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/vaccines-work/past-seasons-estimates...

angelzenon Study suggests long-Covid may be mostly psychological

In practice there is the bureaucratic state ratchet. Everything that favors their policies is taken as gospel on the whimsiest of the evidence. "My aunt's gardner third cousin works in an ER, they are seeing mountains of children in ICUs". Everything counter their policies must be proven via large RCTs. Regulatory capture functions in the same way, creating a sea of red tape that somehow large incumbents are not subject to, but have significant relative costs for smaller upstarts.

angelzenon Study suggests long-Covid may be mostly psychological

That is correct. Usually it is better to wait and see if the results are corroborated by different research teams, preferably in different countries.

angelzenon Pfizer CEO Says People Who Spread Covid Vaccine Misinformation Are ‘Criminals'

Same guy in Aug 2021: "Every time that a variant appears in the world, our scientists are getting their hands around it. And they are researching to see if this variant can escape the protection of our vaccine. We haven't identified any yet, but we believe that it is likely that one day, one of them will emerge.". Somewhat confused here, I thought mentioning "variant" and "vaccine" in the same sentence is criminal antivaxxer conspiracy theory misinformation?

The world needs a cheat sheet at https://pfizer.com/covid with a handful of bullet points for correct speak and a handful for criminal misinformation. Even better, also an anonymous form to submit the names, addresses and workplaces of those who fail to internalize the distinction.

angelzenon On the future of Akka and Lightbend

Not familiar with Akka of Play2, but you articulated the point of overcomplicating the task of returning a simple response to a simple request via a litany of rarely useful concepts quite clearly.

OTOH, I wish popular web frameworks had a clearly documented 'no magic' option that doesn't critically depend on global methods and decorators. Again, not familiar with Play1 other than your example, but I recently did spent too much time wrangling a moderate backend build on with python/flask as a beginner going through the learning curve. After the first 5 minutes of 'look ma, I have a running server', the overreliance of globals became an unpleasant annoyance impeding test writing, with surprises abounding.

angelzenon Decline in effectiveness of all three US Covid-19 vaccines over time

There are multiple studies that point to VE declining over time, to about 50% after 6 months. No further data is available. I do not understand why this vaccine behavior was not observed and documented by the original clinical trials, which were conducted over a period of 4 months (July-Nov 2020). The Pfizer FDA EUA application claimed a blanket 95% vaccine efficacy.

https://www.fda.gov/media/144416/download

(OA) US, veterans, 3 months VEaI = 78%, 6 months VEaI = 50%, https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm0620

US, 5 months VEaI = 47%, https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

UK, 3 months VEaI = 75%. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01548-7

Qatar, 3 months VEaI = 70%, 6 months VEaI = 12.8%, https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2114114

(preprint) Sweden, <50yo, 2-4 months VEaI = 83%, 4-6 months VEaI = 50%, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3949410

angelzenon Decline in effectiveness of all three US Covid-19 vaccines over time

Israel has boosted 2.8 million people as of Sept 2021, a little more than half the vaccinated population. Total vax eligible population is 7 million, but some of them are not vaxed, thus can't take the 3rd booster.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-12/israel-pr...

angelzenon Decline in effectiveness of all three US Covid-19 vaccines over time

The press. "Israel Is Preparing for Possible Fourth Covid Vaccine Dose".

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-12/israel-pr...

angelzenon Decline in effectiveness of all three US Covid-19 vaccines over time

The full on assault on the right to work is reminiscent of the worst abuses of the XX century. Technically Stalin didn't mass murder the kulaks, he just decided they had a bad influence on the general population and offered them jobs in Siberia. "Look how many survived, even their poster boy, Solzhenitsyn, came back and had a very successful career." Plenty in the West applauded and downplayed their plight for decades. Some still do.

angelzenon Decline in effectiveness of all three US Covid-19 vaccines over time

"the government" is just people, perhaps selected for even higher levels of selfishness and poor risk analysis skills.

angelzenon How McKinsey Destroyed the Middle Class (2020)

The middle class cumulative share of the national income and wealth has declined quite significantly over past 50 years.

Income: 62% => 43%

Wealth: 32% => 17%

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-...

angelzenon Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%

This ZOE business is something else. Their website is 75% building up their credentials, 25% promoting their app and 0% substance, e.g. what the actual formulas are or a link to code and data dumps. Or at least a research publication with some details. Perhaps there is a link hidden somewhere, but neither their Home, About or FAQ point to it.

They literally changed their formula because the trends in the unvaccinated population didn't to conform to their prior biases. Though the formula details are still a mystery.

"Last week, we reported a plateau in new COVID cases based on our methods at the time, which relied on a small number of unvaccinated people in our dataset compared with the wider UK population. The number of daily new cases in the unvaccinated group appeared to be dropping which in turn resulted in our overall numbers trending down. This meant the figures were accurate to our dataset but didn’t represent the full picture in the UK."

https://covid.joinzoe.com/post/covid-estimates-updated-vacci...

I'll grant that UK has no vaccine mandates (including for kids!) and none of the craziness. Have a great one!