Hacker News Reader

corticon Attributes and predictors of long Covid

That the vaccine is better than the disease seems a ridiculously low bar to me. I'd be much more reassured if they listed the side effects with their likelihoods (1 in ??) subdivided this with age groups if appropriate, I've seen this in NHS prescriptions in the past and its always been very reassuring.

corticon Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)

more like; "but the amount of electricity is so insignificant to us that we use more doing absolutely nothing"

corticon South Africa suspends rollout of Oxford-AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine

Logically i would have thought the opposite would have happened, since natural immunity is mostly to the nucleus protein (difficult to mutate), and vaccine immunity is based on the spike protein (easy to mutate). I would have thought any partial vaccine immunity would increase mutation rate.

Also been worried that mass vaccinations might short-circuit the mutate to less severe variant process that happens in nature. By taking the advantage away from the current spike configuration we might give an advantage to a worse variant that would naturally have died out (out compete by its parent variant)..

Disclaimer; I'm more qualified to write a science fiction novelette on this theory than a medical paper, so take all this with a big grain of salt.

corticon Firefox 85

NoScript; My browser only runs trusted code on my system. And if you are running an updated browser without NoScript or some equivalent, that's very dangerous.

corticon Firefox 85

Go to google, type something in, then try to select the text by click-dragging right to left, but keep dragging until the cursor is over the Tree Style Tabs, then release.. the page will not have registered the release and if you move the cursor over the page again it will deselect what you have just selected.

Sounds like just a nuisance, and it is, but i use quick-keys with my mouse and it really messes with my workflow.

corticon Firefox 85

First thing i did after installing was disable updates, i should be fine for a while. -Another thing that is becoming more difficult to do in FF.

corticon Firefox 85

Thanks, hopefully that will work for importing.

A lot of websites confuse the field auto detect system, you go back to the page after saving password at login and FF can't find the fields, usually cause it didn't save the field names properly (you can see this in PasswordFox). The old password manager you could edit the field names as well as the U:P and URL fixing this problem. The new Lockwise basically turned 5 minutes of logging in to 25 minutes of copy and pasting for me..

corticon Firefox 85

Been stuck on waterfox since the password manager downgraded to 'Lockwise' (no field edits, no file imports). And since the great add-on reset i can't get a decent tree tabs that doesn't steal mouse focus from the main window..

So, yes, great, another version i probably won't be using.

corticon Why do we assume extraterrestrials might want to visit us?

That is interesting, and it changes my math a bit, though not to your favor;

>Based on the survey, scientists predict that there should be 1 billion Earth-sized worlds in the Milky Way galaxy at present, a good portion of them presumed to be rocky. That estimate skyrockets when you include the other 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe.

So for us to be near the first, near enough not to trip on Fermi's paradox, and allowing a short 5 billions years for these planets to have existed on average; we are (1000 billion X 5 billion) to 1. Which still needs one hell of a filter to explain.

corticon Why do we assume extraterrestrials might want to visit us?

I've never heard of any theories that earth like conditions are new or unique, in fact half of all stars like ours are over 9 billion years old. And the universe has almost stopped making new stars.

If you believe it takes, on average 9 billion years X 100 billion star systems to create 1 civilization, then you believe in some kind of 'filter' that stops life almost completely. A filter that we have passed to be the first.

And by the time any other life statistically emerges we will have colonized the galaxy many times over.

corticon Why do we assume extraterrestrials might want to visit us?

If we are the first, then its likely the 'great filter' is behind us. And it means we will never find life that isn't related to us.

corticon Why do we assume extraterrestrials might want to visit us?

What you are proposing is a great filter of confounding variable and diminishing returns. You really think these limitations are so overwhelming that practically no civilization could expand exponentially? Cause that's what you need to be saying, if even one in a trillion could then they should be everywhere by now.

corticon Why do we assume extraterrestrials might want to visit us?

>The silence implied by Fermi's paradox (“Where is everybody?”) may mean that we are not the most attention-worthy cookies in the jar.

I've always thought of Fermi's paradox as ultimately a math problem, assuming a conservative amount of time between a civilization in one star system colonizing a neighboring star system, over billions of years every star system in the galaxy should be colonized by now.

The fact that we are not getting signals from the considerable number of stars that are within a reasonable distance is concerning. It does point to a great filter that we are not seeing or understanding. Or at least an enormous misconception about our universe.

corticon TV detector vans once prowled the streets of England

The idea is to make the poor and working classes pay for it, being regressive everyone pays the same, taxes are progressive, the more you earn the more you pay.

Government set the licence fee and legislation around it every 5 or 6 years. The last renewal put government appointed editors into the BBC in exchange for a change in Law from 'watch live BBC channels = you have to pay' to 'watch live non-BBC channels = you have to pay'. So now, even if you are just watching BBC competitors,you have to pay the BBC.. what a great business model.

corticon The Great Filter – Are We Almost Past It? (1998)

Could be intelligence in any form is brought about by some kind of grand antagonistic pleiotropy. By this i mean the genes that develop intelligence in any species infancy, inevitably lead to the conditions for your (a)(b) and (c) later on.

corticon What Is Life? (2019)

>..since it would just be the execution of an algorithm that a sentient being programmed

And the execution of an algorithm that evolution programed is somehow 'special', probably because another algorithm says so.

corticon What Is Life? (2019)

> An unplugged computer won't start to autonomously break down and convert chemicals into electricity to keep itself running..

