Hacker News: daughart

New comment by daughart in "Names that decreased in popularity from 2020 to 2021"

daughart — Thu, 05 Jan 2023 13:20:24 +0000

All seems sensical to me.

New comment by daughart in "Ultra-flat timepiece, the RM UP-01 Ferrari, is 1.75 millimetres thick watch"

daughart — Mon, 11 Jul 2022 21:17:05 +0000

The RM UP-01 is thinner. "This new ultra-thin timepiece is a mere 1.75mm in thickness beating out Bulgari by a walloping 0.05mm."

Source: https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/richard-mille-sets-a-new-r...

New comment by daughart in "SARS-CoV-2 contains part of a patented genetic sequence"

daughart — Thu, 24 Feb 2022 14:27:35 +0000

Federal patent law defines patent infringement as “mak[ing], us[ing], offer[ing] to sell, or sell[ing]” a patented invention. Not an attorney, but seems like it would be quite a stretch to argue that becoming infected with a virus would fall under one of those categories.

New comment by daughart in "Wokeademia (2020)"

daughart — Mon, 31 Jan 2022 19:22:30 +0000

Ideology has been and will always be a guiding force in science. Western genetics was heavily influenced by capitalism. Many concepts in Soviet genetics ended up being closer to correct than competing Western theories, although it took a while for this to be appreciated (e.g., epigenetics).

Philosophers of science Collins and Pinch have an excellent entry-level book on this called "The Golem" that I would strongly recommend to anyone interested. Very accessible and not overly philosophical/jargon-y.

New comment by daughart in "Joe Rogan, confined to Spotify, is losing influence"

daughart — Wed, 25 Aug 2021 17:55:35 +0000

Just like Howard Stern (note, SiriusXM also owns Spotify). They traded a broader audience and greater influence for stability and gigantic paychecks. E.g., in Howard's case, even though his personal influence shrunk, his importance to Sirius/Spotify grew as a fraction of the subscriber base is dedicated to one talent and would otherwise unsubscribe. Howard's deal has been renewed a number of times now. I can't blame anyone involved.

New comment by daughart in "CNN Fires Three Employees for Coming into the Office Unvaccinated"

daughart — Fri, 06 Aug 2021 13:20:42 +0000

Your first two citations merely suggest there would be limited benefits to previously infected getting the jab. Other research disagrees with this.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01609-4

New comment by daughart in "CNN Fires Three Employees for Coming into the Office Unvaccinated"

daughart — Fri, 06 Aug 2021 13:14:51 +0000

You know that all US parents are published, after approximately 1 year, in publicly searchable databases, right? I’m sure NIAID had better things to do… like fighting a pandemic.

The real question is why you are so afraid of the vaccine, so as to promote FUD? Or is it just displaced fear from a virus demonstrating that you’re not quite as in charge of your life as you thought?

New comment by daughart in "CNN Fires Three Employees for Coming into the Office Unvaccinated"

daughart — Thu, 05 Aug 2021 22:57:33 +0000

Why take the time to argue a point that's easily disproven?

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/may/12/jerome-cor...

Fauci isn't an inventor or owner of any COVID vaccine patents.

Even if Fauci was an inventor on them, his patents would be owned by the Federal Government. By Federal Law, inventors of government patents are entitled to a maximum royalty of $150k/year.

New comment by daughart in "CNN Fires Three Employees for Coming into the Office Unvaccinated"

daughart — Thu, 05 Aug 2021 22:53:27 +0000

Why in the hell would big Pharma pay any media to promote the vaccines? Most of the revenue is already booked from state actors, and they're literally selling the cure to a global pandemic. They don't need to juice demand - such a ploy could only hurt them. Frankly, continuation of the pandemic via poor adoption of the vaccine would increase future business in the form of boosters, etc.

New comment by daughart in "Ivermectin (Still) Lacks Scientific Support as a Covid-19 Drug"

daughart — Tue, 03 Aug 2021 15:39:50 +0000

The thing I don't understand is some people's implied or sometimes explicitly expressed belief that medical researchers are suppressing promising COVID treatments for some reason.

Clinical trial research is perhaps the most complex and challenging type of research to get right. It's necessary to be critical of clinical research and meta-analyses, so pointing out serious research flaws doesn't mean someone is rooting against a safe, effective, cheap COVID treatment. The VAST majority of candidate drugs don't work well even for the intended indication, let alone have serendipitous effect in a different disease.

