jpdus

On Zoom you can activate raw, non-preprocessed sound. (I never tried it and don't know whether it works well for music)

This is an optional setting.

The main reasons for Zooms popularity (and in general the most important features of a videoconferencing software) are accessibility and reliability.

Same as with Slack/IRC - privacy is not the most important features in that space. If I have the choice of a working solution with some minor privacy issues and a solution which will never be adopted b/c half of the people will not be able to join or their experience is miserable, I will gladly take the former (except for the most delicate conversations maybe).

(And I am someone who takes privacy serious in most cases...)

The 80% shareholder (which was a co-founder of SAP and ironically a very controversial person in German football) just send a press release out (German):

"Walldorf, 15. März 2020 – Die dievini Hopp BioTech holding GmbH & Co. KG, eine Beteiligungsgesellschaft von SAP-Mitgründer Dietmar Hopp mit Investitionsschwerpunkt in innovative Biotechnologieunternehmen, nimmt Stellung zu Presseberichten über eine vermeintliche exklusive Vergabe eines in der Entwicklung befindlichen Impfstoffs von CureVac gegen das Corona-Virus. dievini ist seit 2005 an der CureVac AG, Tübingen, beteiligt an der sie über 80% der Anteile hält. Zweitgrößter Aktionär ist die Bill-und-Melinda-Gates-Stiftung, die gemeinsam mit CureVac Impfstoffe gegen eine Reihe von Infektionserkrankungen entwickelt.

„Seit wir 2005 dievini gründeten, bin ich davon überzeugt, dass das Verstehen molekularer Zusammenhänge Diagnose und Therapie auch schwerster Erkrankungen für Patienten weltweit transformativ verbessern wird“, sagt Dietmar Hopp. „Dem Ziel, alle Menschen vor Infektionen zu schützen und Patienten weltweit besser therapieren und im besten Fall heilen zu können, bin ich ebenso verpflichtet, wie meiner Absicht, nachhaltige innovative Infrastruktur und Arbeitsplätze in Deutschland zu schaffen. Wenn es uns hoffentlich bald gelingt, einen wirksamen Impfstoff gegen das Corona-Virus zu entwickeln, soll dieser Menschen nicht nur regional sondern solidarisch auf der ganzen Welt erreichen, schützen und helfen können. Ich wäre froh, wenn dies durch meine langjährigen Investitionen aus Deutschland heraus erfolgen würde.“

----

The most important point is the last sentence: If we are sucessful finding a vaccine, it shouldnt be available only regionally but for all people worldwide.

I am a bit perplexed. Haven't almost all randomized/controlled trials shown (e.g. [1]) that there is basically no measurable effect for healthy people? All "positive" stories are relying on observational studies with the usual confounders, right?

EDIT: Look at figure 2 in the Paper. Looks pretty random to me. Result is almost exclusively driven by 4-5 small (<250 participants) and old studies.

[1] https://www.vox.com/2018/10/4/17933880/vitamin-d-health-sun-...

This!

The most important feature for me ist the tab queue, which allows one to open tabs in the background. My whole mobile web-workflow depends on this feature and they did not implement this, which makes Fenix inferior for me despite the improved performance.

If you also depend on this feature, please chime in on Github: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/470

This is outdated information. Most newer studies put R0 >3 (e.g. [1]) and there are many well documentated cases outside of China now which confirm at least partial presymptomatic transmission (German cluster, Signapore Conference, British prisoners).

[1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.10.20021675v...

N. Taleb wrote a very good note [1] on why conventional risk-benefit considerations don't apply in the case of an unknown contagion like NCov19 - the comparison to the seasonal flu is not helpful in these cases (thin-tailed risks vs fat-tailed risks which are an existential threat on a long-enough timeline).

[1] https://www.academia.edu/41743064/Systemic_Risk_of_Pandemic_...

Original submission:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22012763

Really nice, the speed is way better than e.g. Overleaf.

Is there any way to divide the screen horizontally instead of vertically for use with widescreens? Did not find an option at first glance.

This!

I can't believe ANY possible explanation (not even incompetency in this case) except direct or indirect bribery.

Really sad to see more and more of theses cases where Non-Profits sell out (e.g. OpenAI), I wonder whether this is a byproduct of people sozialized in the age of hyper-capitalism and consumerism...

K2 is not in China ;-)

An interesting angle which is underreported in my view is who is responsible for extremely expensive new military aircrafts: (former) pilots, who are now High-Ranking officers. No pilot has any interest in giving up flying and switching to drones/remote aircraft which are clearly the future. My bet would be that the first country which bets 100% on autonomous aircraft will probably be China, where there will be less opposition to such a move. The western countries will follow and the F35 will most likely be the last "big" non-autonomous program (excluding aircraft for special roles).

