yholio (u/yholio) - Readit News

yholio commented on How much do construction costs matter to the price of housing? constructionphysics.subst... · Posted by u/ddubski

bobthepanda · 4 years ago

The US has large apartment buildings, the problem is that there is not a whole lot of anything between 5-20 stories, and there is a construction premium for 20+ story buildings.

(And in the US it would be two staircases and 20 single story homes, specifically because building codes require two staircases to prevent a Grenfell-like disaster.

yholio · 4 years ago

In all honesty, Grenfell was caused by bad construction choices, materials and political penny-pinching. A second stairway filled with cyanide smoke would have had very limited benefits.

yholio commented on Guinea worm disease nears eradication nature.com/articles/d4158... · Posted by u/pseudolus

ars · 4 years ago

> "OPV causes more infections than it cures"

OPV2 (specifically 2) cures zero infections because type 2 is extinct in the wild. If causes some infections.

So explain how my sentence isn't true?

A decade ago when type 2 was in the wild, OPV2 was very valuable. Today though it's the greatest obstacle to eradication (and not because people are doing something bad, it's just unfortunate circumstance).

yholio · 4 years ago

> OPV2 (specifically 2) cures zero infections because type 2 is extinct in the wild. So explain how my sentence isn't true?

OPV2 prevents cvdpv2 infections. This is a virus similar in all respects to wpv2, except its lower rate of paralysis onset. It's effectively the same disease, just like in my forest fire analogy.

Before the advent of nOPV2, OPV2 was much more effective at this than any other option. So you could not simply cease OPV2 production, post 2016 it was targeted to cvdpv2 hotspots only.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8393165/

yholio commented on Facebook's African Sweatshop time.com/6147458/facebook... · Posted by u/throwaway765433

pavlov · 4 years ago

A lot of moderation deals with actual legal requirements, e.g. detecting and reporting child porn.

A company can't outsource that kind of responsibility to a bunch of algorithmically selected users.

yholio · 4 years ago

Sure it can, if those users enter a suitable legal contract that gives them rights and obligations similar to paid employees.

yholio commented on Facebook's African Sweatshop time.com/6147458/facebook... · Posted by u/throwaway765433

brimble · 4 years ago

> but they do need to be done.

They do not need to be done.

Facebook needs them to be done for its business model to work.

You may have meant (surely did mean?) the latter, but I think the distinction is important.

None of these people need to be subjected to psychologically harmful material on an industrial scale. We could always just not let Facebook do that, and they'd have to live or die as a company without doing those things. Possibly it would mean broadcast-type social media couldn't exist anymore. If so, then the cost of keeping that seems to be hurting people with this kind of work. But it is something we could stop doing if we wanted to.

yholio · 4 years ago

> They do not need to be done.

You have surely never operated a website that publishes user generated content. Every available textbox and file uploader will be filled with garbage so revolting that, without moderation, will quickly kill any chance of respectability for your site.

yholio commented on Ask HN: Recent computer hacking convictions and employability? · Posted by u/dk79XuL9

denton-scratch · 4 years ago

With blackmail and fraud convictions (and a 3-year prison sentence behind you), I would hope that nobody would give you a job with access to systems that enable you to get at personal information or money. That's their business, of course; but they'd presumably be exposed to an action for negligence if something went wrong as a result of them employing someone with that record.

Blackmail and fraud are both offences that involve using others as means to ends, and require the ability to discount the damage and pain you cause to others. If I were hiring a coder (let alone a computer security consultant) I'd search for a long time before hiring someone with a record of that kind of untrustworthy behaviour.

Sorry to be blunt; I know that some companies pay good money to convicted criminal hackers for their expertise. But I think that's a deplorable practice; it encourages the view that hacking/cracking, blackmail and fraud are a sensible route into regular employment. I think those convictions should be a blocker.

yholio · 4 years ago

> presumably be exposed to an action for negligence if something went wrong as a result of them employing someone with that record.

That's just the type of bullshit that makes pizza restaurants not wanting to have a person with a criminal record anywhere in the building. It's a form of vigilante punishment that continues to for the life of a felon, way past the point where their debt to society has been supposedly paid.

