Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | more amvalo's comments login

Ok, now I really wanna see a photo.


Surely you've seen a photo before?


He does have the disclaimer


Did he have that disclaimer before and did he have the disclaimer on all places he might have posted or shared the link from?

Easy example would have been Linkedin if it was shared there, his title probably would have said he worked there but not had a disclaimer description on his Linkedin profile.


> how much of this nuance is achieved by having discussions about issues which have real life-or-death impacts on people but without having any of those people inconveniently present?

Uh, not much? This comment seems to be assuming some weird things about what the blog typically focuses on. Actually, he writes about trans issues a bit, got some flack for defending Blanchard, and a large fraction of the readership is trans.


I can see what he's getting at, at least if he's focusing on the SSC subreddits and comments. It's easier to be a brave truth-teller when it's not your ox being gored, and I think the demographics of the SSC commentariat explain its openness to e.g. discussing HBD and critiquing feminism, but rather prickly responses to more ingroup-focused critique. The whole 'grey tribe' distinction was often used in a more defensive/obscurantist and less productive/illuminating way than in Scott's original formulation. I think the community is still far more open than average, but this is certainly influenced by the interaction between demographics (which Scott regularly surveys) and blog topics.

I don't think this is unique to SSC, by the way. I think it's why exclusive groups often eventually emerge from inclusive groups, and why apps like Clubhouse are attractive.


It wasn't really addressed to SSC; I've read some of his articles and almost none of the discussions below them, but I am very familiar with HN.


Talking about the Oarsman-regatta thing? That was 2 decades ago...



What are you saying "No" to? This article says it may have been from the 80s?


I guess I'm saying no to your attempt to distract from the fact that you can pay alot of money to pass these tests in addition to not having proof there is esoteric terminology people growing up on poverty despite being good students might not be exposed to.

This would be obvious to you if you've ever taken the SATs.

What point are you trying to make? You should make it. Right now you are knitpicking. Even if you are right only it was that one instance it sets precedent for economic power structures graduating students inherit in the workforce for years to come.

I just don't understand your prioritization of feedback which seems to be entirely focused on distracting from the comment.


The test has actually changed over the years and since people made a stink about the oarsman question, they’ve been more careful to reduce cultural bias (though I’m not convinced it was ever that bad in the first place). It is basically a canard at this point.


That and... the war


What do you mean? The potential of a war breaking out? IIRC before the war started many countries happily traded with and weren't all that critical of Germany.


Just because it's not engineered doesn't mean it didn't come from a lab. It could be a natural virus that was collected and escaped. The original SARS escaped no less than 3 times from chinese labs following the outbreak.


It could be lots of things. The focus on a possible escape from containment as the source seems odd given that - among other more likely causes - bat guano is also widely used as fertilizer, and bats, like humans, shed coronaviruses in their feces. Except that where we do so only occasionally and only when actively infected, bats' generally higher viral load and the high intraspecific transmissibility of a lot of these viruses means they do it much more frequently.


Except this started in the heart of a city the size of New York, near a market not known to have sold bats, within half a kilometer of a lab known to have been doing research collecting bats from neighboring provinces near villages with people confirmed contracted SARS like viruses from bats per their own state media documentary.

And then there's the behavior of the CCP.


No one knows where this started. We know where the first confirmed case was reported, but that's not the same thing.

I carry no brief for the CCP. But I do find it difficult to say nothing in the face of what looks like a struggle among a variety of factions, none openly declared, to establish a narrative of responsibility for a world-altering catastrophe, with no closer or more consistent reference to facts of any kind than is judged useful in support of whatever claim is being pushed at the moment - and, most notably, with the only reference to potentially contradictory facts being to claim either that they're unfounded, or presented with ulterior intent, or both.

Last time I saw something play out that looked like this, it followed the World Trade Center attack and resulted in the Iraq war. That was a catastrophe from both a humanitarian perspective and one concerned with enhancing the geopolitical power of the US - but it was, at least, relatively minor in both respects. This one, if it plays out similarly, seems likely to be much worse.

And aside from all of that, what the hell, is your time of no value? If you're going to peddle what may very well prove to be war propaganda, at least you should have the self-respect to refuse to do it for free.


We absolutely do know where it started. Prehaps not precisely in physical space but that 13 of the first 41 cases had no connection to the seafood market is very strong evidence that whatever the source may be, it was socially and physically proximate to the market just like the lab but not likely the market itself.

To compare this to Iraq is absolutely preposterous and fallacious. The two have absolutely nothing in common and nobody here is suggesting we invade China over it but sure as hell they ought to be held accountable.


Do you not think people come from out of town, sometimes from quite far out of town, to sell food at a city market? That's how they work here in Baltimore, and anyone who's ever been to Lexington Market, or even seen a picture of what the crowds are like there (1), can have no trouble imagining how effective a transmission vector it would be for any contagious pathogen hitching a ride in an out-of-town vendor there. Why should things work differently in Wuhan?

