I said build on top of wlroots, not DWL. And I only brought it up as an example of a small Wayland compositor/window manager because the poster I was replying to wants to build their own anyway. DWL is more interesting as a learning exercise than something to use.
Xorg is still being under development, there is another fork in development too (XLibre) and you're in the comment thread for a project about a brand new X server written from scratch.
Usually things which are "no longer developed" do not have (at least) three implementations in development.
(i worked a _little bit_ on dwl) each wlroots upgrade is a pretty small diff on the dwl source. the annoying part is, as dwl is configured with patches, every patch author has to update their patch to the new 0.x, as dwl is quite minimal, and thus has no stable api. that being said, obviously, dwm doesn't have this problem :)
also, for dwl, the issue is that the initial author (not the guy that wrote that notice) is sorta mia, and he has control of the repo on codeberg, so we'd probably need to fork to be safe, and he may not want to take on project lead. (he checks every patch for merge conflicts with one another and upgrade breakages, god bless him lol)
Nearly every Wayland compositor is built on wlroots. Somehow they manage. But yeah, of course it's going to change more than X11, which is older than I am and more or less abandoned...
It's actively maintained by projects like RHEL which still have versions which are supported which in turn support X11.
Others are looking to run X11 wm under wayland with wayback, xlibre wants to keep it moving forward, and phoenix wants to replace it with a modern version.
> [Einstein's General Relativity] tells us that the universe is expanding
Does GR really tell us that though?
The way I understood it, GR's differential equations will produce solutions for many different constraints and initial conditions you throw at them. Including the constraints & conditions informed by astronomical observation.
GR tells us that a homogeneous and isotropic universe either expands or contracts. Besides being the default assumption, our universe also looks quite homogeneous and isotropic at large scales, and definitely looks like it fits the expanding option rather than the contracting one.
You're ignoring the elephant in the room: frozen mammoth dung.
To restore the gut health of humans, there is this thing called "fecal transplant" [1]: use another person's poo to bootstrap the growth of your own gut microbiome.
There is an abundance of mammoth dung in the northern permafrost. When thawed, its microbiome becomes active again, producing methane. [2]
So resurrecting the woolly mammoth as a species is the hardest part. Equipping the first individuals with a proper gut biome will be really easy.
So this is about epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff being fired by Harvard for doggedly sticking to the evidence regarding covid immunity.
Some excerpts:
> With a genetic condition called alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency, which leaves me with a weakened immune system, I had more reason to be personally concerned about Covid than most Harvard professors. I expected that Covid would hit me hard, and that’s precisely what happened in early 2021, when the devoted staff at Manchester Hospital in Connecticut saved my life. But it would have been wrong for me to let my personal vulnerability to infections influence my opinions and recommendations as a public-health scientist, which must focus on everyone’s health.
> Since mid-2021, we have known, as one would expect, that Covid-acquired immunity is superior to vaccine-acquired immunity. Based on that, I argued that hospitals should hire, not fire, nurses and other hospital staff with Covid-acquired immunity, since they have stronger immunity than the vaccinated.
> For scientific, ethical, public health, and medical reasons, I objected both publicly and privately to the Covid vaccine mandates. I already had superior infection-acquired immunity; and it was risky to vaccinate me without proper efficacy and safety studies on patients with my type of immune deficiency. This stance got me fired by Mass General Brigham—and consequently fired from my Harvard faculty position.
The subthread your comment generated here already answers your question. (<-- not a criticism! just an observation.) People are flaming each other about the inverse square law, droplets vs. aerosols, who is refusing to face reality, and sundry other nastinesses in the comments below. It demonstrates what a shitshow a frontpage thread would have been.
It's not that the topic itself is "untouchable". HN had quite a few threads about the lab leak hypothesis for example. But these things are sensitive to initial conditions, and something about the way that headline frames the story feels doomed to me, from an HN point of view. The good stuff for HN is substantive, thoughtful conversation driven by intellectual curiosity. That's what the site is for. We don't always get there by any means, but I only want to turn off user flags when the odds give us a fighting chance. I remember seeing that story get flagged and thinking: it'll never work.
Another aspect of this: like it or not, curiosity and repetition have an inverse relationship. After the mind has been hammered with the same hammer enough times, curiosity gets sick of it and goes "ugh, not that again". That means that on a topic like all-things-covid, which we all got hammered with, the majority of the audience, who don't care that much, check out at first mention of the topic. Who does that leave? The ones whose motive is more intense than mere curiosity.
