Hacker News: akkawwakka

New comment by akkawwakka in "To hook diners, an invasive species of carp gets a new name"

akkawwakka — Tue, 19 Jul 2022 08:15:56 +0000

Grew up dodging scores of it as they flew over our bass boat flying down the backwaters of the Mississippi. Twenty years ago I wouldn’t be able to find a single person who had ever eaten it and I’m not sure that’s any different today, which is a tragedy since it apparently tastes pretty nice.

New comment by akkawwakka in "We could have universal Covid vaccines soon"

akkawwakka — Sun, 17 Jul 2022 20:06:18 +0000

The conversation around this could benefit from more precise language.

Long lived immunity against severe disease, driven by the T cell response against epitopes that are generally well preserved (>80% for spike protein, ~98% for non spike protein) [1]

≠

Immunity against infection, conferred by circulating neutralizing antibody, which last for a couple of months

Most vaccines blunt or prevent disease but not infection.

[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41423-022-00838-5

New comment by akkawwakka in "We could have universal Covid vaccines soon"

akkawwakka — Sun, 17 Jul 2022 04:56:20 +0000

We are preventing development of serious disease with the vaccine. At the end of the day, that’s what should count.

New comment by akkawwakka in "We could have universal Covid vaccines soon"

akkawwakka — Sun, 17 Jul 2022 04:49:51 +0000

Immunity to infection ≠ immunity to serious disease. The epitopes that drive long-lived memory are fairly well conserved.

New comment by akkawwakka in "Xcode Through the Years"

akkawwakka — Fri, 28 Jan 2022 06:25:18 +0000

You might be happy with something like VSCode + sourcekit-lsp once that combo gets more mature.

New comment by akkawwakka in "Discovering Paxlovid"

akkawwakka — Thu, 20 Jan 2022 11:11:37 +0000

First, this proves that investment in drug discovery for all pandemic potential viruses, fueled by basic science research, needs to be a huge priority going forward. Imagine having antivirals on the shelf for the Coronas, Avian influenza, Nipah, Ebola, etc. to stop pandemics before they started.

Secondly, I’m a little curious whether if we’d ideally administer Paxlovid in double- or triple-therapy, like we do for HIV and Hepatitis C, if we had the option. Will resistance arise to it in the next 12 - 24 months? Would love to be assuaged of my fear here.

New comment by akkawwakka in "FAA Shows ‘Sample NOTAMs’ for Possible 5G Restrictions"

akkawwakka — Sun, 26 Dec 2021 18:16:07 +0000

I recommend checking out Juan Browne’s video [1] that contrasts studies from the aviation world and one from the telecoms. Spoiler: the former brings more technical analysis than the latter.

I’d love to know why the FAA is ‘rolling over’ to the telecoms / FCC on this matter. The spectrum was in use for RADALTs before 5G and safety systems like autoland, used when visibility starts coming down to minimums, rely on them.

Seems to me that, like Canada, the US should just not allow 5G cell sites near critical areas around an airport.

[1]: https://youtu.be/942KXXmMJdY

New comment by akkawwakka in "Outbreak caused by the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant in Norway, Nov to Dec 2021"

akkawwakka — Sun, 19 Dec 2021 10:27:14 +0000

This should be a surprise to no one. The vaccines are designed to prevent serious disease, hospitalization, and death.

Unfortunately the media has harmfully claimed that the vaccines are “less effective against Omicron” because of the reduction of prevention against any symptomatic disease… which they were never designed to prevent.

New comment by akkawwakka in "Xcode 13.2 contains Log4j vulnerability"

akkawwakka — Sun, 19 Dec 2021 09:00:06 +0000

This is a bit of a tangent, but this is emblematic of the fact that, beyond Xcode Cloud, the Apple Developer Tools team seems more excited to work on toys like Swift Playgrounds than make the Apple platform development experience better and more sustainable for users beyond the one-man shop and toy applications.

It’s not surprising that more are preferring to use Electron, React Native, or Flutter to develop apps than to live with the bare metal Xcode toolchain and Apple APIs.

