innomatics

Thanks for the additional links. I guess you would need temperature stable viral RNApol to do direct 'RNA' amplification. Not sure if that exists or if it's even possible due to RNA instability. As you say not so worthwhile due to high errors.

Producing RNA from DNA amplicons (PCR products) makes sense, I'm curious if that is the source of material from in the vaccines, or if it's artificially synthesized?

Would that be a trade secret?

> the emphasis in the wiki article is on DNA, the same basic principles apply with RNA.

This is not my understanding. PCR works to produce DNA because the DNA polymerase enzyme creates DNA copies from DNA templates, and those copies become templates themselves, feeding back into the chain reaction.

I'm not aware of similar enzymes capable of making RNA copies from RNA templates (RNA polymerases use DNA templates AFAIK).

I was imagining the RNA vaccines would have used a fully synthetic oligo production method, to get the extreme purity required. But it might be that some sort of PCR-like amplification process is used. Would love to read more if someone has details.

Thanks for your post and FWIW I don't think your views are crazy, selfish, unsympathetic or offensive at all.

If only the global attention and resources that have gone into the covid crisis could be channelled into the many equally, or more serious issues affecting humanity and the planet today (e.g poverty, oppression, war, over population, pollution, tuberculosis etc.). But they are not the new hot shiny problem, just our boring, faulty and irreplaceable legacy system.

It's nice to believe this, but having a flu jab is only proven to protect yourself. It's not sterilising immunity so you can still become infected, shed virus, and infect others while asymptomatic.

It's quite dangerous if a lot people don't get that the covid vaccines also aren't proved (and are unlikely) to contain transmission. Risk is folks think that we will not longer need to care about hygiene, masks, isolation, quarantine and tracing once most people have been vaccinated.

From a community perspective, no, because AFAIK no vaccine confers sterilising immunity, so my being vaccinated isn't likely to help reduce transmission. I will be very happy to see human studies that prove otherwise. It's be shown that AZD1222-vaccinated macaques still spread virus, with upper respiratory viral loads the same as controls.

From a personal perspective, no, because my age-based health risk, and my local community transmission rates approach zero, so vaccination has negligible upside at this point in time and space for me.

I might see data that could change either perspective and my willingness to be vaccinated. Also if I need to travel internationally I may be willing or forced to do so.

I wonder if the notion of a cover letter is waning in tech recruitment. Did you write a cover letter for those 250+ positions, and if so, I wonder who read it?

When I applied for IC roles in the past I put a fair amount of thought into writing a good cover letter. Now, as a hiring manager I am normally just passed resumes by internal or external recruiters.

The article has me thinking that it might be worth requesting to read the letter, but I believe it's optional, so I worry it might narrow the funnel too much. Also I am conscious that much, if not the majority of the talent pool in my region have English as a second language, so I'm keen not to judge formal writing skills excessively, which could exclude otherwise good informal communicators and coders.

I'm thinking that 85/21,750 or 0.4% of the controls developed the disease (vs 0.04% of those who received vaccine).

It does seem low for the US where you have 3% of the population had disease already in 2020. Perhaps more data came from Germany? Or it could be they measure not just PCR +ve results, but antibody levels and/or severe symptoms?

It is great news.

I didn't see the case numbers but I've inferred to arrive at 90% that there were 9 cases in vaccinated group vs 85 in controls. (95% C.I. 80-99%)

Very interested to see forthcoming results from competitors that don't face the -80 degrees issue.

This confused me as well. I didn't know that there was the ENV command for dockerfiles. It never occurred to me that someone would want to use that, and certainly not to put a secret in a plaintext dockerfile.

Seems such an obvious tip first up that it put me off reading the rest of the article.

B3 overdose is dangerous if you have susceptibility to gout.

This happened to me after I inadvertently megadosed by consuming a knock-off Berocca drink containing something like 10x RDI.

That was over 10 years ago. I have not had a gout attack since.

Edited: Risk is actually for Vit B3 (Niacin). The drink I had contained massive amounts of B12, B3 and others.

https://www.mayoclinic.org/drugs-supplements-niacin/art-2036...

Obviously the difference is between 'customer has placed order' and 'customer will buy'. Great salespeople will use their energy and skill to achieve the latter with high probability of conversion. They do not need to hound the customer about signing/paying. They have closed and move to the next.

The biggest difference between sales and engineering is the concept of closing.

Engineering or research work is never completed. We are always improving and perfecting the machine.

Closing needs to be thought of binary. This doesn't necessarily mean via contract. Good sales people will close the sale well before anything need to be signed. An expert sales person understands the customer's psychology and leaves them thinking of no other option than to purchase from you.

In technical sales it pays to be knowledgeable and understand the customer's objectives. But even smart buyers and not immune to subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, closing techniques. If you don't employ aggressive closing strategies at the right opportunities, your competition will beat you to it.