From an HN point of view, that's a ticket to hell. Curiosity can only operate within a certain range of nervous system activation. If the needle sinks too low, the topic is 'bleh' and nobody cares; but if the needle goes into the red, people will care—my god will they care—but they'll no longer be functioning out of curiosity. That's a failure mode for HN.
When it comes to divisive, heavily-covered topics like that one, the thing to watch for is some kind of interesting new information that isn't entirely reducible to existing battle lines. The same forces driving the thread into flamewar will still be present—but at least you'll have some current running the other way.
Stories about COVID controversies are almost certainly getting flagged off the front page by users, not touched by mods. People look at the titles of these stories and think that's all flaggers are going by, but lots of people flag stories based on their experience of what the threads are like, and the threads on COVID controversies are fucking dreadful. I didn't flag (or see) that story, but I would have.
But why must they be dreadful? Genuine question, I am not being obtuse. We should be able as a community to discuss conterversial subjects somehow.
I also think this sort of thing invites flag brigades. Or better yet, a small batch of bad actor can easily start brigading and forcefully associate such flamewar expectations with any subject they don't like to drive it off HN.
Maybe worth reconsidering how you flag? You might be getting played. Or not, I really don't know. No obvious answers.
Whether or not we’re able to discuss controversial subjects, a topic’s controversy doesn’t imply importance or relevance.
It seems to me that the quality of any public discussion tends to increase when it’s relevant to the expertise in the room, and decrease when it involves people’s casual reads of complicated stuff about which they have vague but emotionally-charged impressions. HN folks have great, nuanced discussions about a wide range of technical questions, but we’re much less likely to collectively know what we’re talking about in questions of the latest hot-button political mudslinging.
There are communities that are good for that kind of discussion, but that’s not what we come here to do. And for this place to stay good at what it does do, it can’t afford to drown out the signal with the noise of emotive bickering.
The site guidelines do, I think, an incredible job of articulating what sustains the tenor here.
But at the end of the day, how best to capture “the vibes” about whether we collectively think a topic is tired or doesn’t fit here? It seems like HN does it just like a good dinner party host would: Change the subject when your guests—that is, the people with a strong track record of positive contributions—indicate that they’re weary of it. After all, we’ve got plenty of things to talk about that we do agree would be fruitful.
> It seems to me that the quality of any public discussion tends to increase when it’s relevant to the expertise in the room, and decrease when it involves people’s casual reads of complicated stuff about which they have vague but emotionally-charged impressions. HN folks have great, nuanced discussions about a wide range of technical questions, but we’re much less likely to collectively know what we’re talking about in questions of the latest hot-button political mudslinging.
The expertise on HN is indeed unrivaled.
If I want to learn about the quirks of a variational autoencoder in some neural network, I read the discussion between experts here on HN [1].
If I want to learn about protein folding, I can find relevant domain experts answering questions here on HN [2].
But why do you and so many others think that there is a covid-shaped hole in the expertise on HN? Do you really believe that out of all domain experts, the covid ones decided to stay away from here?
There's a lot of expertise about COVID here! The problem is, in a variational autoencoder discussion, that's mostly all there is, and in COVID threads there is lots of energy from non-COVID experts.
This isn't complicated. You can just look at any COVID thread and see what a shitshow it is. That's not for lack of COVID expertise, though most of that expertise is probably Homer-melding-backwards-into-the-hedges when they see the thread.
>This isn't complicated. You can just look at any COVID thread and see what a shitshow it is.
I hardly see any covid threads here. I happened to see the one of this week. It got 8 comments before being flagged into oblivion.
>That's not for lack of COVID expertise, though most of that expertise is probably Homer-melding-backwards-into-the-hedges when they see the thread.
You cannot have it both ways. Either you flag covid threads preemptively [1] along with a bunch of other users [2], or you try to learn from domain experts in these threads.
But making assumptions about what these experts would have thought of these threads, had they not been flagged down prematurely, is a weird leap of reasoning.
