Hacker News Reader

woke_neolibon Antibiotics damage the colonic mucus barrier in a microbiota-independent manner

Two distinct classes of antibiotics (neomycin and vancomycin) seem to induce ER stress in colonic cells which decreases mucus production and increases risk of bacterial inflammation etc. The point is that there appears to be a direct effect on the host mouse physiology. There are other classes of antibiotics that do not have this effect, phage would likely be one of them (there is a theory that phage provided a persistent immunity by dwelling in the mucus).

woke_neolibon GeneGPT, a tool-augmented LLM for bioinformatics

The repo more or less just constructing a prompt to explain the APIs available and how to use them, wrapped up in CLIs. They include some evaluation tasks, which I guess they wanted to be repeatable, but not sure this warrants a paper -- this should be a GPT in the OpenAI marketplace.

edit: it is! https://chat.openai.com/g/g-HvvFt9ohw-genegpt

woke_neolibon Ferret: A Multimodal Large Language Model

Apple apparently uses Google Cloud, so it's that or TPUs!

woke_neolibon Ask HN: I’m an FCC Commissioner proposing regulation of IoT security updates

What makes IoT devices special, and warrants carve outs for security / vulnerabilities?

I guess I am not surprised there are security issues with these devices, because I think of most of them as coming from small companies, and wonder what the impact would be on the IoT space if only large players can work through more regulation.

That said, I can't decide if I am more concerned about my Wyze camera sending data where I don't want it to, than my water heater leaking it's current temperature (implicating whether I am home or not).

woke_neolibon Covid drug drives viral mutations – and now some want to halt its use

Phage is short for bacteriophage. They are viruses that attack bacteria. As far as I know there are not viruses that target other viruses, except as a side effect - the viral life cycle is dependent on a host, and a coronavirus has little to offer a bacteriophage. Similarly, antibiotics target bacteria, not viruses. Antivirals often have very different mechanisms of action.

woke_neolibon Covid vaccine makers commit to not seek approval until complete Phase III trials

They did not actually commit to finishing the clinical trials.

> The companies did not rule out seeking an emergency authorization of their vaccines, but promised that any potential coronavirus vaccine would be decided based on “large, high quality clinical trials” and that the companies would follow guidance from regulatory agencies like the Food and Drug Administration.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/08/world/covid-19-coronaviru...

woke_neolibon Why San Francisco is in trouble – highly compensated city employees

It's wonderful that city employees make competitive salaries. I wish they were held accountable when they failed to do their job.

woke_neolibon Covid-19: What do we know about “long Covid”?

The reports of pulmonary, neurological, and cardiac damage are pretty troubling.

Ed Yong's Atlantic article about long-haulers is excellent: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/06/covid-19-...

Eric Topol's twitter is an excellent source for Covid science coverage: https://twitter.com/EricTopol