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user_50123890

242 karma · joined September 7, 2019

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user_50123890··on Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer
Because good senior programmers are rare (as can be observed if you post a job listing).

Most of this stuff comes from students / junior developers, where yes, they probably visit stack overflow every 20 minutes

user_50123890··on Trials begin on lozenge that rebuilds tooth enamel
You're not supposed to eat the xylitol, just get it onto your teeth. So use xylitol toothpaste.
user_50123890··on Has the era of overzealous cleaning finally come to an end?
A 100% effective "behavioural" covid vaccine (which also works for ALL other respitory diseases):

Don't be indoors with other people.

user_50123890··on OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin
A new human doesn't come out of thin air, evolution has "trained" them with billions of inputs for billions of years.
user_50123890··on The evidence which suggests that Covid-19 is not a naturally evolved virus [pdf]
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6178078/

Just look at the prior chinese coronavirus-related studies, they did antibody tests in villages near bat caves for SARS-like coronaviruses, some of villagers had antibodies in 2015 despite no reported SARS infections ever near the area.

Simplest conclusion: Zoonotic diseases sometimes jump from bats to humans in Chinese rural areas. The case clusters stay inside the isolated communities and stop naturally due to low population and lack of super-spreader events that can kickstart an epidemic.

In 2019 it happened again, but this time a villager who was infected visited Wuhan => pandemic

user_50123890··on A doctor who championed hand-washing and briefly saved lives (2015)
Handwashing is overrated IMO. Yes, it's important for doctors and nurses(who touch dozens of sick humans a day), people who are in contact with animals, and small kids who don't have any concept of hygiene.

But for the average adult, they just do not have that many harmful bacteria or viruses randomly on their hands.

This caused some major issues with the Coronavirus. Eg. if you googled anything related to it in march, the search results displayed a "wash your hands message" even though the virus is spread by droplets AKA sharing air indoors with an infected person.

I can only imagine how many unnecessary infections and deaths this caused when people thought they were safe if they just washed their hands often. To this day, I'd say about half of the population has no clue how respitory diseases spread.

user_50123890··on Ask HN: How do you deal with social isolation while working from home?
Video games in the evenings with friends, with voice chat.
user_50123890··on Why the home-working boom could tumble London's skyscrapers
I hope we do start to go back to the more decentralized way of living, where smart highly educated workers don't concentrate in the largest cities and instead live all over the country. This is how it used to be 50 years ago.
user_50123890··on FreeDVDBoot – Hacking the Playstation 2 through its DVD player
Isn't it interesting how these sort of exploits exist for probably every hardware/software out there, just that they are never discovered? Since the amount of people with the knowhow for reverse engineering, discovering, and actually building something out of the exploit is so miniscule.
user_50123890··on Sensors detect rise in nuclear particles on Baltic Sea
? Nuclear accidents don't come out of thin air, they are caused by humans, some countries/areas have higher risks of accidents, and most areas have zero risk.

Russia is definitely a high risk area (if not THE high risk area), considering their soviet legacy of ancient nuclear power plants etc.

user_50123890··on Sensors detect rise in nuclear particles on Baltic Sea
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EbdAa9qXQAYji-z?format=jpg&name=...

Spoiler: 99% chance it's from Russia.

user_50123890··on California sets Covid-19 daily record, Bay Area cumulative total passes 20k
https://images.says.com/uploads/story_source/source_image/75...

Looks like prime batcave-like conditions for coronavirus spread.

user_50123890··on California sets Covid-19 daily record, Bay Area cumulative total passes 20k
Coronavirus deaths lag new cases by about 3 weeks
user_50123890··on Today’s developers don’t need what the App Store offers
I doubt there are really too many of those. At the most, I'd say under 50k.

The real reason for the fee is just to stop spammers on the App store. It probably blocks around 99% of them, without the fee I'd wager the appstore would be unusable.

user_50123890··on Wuhan hospital traffic, search engine data indicate virus activity in Fall 2019
Ehh.. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2010-07-01%202...

Seems that people only started searching SARS in december by which the new coronavirus was already public knowledge or at least public rumor

user_50123890··on Did Japan Just Beat the Virus Without Lockdowns or Mass Testing?
Cleanliness does not really matter that much. There is little evidence for mass surface transmission.