You just described a laptop.

corticon Oxford-AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine approved for use in UK

Thank you, i did not realize there was such a setting and was getting fed up of all the [flagged] comments.

corticon Messengers of hope: two mRNA Covid-19 vaccines herald a new era for vaccinology

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-12-covid-vaccines-focus-...

I was wrong, its the nucleocapsid protein, not the membrane one, but that's even weirder as the N protein is only found inside the virus particle..

corticon The Impossible Mirror Scene in 'Contact'

[flagged]

just wanting to join in.

corticon Oxford-AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine approved for use in UK

https://boogheta.github.io/coronavirus-countries/#deceased&r...

If you had to look at this comparison without knowing; you couldn't tell which country maintained civil liberties. And yes there are countries that fared better, and countries that fared worse.

https://boogheta.github.io/coronavirus-countries/#deceased&d...

Sweden's second wave seems dwarfed by both France and Switzerland in this comparison.. I mean if you have to squint and twist the stats to make Sweden look bad, then maybe we gave up all our rights unnecessarily.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

Overall, they have the 25th worst deaths per million on earth, UK is 12th, USA is 14th and France is 16th worst. They didn't do badly. And most all countries that did worse, did so while stripping every right and liberty off their citizens.

corticon Messengers of hope: two mRNA Covid-19 vaccines herald a new era for vaccinology

I read that the immune system doesn't usually produce antibodies for the spike protein when fighting the virus, i think it was a membrane protein that was more commonly targeted, and we didn't understand why.

corticon Oxford-AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine approved for use in UK

Not sure what the 'tried with catastrophic end results' is because the post you replied to has been censored, but; Sweden have done massively better than France, UK, USA, in deaths per million, they have even done better than Switzerland, all the while not treating their citizens like criminals. While the west look to shining examples like North Korea and China as what we should be doing.

corticon Firefox 84.0

about:config and search toolkit.telemetry.enabled I checked on a fresh 83 and its greyed out.

You need to create the file firefox.cfg in install Dir and enter lockPref("toolkit.telemetry.enabled", false); To override it And to get that to work you need to create /defaults/pref/autoconfig.js with pref("general.config.obscure_value", 0); and pref("general.config.filename", "firefox.cfg.js");

Its getting harder and harder to make a good browser out of FF, I personally don't mind the work, but things like Lockwise replacing a working password manager without the needed options and no addons to fix it or workarounds, i can see it messing up fields in PasswordFox but can no longer do anything about it.

corticon Firefox 84.0

> can change this in the configuration dialog,

The options in config were greyed out in 83.

> "proper menu system", do you mean..

The ability to make multi tier menu with icons or text instead of both

>Doing so would result in running an outdated

Doing so would result in a stable system that wouldn't just randomly disable all addons from working, security related addons at that.

corticon Firefox 84.0

My advice; stop reinventing the wheel, and if you must reinvent the wheel, make sure its at least as round as the last one.

I've been using FF since Netscape, and it used to be a few settings and we're off. Now, you have to edit policies.json to get updates stopped, autoconfig.js and firefox.cfg to disable telemetry, legacyUserProfileCustomizations to use userChrome.css to get anything like a proper menu system.

'Lockwise' has dumbed down the login system so much you can't even change field names, making many sites incompatible. Nor can you import logins from file or even point to installations to import. The add-ons system is like traveling back in time ten years, bugs and fewer alternatives than ever, still can't figure out how to stop Tree Style Tabs from stealing mouse focus from the page onmouseover like a widget. -And these are problems that were fixed before they were reinvented.

For the first time in 16 years I'm seriously trying alternatives.

-these were my views on 83, i hope to hell 84 fixes some of them.

corticon Privacy matters even if “you have nothing to hide”

Posted this five months ago, but its still relevant: My nothing to hide argument;

Nothing to hide is an incomplete sentence. Nothing to hide from who? Surly you want to hide your children from abusers and predators? Don't you want to hide your banking details from con artists and fraudsters? Your identity from identity thieves.. Your location from burglars, your car keys from car thieves or your blood type from some rich mobsters with kidney problems..

we don't know who are any of these things. So we should protect ourselves from all of them, in effect we have everything to hide from someone, and no idea who someone is.

corticon New UK police speed gun can read license plates from half a mile away at night

Have you ever consider that 1m gap is a product of speed limits? If we didn't have such limits, dedicated cycle lanes set apart from roads would become the norm imo.

Its not uncommon for cheap inadequate safety measures to supplant real ones.

corticon I Feel Like I Have No Real Interests; My Only Interest Is Making Money

Not the OP, but this is an interesting question; So you'd have to save at least 72k per year for 35 years. That would put you on the 45% tax in my country so you'd have to make 131k to be left with 72k after tax. Maybe +30k to live on, assuming you commute out of the city. So OP should be on something above 161k.

In the US the OP would be in the top 3% of earners, top 4% in the UK. Even if you are in the top few percent you still have to spend most of your life working to be 'free' for a bit at the end of it.

Of course if you are inside the top 1% you could probably get away with a 10-15 year sentence. Where the average wage is generally life with a few years of poverty like freedom at the end.

corticon Mozilla Firefox 83 boosts JavaScript performance

They make all sorts of good advancements; But its also becoming harder and harder to make a good browser out of Firefox.

'Lockwise' has dumbed down the login system so much you can't even change field names, making many sites incompatible. Nor can you import logins from file or even point to installations to import. The add-ons system is like traveling back in time ten years, bugs in everything, and fewer alternatives than ever, still can't figure out how to stop Tree Style Tabs from stealing mouse focus onmouseover like a widget.

For the first time in 16 years I'm seriously trying alternatives.