AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine study put on hold due to suspected adverse reaction

Re:AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine study put on hold due to sus... by ethbr0 on Tuesday September 08, 2020 @08:12PM (#24415190)

Imagine a 4 billion year old codebase, written by dice throws and unit testing.

The immune system is a "complicated" thing to work with.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine study put on hold due to sus... by webmaven on Wednesday September 09, 2020 @02:55AM (#24418058)

> Imagine a 4 billion year old codebase, written by dice throws and unit testing.

That's a great analogy, except it doesn't go quite far enough. The code for the toolchain that compiles the codebase (not to mention the unit testing framework) is just as old, and written the same way.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine study put on hold due to sus... by webmaven on Thursday September 17, 2020 @02:19PM (#24508128)

Note to self: while the code (including the toolchain code etc.) is in a monorepo, it is actually surprisingly modular. OTOH, much of the functionality was implemented by copy-and-paste of existing code elsewhere in the repo, and the copies then diverged with subsequent modification.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine study put on hold due to sus... by beowulfey on Tuesday September 08, 2020 @09:41PM (#24415820)

And it has to work on 7 billion similar but slightly different operating systems

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine study put on hold due to sus... by Daynil on Tuesday September 08, 2020 @09:39PM (#24415800)

I'm going to print this out and frame it.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine study put on hold due to sus... by qchris on Tuesday September 08, 2020 @09:55PM (#24415934)

Yeah, I just wrote this down to remember for later. What a quote.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine study put on hold due to sus... by ethbr0 on Tuesday September 08, 2020 @11:36PM (#24416779)

Repressed humour from the programmer son of a pathologist.

My favorite dad quip was 'Biology itself is proof against an intelligent designer.'

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine study put on hold due to sus... by xlm1717 on Wednesday September 09, 2020 @12:10AM (#24417037)

Biology is too "complicated" for our intelligence at least.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine study put on hold due to sus... by ethbr0 on Wednesday September 09, 2020 @06:56AM (#24419646)

His point was more along the lines of it being poorly designed.

Evolution isn't going to nicely separate functionality into clean, single-purpose biochemical pathways.

It's going to overload something that it already has to support a new feature, leading to a rat's nest of intertwined effects.

The hard part in drug development isn't affecting your target: that's pretty easy to guarantee with modern tools. It's finding out that that target also governs 10 other, completely unrelated bodily functions.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine study put on hold due to sus... by landryraccoon on Wednesday September 09, 2020 @01:43PM (#24423609)

> It's going to overload something that it already has to support a new feature,

Some companies in the valley just call that Wednesday.=)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine study put on hold due to sus... by ethbr0 on Wednesday September 09, 2020 @02:05PM (#24423889)

Absolutely, which gives me a chuckle when people trivialize biology, but run screaming from a (gasp!) 20 year old legacy codebase.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine study put on hold due to sus... by FartyMcFarter on Tuesday September 08, 2020 @09:52PM (#24415908)

> unit testing.

Did you mean integration testing?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine study put on hold due to sus... by ethbr0 on Tuesday September 08, 2020 @11:27PM (#24416710)

Absolutely not.

Evolution unit tests, then integrates in prod.

[ Parent | on HN ]