On an unrelated note: I submitted this article 4 days ago without any discussion [1], does anyone know what the time frame for resubmission on HN nowadays is?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20758128

Ryanair does still use the internal 737 stairs at some airports in Europe.

I challenge anyone who downvote me to provide a sound reasoning why my position is wrong and how nuclear energy on a large scale is viable and more cost efficient than renewables (with storage/distribution costs factored in already!).

Fact is: Even the pro-nuclear lobby did not manage to show how nuclear is competitive anymore. If you totally dismiss external effects and subsidies, sure, nuclear looks attractive on paper. If you start accounting for longterm waste management, safety costs, insurance (this is a biggie! No insurance company in the world will insure a nuclear power plant. This alone shows that the technology can not be commercially viable. Calculations usually just assume zero-cost government guarantees...) and factor in realistic building costs (please look up the last reactor projects in western countries), it becomes clear that (fission) nuclear is not the solution. As said at other places in this thread: Even China, where many of the external effects can be discounted vs the west does not build new nuclear plants on a great scale.

But sure, downvoting is easier than discussing that topic critically or providing any sound arguments in favor of commercial viability of nuclear vs renewables.

Virtually no land use, despite nobody wanting to live besides a nuclear reactor? My argument was that renewables can provide the same unlimited power (and the "constant" part can be done via batteries or other means, given sufficient investment. No other energy source comes even close to nuclear when it comes to "hidden" lifecycle costs. Alone the fact that a nuclear plant is not insurable shows, that nuclear depends on enormous public subsidies and will never be commercially viable on itself.

Interesting that I am getting downvoted without anyone providing any arguments or facts against my narrative.

You are the one being irrational here. Nuclear power is just way too expensive (when done safely at today's standards) and can't compete in any way with renewables, if you start to factor in all associated costs (e.g. insurance, waste management and security,...) which the government/taxpayer usually has to bear.

Nuclear power won't save the planet, but given the political will and investments we have all necessary instruments to get to 100% carbon-free power sources available today (better, cheaper and more sustainable than fission nuclear).

> Even the greediest capitalist executives imaginable would not take a gamble on there being a second wave of problems with that plane.

Well I guess the downvotes happened because this statement seems to be totally unsubstantiated.

Did you see any signal of transparency and accountability at Boeing so far? Any personal consquences?

In my opinion this shows again a flaw of late-stage capitalism. No one in Boeings leadership gains anything from transparency or really "fixing" Boeing´s problems and culture. In the opposite, these steps would cost lots of money and would probably cost the current leadership their job (and bonus). This really is a principal/agent problem and a problem between (not-measureable) long-term goals and (financial) short-term rewards.

From my point of view, its absolutely not understandable how Muilenberg still has his job. Even if the whole development happened before his time, at least the second crash is 100% his responsibility and there is no way a manager with his record would still be in charge in all other western countries (e.g. Europe or Japan).

Unpopular opinion here:

I followed the outrage about Datacamp loosely on Twitter. At first I thought it was about an actual assault, but so far afaik the only thing publicly known is "uninvited contact", on a dancefloor and the victim reported that several months later.

Sexual assualt or abuse is a crime and should be punished and prosecuted. However, if we treat every situation where two people interact physically and have a different understanding of their relationship as sexual assault, there won't be any sexuality without a written consent form in the future anymore and real victims get marginalized at the same time. I don't know if that is really what we should be aiming for.

I don't see Datacamps reaction as inappropriate in this case,at least if there is nothing more to the story behind the curtain. Humans do errors and in most cases everybody should get a second chance. One moment of misjudgment can be enough today to get fired, you name gets burned forever in the Internet and your life can get turned upside down. And I don't know if that helps the victim in any way.

Probably I will be downvoted for that, but I want to make clear again that I don't tolerate this behaviour in any way and I think the industry needs to be more inclusive and diverse. I just think that you have to differentiate and that public shaming is not on all cases a good solution.

This is a huge problem.

Prices and rents are left to "the market", but construction is not at all. Strong rent control should be introduced everywhere and ownership for investment reasons should be massively discouraged (e.g. by strong taxation). On the other hand protection of existing landlords should be reduced to encourage new building. Rent seeking is damaging the economy and the society and only privileged landlords benefit from current conditions.

Unfortunately most economists seem to be biased or are probably benefitting themselves, thus there is no concentrated effort to push for better policies.

Still 502, can't get the page to load.

Yep, definitely true (but his points for other firms like google are directly linked above the article, this I would deny that there is a clear bias).

I have no side in this game (no affiliations to either Google or Apple) but this points about Apple are both true and relevant and thus imo no reason to flag. You can still just ignore the topic.

Flagging just kills the discussion and during recent times this often happened to legit but controversial topics (e.g. OpenAI for-profit announcement was heavily flagged and buried as well).

Wow - regardless of whether one agrees with RMS, alone the fact that this submission has been heavily flagged already (and will thus drop from the frontpage soon) tells you a lot about the power of Apple and their fans here.

HN urgently needs to address the flagging problems, this has been the case for many important but controversial topics recently and leads to a degraded quality of frontpage submissions in my view.

thanks for your reply, and I appreciate that you share your reasoning here.

However, this still sounds incredibly entitled and arrogant to me. Nobody doubts that there are many very smart and capable people working for OpenAI. Are you really expecting to beat the return of the most successful start-ups todate by orders of magnitude and to be THE company developing the first AGI? (And even in this -for me- extremely unlikely case, the cap would most likely don't matter, as if a company would develop an AGI worth trillions the government/UN would have to tax/license/regulate it.)

Come on, you are deceiving yourself (and your employees apparently as well, the Twitter you quoted is a good example). This is a non-profit pivoting into a normal startup.

Edit: Additinally it's almost ironic, that "Open"AI now takes money from Mr. Khosla, who is especially known for his attitude towards "Open". Sorry if I sound bitter, but I was really rooting for you and the approach in general and I am absolutely sure that OpenAI has become something entirely different now :/..

Wow. Screw non-profit, we want to get rich.

Sorry guys, but before you were probably able to get talent which is not (primarily) motivated by money. Now you are just another AI startup. If the cap would be 2x, it could still make sense. But 100x times? That's laughable! And the split board, made up of friends and closely connected people smells like "greenwashing" as well. Don't get me wrong, it's totally ok to be an AI startup. You just shouldn't pretend to be a non-profit then...

I am somewhat disappointed that they stream only hand-picked replays. For a big, announced presentation, they should be at a stage to stream live games (like OpenAI did with Dota).

However, apart from that great work by Deepmind and I am excited to follow the progress in this area.

This is a very hypocritical stance in my opinion.

All medical research need patient data and every newly admitted medicine has to withstand rigourous (data-driven) testing and this did not change with new technology at all.

Only 2 things changed: 1 - Nowadays with GDPR and increased alertness on data protection (which is a good thing in general as the possibilites evolved more quickly than the regulation), people are explicitly asked about these things. 2 - The big internet companies like Google/Facebook (which did not behave well in the past and are thus partially responsible themselves for the public mistrust in these cases) have most experience/talent for the development of ML/AI-based technologies and are deploying this in new areas like medicine.

I don't get all the negativeness here. I vastly prefer Google/Facebook working on medical progress than working on improving ad targeting. Imo they should be encouraged to use their expertise and resources for progress in these fields. IF they are indeed found guilty of breaking promises and harvesting highly-sensitive data, shame on them. But this is not the case here.

With this argument, you should be more upset about Apple.

Google is missing out on the soon-to-be biggest ad market of the world - at least partially due to ethical standards. Apple does earn a significant part of its revenues in China and has no problems with working with the govt there.

(I am not affiliated in any way with either company - just don't understand all the hate against Google)

Its relatively easy. All the big tech crops are paying effectively below 1% of their profits in Europe and are moving almost all of their profits to tax havens. As these companies are very creative when measuring their localized profits, its easier and more fair to impose a tax at the revenue level.

I don't understand all the negative comments here. Look at the big profit margins of all big tech companies (maybe with the exception of Amazon retail) and ask yourself whether a moderate, unavoidable tax is really unjustified or will have negative effects on anyone (except maybe the shareholders). I don't think so and in my opinion tech workers should be a bit more mindful when thinking about these taxation topics. I prefer paying high taxes strongly to further social segregation, which will lead to the development of civil unrest and lower quality of life for everyone sooner or later...

I don't understand the uncommented downvotes here. OP is provocant to make his point which is a valid one.

It IS pretty obvious that the raw, uncontrolled market is not increasing the quality of life for a majority of the population and arguably your luck (your family bought some hectars of land in SV in the 80s? Or even simpler: you were able to go to a good college?) is way more important for your economic situation than your own hard work. This is not healthy for society in the long term and if you are not closing your eyes you see more than enough alarming signs for wrong developments. Better to share some wealth with everyone than being constrained to gated communities and let everyone else fight for meager rest in my opinion.