Hacker News Reader

tobesseboton New UK data laws could be incompatible with GDPR in the EU

This is a point you can make, but it's distinct from sovereignty being infringed. If Parliament is sovereign, it can decide to give away powers, no?

tobesseboton New UK data laws could be incompatible with GDPR in the EU

The UK Parliament ratified the Treaty? How is its sovereignty violated by something it itself agreed to?

tobesseboton In Response to My first impressions of Web3

This is the dilemma in a nutshell. There are lots of incredibly smart people working in the web3 space who are aware of its limitations, but for every one of those, there are 1000 people just trying to make as much money as possible.

tobesseboton Interview with CEO of Flexport: Supply chain crunch, modern logistics

IIRC this is exactly what the government has been doing, they're trying to find as much space as possible near LA.

Interesting podcasts for more background:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-25/the-white...

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/gene-seroka-on-the-log...

tobesseboton Macron says France will build new nuclear energy reactors

In theory yes, in practice...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)#Flamanvi...

tobesseboton TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant

Munich does have Infineon as well and it's closer to lots of the eventual customers in the automobile industry.

tobesseboton CureVac fails in pivotal Covid-19 vaccine trial with 47% efficacy

Should be a good start.

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/part-2-reverse-engineering...

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source...

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/curevac-vaccine-and-wonder...

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/genetic-code-of-covid-19-v...

tobesseboton Poll: Only 18 Percent of Germans Feel Free to Voice Views in Public (2019)

Good point, however the more important question is what is meant by "careful".

tobesseboton Poll: Only 18 Percent of Germans Feel Free to Voice Views in Public (2019)

The precise question was:

"Would you say that you are free to express your opinion in public or do you have to be careful with certain or many topics?" („Würden Sie sagen, man kann seine Meinung in der Öffentlichkeit frei äußern oder muss man bei einigen oder vielen Themen vorsichtig sein?“)

As a German, I believe that I am free to express my opinion, nevertheless I would say that there are obviously many topics of discussion where one has to be careful just because there is lots of potential to be misunderstood.

How am I supposed to answer this poll?

tobesseboton Covid: US backs waiver on vaccine intellectual property

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/02/02/my...

This is about mRNA vaccines, but similar things exist for viral vector vaccines as well. Technology transfer, bioreactor bags, fill-finish capacity, all of these things are bottlenecked till next year basically.

tobesseboton Covid: US backs waiver on vaccine intellectual property

They rightly fear that in 2-3 years, when the pandemic is likely over everywhere and other people have figured out how to commercialize the IP, they won't be the only ones producing their vaccines.

This isn't going to help India or anyone in the short term and there'll be more than enough doses for every person on Earth by next year. Why should they not retain the IP rights to make a profit on new generations that need to be vaccinated or potential booster shots? The manufacturing capacity will have been built up so scarcity won't be a problem at that point.

tobesseboton US agencies call for pause in Johnson & Johnson vaccine

J&J uses a very rare human adenovirus, AZ uses a more common chimpanzee adenovirus. J&J also has the so-called 2PP modification on the Spike protein compared with the AZ vaccine. Good writeup here: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/genetic-code-of-covid-19-v...

tobesseboton Israeli study finds 94% drop in symptomatic Covid-19 cases with Pfizer vaccine

I think you'd be seeing some improvements as we are seeing some upward adjustments in production capacity projections on a 3-6 month timeframe now that everyone is spending so much to get additional doses because of political pressure, but it wouldn't be nearly enough to change the situation drastically as some have been claiming.

tobesseboton MuZero: Mastering Go, chess, shogi and Atari without rules

I mean they pretty much solved protein folding this year...

tobesseboton Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

Third-party foundations finding legitimate instances of sexual abuse of children is going to be incredibly rare because how would you ever tell 18 and 17-year-olds apart? Facebook has much more information available to them and they are aggressively checking their platform for it, that's why they find so many instances.

tobesseboton Wall Street Begins Trading Water Futures as a Commodity

Thanks for the addition!

tobesseboton Wall Street Begins Trading Water Futures as a Commodity

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03784...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0960310011008808...

Futures markets do increase spot market efficiency.

tobesseboton German Made State Malware Company FinFisher Raided

It does if that's the only standard you apply in choosing to whom you deliver a product. If you sell to despotic regimes and not to Israel, you're criticism of Israel is anti-semitic.

tobesseboton Top EU court overturns US data transfer agreement in Facebook case

US-EU data agreements are also about geopolitics.

tobesseboton Dueling Scar

Bierjunge!

tobesseboton Preliminary result of the Gangelt, Germany Covid-19 case cluster study [pdf]

For now.

tobesseboton Study: No evidence of efficacy of hydroxychloroquine in hospitalized patients

Independent of whether that is actually right, where did I consider them to be connected in this discussion? I'm not even inferring a political motive, I'm just stating that it is a dumb thing to say.

tobesseboton Study: No evidence of efficacy of hydroxychloroquine in hospitalized patients

I can personally discount everything he says, that doesn't make it any less legitimate to say that the President of the United States shouldn't hold press conferences in which he over-hypes the proven effectiveness of certain drugs during a pandemic.

Otherwise anyone can just claim anything whenever they want without any proof whatsoever.

tobesseboton Study: No evidence of efficacy of hydroxychloroquine in hospitalized patients

The problem wasn't that Trump encouraged trying it, but that he clearly exaggerated what we knew about its effects and continued to do so for a long time even after having been confronted about it.

tobesseboton Senate Stock Watcher

This seems like it would suffer from the principal-agent problem.

tobesseboton YC Summer 18 ( Invites / Rejections )

Nope, this is agonizing.

tobesseboton The rich are hoarding economic growth

Right. The economy has a fixed amount of assets that generate money. Oh, wait.

tobesseboton Startup School 9: Alex Schultz, How to Grow

Really appreciated this one. He obviously repeated some of the key things from his talk in the last one, but still had very valuable new insights. Can't say that about all of them, Aaron Levie's talk even had the same joke about college dropouts in it.

tobesseboton British business ‘benefits massively from EU’

Norway and Switzerland are in the EEA and Schengen, so it doesn't really matter whether they are in the EU or out of it, they benefit. They have to pay into the EU without any representation though. Not the best deal in my eyes. Note that both have agreed to Schengen, which has dramatically eased

Iceland and Greece have had economic trouble, but because of vastly different reasons (insert any link to Paul Krugman analyses of the European debt crisis here). The Troika is also not a product of the EU, it is a product of the Euro and the lack of a fiscal oversight complementing the monetary oversight (ECB).

Stay in. There is no chance of this kind of stuff happening in the UK because you aren't in the Euro.

tobesseboton Understanding Growth, Part 1

True, but the counterpoint would be that we don't need to stay on this planet. It is at least possible that we can sustain growth until we are multi-planetary.