Hacker News Reader

b0skon Brain imaging before and after Covid-19 in UK Biobank

> At this point, the odds of getting COVID are small.

That's because the herd around you has been vaccinated. So you are OK with others getting vaccinated for your benefit but wouldn't do your part to benefit the herd. Awesome!

Maybe your post is parody. Can't really tell.

b0skon Current RNA vaccines protect against worrying coronavirus variants

are you sure about the infecting the remaining 40%. In every article I read, they specifically mention re-infections in many cases.

b0skon Current RNA vaccines protect against worrying coronavirus variants

Not necessarily [1]. COVID vaccines particularly give you far higher neutralization titers than a prior infection.

[1] A glaring counterexample to your hypothesis is Brazil (Manuas) where prior infections (as high as 60%) didn't stop the P1 variant from ripping through.

b0skon Brazil Rejects the Gamaleya Vaccine

Here's a follow-up post on the behavior by the Sputnik V Twitter account https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/04/28/ru...

Greg Lowe is a very respected commentator on all things vaccines.

b0skon Supreme Court to Decide First-Ever Gun-Carry Case

A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (And Some Bears) - Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling

b0skon Richard Stallman Removed from the GCC Steering Committee

Ah. The Paradox of Tolerance defense. "If my intolerance is not allowed, are you folks really tolerant?"

https://miro.medium.com/max/1200/1*TnDoAk0BjC7x4OuBISbYCw.jp...

b0skon Stallman's return denounced by the EFF, Tor, Mozilla, and the creator of Rust

I discovered the same thing. It seems literally a clash of 2 cultures.

b0skon Red Hat statement about RMS’s return to the Free Software Foundation board

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/diversity/default.aspx

i think you should write your own OS

b0skon Goroutines are not significantly lighter than threads

Easier to reason about. easier to communicate. Threads are a low level primitive. the goroutines seemed to be designed with concurrency in mind.

b0skon There Is No Such Thing as “White” Math

It's also the "most racist document he has ever read". That's kinda fantastic in itself.

b0skon My tutorial and take on C++20 coroutines

Not necessarily. Concurrency is generally not parallelism.

Coroutines help solve IO-bound issues - a long networking API call doesn't block your program. You can continue doing other things. The side-effect of which may use all your cores efficiently but that's not the primary goal.

b0skon What’s Wrong With The Honeywell Humidifier

Without a humidifier, you can actually feel the dry air and it gets pretty uncomfortable at night. The skin looks dry and flaky in the morning. If you happen to catch a cold, your symptoms get worse because your mucus tends to dry out (the only remedy is to then go and stand in a high humidity bathroom for some-time or inhale vapors. You need it for at-least 2-3 peak winter months in the eastern part of the US.

b0skon Covid Took My Grandfather. But It Wasn’t What Killed Him

Maybe if our COVID response was like Germany, a lot of lives would have been saved, like her grandfather. Why isn’t it the fault of Trump who was focused on his re-election and did the bare minimum?

“no matter how good the government is..” classic strawman. it’s like saying no matter how good the vaccine is, there would be one preventable death, so why blame anti-vaxxers.

b0skon I’m Not yet Ready to Abandon the Possibility of America

LOL at mentioning all those things as a factor that "drove" you to Trump. No, you drove yourself to Trump.

Trump is literally worse in every point you listed.

b0skon How to Interview Engineers

I believe it is satire. He might have written a genius article that straddles the Poe's law line.

b0skon Trump administration announces overhaul of H1B visa program requiring higher pay

It's the rules!

b0skon Ask HN: What is a science fact that blew your mind when you learned it?

A ripple in a pool simply displaces the ball up and down vertically. The ball doesn't move along the wave

b0skon The CDC lost control of the coronavirus pandemic, then the agency disappeared

This is classic starve the beast. There is one party that continuously tries to gut government institutions - like putting Betsy Devos to head education, Wheeler to head EPA etc etc and then has the gall to say that government institutions don’t work

Who gutted the pandemic response unit?

b0skon Trump signs executive order targeting protections for social media companies

Absolutely. To get a slice of that thinking. Here's Rush Limbaugh:

(backstory: Trump has been repeatedly peddling an absolutely baseless claim that his TV critic Joe Scarborough murdered his employee couple of decades back. Her husband is now pleading that Trump is causing irreparable damage to their family). Anyway, here's Limbaugh:

“The thing here is when you get to Trump and his conspiracy theories, he does it in a really clever way,” he proclaimed. “And this is where people don’t get the subtlety of Trump because they don’t think he has the ability to be subtle. Trump never says that he believes these conspiracy theories that he touts. He’s simply passing them on.”

Asked by his producer whether he thinks “Trump cares whether Scarborough murdered anybody or not,” Limbaugh replied that the president doesn’t care but is tweeting about it “because it’s out there.”

“So Trump is just throwing gasoline on a fire here, and he’s having fun watching the flames—and he’s having fun watching these holier-than-thou leftist journalists react like their moral sensibilities have been forever rocked and can never recover,” he concluded.

b0skon Things I hate about Rust

I know exactly what you feel. I am kind of in the same boat (I am a C++ developer trying out rust). One example is the lifetime specification makes it look like code from the code golf languages i.e. "&'a mut"

However, this sense is reducing every-time I see an example of some idiomatic Rust code. I appreciate that they've addressed a lot of C++ pain points.

1. Traits are awesome. (Simon Brand: How Rust gets polymorphism right - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSlBhAOLtFA)

2. The lazy pipeline styled programming is idiomatic and produces optimal assembly. (Ranges in C++20 )

3. Extremely powerful enums. Straight out of functional langs.

These are only a few of the things top of my mind but it makes me appreciate Rust more and more.

b0skon Freeman Dyson Has Died

the ridiculously hot summers in Australasia resulting in bushfires, famine and drought... seas taking over the cities are all demonstrable effects of climate change.

Did he live in UK? Yea the winter was milder I guess.

b0skon Coronavirus – The Outlook Has Worsened

I have seen a lot of FUD, bordering on cheerleading, from especially crypto guys. My cynical mind says that anything that weakens the present investment options is an opportunity for crypto to enter the fray (and the guys to make as much money in the interim)

b0skon Ask HN: What do top engineers you know do that others don't?

They have a great mental model of the inner workings on the product. Even for a part of a code they haven't seen in a long time. When you debug code with such a person, you notice that they seamlessly translate the piece of code on the screen to the mental model and back (it probably takes hours for Jr engineers to piece those together). Neo deciphering the matrix is a good analogy.

b0skon C++ Patterns: The Badge

This is pretty much the PassKey idiom

b0skon FCC Chairman Still Receiving Threats

Awesome doublespeak byline. "As Ajit Pai liberates the Internet"

should be followed by "and gifts it to his corporate overlords"

b0skon Ask HN: Is there a new habit you cultivated recently that is really paying off?

That's only during the initial "burn-in", you feel fatigued when your body is adjusting. (not a keto guy, just interested in researching about it"

b0skon Tesla in fatal California crash was on Autopilot

Is it wrong to hold technology to a higher standard?

b0skon U.S. To Ban Laptops in All Cabins of Flights from Europe

And this is exactly what the Bannon wing of the admin wants.

b0skon Trump Wants Tax Plan to Cut Corporate Rate to 15%

Awesome. Let's cut it down to 0%.

Why did you remove "snowflakes" from your post?

b0skon Ask HN: What are good reads for designing APIs?

a bunch of API design guidelines flow from Scott Meyer's famous maxim "Make interfaces easy to use correctly and hard to use incorrectly."

http://www.aristeia.com/Papers/IEEE_Software_JulAug_2004_rev...