The Java / Kotlin + Gradle and JS development ecosystems are dramatically easier to live, despite the fact that Apple has the resources to do dramatically better.

New comment by akkawwakka in "The metaverse is bullshit"

akkawwakka — Sat, 30 Oct 2021 09:24:58 +0000

Yes, they are. Strap one on and fly a fighter jet in Flight Sim 2020 and tell me they aren’t.

But they are fatiguing, unflattering, and uncomfortable, even for 20 or 30 minutes worth of usage.

Maybe in 10 years when the software stacks are ready the headsets will be good enough for passive use.

New comment by akkawwakka in "Tesla pulled its latest ‘Full Self Driving’ beta after testers complained"

akkawwakka — Mon, 25 Oct 2021 08:54:00 +0000

Prosecuting FSD claims, historical or present, seems like a slam-dunk case for the FTC…

New comment by akkawwakka in "Zero-Trust RDP and SSH Access to VMs on Google Cloud"

akkawwakka — Tue, 07 Sep 2021 09:33:32 +0000

Parsec is outstanding for this use case, it’s basically a roll-your-own Stadia. Dunno what its future will be now that it was acquired by Unity

New comment by akkawwakka in "Predictors of Nonseroconversion after SARS-CoV-2 Infection"

akkawwakka — Tue, 31 Aug 2021 06:58:53 +0000

Understanding (confirmation?) of memory T cell immunity might also tamp down the popular concerns regarding waning / lowering of of circulating B antibody levels.

It seems we’re champing at the bit to get boosters going for non-immune compromised people before we even know what the correlate of protection against SARS-CoV-2 is.

New comment by akkawwakka in "Improving ventilation will help curb SARS-CoV-2"

akkawwakka — Sun, 30 May 2021 22:18:38 +0000

Easy to scoff at an obvious headline, but SARS-CoV-2 may very well be endemic now. Going forward pandemic preparedness will no longer be reserved for the Fortune 5s or 50s.

New construction for a while at least will hopefully consider biosecurity and pandemic preparedness as concrete a threat as natural disasters.

New comment by akkawwakka in "TikTok Remix Culture"

akkawwakka — Sat, 15 May 2021 05:27:21 +0000

It’s definitely a pro-social, social platform. It shows that you don’t have to rely on polarizing or adversarial content to drive engagement (_ cough, like Facebook & Twitter cough)

New comment by akkawwakka in "TikTok Remix Culture"

akkawwakka — Sat, 15 May 2021 05:21:20 +0000

The moderation is a definite net positive. Though those with political viewpoints opposite a given user and anti-vaxxers have abused the stringent moderation to wantonly get videos taken down or users’ live stream disabled. Growing pains.

New comment by akkawwakka in "In the search to stall aging, biotech startups are out for blood"

akkawwakka — Sat, 15 May 2021 02:38:56 +0000

Calico seems like a vestige of Larry’s Google. Hope Ruth doesn’t Loon it. https://killedbygoogle.com

New comment by akkawwakka in "TikTok Remix Culture"

akkawwakka — Sat, 15 May 2021 02:30:07 +0000

It’s definitely a fount of creativity! Maybe it’s all the Gen Zers but it’s also the least toxic social network around. There’s so much joyful content there.

New comment by akkawwakka in "iPad Pro M1"

akkawwakka — Wed, 21 Apr 2021 10:19:43 +0000

Agreed. They can do it nicely, too, by extending the "Handoff" concept to further replicate application state between macOS and iPad OS apps.

It would probably be an opt-in thing for apps, but even without any fancy state replication it'd be just fine.

New comment by akkawwakka in "A top audio engineer explains NPR’s signature sound (2015)"

akkawwakka — Sat, 17 Apr 2021 00:04:42 +0000

ISDN still must be in heavy use in radio. Sirius XM has been using hardware IP codecs since the pandemic began, and once a three hour show you might hear garbled audio for a few seconds.