seccess's comments

"Finally, looking at that figure you might wonder why the relative risk of smoking has increased so much. Based on my first pass through the literature, it seems like no one knows. There are at least three possibilities:

- Over this period, cigarettes have been reformulated in ways that might make them more dangerous.

- As the prevalence of smoking has decreased, it’s possible that the number of casual smokers has decreased more quickly, leaving a higher percentage of heavy smokers.

- Or maybe the denominator of the ratio — the risk for non-smokers — has decreased."

My first thought was "second hand smoke". My logic is, when smoking was more normalized, non-smokers were exposed to some of the same risk as smokers due to smoking indoors, etc, resulting in higher rates of lung cancer among non-smokers.

You should. I have no idea to what you're referring.

Next time you wind up in a situation like this, just lie about your number.

"Instead, they’ll be reminiscing about watching a Twitch streaming millionaire child screaming racial slurs as he rail-guns his opponents on Fortnite."

This perspective is reductive and insulting. There are many great, wholesome creators on YT/Twitch who put a lot of work to make their content welcoming and intellectually engaging, even if they are seemingly just playing video games. Just because the author doesn't like it doesn't make this remotely accurate to the real world.

"The new shadow terminator offset setting helps you to avoid shading artifacts with smooth normals on low-poly meshes."

THANK GOODNESS, man those shadows always looked so ugly. I primarily use EEVEE so this makes me happy.

For context: This seems directly related to the discussion that went on with the Hey iOS app yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23552760

I think in this case, the hypothetical lawsuits would be between companies that make iOS apps and Apple. The companies that make iOS apps want to have their own payment system where Apple doesn't take a cut.

I couldn't find a date on this article, but I don't think this line is accurate anymore:

"Facebook, Wikipedia, Yahoo, Flickr, Tumblr all these sites run in PHP and welcome millions of users every month without flinching."

Facebook dropped PHP for their own language called Hack, which I think is based on PHP but with a lot of the things people complain about changed.

I don't think its that simple, because it doesn't have to be all or nothing. I think CA has the right idea to lift restrictions at the state level so that less at-risk rural areas can try it out. It will give an idea as to what LA county would need to do: if things go okay then a reopen is reasonable, if people don't feel comfortable without some kind of "distancing" rules then those would need to be considered, or something else.

So yeah, of course there is a point in debating such a question. And there are real ways to find answers. Probably even better ones than what I said.

I think this is a valid point, but one consideration that feels missing from a lot of these kind of disucussions is to what extent the economy will "come back", even if every restriction were lifted.

If people are afraid to be in public, then the restaurants, bars, and shops won't see full-scale business return. Those jobs and business will be lost anyway, perhaps with more people infected than necessary. Or, we try and find some middle-ground "new normal" that lets people feel safe in public. Or something else? I have no idea and I doubt many people in this comment section really know either.

A bit tangential, but this reminded me of Dexter Holland [0] the lead singer and songwriter of the band The Offspring. He went on to get a PhD in molecular biology (not an honorary one) and publish various papers about HIV.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dexter_Holland

Haha, there is always one :)

I feel like trying out various languages/frameworks would affect compsci labs a lot less than other fields, since the students probably have some foundational knowledge of languages and have already learned a few before getting there. Might be easier for them to pick up new ones.

I don't find this response convincing because:

(a) While I'm being honest that my observations are based on the fields I have experience, there is no such justification that "It is true broadly for computation in academia" in your comment.

(b) Interpreting "niche" as "small" (especially given your "true broadly" claim): Computational genetics is huge in terms of funding dollars and number of researchers.

> Python has been the defacto standard in scientific/data/academic programming for decades

In my experience (Genomics) this is simply not true. Python has caught on over the last 5 or so years, but prior to that Perl was the defacto language for genetic analysis. Its still quite heavily used. Perl is not a paragon of simplicity and clarity.

I don't understand this comment, what are you suggesting Google will do? Surreptitiously insert code into your binary during a patch?

If you are running in Google cloud, its their machines and they have power to do pretty much whatever they want anyway. How would this feature affect anything?

I'm reading into this a bit, but I think David Byrne is focusing on American protest songs which could explain why Fela Kuti wasn't included.

This paper from 2010 has some info on why this may be the case [0]: "These results indicate that the protection of bacteria on the leaf surface by biofilm formation and stomatal colonization can reduce the antimicrobial efficacy of irradiation on leafy green vegetables."

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20629883

I wonder how the author feels about leaf vacuums like this, which is what I use: http://a.co/d/dGh7M4R

Its electric, so no fumes, and since it sucks instead of blows I don't have to worry as much about annoying passers-by with dust. Sadly it still makes noise, of course, though its far quieter than the backpack blowers the author is talking about.

Hey I just recently complained about SNI on a recent HN thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18223168). This is a lovely coincidence. Thanks Mozilla!

Thanks for the links. Sounds like the main reason it hasn't been addressed is DNS, if the client is just going to make a DNS request before their TLS session, the host is effectively leaked anyway. Sadly DNSSEC wouldn't address this as it only provides integrity and not confidentiality.