acallahan

The W.H.O. director said 4 days ago "Covid-19 does not transmit as efficiently as influenza" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22488862). So, I'm also confused and unsure how to rectify this.

That's an impressive and surprising stat I've never heard before, and really puts the prospect of nuclear energy in perspective. Can you provide a source for this?

Some interesting prior discussion in this older comment thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15929339

My understanding is that out of 3,500 mosquito species, only about 40 transmit malaria. Most of what I've read from experts implies they're not sure that mosquitoes play any biologically important role at all, and it seems like if there is some role (other than killing humans), the other 99% of non-eradicated mosquito species could fill in that gap.

In my (decidedly non-expert) opinion, that's good enough to start making moves towards eradicating the mosquito-causing species.

Not the parent, but this is a comprehensive source: https://examine.com/supplements/melatonin/

You can ctrl+f "dose" there.

Obscurity seems like useful security here. IIUC it shouldn't be possible to e.g. trick self-driving cars with noisy signs, unless you have a copy of the classifier to train against. Thinking about ATMs, you could train against it as a black box, repeatedly inserting different patterns of noise? But it seems probably infeasible if you need to do a lot of iterations.

It also suggests that people concerned about adversarial attacks shouldn't use off-the-shelf pretrained classifiers, where attacks can be trained offline in advance. Similar to hashing algorithms and rainbow tables, maybe a practice of "salting" an off-the-shelf classifier could be effective in dodging attacks.

To make that more concrete, there are environmental externalities that no one is paying on gas, but whose cost is real. The first recent source I found on google [1] pegs the externalities at $3.80 per gallon of gas, which would more than double the cost of gas (in the US) if factored in.

More directly, if you drive your vehicle 100k miles at 20 MPG, that's $20,000 in environmental harm you're creating and passing on to be someone else's problem. To me, that makes electric cars (and other alternatives) seem more attractive.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomzeller/2015/03/05/study-your...

AFAIK Lytro's new play is into the cinematic VR space.

They're working on a light field camera and stack that they advertise will allow the viewer to don a VR headset and view a live-action scene with 6 DOF, so long as the viewer doesn't move their head terribly far.

https://www.lytro.com/immerge

Maybe it's safer /not/ to wear a seatbelt.

It was hard to find good stats with quick googling, but this old source[1] suggests that blood clots during flights are the greater risk, killing at least 2,000 people in the UK per year. I suspect that keeping a seatbelt off while cruising lets you shift around more mid flight and would give a small decrease in the frequency of clots.

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/1109406.stm

Dissenting opinion: I owned a Super Feeder before upgrading to the feeder pictured in the original story. My cat was able to produce food from the super feeder continuously, just by lightly smacking the tall column on the top. Perhaps the kibble my cat eats is below the minimum supported size?

The new PetSafe feeder is better: it will produce a little food when kicked, but it will only drop out a bit of the next meal from the top of the ramp; in contrast, the super feeder could drain its entire reservoir through continual knocking. I also find the PetSafe a better machine in other regards (battery operated, much larger reservoir, easier to program a serving by volume).

I do think the super feeder is more hackable though, so if you're looking to do metalwork maybe it's the better fit.

Related: a similar story of scaling the mobile app "Draw Something", where usage was doubling every day.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/168799/Scale_Something_Ho...

I haven't seen them myself, but the TrueTone displays in Apple's newest iPad pro seems to put a lot of work into this, particularly in automatically matching the color temperature of the surrounding light.

Some HN discussion about that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11546490

That was a really fascinating experiment. Here's a pretty approachable writeup, if anyone is interested:

http://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/

I have the opposite problem - USPS packages are put in a special mailbox in my building, but UPS and Fedex won't get delivered at all because I'm not home.

Even if Amazon's worried about letting the user choose what shipping option they want, they should show the shipping method at checkout as a read-only field, so that I know whether to ship a particular package to home or work.

I got mine this week as well. The camera is about what you expect from the reviews - acceptable, but not amazing. The biggest problem is start-up and focus lag when using the camera, but I read at least one review indicating that an update is coming out soon to address this.

I'm happy with it size-wise, it feels about the same as the S3 I had before it (but with speed and screen noticeably improved)

I think you should flag this as breaking bad spoilers - not everyone has finished watching the show

For the interested, there was a pretty good article earlier this year by priceonomics about bike theft:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4444708