Sometimes the signal to noise ratio is so bad that I can't blame the experts for no longer engaging and/or me disengaging before I encounter an expert steering the discussion towards more fertile grounds
They're dreadful because people are coming from opposite places and are unwilling to be convinced otherwise, so the conversations are repetitive and dull, with little new information. We really don't need to hear for the 100th time how Covid was or was not a lab leak when there's no new real evidence one way or the other, but every time Covid comes up, there's gonna be some unresolvable argument in the comments that's just dreadful and not worthy of this site's time. Hence the flag. With a infinitely more heavy handed moderation team (or LLM) to judge comments before they got posted, we might be able to have good discussions on such topics, but until then, you can turn on show dead in your profile to see what kind of low-quality comments certain topics attract.
COVID stories are dreadful because there is a very low average level of applicable domain knowledge for COVID discussions.
In plain English, not enough people actually know what they are talking about to create an informative and educational discussion. So they all just end up as a pointless exercise in all the worst aspects of forum flame wars.
HN is at its best when people with lots of relevant experience and knowledge come into the discussion. Then the rest of us can learn new facts, tools, perspectives, etc.
There’s a long list of topics where that is just not available in the existing audience. So there are a lot of topics that, while interesting, are just not a good investment of everyone’s time here.
That thread actually changed my mind on the issue. You say "We should be able as a community to discuss conterversial subjects somehow." Well, guess what, we're not, or at least we're not without a great amount of care. Stories like the submitted one, which may be factually accurate but clearly have a political axe to grind are absolutely not going to lead to anything but a shitstorm of useless discussion.
I think this sort of thing taken to the limit will cut every which way until eventually we run out of subjects and the overton window shrinks into an overton dot.
The risk that the quality of discourse on HN falls to Reddit leveles of shitposting seems a greater one to me. Having high volume of popular highly polarized discussions seems a great way to have an Eternal September[2] event, and there is no way to recover what makes a forum unique after that.
HN is a single place on the internet with clear moderation guidelines[1]. It doesn't have to cater to every form of speech. In fact, actively not doing so is probably the reason why HN's level of discourse is comparatively high.
People who want Reddit should go to Reddit, not drag HN with them through the mud.
It converges to the front page we have now, which, while imperfect, seems to be to the liking of the community, such that stories like this carry a bunch of comments about how happy they are about moderation here, and how about how few if any of the stories getting yeeted from the front page are things they even want to see on HN.
HN does not have to be a space for conversations about every important story. It is enough for it to be good at the conversations it is good at. There's a whole wide internet out there for the rest of the important conversations to take place on. Moreover: that has always been the premise of HN; it's not a principle we just sort of slipped into accidentally.
Empirically they are not. What you mean is that you don't like to be faced with the reality revealed by these stories and the comments.
But this attitude explains a lot of the abusive flagging that goes on here. Stories get flagged because they make people feel ick, and they feel ick because they previously took positions that were wrong. So they flag. And when asked, why do you flag, they say "I don't know, I just don't like it", forgetting that the site exists supposedly to help drive intellectual curiousity. You may not like these stories, but other people do find them useful and you should not interfere with them.
This isn't actually COVID specific. It's a nasty and frequent tactic on this forum, where someone makes strong assertions about one side of an argument whilst simultaneously claiming that the other side can't be allowed to speak because it would be "fighting", a "flamewar", a "trash fire", "not curious", "tedious" or whatever. It's an attempt to manipulate the site rules to suppress debate and is itself anti-curious.
"Given the weak sourcing, it feels like this article, in particular, flunks the "divisive subjects require more thought and substance" test."
(on a Bari Weiss article arguing that health authorities weren't really driven by science, something they now admit themselves was true).
In other comments you asserted that COVID vaccines can't possibly be dangerous but also said, "Convincing suspicious vaccine-skeptics of the value of vaccines is not the goal here. We're not a public health service; we're a forum for curious conversation. Tedious rehashes of antivax arguments aren't curious; they're just tedious."
If you don't like such discussions, ignore them! Nobody forces you to click through to the comments section. But this tactic of trying to define disagreement with your very strong opinions as not "curious" enough is tiresome. Other people do in fact want curious conversation, which will sometimes mean conversations about topics that you don't like. I'll say it again: leave those discussions alone. Stay away by all means, but don't interfere with other people's curiousity.
Hm. I think what I'm going to do instead is relentlessly flag them.
