Hacker News Reader

helloworldon Reversing Lens-Induced Myopia (2018)

https://newsroom.uw.edu/news/glasses-stop-myopia-are-success...

Their big breakthrough in understanding myopia occurred in 2008 when they studied a particular group of people who had a genetic form of myopia that’s very severe. They discovered a gene mutation that was causing the myopia.

“It turns out it was a mutation in the cone photoreceptors,” said Jay Neitz. “We then realized that it’s really just the way that the images are being encoded on the retina.”

What’s supposed to happen as your eye grows, is that things should begin to go out of focus in the periphery of your vision. That’s a signal for the eyes to stop growing.

But as long as things are still clear in the periphery, the eyes think this person must still be farsighted, because in the natural world things in the periphery are far away.

Neitz said his team was able to design a lens to make central vision clear and in focus, and give the peripheal vision much lower contrast.

“It recreates what is supposed to be going on with our eyes before we started putting all of these things in front of our face like computer screens and tablets,” he said.

helloworldon Moderna’s HIV vaccine has officially begun human trials

"Prof. William Schief explains how the novel #HIV #vaccine being tested in human clinical trials can trigger the right #Bcells of the immune system to achieve the much sought after broadly neutralizing #antibodies."

https://twitter.com/scrippsresearch/status/13581208549709127...

helloworldon How to Make Friends, According to Science (2018)

https://archive.is/SfsK0

helloworldon Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

At least as of 2011: "Collins remains actively involved in research, studying the molecular genetics of diseases including cancer and adult-onset diabetes. His group also is developing animal models of genetic disorders to test potential therapeutic approaches." [0]

[0] Kresge N, Simoni RD, Hill RL. The Molecular Genetics of Cystic Fibrosis: The Work of Francis Collins. J Biol Chem. 2011 Aug 12;286(32):e8–9. doi: 10.1074/jbc.O111.000248. PMCID: PMC3151108

helloworldon Don't Waste the Good Days

Actually, back in the day, Seth Godin was an early -- and successful -- Internet entrepreneur:

https://www.wired.com/1998/10/yahoo-acquiring-yoyodyne/

helloworldon Wayne Thiebaud, known for his colorful depictions of everyday life, dies at 101

Here's a great interview with him:

https://youtu.be/LTZJfenUpsA

helloworldon A new book looks behind Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign

I remember William F. Buckley, Jr. once saying something like, "The question is not whether an elite will rule, but which elite will rule."

helloworldon WindowTabs: Browser-style tabbed window management on the desktop

In 1993, the Windows Taskbar actually began life as tabs across the top of the screen:

https://www.businessinsider.com.au/history-of-the-windows-st...

helloworldon A Spacetime Surprise: Time Isn’t Just Another Dimension

That's what I just discovered, too, using Android Chrome.

So, out of curiosity, I switched over to Android Firefox and turned on "reader view." Much better!

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/view-articles-reader-vi...

helloworldon Notes by Andy Hertzfeld on Alan Kay's talk at Creative Think seminar, July 1982

Twenty-five years before social media became mainstream, this observation seems so prophetic:

Sharing is important - we're all communication junkies

helloworldon Michael Hawley of MIT's Media Lab has died

I hadn't known that Hawley helped write Steve Jobs's inspiring 2005 Stanford commencement address:

https://twitter.com/mjhawley/status/1173273979894796297?s=19

helloworldon TWA L1011 TV ad: “We've made part of first class a dining room” (1972)

Did anyone reading this ever fly on a TWA plane with a dining room in first class?

What was the economics of this? Did they expect that passengers would order enough food and drinks to make up for lost fares from the missing seats in first class?

helloworldon Show HN: An attempt to spot Covid-19 outbreaks using wearable devices

That's a great suggestion. To do that, though, I'm pretty sure that we'd still need approval from our IRB. When you do research within an academic institution, everything needs to be looked over by a relatively impartial third party. And in general, I think that's a good thing -- especially when the research involves human or animal subjects.

helloworldon Show HN: An attempt to spot Covid-19 outbreaks using wearable devices

Also, we need approval from our institutional review board. That might complicate making the study available in multiple countries.

helloworldon Show HN: An attempt to spot Covid-19 outbreaks using wearable devices

It would be great if there were a way to join multiple studies at the same time. At the moment, though, you have to sign up separately for the Stanford COVID-19 Wearables Study: https://innovations.stanford.edu/#section-wearables

helloworldon Show HN: An attempt to spot Covid-19 outbreaks using wearable devices

If you have a Fitbit that includes heart rate monitoring, please consider joining the study.

Unfortunately, as a non-profit academic institution, we don't have any budget for advertising. I wish we could run millions of dollars of ads online and on TV to encourage people to join. Instead, I guess we'll have to rely on word of mouth.

helloworldon Show HN: An attempt to spot Covid-19 outbreaks using wearable devices

That "Body Battery" features sounds interesting. I just checked it out:

https://support.garmin.com/en-US/?faq=VOFJAsiXut9K19k1qEn5W5

I wish that the formula used to calculate it were less opaque. If it were open source, researchers might make use of it.

helloworldon Show HN: An attempt to spot Covid-19 outbreaks using wearable devices

There's so much we don't know about this disease. Maybe there will be surprising findings.

helloworldon Show HN: An attempt to spot Covid-19 outbreaks using wearable devices

Thanks, I hadn't heard that yet. This might be one of those situations where it's preferable to "let a thousand flowers bloom."