Employers should be banned to ask or process such information. "Is currently wanted or on parole" - legitimate question, "was ever convicted" - No, you have no right to know that, except very limited cases defined by law: working with children and the vulnerable, large sums of cash, working in the financial sector etc.

yholio commented on Guinea worm disease nears eradication nature.com/articles/d4158... · Posted by u/pseudolus

akamaka · 4 years ago

Where did you get these outlandish expectations of how much progress would have been made by now? The plan, above all else, was and is to eliminate wild polio virus. Even in the best case scenario, we’re still 5-10 years away from being able to declare it extinct, so you should expect the OPV is still going to be in use until then, and the risks of vaccine-derived polio will still have to be managed for a long time to come. Unfortunately not every country have done a perfect job of that, but it certainly is possible, as demonstrated by the majority of the world having zero cases.

yholio · 4 years ago

I think 'ars' is leading you into a rhetorical trap. The objective was never eliminating the wild virus, the objective was curing polio. The OPV vaccine is a bit like fighting fire with fire: you burn down the forest (immunize susceptible hosts) in a controlled fashion, so that the forest fire cannot reach homes (paralyze children). But when your house burns down, it's irrelevant if it was the "wild" fire or a fire set by the firefighters, i.e a attenuated virus that mutated.

What 'ars' seems to be missing is that this particular "forest" is very rapidly growing back, in some countries you have in excess of 5% of the population as infants each year. Those are new hosts that were never vaccinated, and due to the extreme contagiousness of the disease a few years of lack of coverage can reignite the fire. What happened after OPV2 withdrawal was that a whole new generation inoculated with only bivalent (type 1+3) vaccine became susceptible to cvdpv2 that was still circulating in small pockets.

Essentially, the campaign failed the end-game strategy, they proved they can reduce the infection to arbitrarily low levels using trivalent OPV, but once you take OPV away, as they attempted for a single strain, the epidemic reignites. It's irrelevant if it's a wpv or cvdpv strain. The end-game was always considered a challenge by experts, but a variety of reasons, Covid, political issues etc. conspired to make it very difficult.

This whole thread leaves me very pessimistic about the prospects of eradication. If a relatively inteligent and educated internet-person that has proper sanitation cannot understand these epidemiological dynamics and claims that "OPV causes more infections than it cures", what's the chance you can explain it to rural farmers, especially after the global rise of the antivax movement after Covid?

yholio commented on Guinea worm disease nears eradication nature.com/articles/d4158... · Posted by u/pseudolus

ars · 4 years ago

You are completely misinformed about this. I spent quite a long time reading about this.

What you write is what they hoped would happen. However it did NOT happen. The reason is that the more you try to vaccinate the entire population, the more cases of cvdpv2 you cause. Until you hit that magic 100% you cause more harm than you prevent.

And in the real world 100% is impossible. So yes opv2 "causes more cases than it's stopping" - there are zero cases of wild type 2, so it's stopping nothing except itself.

And in fact that people running this campaign noticed this and stopped vaccinating with opv2! (Which perhaps you did not know.)

The new version of it will hopefully help, and we can eradicate this.

But right now Polio eradication is failing, not because of Taliban, but because of cvdpv2.

I have high hopes for the new version, but it'll be years before we know.

yholio · 4 years ago

> The reason is that the more you try to vaccinate the entire population, the more cases of cvdpv2 you cause. Until you hit that magic 100% you cause more harm than you prevent.

This makes little sense if you understand that both wpv2 and cvdpv2 were eliminated in the poorest regions of the world using OPV2. If what you claim is true, elimination would have been impossible, you would simply replace wpv2 with cvdpv2, since any attempt at eradication would seed new cvdpv2 cases.

Inactivated injectable vaccine, which does not boost herd immunity, is inefective in these countries with limited health systems.

> And in fact that people running this campaign noticed this and stopped vaccinating with opv2! (Which perhaps you did not know.)

Perhaps you refer to the global coordinated action to move from trivalent vaccine to bivalent (wpv1+ wpv3) in 2016 after the wild type 2 virus was certified as eradicated. But monovalent OPV2 was still being used recently to target specific areas where cvdpv2 is endemic. It makes little sense to use it elsewhere and seed cvdpv2.

yholio commented on Social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH twitter.com/thomasg_eth/s... · Posted by u/floetic

xwdv · 4 years ago

Ah yes, a world where taxes don’t exist and the S&P always returns 10%-20% a year and everything you really want in life is dirt cheap.