Check this out. It's barely on the front page, and has just 3 comments right now. How great is this post? How much more would I rather be reading comments on this than about Bari Weiss? Infinity times more:
My son is a biochemist (interviewing for grad school slots right now, as in this actual evening, I'm living vicariously through him, wish him luck). I've been for years paying attention to bio/chem/biotech experts on HN, because I'm a biochem dad. We have lots of expertise about COVID here. None of it is on these COVID threads because all of them would apparently rather eat a bug than "truth it out" with people paraphrasing Bari Weiss. The verdict is in. You're on the wrong side of it!
But these have been useful data points for me, and I appreciate you offering them up. Have a great weekend!
Congratulations on your son becoming a biochemist! A wonderful achievement.
Surely his middle school biology teachers had something to do with it. You should pay them a visit. Maybe ask them how many genders there are and see their faces contort in horror.
Please note that on this, covid, and whatever other such... things.. I offer no opinions of my own. I don't actually care very much about those topics and also, perhaps similarly to you, am put off by the far-(right|left) fanatics obsessed with them.
My peeve is with what it did to good public discourse and good people.
Perhaps if you see it on the faces of your sons teachers, who no doubt have had a rather increasingly stressful job in the not so many years since he left them, and to whom he owes at least a modicum of his no doubt bright future - you will understand my objection to your behavior of drumming out people in this fashion.
> How much more would I rather be reading comments on this than about Bari Weiss? Infinity times more
So do so! Nobody forces you to click on the Bari Weiss stuff.
There is no doubt an evil twilight zone tptacek who flags the other way. And you both think you're great sheriffs clearing the joint from scum.
How much would I rather the thread you linked on daunting papers. How much more would I rather be reading comments on this than "you-are-wrong-about-my-sacred-cow, flagged!" remarks.
In my opinion you should just let people be wrong (see, no snarky air quotes from me! I hope you understand my tone and where I'm coming from) in the covid threads, leave each other alone and it won't boil over to more interesting threads. It's weird adults teach this in kindergarten but on a fancy I so smart forum we can't bring ourselves to rise above.
I don't think you understand the difference between a public health official and a biochemist. He cares what proteins think about his work, not what Bari Weiss does. It's not a persuasion job.
Anyways, my point is: we have subject matter experts on virology on HN. They tend not to participate in COVID threads, which are invariably overheated and Weiss-ian.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
An editorial that clearly does not embody that spirit is a poor starting point if you want the discussion to trend towards sanity.
Especially when the title itself violates—and ensures further violations of—this rule:
> Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead.
> lots of people flag stories based on their experience of what the threads are like
IMHO story submissions should be judged based upon their own merits. Toxic commenters can be downvoted/banned but the story submitter shouldn't be punished for the misbehavior of others.
> I didn't flag (or see) that story, but I would have.
You mean purely based on the expected awfulness of imagined future comments, instead of the actual comments? If so, with a precrime mindset like that, you're fanning the flames of controversy.
There's not enough space on the front page for all the good things we want to read. I'm not interested in expending extra effort to rescue marginal stories with a low likelihood of generating a good conversation. The people most invested in these kinds of stories seem to be almost the least invested in HN's rubric of curious conversation.
I don't call any of the shots around here, but I think I speak for a bunch of different users who flag this way.
> I'm not interested in expending extra effort to rescue marginal stories with a low likelihood of generating a good conversation.
I didn't ask you to expend effort in rescuing stories. I took issue with the way you expend effort in burying stories, even before the comment section turns out to go sideways:
> I didn't flag (or see) that story, but I would have.
It takes very little effort at all to flag stories that I'm convinced are both colorably off-topic, or duplicative of other marginally topical stories that have run within the last year, and that I'm convinced will create nightmare threads. That's the purpose of the flagging system. That system is also monitored, so that people who abuse it as a super-downvote for stories they just don't like quietly lose flagging powers. So: I plan to keep on doing it.
Remember though: we're not having this conversation so you can persuade me to change how I use the site. I'm just one doofus here. Wha ye need tae worry about are the t'ousand doofuses standing behind me. (_The Devil's Own_, 1997, starring Brad Pitt and Harrison Ford).
It doesn't get less curious that "I try to bury discussion before it even happens and can't even explain why". You should be ashamed that you spend so much time here yet fundamentally do not get the rules.
I flagged that article, so I'll clearly explain why:
1. I think for anyone that has been on HN throughout pandemic knows it is extremely unlikely for topics like this to produce any sort of valuable discussion. I almost never see any sort of humility on the topic (to be clear, from many/all sides) that admits that people (individuals, experts, literally everyone) were doing what they thought best with the information they had available at the time. It always devolves into portraying the other side as evil. I'm tired of it, I don't want to see it on HN, there are literally pages and pages and pages of place on the Internet where you can have that debate if you're so inclined.