I worked in tech sales for couple of years and did just OK. My style was a little too far on the consultative side and I realised I lacked the killer instinct to close hard often enough. Possibly not all industries are as competitive as the one I was in (PCR equipment/reagents). But I decided my personality was just better suited to tinkering so I became a coder instead.

Another famous recording which for me induces a dissociative state:

Sitting In a Room - Alvin Lucier https://youtu.be/bhtO4DsSazc

It annoyed me when I wanted to see the list for a single language.

I like this idea. Also I am looking at a separate GraphQL stack alongside Django for flexible access points.

Related I worked on a real project that used a database of recipes and nutritional information to build varied meal plans to meet certain dietary requirements and goals.

We used a linear solver and added a lot heuristics e.g. what time of day certain recipes were 'acceptible' suggestions. We also needed a lot variants e.g. proportions to meet kJ targets.

Can you elaborate on how keybase put you in that position?

If by 'recovering' you mean recover after a lost key, then I'd regard that as a feature not a bug!

Am looking for a keybase alternative now.

If they had a transparent build server which published directly to the stores (ala fastlane) that would go a long way.

Folks could see builds running when code is pushed and the app versions being released soon after.

So VDI is prevalent in the severe disease, but it's also prevalant in the general population.

Numbers in the study are very low and no significant correlation was found.

Lots of interesting postulation in the discussion. Could be worth looking at in a larger study.

Now cue the press stories, and panic buying...

Yes, which is wonderful. I am wondering what caused the large 2016 spike. Another interesting thing is the effect any behaviour changes are going to have on regular flu numbers. It's already looking to have a big effect in then southern hemisphere.

Agree with your points although the link was blocked for me.

Do you think that a very mild flu season could possibly have made this outbreak worse?

Euromomo data is really interesting to me because of these two points: 1) the spike in death rate caused by Covid-19 this year is of the same magnitude as the normal flu season spike in 2016 2) this year's flue season spike was low compared to recent years. Maybe due to a warmer summer?

One interpretation could be that a large number of vulnerable people escaped death from regular ILIs this European season, only to sadly succome to this pandemic.

Will check it out thanks, we had evaluated ABBYY but it didn't suit. Does your product do something like key value or table detection?

A business that invests in building a machine that reads data, produced by a 3rd party machine, using format intended for lay humans to read, is not investing in the right tech IMO.

Small-mediums should be looking to consolidate buying through a few good suppliers and working with them directly to automate process, or adopting interchange formats.

Problem for some small-business is the cost (process changes, licencing etc) of adopting interchange formats and working with large vendors is prohibitive at their scale e.g. the airline BSP system.

I agree that solving the problem generally i.e. replacing an accounts payable staff person capable of processing arbitrary invoice documents will be comparable to self-driving in difficulty.

If a company deals with a lot of a single type of PDF, then the approach could be economical. I am actually involved in a project looking at doing this with AWS Textract.

Hi Justin here from March 2 Zero.

We are aiming to create a simple site that provides challenges for folks to reduce their carbon footprint.

It's centered around the month of March, similar to some other calendar-based charities/fund-raisers which are popular here down under.

At this stage it's a basic prototype, but we are trying to build momentum by getting some interest, participation and feedback. We are also seeking funding to achieve nonprofit status, and then to build out the functionally and content for global reach (is currently AU-centric)

Thanks for checking it out. We appreciate any constructive comments re: the site or pledges. Although prefer not to encourage general climate change debate here.

Any offers of voluntary assistance in terms of UX and FE engineering will be most gratefully received.

Both are hard problems. However the folding properties of both nucleic acid and proteins is where the complexity lies.

It's the 3D structure, not the sequences so much of these molecules that determine intra- extra- and inter-cellular behaviour.

So we'll never fully understand the brain until we understand the genome and proteome.

>does anybody really enjoy a stiff, snappy UI?

Yes many do. Especially the snappy part. I've removed a lot of eye candy animations coded by well meaning devs at the request of users who care about nothing more that speed.

Animations can be a nice first impression, but if you use the app daily e.g for work or data entry you know how to navigate and you want as close to instant response as possible.

Maybe a smart pattern is animate in the early days for new users then transition into a more jarring and snappier world as they become regulars.

Melodramatic... perhaps. I don't see it as brain to brain. Eyes are clearly required to stare at the yes or no pulses for the sender's.

Seems like an extremely low bandwidth way to digitise 'thoughts'.

Also a bit skeptical about the receipt of this single bit of information being directly into the brain. Essentialy zapping part of the brain to cause a perceived flash. It's and incredible gap still toward encoding something as complex as a real thought.

I think it's fine. The author might show up otherwise others with interest in the area might reply.

Great post and thanks for sharing your learnings.

A couple of quick questions:

Was the 25TB raw data gathered from a single human genome?

What would be the size in bytes of a unique genomic fingerprint once raw data is all fully processed into high confidence base values? (including non-coding regions)

If we just look at coding regions and further compress by only looking at SNPs, how many bytes is that?

Considering that each base has ~2B of information... it would be super interesting to know how much space it takes to describe our uniqueness!