Hacker News: morvita

New comment by morvita in "How much of Thermo Fisher's antibody data has been manipulated?"

morvita — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 19:04:00 +0000

Antibodies on this scale are not _produced_ by animals. The way these things work is an antibody that binds to a specific target will be _discovered_ by immunizing animals and then screening it's blood or lymph nodes for antibodies of interest. Once an antibody is found and commercialized, it is produced in large bioreactors of cell cultures engineered to produce large amounts of a particular protein (in this case the antibody).

Source: work as a software dev at a company developing antibody drugs

New comment by morvita in "Help us raise $200k to free JavaScript from Oracle"

morvita — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 17:16:37 +0000

Isn't that exactly what they're doing here? My understanding is Deno is asking the courts to invalidate Oracle's JavaScript trademark, making it a generic term in the public domain. They are not asking for the mark to be re-assigned to Deno.

New comment by morvita in "Apple Intelligence for iPhone, iPad, and Mac"

morvita — Mon, 10 Jun 2024 23:16:15 +0000

It worth noting that the power of the neural engine doubled between the A16 and A17 chips (17 vs 35 TOPS, according to Wikipedia), while the A15 to A16 was a much more modest increase (15.8 to 17 TOPS). So it does seem like they started prioritizing AI/ML performance with the A17 design.

New comment by morvita in "Opera sees big jump in EU users on iOS, Android after DMA update"

morvita — Mon, 25 Mar 2024 16:42:55 +0000

Unfortunately, since 2013 Opera is also built on Chromium. They dropped Presto a long time ago.

New comment by morvita in "Harnessing heat from wastewater"

morvita — Tue, 16 Jan 2024 00:32:45 +0000

The article says this system in Vancouver has 300% efficiency, so seems like a problem that works a lot better at scale.

New comment by morvita in "Fastmail Employees Form a Union"

morvita — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 19:11:17 +0000

There's power in bargaining as a collective, whether you're a collective of ten or ten thousand. Either way, it helps with the power imbalance between employees and management.

New comment by morvita in "Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive"

morvita — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 19:37:22 +0000

Good news, Apple just announced they'll start supporting RCS next year.

https://www.techradar.com/phones/iphone/breaking-apple-will-...

New comment by morvita in "WeWork nears bankruptcy"

morvita — Wed, 01 Nov 2023 18:42:49 +0000

I've stopped using Uber in my city (Vancouver) and gone back to traditional taxis because they're providing a more reliable service at equivalent or cheaper prices.

The last few times I've tried to use Uber, immediately after matching with a driver they'll message me telling me to cancel the trip because they don't want to go where I'm going. When I refuse, they'll play chicken and drive around in circles refusing to come pick me up and refusing to cancel themselves if they don't want the job, trying to make me pay the cancellation penalty rather than them. When I fly into YVR, it's so much more convenient to walk to the taxi stand and get a ride home within a few minutes for $50, than to order an Uber, wait 20 minutes for it to arrive, and pay $60-80 for the privilege.

New comment by morvita in "Firefox 118"

morvita — Tue, 26 Sep 2023 16:09:23 +0000

Interestingly, there appears to be some localization with that page. I'm in Canada and see:

hello :maple leaf: -> bonjour :fleur-de-lis:

New comment by morvita in "Ask HN: Why did Python win?"

morvita — Wed, 30 Aug 2023 13:04:27 +0000

That's funny, I tried Go for Advent of Code last year and got through the first 10 days or so without any real difficulty, having never written a line of it before.

Just as there are different spoken/written languages and people find different ones easier or harder to learn based on a huge number of variables, I believe the same is true of programming languages. Sometimes it's the syntax that makes a language difficult, sometimes it's a different paradigm, sometimes it's an unfamiliar memory model or type system -- there are lots of things that can make your brain throw up a block when trying to dive into a new language.

New comment by morvita in "Ask HN: Why did Python win?"

morvita — Tue, 29 Aug 2023 20:26:20 +0000

I've heard so many people say that Ruby is really easy to pick up and work with and for some reason I've had the exact opposite experience. I have tried to learn Ruby at least three or four times and I bounce off it every time. There are a bunch of other languages that I've learned and worked with effectively, but for some reason my brain just refuses to grok Ruby.

New comment by morvita in "Canada plans brain drain of H-1B visa holders, with no-job, no-worries permits"

morvita — Thu, 29 Jun 2023 03:35:48 +0000

The relative costs didn't change for me significantly, I was paying 2600/month USD in rent in the Bay and 2700 CAD in Vancouver, so while it was a significant paycut if you look at the value in USD, the day to day wasn't noticeable.

New comment by morvita in "Canada plans brain drain of H-1B visa holders, with no-job, no-worries permits"

morvita — Wed, 28 Jun 2023 20:18:46 +0000

I really liked San Diego when I visited, if I was going to return to the US, I'd seriously consider San Diego.

New comment by morvita in "Canada plans brain drain of H-1B visa holders, with no-job, no-worries permits"

morvita — Wed, 28 Jun 2023 19:30:17 +0000

I am a US citizen who moved to Vancouver from the Bay Area three years ago.

I took a small pay cut when I moved (from ~135k USD to ~125k CAD, after a few years of raises I'm over 140k CAD now), but certainly not cutting my salary in half. Yes, Canada has its issues, but I'm overall happier living here than I was in the Bay. We have a regional train system that runs every 3-6 minutes instead of the 15-20 you get from BART and better accessibility to the outdoors (I can get to a ski mountain on the bus). I had better accessibility to healthcare in California, but here I don't have to worry about being out thousands of dollars for healthcare if I get laid off.

I work for a smaller tech company founded and headquartered in Vancouver, but I've seen the big tech companies making huge investments in this city over the last couple years. Amazon is in the final stages of building a new tower that will house 6000 employees [0] and Microsoft recently moved into 75,000 sqft of office space and is working on another 400,000 sqft [1]. The tech industry in this city is booming and it's certainly not all driven by companies stashing employees who can't get US visas.

[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/amazon-canad... [1] https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/microsoft-vancouver-office-b...

New comment by morvita in "Amendment introduced to limit remote working in Ohio"

morvita — Mon, 26 Jun 2023 23:02:24 +0000

My mother was a teacher before she retired to a different state than she'd worked in. She now has to file income taxes in the state she receives the pension from and the state she currently lives in each year.

New comment by morvita in "Canada's population reaches 40M"

morvita — Fri, 16 Jun 2023 20:31:36 +0000

It's worth noting that roughly half of Canada's population lives in the Quebec-Windsor Corridor [0] (the land between Quebec City, QC and Windsor, ON). This region is really the Canadian equivalent of the Boston-Washington corridor in the States, so imagine if nearly 150 million lived in BosWash.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_City%E2%80%93Windsor_Co...

New comment by morvita in "Supreme Court rules Andy Warhol’s Prince art is copyright infringement"

morvita — Thu, 18 May 2023 22:05:16 +0000

This is why the lifetime of the creator should have nothing to do with copyright terms. All works get a fixed term of 20, 30, whatever years, if the creator dies before that term the rights can be transferred via their estate.

New comment by morvita in "Why Fortran is a scientific powerhouse"

morvita — Wed, 11 Jan 2023 00:18:14 +0000

I did a PhD and Post-doc in computational chemistry (focusing on quantum chemical simulations) in the late 2000s/early 2010s and nearly all the software I used was written partially or wholly in Fortran including Gaussian, Q-Chem, Quantum Espresso, and NWChem. Most of the professors I worked with only knew Fortran and had no interest in learning C/C++. The one exception was a professor who was in the process of porting her group's in-house molecular mechanics software from Fortran to C/C++ (don't remember which) so they could get it running on GPUs easily.

I think one of the driving factors in this is that, as other people in this thread have discussed, most of the people writing this software are not software developers and have no interest in being software developers. The scientists trained in the 60s/70s/80s learned Fortran, who then founded their own research groups and taught their students Fortran, who are now running their own groups using Fortran because it's what they know. Some folks use Python for data analysis after their simulations run, but even that was rare 10 years ago.

New comment by morvita in "We’re making Firefox accessible and delightful for everyone"

morvita — Mon, 05 Dec 2022 22:47:07 +0000

Which is also based entirely on their market dominance. I'm 100% convinced Google continues handing millions of dollars a year to Mozilla so Google can point at Firefox as competition when the regulators come knocking.

New comment by morvita in "Amazon fails to overturn New York City union election"

morvita — Fri, 02 Sep 2022 18:25:50 +0000

I am pro-union and acknowledge that some unions will protect workers that don't actually contribute to the business, but I think we need a source on unions that drove companies into bankruptcy. That's a pretty extreme case that needs concrete examples.