2. Are you honestly purporting that specific article is well tailored to "an overwhelmingly science-minded audience", as opposed to just having a particular political axe to grind, given the title is "Anthony Fauci Fesses Up"? Honestly, if the article was written with an intent to encourage an actual understanding about where the 6-foot rule came from, and about whether the evidence for it was lacking, I probably wouldn't have flagged it.
> it bothers me that an important topic like that is deemed untouchable.
I think the mistake you are making there is thinking because a particular article is flagged by a lot of users that "an important topic like that is deemed untouchable." I can't speak for others, but for me that is absolutely not what I think, and it's not why I flagged this particular submission.
That isn't clear at all. You seem to be saying that if you anticipate that people might question other people's competence or motives, or in your view a discussion won't lead people to think the right thoughts ("encourage actual understanding") then you flag it to try to ensure nobody can discuss it.
But you also say that making it undiscussable is also not about making the topic untouchable. That's just playing with words, isn't it? It's exactly what you're trying to do and exactly why you're flagging it.
This particular case is really egregious. Fauci has said this draconian policy "just sort of appeared", yet you damn anyone questioning his competence or motives as lacking humility? What would it take for you to allow criticism of this guy?
Your response highlights the exact thing I'm talking about, as it ascribes motives to me that are totally foreign to me, and takes the tone that flagging an article means that I think I want to "ensure nobody can discuss it."
I could respond to some of your other sentences, but you've exactly proven my point, so thank you.
(Shrug) I don't require scientific proof of the inverse-square law. It's self-evident to the point of being axiomatic. Standing 6 feet away from a virus source will expose you to about 44% fewer virus particles than standing 5 feet away from one, while not imposing any real hardships in most public interaction scenarios. What's controversial about that?
If you demand precise scientific rigor in all aspects of everyday life, public health is probably not the career field for you.
Put a water hose on mist and spray someone with it. Then put a cloth over the nozzle and try to spray them. It's self evident yet people just could not grasp it.
When the medical field phases out masks because they "have no benefit" I will believe that masking was useless. Also keep in the mind that the primary reason for studies showing masks not working is that people don't wear it correctly or at all.
That's just one RCT. The Cochrane meta-analysis looked at a bunch of them.
>When the medical field phases out masks because they "have no benefit" I will believe that masking was useless.
You're putting the cart before the horse. In an ideal world, guidelines for the medical field are based on scientific evidence. But there's always a delay.
You better consult the scientific evidence to make up your mind.
When it comes to covid and masking, policymakers will wait as long as possible before aknowledging the evidence, because they know the public hasn't forgotten the draconian masking of school kids yet.
You can find a meta-analysis to prove anything you want.
It is an extraordinary claim that wearing a mask properly does not reduce transmission of viral particles. You'll need to come up with a physical basis for this unintuitive hypothesis if you want to be taken seriously. Then you can point to studies whose results are explained by that hypothesis.
>You can find a meta-analysis to prove anything you want.
I'm not trying to prove anything. I just rely on the judgement of domain experts.
In this thread I cited Cochrane, The Lancet, SciAm and Science Magazine. If you have more reputable sources, please share them here.
>You'll need to come up with a physical basis for this unintuitive hypothesis if you want to be taken seriously.
It's only unintuitive if you stick to the droplet model. SARS-CoV-2 however spreads like smoke through the air, as I documented already extensively in this post:
Generally, after asserting that someone is drastically wrong, the next few paragraphs should be about backing that claim up with convincing evidence and explanations. Instead you digressed into talking about droplets vs aerosols and forgot to even make a connection between that and the "drastically wrong" take you were replying to.
Here's some serious research, spanning one year. Note how the confidence increases throughout time. You can't blame nvm0n2 for taking for granted what is already well-established since three years.
--> May 2020: "How Coronavirus Spreads through the Air: What We Know So Far"
>For months, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization have maintained that the novel coronavirus is primarily spread by droplets from someone who is coughing, sneezing or even talking within a few feet away. But anecdotal reports hint that it could be transmissible through particles suspended in the air (so-called "aerosol transmission"). And the WHO recently reversed its guidance to say that such transmission, particularly in “indoor locations where there are crowded and inadequately ventilated spaces where infected persons spend long periods of time with others, cannot be ruled out.”
