dr_faustus

I also find it just fascinating, that anyone would pump hundreds of millions in a service which is a copycat anyhow and doesn't even own the IP on the only thing that could potentially differentiate them from their competitors.

I mean, hiring desperate people and students to make deliveries in a couple if cities at a loss seems not to be the greatest feat. Services like Uber at least have some tech in-house which is mildly innovative. But this is just pathetic.

Why would I choose Meilisearch over, e.g., Algolia?

nauseating

Again, no expert, but glucose, insulin levels and blood oxygen have been measured in a drop of blood forever, so I guess they are sufficiently homogeneous and also available in sufficient amounts even in small drops of blood for that to work. But the promise of Theranos was that basically every serological test could be performed on a drop of blood (even many tests with the same drop).

No biochem, but from what I read, it was highly doubtful that the product could even theoretically work because blood is not a completely homogeneous fluid. Concentrations of the things you want to test for vary by quite a lot if you take tiny samples from different places (esp. blood from small capillaries like in the finger tip).

That's (at least one reason) why "normal" blood draws are quite a lot of blood. By thoroughly mixing the drawn blood, you get a much better approximation of the average concentration throughout the body.

It‘s purely anecdotal but in our Kindergarten in Germany there was a huge outbreak of an respiratory infection in the last week of February and unlike those „normal“ Kindergarten viruses, it affected the parents worse than the children. My wife and I both had pretty high fever (which never happened before in six years with small children in places like that). It was confirmed NOT to be the flu (which usually affects adults less anyhow). So my guess is, the dominant narrative of when and how Corona spread throughout the world is incorrect.

Right, MORE air conditioning will solve our problems with global warming…

One test costs about as much as one dose of vaccine. So there is a considerably higher cost associated with weekly (or more) testing than with vaccination. Taxpayers (70% of which have now gotten vaccinated) don't have to pay for the luxury of the unvaccinated. Mind you, the government doesn't force you to get tested, btw.. You just can't partake in certain activities if you don't want to spend the money on the tests and don't want to get the vaccine.

A completely non-responsive marketing page. Haven’t seen that in a while.

Its hearsay, but my brother in law works with someone who has known Sahin and his wife (and cofounder) for a long time and according to them, they actually couldn’t care less about money. Cloths, cars etc are of little concern to them. They are research addicts and they only see money as means to do more and better research. So I guess it just makes sense to pick diseases where the impact of their work is maximized.

News Alert: The plastic bag industry has won the bag wars against Louis Vuitton! For every LV Neverfull Consumers use 1,2 trillion plastic bags.

Let‘s be honest, this is exactly what should and probably will be happening to FAANG.

In comparison to the resources of large nation states, even the resources of the Gates foundation (which amount to a couple of billion a year) are tiny. Still, most western countries obviously could not care less. If you transferred the wealth of BG and all other tech billionaires to the governments of the countries they live in, they would waste it on the same stupid stuff they spend all their other resources on (inefficient defense spending, unwarranted gifts for the boomer generation, etc.).

So, yeah, I grateful for how BG spends his money. Larry Ellison spends his money on stupid yachts. I certainly see a difference there.

Its a well known problem for any type of infection and or vaccination in the area. They just wanted to write a sensationalist Covid story. It's annoying because there are significantly more relevant stories about ... well just about anything.

And since there are enough people just reading the headlines, its just fodder for anti vax conspiracies. You have to read the article to the very end to see that this is just very short term problem which is well known (by any competent radiologist/ob/gyn).

How about: Don't do a routine mammogramm in the weeks following any (!) vaccination in the arm. Problem solved!

EU did not "introduce" PSD2 this year, it was/should have been in effect since Sept 2019!

However, the member states (and therefore the EU) have cut the banks an inordinate amount of slack to get their shit together, even though they have been heavily involved in the writing of PSD2 and had since 2015 (!) to implement everything. Here in Germany, in September 2019, which should have been the hard end of a one year grace period, practically no bank actually had a working PSD2 API or had implemented 2 factor authorization properly.

So all the whining about PSD2 six years after it passed is ridiculous. Everybody had plenty of warning and time to get their site prepared and checkout processes optimized. And quite frankly, unless the author of the article is running some kind of one-click order scam, I find the drop of up to 50% in conversion highly unlikely. From my experience with dozens of e-commerce site, the drop is negligible. And considering the rampant credit card fraud, 2FA was long overdue.

Your translation is not correct, it says "filming the victims of an accident". So presumably filming an accident from a distance (where the victim cannot be identified and you are not in the way of the rescue workers) is not illegal.

The article has many logical inconsistencies. None of the points made refute Gates' position.

The stockpile of the US would be just as high if the IP were free. They overproduced out of an abundance of caution which from a national point of view certainly made sense.

The only thing that the Serum Institute proves is that if there are production capabilities in development countries, they are used to full effect and IP is not keeping them from anything. OP would have a point if the facilities at the SI would be idling due to licensing issues. Whats keeping them from producing more seems to be predominanlty supply chain issues (which have almost nothing to do with IP).

From what I can see, there are simply no excess production capabilities available (neither in developed nor in development countries) which is the bottleneck.