For example, in another comment, I mentioned a study that's using the Oura ring, which is a great product, but has a far smaller user base than the mass-market Fitbit and Apple Watch audience that our study is focused on. So it's really additive to have both of our research efforts going forward.

helloworldon Show HN: An attempt to spot Covid-19 outbreaks using wearable devices

Thanks for sharing that. I hope there's eventually some way for Scripps and the Robert Koch Institute to pool our data.

helloworldon Show HN: An attempt to spot Covid-19 outbreaks using wearable devices

Finger pulse oximeters can definitely provide useful data, but I suspect that they're lagging indicators for Covid-19, because typically, severe respiratory symptoms that affect blood oxygen levels appear later in the course of the disease. (But my background is in behavioral science, not pulmonology, so I might be wrong!)

helloworldon Show HN: An attempt to spot Covid-19 outbreaks using wearable devices

Sorry about that! We're hoping to roll it out to other countries before long.

helloworldon Show HN: An attempt to spot Covid-19 outbreaks using wearable devices

The Oura ring measures body temperature, and they've launched a similar study: https://ouraring.com/ucsf-tempredict-study

helloworldon Show HN: An attempt to spot Covid-19 outbreaks using wearable devices

How can we spot the "silent spreaders" of SARS-CoV-2 -- the people who are infected and contagious, but have no symptoms? [1] Our digital medicine group at Scripps Research Translational Institute has just launched a health study [2] to explore one possible approach: crowdsourcing data from wearable devices like the Apple Watch and Fitbit, and then attempting to use machine learning (or less grandly, linear regression) to identify COVID-19 infections.

In January, my colleagues at Scripps published a study in the Lancet that used heart rate and sleep data from about 47,000 Fitbit users in the U.S. to predict which areas would be hardest hit by flu. [3] The correlation with actual reports from the Centers for Disease Control was very high: 0.9.

We’re hoping that we can do something similar for COVID-19 infection. In particular, elevated resting heart rate appears to be a reliable indicator of viral infection. [4] We’re wondering whether it might also be a leading indicator, i.e, spiking to a detectable degree before any measurable fever. If it were, we might be able to identify COVID-19 infections in individuals -- and areas with outbreaks -- before people even have any symptoms.

To figure this out, we’re going to need a lot of participants. And that’s really the greatest challenge for us now. A similar project in Germany [5], which was inspired by our Lancet flu study, already has more than 160,000 volunteers. But they have the advantage of being sponsored by a national research institute. We don’t.

If you have suggestions about how we might reach people with wearables who want to help out -- or if you have questions about the DETECT study -- please add them to the comments.

Thanks, Danny

[1] Substantial undocumented infection facilitates the rapid dissemination of novel coronavirus. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/03/24/scie...

[2] Pivoting health research to take on COVID-19. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/03/pivoting-health-resea...

[3] Harnessing wearable device data to improve state-level real-time surveillance of influenza-like illness in the USA. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landig/article/PIIS2589-7...

[4] Fever and cardiac rhythm. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/articl...

[5] Germany launches smartwatch app to monitor coronavirus spread. https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2020/04/07/technology/07reut...

helloworldon Ask HN: How can I help during the Covid-19 crisis as an open source developer?

Maybe build something like this:

A framework for identifying regional outbreak and spread of COVID-19 from one-minute population-wide surveys https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.19.20038844v...

helloworldon South Korea's drive-through testing for coronavirus

This is striking: "A nation of 51 million, South Korea has tested about 250,000 people since its outbreak began on Jan. 20, with a daily capacity of 15,000. It has conducted 3,600 tests per million people compared to five per million in the U.S."

helloworldon Clinical features of patients infected with 2019 novel coronavirus

> no Caucasians died during the SARS epidemic in 2003

That's not accurate:

29 March 2003

Dr. Carlo Urbani, an expert on communicable diseases, died today of SARS. Dr. Urbani, worked in public health programs in Cambodia, Laos and Viet Nam. He was based in Hanoi, Viet Nam. Dr. Urbani was 46.

https://www.who.int/csr/sars/urbani/en/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_Urbani

helloworldon Facebook Horizon

I wonder whether those legless avatars fall into the "uncanny valley":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley

helloworldon Large-scale GWAS reveals insights into same-sex sexual behavior

If you have a WSJ subscription, this article provides a good overview:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/research-finds-genetic-links-to...

The study involved people who self-reported whether they had ever had sex with someone of the same sex, not whether they considered themselves gay, lesbian, bisexual or another orientation.

“Behavior versus identity are different components and different pieces of how people think about their sexual behavior,” said Benjamin Neale, a geneticist and member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard University who is one of the study’s senior authors. “That is a really critical aspect to sort of appreciating and understanding how we think about these kind of issues.”

Taking into account the entire contribution of genetic markers that may play a role, the researchers estimated that genetic variation could account for up to 8% to 25% of same-sex sexual behavior in the population studied. But when the researchers pooled all of the identified markers to create a score for an individual person, the genetic variation explained less than 1%, making it practically impossible to predict a person’s sexual orientation or behavior based on their genome.

“It does solidify the fact that genes matter,” said Michael Bailey, a psychology professor at Northwestern University who wasn’t involved in the work. “But it also provides more support for something that we all knew, pretty much—that genes can’t be close to the entire story.”

helloworldon A book from Alan Turing and a mysterious piece of paper

It took a while to get to, but I liked this part:

In modern times, the Y combinator has been made famous by the Y Combinator startup accelerator, named that way by Paul Graham (who had been a longtime enthusiast of functional programming and the LISP programming language—and had written an early web store using it) because (as he once told me) “nobody understands the Y combinator”. (Needless to say, Y Combinator is all about avoiding having companies go to fixed points…)