>Even if aerosols do not travel farther than most droplets, the oft-touted “six-foot rule” for social distancing may depend on the circumstances, Cowling says. If there is a fan or air conditioner, infectious aerosols (or even droplets, as was suspected in the case of that restaurant in China) could potentially sicken someone farther away who is downwind.
--> October 2020: "Airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2"
>Viruses in droplets (larger than 100 µm) typically fall to the ground in seconds within 2 m of the source and can be sprayed like tiny cannonballs onto nearby individuals. Because of their limited travel range, physical distancing reduces exposure to these droplets. Viruses in aerosols (smaller than 100 µm) can remain suspended in the air for many seconds to hours, like smoke, and be inhaled. They are highly concentrated near an infected person, so they can infect people most easily in close proximity. But aerosols containing infectious virus (2) can also travel more than 2 m and accumulate in poorly ventilated indoor air, leading to superspreading events (3).
>Individuals with COVID-19, many of whom have no symptoms, release thousands of virus-laden aerosols and far fewer droplets when breathing and talking (4–6). Thus, one is far more likely to inhale aerosols than be sprayed by a droplet (7), and so the balance of attention must be shifted to protecting against airborne transmission. In addition to existing mandates of mask-wearing, social distancing, and hygiene efforts, we urge public health officials to add clear guidance about the importance of moving activities outdoors, improving indoor air using ventilation and filtration, and improving protection for high-risk workers (8).
--> May, 2021: "Ten scientific reasons in support of airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2"
> First, superspreading events account for substantial SARS-CoV-2 transmission; indeed, such events may be the pandemic's primary drivers. [...]
> Second, long-range transmission of SARS-CoV-2 between people in adjacent rooms but never in each other's presence has been documented in quarantine hotels. [...]
> Third, asymptomatic or presymptomatic transmission of SARS-CoV-2 from people who are not coughing or sneezing is likely to account for at least a third, and perhaps up to 59%, of all transmission globally and is a key way SARS-CoV-2 has spread around the world [...]
> Fourth, transmission of SARS-CoV-2 is higher indoors than outdoors and is substantially reduced by indoor ventilation.5
Both observations support a predominantly airborne route of transmission.
> Fifth, nosocomial infections have been documented in health-care organisations, where there have been strict contact-and-droplet precautions and use of personal protective equipment (PPE) designed to protect against droplet but not aerosol exposure.
> Sixth, viable SARS-CoV-2 has been detected in the air. In laboratory experiments, SARS-CoV-2 stayed infectious in the air for up to 3 h with a half-life of 1·1 h. [...]
> Seventh, SARS-CoV-2 has been identified in air filters and building ducts in hospitals with COVID-19 patients; such locations could be reached only by aerosols.
> Eighth, studies involving infected caged animals that were connected to separately caged uninfected animals via an air duct have shown transmission of SARS-CoV-2 that can be adequately explained only by aerosols.
> Ninth, no study to our knowledge has provided strong or consistent evidence to refute the hypothesis of airborne SARS-CoV-2 transmission. [...]
> Tenth, there is limited evidence to support other dominant routes of transmission—ie, respiratory droplet or fomite. [...]
Thank you to sibling ggdG for presenting even more evidence.
But I don't get your reply at all, wtallis. "the next few paragraphs should be about backing that claim up with convincing evidence and explanations" - which is what the stuff about the Diamond Princess, SARS-1 and Hong Kong was about? Evidence and explanations for why the droplet model was wrong. Do you see that? The connection is that the claim exposure as simple as inverse square law on distance assumes no aerosol transmission, which is incorrect.
It's hard not to feel that if people didn't keep flagging these kinds of discussions off the front pages, the wider HN community would be aware of all these basic facts which as the sibling post points out, is actually not controversial and hasn't been for years. HN is supposed to be about intellectual curiousity but the aggressive flagging behavior talked about by others in this thread means that too many posters here are stuck in a timewarp where it's still Jan 2020.
I think you both have made a mistake that seems all to common among people who are eager for a fight: namely, failing to recognize the distinction between someone who disagrees with your conclusion, and someone who believes your argument to be unsound.