"Held accountable" is a rhetorical phrase that was much used then, too. (2) So it's an interesting thing to find in an argument that this situation and that one are totally unalike.

(1) https://www.wypr.org/sites/wyprmain/files/styles/x_large/pub...

(2) https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2001/nov/28/iraq.brianwhit...


This market is not known to have sold bats and by all accounts it did not. Consuming bats is a southern thing not a central thing.

Your theory also doesn't along with the evidence, that the first known cases had a significant population with no known connection to the market, 27 with connection, 14 without; and that other than the market there are no other obvious connections. If it were just some hawker you'd expect a much stronger connection to the market. And over a longer period.


I had a theory around guano used for fertilizer acting as a fomite, but found some research an hour ago that suggests SARS doesn't remain viable via that route, so SARS-CoV-2 probably doesn't either.

Do we know that bats are the only (or only likely) nonhuman host? Was there a significant population of cases with a known connection to the lab?


Pangolins Malasia I think are the next closest source genetically. China imports from there as well as Africa for TCM so but the known strains from bats are still match much much better.


You have previous known infections in the villagers who interact with bats and then travel to say the Wuhan live market. We study these viruses because we know they infect humans. The Spanish flu was a bird flu. There were no biosafety level 5 labs back then. We get viruses from other animals all the time.


Nitpick: there's no such thing as BSL-5. The scale tops out at level 4. Coronaviruses are handled at BSL-3.


Furthermore, gain-of-function research doesn't have to be by genetic engineering. The controversial experiment of a few years back which I vaguely remember was more like natural selection.


Also the only lab that handles this stuff in Wuhan is less than a couple hundred meters from the wet market that Chinese authorities claimed was the epicenter.

I'd believe this is a story of grave incompetence, and brazen managerial failure at a biolab. The intern gets bled on, bitten, or just breathed on by the test bat, gets a bit sick but comes into work anyway. After it seems to pass, she heads down to the market on the way home, and spreads the disease to one of the live animals, including humans, in the vicinity.

Boom, outbreak.

Could be as simple as that, with it being a pretty tenacious virus.

The proven conspiracy follows, when authorities up to the top sought to cover up this embarrassment, then to make sure that the damage was global so that they wouldn't be at a relative disadvantage, and could maybe start claiming that it came from somewhere else (as they are now doing).


Can you find your source for the market being a couple hundred meters away? This tweet has a map showing it's twenty miles away, but the source is the Daily Mail:

https://twitter.com/dystopia992/status/1220735100192620546


Different lab. I bookmarked https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-china-tra... but it's offline for me right now. (Can't say if any of it is right, but the claim of the ~180m-away lab was the most interesting bit.)


Thank you very much!


Until recently there were sites selling contact lenses (like visiondirect.co.uk) that would flaunt this rule, but visiondirect was recently being investigated for it so YMMV.


Seems to be a scam. If you look up their FDA registration number nothing shows up.


I’ve used some of their other home testing kits before, like their colon cancer screening kit. Detects globin at 50 ng/mL and is board approved by gastroenterologists. The company isn’t a scam.


Yeah, after digging into it more I saw that. Doesn't explain the missing FDA number though which is quite sketchy.


Their number is listed in the info brochure.

https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/1010/0544/files/COVID19Bro...


Yeah, and it's not listed... in the actual FDA database.



"Page Last Updated: 03/23/2020"

Strange indeed.

You said your test kit arrived already? What does it look like?


Well, pretty much like the picture. Package insert is the same. Not going to unwrap the LFA device unless it's really necessary.


The answer is simple: these systems aren't mature enough to formalize the modern fashionable math. They need better ergonomics and perhaps better underlying theory before we attempt that.


Another way to say that is that modern fashionable math is poorly founded and practitioners don't really know what are the fundamental things they are talking about.


What would the better ergonomics look like? Do you have an idea what might be wrong with the theory?


The biggest pain point with the theory was its handling of equality, which HoTT fixes.

Ergonomically.. well it's hard to describe TBH, the easiest way to see is to just download one of these systems and try using them. You try to prove a theorem and everything just ends up taking way longer than you'd expect. Mostly because you can't gloss over small details the way mathematicians will do informally. Every small turn of phrase like "for large enough N" or "without loss of generality" can become dozens of extra lines of code.


I didn't mean to doubt your claim — my limited experience is that proof assistants are totally inscrutable, although I've been inspired by some of the Lean and Agda stuff I've been seeing lately. I just wanted to ask for your perspective, since it's probably more informed than mine!

It seems to me that if you want to formalize the small details, you will necessarily have to do something different with some of those small details, won't you? Maybe a tactic search can find a formal and rigorous proof without you having to write those dozens of extra lines by hand, but simply glossing over them seems like it would defeat the goal of formalization.


Oof, madison is pretty "hot" these days.


In what sense?


being very expensive


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: