Hacker News: taipan100

New comment by taipan100 in "Ask HN: Any recommendation for a good History of Science book?"

taipan100 — Sun, 27 Feb 2022 17:21:36 +0000

Life is Simple https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56643989-life-is-simple

New comment by taipan100 in "UK and Norway fail to reach fishing deal"

taipan100 — Fri, 30 Apr 2021 11:37:36 +0000

Britain being "historically bad negotiators" is an objectively silly thing to say

New comment by taipan100 in "The EMA Covid-19 data leak, and what it tells us about mRNA instability"

taipan100 — Tue, 16 Mar 2021 21:56:48 +0000

Valid mRNA has a start codon and a stop codon. Without these mRNA will be broken down and untranslated. However without translation the vaccine will be useless. So while unintended translation is unlikely it is possible that efficacy would be impacted.

New comment by taipan100 in "South Africa suspends rollout of Oxford-AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine"

taipan100 — Mon, 08 Feb 2021 12:53:25 +0000

This is not really correct. CI means we are 95% sure that the true result falls somewhere within the range of -50 to 60. What this really means is that the study lacks statistical power to say anything interesting at all about vaccine effectiveness.

New comment by taipan100 in "South Africa suspends rollout of Oxford-AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine"

taipan100 — Mon, 08 Feb 2021 09:51:41 +0000

All based on the results of a study with 95% CI between -50% and 60% efficacy.

New comment by taipan100 in "Coronavirus and Credibility"

taipan100 — Tue, 07 Apr 2020 00:58:58 +0000

We do not know the Lombardy hospitalisation rate because we do not have an accurate count of how many people have been infected in Lombardy.

To get such a count we would need 100% serological testing which has not been done. We know how many were infected at the time of testing but the whole point of the Oxford model is that we do not know how many have been infected, not shown symptoms, and recovered.

Once again, the core point of the Oxford model was to emphasise the need for serological testing.

New comment by taipan100 in "Coronavirus and Credibility"

taipan100 — Mon, 06 Apr 2020 11:32:27 +0000

To call the Oxford study "utter rubbish" is foolish.

Your "example" of bad data is the only quoted data in that article and it doesn't even mean anything since the implicit assumption of the Gupta model is that we do not know how many asymptomatic cases of COVID exist (even WIRED concede this point). Testing in Italy is insufficient to tell us this. 1 in 1000 infections requiring hospitalisation could be a realistic number if a high percentage of infections are asymptomatic.

> we just won’t know the true proportion of people who have contracted the disease without showing any symptoms, but it is likely a much lower number than the Oxford study assumes.

Epidemiology is not done by "it is likely much lower than the study assumes" since that is pure guess work without the tests.

What the Oxford study offers is a strong argument that antibody testing is vitally important and nobody is doing it.

As I say this is a very long way from utter rubbish.

New comment by taipan100 in "Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub"

taipan100 — Mon, 04 Jun 2018 11:27:36 +0000

Hold on. GitHub has become too much of a monopoly? And this is somehow fixed by being acquired by Microsoft?

New comment by taipan100 in "Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub"

taipan100 — Mon, 04 Jun 2018 11:14:03 +0000

I completely agree. The biggest issue here is that we are losing a neutral player as the top comment says. The tech world is that much more monopolistic without an independent GitHub.

New comment by taipan100 in "What we lose with data-driven medicine"

taipan100 — Sat, 19 May 2018 17:57:23 +0000

There are so many ideas here for how computer systems could be improved. It reads like an argument against the computer in a medical setting (or at least a move away from current, perceived, over-reliance) and yet systems could so easily fix 99% of these problems.