In reply to a comment about the inverse square law, you replied with arguments about droplet vs aerosol when neither concept was mentioned in the comment you were replying to. Simply put, your argument was unsound; it lacked any connection between the concepts in your comment and the concepts in the parent comment. As written, it falls somewhere between a non-sequitur and a straw-man.
When your conclusions are correct, such unsoundness is usually easy to rectify; you've now made it at least halfway there by implying that the inverse square law applies to droplet transmission but not aerosol transmission. You now only need to reinforce that new claim with evidence to complete the originally broken chain of reasoning and have a convincing argument.
Even when you are right, you still have a responsibility to make your point using complete and coherent reasoning. I routinely downvote people whose conclusions I agree with when their explanations or justifications are clearly deficient and overreaching and don't come close to proving their point. I flag such comments when it looks like the poster is being disingenuous or displaying egregious intellectual laziness. Because discussions here are meant to be thoughtful and substantive, and you don't accomplish that by regurgitating talking points without even re-writing them to fit appropriately into the context of the discussion. Bad arguments are always bad comments for HN.
(Not having researched the droplet vs aerosol issue myself, my suspicion is that both are likely subject to distance falloff that is at least quadratic, but that the constant factors are so wildly different that effective "social distancing" for aerosol transmission would require distances that do not fit into most indoor spaces, and consequently aerosol transmission in confined indoor spaces can result in aerosol concentration becoming fairly uniform instead of maintaining a strong gradient. But that's rather more reading between the lines than you can reasonably demand from people.)
> Your ability to follow simple conversations is far too poor to judge others like this.
It's not about ability to follow "simple" conversations. It's about willingness to chase down numerous seemingly-unrelated references (that you didn't even bother providing links for) in order to discover the missing connections that you could have easily explained up front, without much a priori confidence that tracking down those references would satisfactorily fill in all the gaps.
On a forum with such a broad audience, you have to be more careful about assuming which things "everybody knows", and need to put more effort into fleshing out your arguments and explanations. Otherwise, it's hard for people who don't share your expertise or obsessions to tell when you're eliding important information because it can reasonably go without saying in some narrower community you're used to discussing the topic in, or whether you're presenting an argument that genuinely has serious holes in it. The latter happens often enough in discussions where I have expertise that I'm sure it's common when other subjects are involved.
I'm sure we'd both agree that HN has plenty of people who are not qualified to provide expert opinions on subjects like epidemiology. Whatever qualifications you you may have are not on display here, so users such as myself have to estimate your credibility based only on your comments. That evaulation will necessarily be a snap judgement, because there are too many trolls and misinformed people debating controversial subjects, and because someone who is knowledgeable and right but bad at explaining to people not already in the know isn't worth much more of my time and still isn't what people want to find when they come to HN.
That comment lined up pretty closely with one of my pet peeves. I apologize for overreacting and contributing negatively to what was already a busy day for you. Thank you for all your hard work and patience.
The top comment complains that the title submitted to HN is both not the original headline, and not an accurate characterization of the content of the article.
If there's no possible title to use for a submission that won't get it flagged, then clearly it's not a great article to be submitting.
And it's disingenuous for you to pretend that the issue is HN users being unwilling to reexamine the public health response to Covid-19, when the submission is clearly flouting HN's rules. (The paywall doesn't help its viability as an HN submission, either.)
> The top comment complains that the title submitted to HN is both not the original headline, and not an accurate characterization of the content of the article.
What do you mean: "not an accurate characterization of the content of the article"? The title pretty accurately describes an admission by the former NIAID director in a House Select Subcommittee, according to the WSJ. That admission is the topic of the article.
> And it's disingenuous for you to pretend that the issue is HN users being unwilling to reexamine the public health response to Covid-19, when the submission is clearly flouting HN's rules.
If it had been submitted with that title, it would simply have been harder to pretend there's wasn't plenty of reason for the submission to be flagged.
Personally, I thought it was already pretty well established that the six-foot rule was based on poor science. I remember hearing about that years ago.
The thing is, you're not even wrong. The six foot rule was based on what the best understanding of the experts was at the time, and probably saved thousands of lives. Just like forced masking up probably saved tens of thousands of lives. Both were great examples of science, which readily admits to tuning when new evidence comes into play.