Nah, I want cars, some homes, a yacht and a hot ass babe to pleasure me and raise nice children as we travel the world and dress fancy.

yholio · 4 years ago

> hot ass babe to pleasure me and raise nice children

Boy, are you in for a nasty surprise. But don't come crying to us, old men who warned you that what you really should want is a nice cabin near a lake with plenty of fish and an absolutely plain ass woman.

yholio commented on Guinea worm disease nears eradication nature.com/articles/d4158... · Posted by u/pseudolus

ars · 4 years ago

That was the idea - but it failed. Type 2 does not exist in the wild, it's all from vaccine derived. It got so bad they stopping giving type 2 vaccine, but then people have no immunity to the vaccine derived version - but if you give the vaccine, then the vaccine causes more cases (of type 2) than it's stopping.

There's no solution here - either option makes things worse.

So I hope the new version of the vaccine works, because otherwise this will fail.

Type 3 appears basically extinct - both in the wild, and vaccine derived. Only type 1 still exists in the wild, and vaccine derived type 2.

yholio · 4 years ago

> if you give the vaccine, then the vaccine causes more cases (of type 2) than it's stopping.

> There's no solution here - either option makes things worse.

That's false and misleading. The OPV2 vaccine will stop both vaccine-derived cvdpv2 virus from spreading and the wild type 2, which has been eradicated. Since OPV2 is a live attenuated virus, it will also continue to multiply and confer protection to any person drinking contaminated water, the vaccine "spreads". It is thus highly effective at stopping polio and in no way it can be said that it "causes more cases than it's stopping".

The problem with OPV2 is that it has a relatively higher chance of reverting to an variant that causes polio. This is not a problem if the population has a high level of vaccination, since the live attenuated virus cannot propagate and mutate. It's only problematic in low coverage areas where it can multiply extensively in many hosts.

Thus, the cvdpv2 epidemic is an expression of low vaccination rates, similar in every way to a wild poliovirus resurgence. The novel OPV2 vaccine will improve the genetic stability of the attenuated virus, allowing further "viral vaccinations" in low coverage areas - but we could eradicate cvdpv2 today with the existing OPV2 vaccine, if only we could get good vaccinations rates everywhere, as it has happened in most of the world.

yholio commented on Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy bbc.co.uk/news/science-en... · Posted by u/playpause

jiggawatts · 4 years ago

The levelized cost of large scale solar power is about 7 cents per kilowatt-hour.

ITER alone will cost $21B minimum and won’t make power. DEMO will conservatively cost about the same, but let’s be generous and round up the total “fusion research cost” to just $30B.

That would buy about 1.5e18 joules, or around the same amount of energy as the electrical generation of the United States… for a month.

So, a drop in the bucket compared to what we use globally…

Even if you use much bigger numbers for fusion research and assume further solar power cost improvements, fusion might still be worth it.

However, it’ll only be worthwhile if the total cost the production fusion plants is not too high. If they end up costing $10B each then the whole thing will be a dead end economically.

yholio · 4 years ago

Nothing about the current tokamak based designs suggests they will be any cheaper to build for a given power rating than existing fission designs:

- They need large, highly advanced cryocooled superconducting magnets in very close proximity to a hundred million degree plasma. This only makes economic sense in massive, and expensive plants.

- They are a very strong source of fast neutrons useful to transmute cheap depleted uranium into plutonium, so carry massive proliferation risks, need close regulatory scrutiny and will require mounts of paperwork to operate, thus exceptionally inflexible to improvements and rapid iteration. Just like the current fission crop.

- Aneutronic fusion is a currently a purely theoretical concept, in the last 70 years nobody has been able to contain even the much cooler D-T plasma for economically viable durations and temperatures.

- The structure of the reactor becomes radiologically active and cleanup operations must be considered. Highly penetrating neutron radiation means some radiation will escape regardless of containment, requiring a radiological exclusion zone. No Mr. Fusion in your car, sorry.

- They operate and must breed sensitive nuclear materials - Tritium, a well known component of boosted thermonuclear weapons. The limited efficiency of tritium production from lithium-6 might require obtaining some from fission reactors to top up the fuel cycle and keep fusion reactors operating.

So when you draw the line, a life time of magnetic containment research has produced a speculative design that even if it were to work, which it doesn't, would be, in the best case scenario, comparable to existing fission designs that are being phased out for cost and risk issues.

A PhD money pit with zero chance of ever building anything useful.