The W.H.O. director said 4 days ago "Covid-19 does not transmit as efficiently as influenza" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22488862). So, I'm also confused and unsure how to rectify this.
I saw that thread as well and there were so many comments about how he cannot be trusted and that they are an institution bought by the Chinese.
I don't know. I might just be horribly, horribly naive. That is not meant to be sarcastic, but an actual possibility. But I really do feel like if we cannot trust institutions like the WHO, then we have zero facts and everyone can just come up with their own facts/form their own beliefs about this disease. I guess the one thing everyone is on the same page about is that we should wash our hands more frequently ...
It appears China did actually donate $20 million to the WHO[1], but I'm not sure what this means. I've seen claims that they've walked back statements immediately following the donations, and whether or not that's true seems to be mostly opinion. I'm sure it influenced the WHO but how much is difficult to say.
Maybe I'm grossly naive too, but it seems incredibly myopic to assume that everything coming out of the WHO is now immediately suspect when the facts are pretty clear that we just don't know much about this virus and probably won't for quite some time. There have been one or two early papers coming out questioning how transmissible the virus is, but I think the data is just too limited.
Without the World Health Organization, we're left with the CDC... and not much else.
FWIW the Gates Foundation was also going to donate $20 million to the WHO[2].
HN can be very disappointing. Software developers in general can be disappointing because we usually have enough information to make us dangerous and we also succumb to conspiracy theories.
WHO currently represents the scientific consensus.
I'd rather be on the side of the scientific consensus rather than entertain unfounded accusations of corruption promoted by random weirdos on YouTube.
one of the features of influenza is the neuraminidase protien [sialidase].
our cells have a "fuzz" of molecules around them refered to as a glycocalyx, and the influenza virus can digest its way through the glycocalyx, using the neuraminidase.
coronavirus doesnt have this feature to assist in fusion and entry.
That's an impressive and surprising stat I've never heard before, and really puts the prospect of nuclear energy in perspective. Can you provide a source for this?
My understanding is that out of 3,500 mosquito species, only about 40 transmit malaria. Most of what I've read from experts implies they're not sure that mosquitoes play any biologically important role at all, and it seems like if there is some role (other than killing humans), the other 99% of non-eradicated mosquito species could fill in that gap.
In my (decidedly non-expert) opinion, that's good enough to start making moves towards eradicating the mosquito-causing species.
Obscurity seems like useful security here. IIUC it shouldn't be possible to e.g. trick self-driving cars with noisy signs, unless you have a copy of the classifier to train against. Thinking about ATMs, you could train against it as a black box, repeatedly inserting different patterns of noise? But it seems probably infeasible if you need to do a lot of iterations.
It also suggests that people concerned about adversarial attacks shouldn't use off-the-shelf pretrained classifiers, where attacks can be trained offline in advance. Similar to hashing algorithms and rainbow tables, maybe a practice of "salting" an off-the-shelf classifier could be effective in dodging attacks.
True. Also, just having unconnected systems that use different types of features / heuristics should be enough to at least pull the car over when they wildly disagree over what to do.
To make that more concrete, there are environmental externalities that no one is paying on gas, but whose cost is real. The first recent source I found on google [1] pegs the externalities at $3.80 per gallon of gas, which would more than double the cost of gas (in the US) if factored in.
More directly, if you drive your vehicle 100k miles at 20 MPG, that's $20,000 in environmental harm you're creating and passing on to be someone else's problem. To me, that makes electric cars (and other alternatives) seem more attractive.
AFAIK Lytro's new play is into the cinematic VR space.
They're working on a light field camera and stack that they advertise will allow the viewer to don a VR headset and view a live-action scene with 6 DOF, so long as the viewer doesn't move their head terribly far.
It was hard to find good stats with quick googling, but this old source[1] suggests that blood clots during flights are the greater risk, killing at least 2,000 people in the UK per year. I suspect that keeping a seatbelt off while cruising lets you shift around more mid flight and would give a small decrease in the frequency of clots.
You don't need to wear it tight (like you do with a car seat belt), we're not talking about tens of G accelerations like in a car crash. All you need is for it to prevent you from flying up out of your seat.
Dissenting opinion: I owned a Super Feeder before upgrading to the feeder pictured in the original story. My cat was able to produce food from the super feeder continuously, just by lightly smacking the tall column on the top. Perhaps the kibble my cat eats is below the minimum supported size?
The new PetSafe feeder is better: it will produce a little food when kicked, but it will only drop out a bit of the next meal from the top of the ramp; in contrast, the super feeder could drain its entire reservoir through continual knocking. I also find the PetSafe a better machine in other regards (battery operated, much larger reservoir, easier to program a serving by volume).
I do think the super feeder is more hackable though, so if you're looking to do metalwork maybe it's the better fit.
huh. usually a solid rap will drop a bit of loose stuff from our super feeder, but a second one doesn't drop anything more. basically behaves as you're saying your petsafe does.
> Perhaps the kibble my cat eats is below the minimum supported size?
i do think it has some issues with sufficiently small kibble. i noticed a bit of increase in portion size variability when we moved to a smaller kibble.
did you have any luck with reducing the gate opening?
> I do think the super feeder is more hackable though
controlling it by applying power is certainly convenient. i've got an rpi which dispenses on a schedule, and lets us hit a web page to dump out some more food when the cats are complaining.