However, because there's a right wing cult around Donald Trump, whose fortunes were hurt by the pandemic, the six foot rule and masking and vaccines are set up as straw men and attacked by a gigantic and well funded and organized horde of proxies, including the #1 media network in the US. It goes something like this: because a particular individual got COVID, that's proof that vaccines are not 100% effective and so They Lied To Us For Nefarious Purposes. Or because this particular individual stood 6 feet away and still got COVID, that's evidence that Fauci Is In A Conspiracy With The Chinese. Or because this particular individual survived COVID, it's just a cold. Or because masks are not 100% effective when not worn securely, they are not effective. And on and on.
So it's not unreasonable or unlikely that you heard a thing about bad science and six feet of social distance or whatever. But hearing a thing, and the thing being true from foundational motivations of actual science, are very different right now.
literally quoting from that meta-analysis, which does not include many clinical trials that have demonstrated an impact:
"Key messages
We are uncertain whether wearing masks or N95/P2 respirators helps to slow the spread of respiratory viruses based on the studies we assessed."
>literally quoting from that meta-analysis, which does not include many clinical trials that have demonstrated an impact:
Yes. To their credit, they only looked at randomized controlled trials.
>"Key messages We are uncertain whether wearing masks or N95/P2 respirators helps to slow the spread of respiratory viruses based on the studies we assessed."
In other words: the RCTs don't show an effect to a significant degree.
> They vaccinate for all sorts of diseases. Covid is no different.
But the covid vaccines ARE different:
Vaccines typically take 10-15 years of research and clinical trials before approval [1].
The covid vaccines OTOH got developed, "tested" and approved within the timespan of less than a year. They literally had to invoke a sci-fi trope ("warp speed") to justify this timetable [2].
> It’s a risk and threat to them being functional as an organization.
The injection poses a bigger threat to them as an organisation than the disease itself: men below 40 are 6 times more likely to get heart damage from the mRNA shot than from the disease [3]. And this for a disease that has a lower IFR than influenza among people younger than 60 [4].
Pre-2020, decades of research into vaccines for (other) coronaviruses only resulted in vaccines that either didn't work at all or led to enhanced disease [5].
After a gain-of-function experiment went south in Wuhan, all that hard-earned wisdom got thrown out of the window (along with the Nuremberg code [6]) for a panicked and rushed vaccination program.
Yes, these vaccines improve the short-term relative outcomes for the elderly, the obese and the sick. About six months after vaccination you still are somewhat protected against symptoms, but are more likely to get infected than the non-vaccinated [7] [8] [9].
> I don't understand your goal. Why are you doing this sort of comment? Taking the time to dull peoples minds against whats happening to the world?
> Is it for yourself? Are you scared and it makes you feel better to try and control other peoples' perceptions and reactions? Do you believe you're doing a service and creating a nuanced worldview that helps people make better decisions? You're not. I don't understand you.
> Are you in a position that this com
ment is useful? Is this a place where it is useful? If it's not, is the purpose of the article to solicit the sort of response you've provided?
> You are going to die asking stupid questions in meetings.
“Of all the offspring of Time, Error is the most ancient, and is so old and familiar an acquaintance, that Truth, when discovered, comes upon most of us like an intruder, and meets the intruder's welcome.”
1. Cesario et al [1] received some criticism [2], but they stood by their findings [3]
2. A student union / twitter mob was not happy with the findings of the study [4]
3. The resulting political pressure led to the ousting of Stephen Hsu from MSU, who had approved the funding for the study [5]
4. Only then retracted Cesario et al their study, while still standing by their findings [6]
______
There is a similar study done by economist Roland Fryer [7], while at Harvard.
Summarized, the two studies find the following:
Cesario et al:
Per interaction with the police, civilians have roughly the same risk of being killed by police gunfire, regardless of their ethnicity.
Fryer:
- Per interaction with the police, civilians have roughly the same risk of being the target of police gunfire, regardless of their ethnicity.
- Per interaction with the police, a black civilian is 1.5x more at risk to receive slight use of force by the police than a white civilian. This disparity gets smaller at higher levels of force. (See [7], Figure 1)
- Per interaction with the police, a perfectly compliant black civilian is 1.2x more at risk to receive slight use of force by the police than a perfectly compliant white civilian. This disparity gets smaller at higher levels of force. (See [7], Figure 5)
> 2025-08-16: dwl IS CURRENTLY UN-MAINTAINED. AT THE PRESENT TIME, I (@fauxmight) DO NOT HAVE THE TIME OR CAPACITY TO KEEP UP WITH wlroots CHANGES.
https://codeberg.org/dwl/dwl
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