New comment by daughart in "Lab Cultures: An Interview with an Anonymous Biologist (2019)"

daughart — Tue, 08 Jun 2021 19:41:42 +0000

Unless I missed where the article revealed the scientist's gender, the interviewee may not be male. I agree it was an enjoyable read, though!

New comment by daughart in "The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins"

daughart — Fri, 04 Jun 2021 15:45:35 +0000

And the villagers were the ones to blame in "the boy who cried wolf".

New comment by daughart in "[dead]"

daughart — Tue, 25 May 2021 17:28:49 +0000

This is a debatable point. Mullis definitely patented PCR, but there's a legitimate argument Har Gobind Khorana (another Nobel winner, for separate contributions to biology) actually invented PCR almost two decades prior. According to the oral history of the Khorana lab, the PCR method was used routinely going back to 1970, but they didn't consider it important enough to publish separately as a method. However, they did describe the method clearly in a 1971 publication.

“The principles for extensive synthesis of the duplexed tRNA genes which emerge from the present work are the following. The DNA duplex would be denatured to form single strands. This denaturation step would be carried out in the presence of a sufficiently large excess of the two appropriate primers. Upon cooling, one would hope to obtain two structures, each containing the full length of the template strand appropriately complexed with the primer. DNA polymerase will be added to complete the process of repair replication. Two molecules of the original duplex should result. The whole cycle could be repeated, there being added every time a fresh dose of the enzyme.” - Kleppe, K., E. Ohtsuka, R. Kleppe, I. Molineux, and H. G. Khorana. "Studies on polynucleotides: XCVI. Repair replication of short synthetic DNA's as catalyzed by DNA polymerases." Journal of molecular biology 56, no. 2 (1971): 341-361.

The use of thermostable polymerase (Taq) was a separate innovation, which Mullis also didn't invent.

Relevant quote from Henry Erlich, who led the Cetus PCR group:

“On the one hand I was delighted to see that PCR as a technology was recognized by the Nobel Committee, but I was frustrated that awarding the prize to Mullis alone certified an account which Kary had created which was not true.

Mullis had a great idea, which he followed up with years of misrepresentation and self-promotion. Rewriting history was more productive than writing papers. He never really got it to work. It would have been appropriate to include others on the award.”

New comment by daughart in "Countries Using Hydroxychloroquine Have Lower Covid-19 Fatality Rates"

daughart — Fri, 24 Jul 2020 22:42:16 +0000

No citation for the illustration of the mechanism of action, maybe JAMA or NEJM?

New comment by daughart in "When evolution's path leads to a dead end"

daughart — Mon, 09 Jul 2018 17:22:10 +0000

What makes you think sexual selection led to increased intelligence in humans? In the grand scheme of things, I'm not sure humans are even that sexually dimorphic TBH, I believe the size dimorphism is actually pretty small compared to other mammals.

New comment by daughart in "Cells Talk and Help One Another via Tiny Tube Networks"

daughart — Mon, 04 Jun 2018 16:21:03 +0000

Maybe something you're missing is the concept of "evolvability". You can see the book "Resolving Darwin's Dilemma" (review here: https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/56/9/772/263015). An important concept in the evolution of novelty (creating new, advanced functions out of "random" mutations) is that all the living systems we observe today are highly evolvable. Evolvability is an emergent property of some evolving systems, and it enables surprising leaps in functionality.

New comment by daughart in "New York Times Editorial Board Thinks Uber Is Too Popular, Demands Price Floors"

daughart — Wed, 09 May 2018 21:43:45 +0000

The article assumes Uber can go on offering cheaper rides forever, but every piece of serious analysis I've read comes to the conclusion that Uber must eventually raise its prices to sustain its business. Nothing in the NYT article attacks dynamic pricing, to the contrary it reads to me as endorsing the idea of dynamic pricing. The whole blog post is flimsy.

New comment by daughart in "iPhone X"

daughart — Thu, 14 Sep 2017 17:19:54 +0000

$40 Amazon Fire tablet.

New comment by daughart in "Geneticists pan paper that claims to predict a person's face from their DNA"

daughart — Mon, 11 Sep 2017 21:30:56 +0000

Anonymous participants in genome research have been re-identified in the past [0]. In one of these examples, people were re-identified merely using zip code, date of birth and gender. Everyone should assume that they can be identified once they have revealed even a few personal datapoints. The genome contains millions of datapoints.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamtanner/2013/04/25/harvard-p...

New comment by daughart in "Sundar Pichai Should Resign as Google’s C.E.O"

daughart — Fri, 11 Aug 2017 15:56:36 +0000

Especially given the reporting about him offending his classmates at Harvard.