This is a disease that is spread by breathing in air contaminated by a infected person coughing or talking.

user_50123890··on Did Japan Just Beat the Virus Without Lockdowns or Mass Testing?
Other Asian countries are seeing the exact same results though? The virus is basically gone in all of them, the average person doesn't have to worry about it.

It seems only China is being overly cautious, implementing lockdown-type measures on a Russian border city with 130 confirmed cases

user_50123890··on Did Japan Just Beat the Virus Without Lockdowns or Mass Testing?
Yes, everybody wears one. Masks are popular even during normal times.
user_50123890··on Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?
Don't care, i'll take a good web app over a shitty native app any day.

Since native apps take much longer to develop and the UI toolkits are stuck in the 90s, it's pretty much given nowadays that new ones are shitty compared to the equivalent web one.

user_50123890··on Nearly 40% of Icelanders are using a Covid app, but it hasn’t helped much
This reassures the hypothesis that you probably won't catch the virus from a brief contact in a grocery store or similar if you keep your distance.

Infections happen within families, and spread from one family to another by friends/coworkers. The infected people should be easily able to list all exposed out by name.

An exception is of course mass indoors public events that are forbidden now. This is where a contact tracing app would probably prove to be the most useful.

user_50123890··on 40-60% of the unexposed produce Covid-19 antibodies due to earlier cold exposure [pdf]
What do you think would happen to the economy if we let the virus run free through the population, and eventually everyone would be too scared to leave their house and quit showing up to their job?
user_50123890··on 40-60% of the unexposed produce Covid-19 antibodies due to earlier cold exposure [pdf]
Yes, look at Greece, they implemented extreme measures. As a result, they basically had no issues at all with the virus compared to neighbouring Italy and Turkey.
user_50123890··on 40-60% of the unexposed produce Covid-19 antibodies due to earlier cold exposure [pdf]
Surely almost all elderly people should have antibodies then due to decades of exposure to the other coronaviruses?
user_50123890··on Doctors are tweeting about coronavirus to make facts go viral
Whether you get infected or not is a game of chance. There are a lot of factors affecting the probability:

* Being indoors during contact (increases)

* Duration of contact (every minute increases)

* Physical distance between contacts (every meter decreases)

* Amount of contacts (every person increases)

* Wearing masks (decreases)

* Washing hands (decreases)

* Coughing, speaking, singing during contacts (increases)

Meeting people close to you ticks basically every probability-increasing checkbox in the list.

user_50123890··on Doctors are tweeting about coronavirus to make facts go viral
I said mostly. Yes basic surgical/cloth masks do protect the wearer a small bit, but the air you inhale has to come from somewhere, and with a surgical mask that air is not filtered.
user_50123890··on Doctors are tweeting about coronavirus to make facts go viral
How about tweeting these,

1. The virus mostly spreads through BREATHING/TALKING/COUGHING.

2. 80% of infections come from FRIENDS/FAMILY. Stop going to meet them unnecessarily and spending hours together indoors.

3. Masks mostly don't help you, they help the people AROUND you.

I'd say the average person would be much better prepared against the virus with these three facts.

user_50123890··on As France reopens, just 4.4% of population infected by coronavirus
^ herd immunity is a 19th century solution to a pandemic.
user_50123890··on India coronavirus: The 'mystery' of low Covid-19 death rates
Hahaha people on Scandinavian social media think _South Korea_ and _Hong Kong_ are faking their case numbers and refuse to believe the virus is actually easily possible to contain.

Somehow lots of them believe their governments are acting competently and that herd immunity is "the only way to stop the epidemic".

This virus is probably the first visible sign that Western countries have fallen from their grace, and that the Asian century has begun.

user_50123890··on Seattle’s leaders let scientists take the lead, New York’s did not
Sweden has about 10 times more deaths than their neighbours. Oh and this is with 80% of the population in VOLUNTARY lockdown, their bars and restaurants are open sure but they're empty.

The US would probably be at over a million deaths by now if life had continued normally without lockdowns.

user_50123890··on Seattle’s leaders let scientists take the lead, New York’s did not
Imagine it's February 2020, multiple european countries decided to start softly locking down due to the scary news from Asia, even though they have barely any cases. Fast forward a week.

Your argument would basically be saying at that point "China has much more cases even though they have stricter restrictions, which means restrictions don't work!"

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