I had the distinct pleasure to make a trip with late Nobel laureate Jack Steinberger to CERN. And while he was certainly deserving all the recognition he got, he himself mentioned that giving prizes like the Nobel to individuals (and I would presume Turing is similar) becomes increasingly outdated. When Nobel conceived the prize, it was still a common thing for individual researchers to make big advances more or less in isolation. That is just not the case anymore in almost any scientific field (math might be an exception, idk). Prizes should go to research groups because most fields of science have become so complex that its very hard to get anything done as an individual researcher. The nobel peace price is regularly awarded to institutions, so it is not inconceivable.

What lead? The main advantage of Tesla is that they have the guts to put beta quality software in cars and get away with it (from a regulatory perspective) up to now.

As can be witnessed in loads of videos on YouTube, the current FSD betas still pretty much require full attention (I would say even more attention than driving youself because you have to watch the environment AND the behaviour of Autopilot). And these demos are on American roads which are among the easiest to drive in the world (generally very wide, lots of traffic lights, large intersections, etc.).

Bad weather conditons (which are a thing outside of southern California) are even more problematic. So while the tech might or might not be more advanced than what other car companies have in their labs, reliably its still pretty much an improved cruise control and in that regard not that far ahead of the competition (all premium brands have that in one way or the other).

But isnt meteorology a good example of a science capable of producing models with high accuracy (albeit just for a couple of days in advance) in absence of lab conditions. I can't think of a single economic model as accurate as modern weather models (or even climate models).

Economics is for me the prime example, even more so than psychology. They layer mathamatical models upon models to make it look like "hard" science. But even the most basic assumptions are disputed and you can basically find an economist (even from a reputable institution) for pretty much any position about any topic.

No economic theory has ever been found that would be capable to make even modest correct predictions (beyond very basic "rules of thumb" which pretty much have been established by Adam Smith and a couple of following generations). It would be fine with me, if they owned up to the fact that its a social science which can deliver some interesting models to think about the past. But every day you see economists on TV steadfastly claiming that they know whats going on and what's going to happen. Their chance is pretty much always 50/50.

Surprisingly, they can't even agree on the role of entirely artificial constructs with a small number of participants (no "invisible hand" involved) like the TARGET2 mechanism of the ECB [1]. It's all just completely arbitrary.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TARGET2#Intra-system_credit_fa...

We have been using Chatwoot for a couple of months. Launch HN is a bit of an understatement, its already a very polished, comprehensive product. Congratulations!

It's not my place to evaluate which method of calculating the exposure was correct. Just pointing out, that 1 mSv is a rather small amount of radiation. The smallest amount of radiation where one sees some indications of an increase in cancer risk is at 50-100 mSv [1].

I'm not arguing either way whether this should have an impact on any payments. Putting the threshold for compensation at 1 mSv is very conservative and will lead to the payment of compensation for many cancers that weren't caused by radiation. Which, again, is fine by me because I do believe that very little interest was paid to the protection of the neighboring populations.

[1] Pretty good summary: https://www.pnas.org/content/100/24/13761

1 mSv is a pretty low threshold. It's actually a bit more than 10x the radiation of a thorax x-ray done with modern equipment. But its 1/10 of a thorax ct. It's also less than the yearly difference between the exposure of people living in regions with low and high natural radiation here in Germany (which, as has far as could be determined, has no impact on the cancer rate).

An increase in thyroid cancer is the main single cause of fatalities (of people not involved in the cleanup) in the Chernobyl Forum report and don't get me wrong: The last thing I wish on anyone is to experience to go through cancer or have a child diagnosed with cancer, even if it is one with 99% survival rate. As I said: nuclear power is dangerous, its just by far not as dangerous as its made out to be. And the hysteria itself can have dire consequences. In Western Europe there were an estimated 100 - 200 thousand excess abortions due to fear of birth defects in the aftermath of Chernobyl. That's by orders of magnituds more than the fatalities actually caused by the incident (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1248180/?page=1).

I have no doubt, that in the over 30 years after Chernobly hundreds of thousands of children were born with birth defects in Poland and Ukraine, many of them severe. Which is tragic. And has nothing to do with Chernobyl. Because roughly 6% of all babies born around the world have birth defects (https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/birth-defects-caus...). As a parent, I can understand the impulse to attribute such a senseless act of nature to some outside, "evil" force. But the statistics just don't show any meaningful connection.

I find it always fascinating, that the same groups (Greenpeace, etc.) are always quick to point to UN reports about climate change (like the IPCC report) as if they were gospel but all the reports of the UN about Chernobyl and Fukushima are supposedly fake. I personally believe both are correct.

After extensive, long-term, high-quality studies of the effects of (mid- to low-level) radiation on populations after Chernobyl [1], Fukushima (cf. article) and even Hiroshima [2], it is pretty safe to say that radiation poses a much smaller risk to humans than is often propagated in the horror scenarios of many environmental groups. The theory most of these scenarios are based on, ie. that every little amount of radiation lineraly increases the risks for cancer, is pretty much debunked. So, yes, nuclear is a dangerous technology, esp. if we keep stopping reserch and progress happening on a large scale and don't replace the 50 year old reactors. But coal kills tens of thousands every year and nuclear is still one of the few relatively reliable, almost CO2 neutral power sources we have.

[1] https://www.un.org/press/en/2005/dev2539.doc.htm [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3907953/

I looked at Nomad about a year ago but deployment of a secure production cluster involved more moving parts than I liked. Especially the security seemed to be very complicated (with a private CA, certificates, Vault, etc. necessary). A simple shared secret would have sufficed imo, but that was not available as an option.

Almost as world beating as the death toll.