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spauka

Ironically, you've picked an example (Artemisinin) which is discussed at some length in the linked article - as an example where TCM success is overstated and not backed up by real-world results!

See P5-6 in section "The implausibility problem" - which points out that in order for the treatment to be effective it had to be refined into a form that is not rapidly eliminated from the body.

One additional fact to keep in mind - the ability to smell hydrogen cyanide has a genetic component and 1 in 4 people will not be able to smell the "bitter almond" odour [1].

I do wonder how similar the smell of sweet and bitter almonds are, they are apparently different [2].

[1] https://academic.oup.com/occmed/article-abstract/67/9/662/47... [2] https://www.thespruceeats.com/what-are-bitter-almonds-180699...

Re:Statewide fluoride ban for tap water passes in Florida on Wednesday April 30, 2025 @09:10AM (#43844747)
Without comment on the question of health benefits or harms, I'm curious whether you've had the well water you use tested. Fluoride concentrations in bore-well water varies quite widely, and concentrations higher than fluoridated tap water not uncommon. There are several areas here (in Aus) where fluoride is removed to reach the recommended concentration of 0.5-1.1 ppm. This obviously varies based on location.
Re:Blog hosted on a Nintendo Wii on Monday April 21, 2025 @09:01PM (#43758142)
One of the coolest revelations to me, just looking at the status page [1] is that the Wii only had 88 MB of RAM - split between 24 MB built in to the SoC and 64 MB of GDDR3.

Given that this is the case, ntpd using 15% of the system memory means it was using about 13 MB of RAM - hardly a huge chunk by today's standards but not small either. I wonder if reducing the number of time servers would improve this much? On my system I can see I'm tracking about 9 servers from the debian pool.

Compare this to the XBox 360 which even at the time had 512 MB, it's really amazing how much they managed to squeeze out of such a tiny chip.

[1] - https://blog.infected.systems/status/

Re:Blog hosted on a Nintendo Wii on Monday April 21, 2025 @08:33PM (#43757968)
Depending on how often you are refreshing - the status page only updates every 15 minutes:

> So I put together a simple shell script that runs from the crontab every 15 min, outputting some system stats to a basic HTML file in the webroot.

Re: on Tuesday January 07, 2025 @02:05AM (#42620081)
Raspberry Pi's RP2350 microcontroller introduced a multitude of new hardware security features over the RP2040, and included a Hacking Challenge which began at DEF CON to encourage researchers to find bugs. The challenge has been defeated and the chip is indeed vulnerable (in at least one way). This talk will cover the process of discovering this vulnerability, the method of exploiting it, and avenues for deducing more about the relevant low-level hardware behavior.

The RP2350 security architecture involves several interconnected mechanisms which together provide authentication of code running on the chip, protected one-time-programmable storage, fine-grained control of debug features, and so on. An antifuse-based OTP memory serves as the root of trust of the system, and informs the configuration of ARM TrustZone as well as additional attack mitigations such as glitch detectors. Raspberry Pi even constructs an impressive, bespoke Redundancy Coprocessor (RCP), which hardens execution of boot ROM code on the Cortex-M33 cores with stack protection, data validation, and instruction latency randomization.

Since there are many potential incorrect guesses to be made about where problems might lie, here I begin with the most fundamental features of the chip logic, including the reset process. Even small oversights at this level can entirely defeat sophisticated security efforts if higher-level mechanisms place complete trust in seemingly simple hardware operations. I show how cursory research into the design details of IP blocks used in the SoC can help inform an attack, and demonstrate the importance of fully testing new features which are built atop older IP. Ultimately, the significant amount of luck (or lack thereof) involved is a reminder of the need to meticulously understand and validate complex systems.

Re:Did DORA's last update create an encryption loophole? on Monday October 28, 2024 @02:12AM (#41968216)
It seems like the summary of this article is: No

Encryption is mandated for data at rest and data in transit. There is a provision for encryption of data in use when homomorphic encryption becomes feasible, but the loophole referenced in the title is that it is not required now.

Re:What Is ChatGPT Doing and Why Does It Work? on Tuesday February 14, 2023 @07:48PM (#34798511)
So ChatGPT didn't correctly summarize the text at all, this article does not talk about ethics at all, doesn't talk about potential uses and I would consider the statement about capturing context and incorporating knowledge from a wide range of sources to be a pretty poor summary of the text.

In fact I think that's a great example of exactly what is actually discussed, namely that the context that ChatGPT is able to hold is limited as it's context is held completely in its input. There is never any modification to it's internal state, we're just passing a longer input vector in to the start of the GPT-3 black box. For long inputs the embedding vector becomes more and more sparse and it needs to make more assumptions to fill in it's output.

Re:Transparent Aluminum on Sunday February 12, 2023 @08:32PM (#34769147)
Worth noting that the material is not conductive or otherwise metallic in any way. In a lot of ways this material is similar to Alumina (Sapphire) which you could also describe as "Transparent Aluminum".

Conductive transparent materials do exist (see ITO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indium_tin_oxide), but this is not it.

Re:Ask HN: Firefox connection problems after enabling DoH? on Thursday January 13, 2022 @04:43AM (#29918775)
While your point stands - it's worth pointing out that this bug was NOT caused by an update [1], but seems to have been a long-standing bug in the HTTP3 stack that was triggered due to some external site (including apparently Mozilla's telemetry provider) that changed their stack.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1749908

The paper does not make conclusions about whether the vaccinated are more likely to be asymptomatic - but in case you are interested the results are presented in Table 1.

Of The 69 cases infected, 47 developed symptoms (median 4 days post diagnosis), which is 68% of cases. Viral loads for symptomatic cases was higher (page 11).

Key points: there is not enough information here to draw conclusions about the infectiousness of vaccinated vs. unvaccinated individuals, or about whether vaccinated individuals are more likely to be asymptomatic. This paper does not even try to draw such conclusions.

Re:High-End Gaming PCs Banned in Six US States on Wednesday July 28, 2021 @02:36AM (#27980870)
That is not accurate - take a look at Page 9 of the product compliance datasheet: https://downloads.dell.com/rdoc/dell%20alienware%20ryzen%20e...

WOL and similar features do not change power consumption and this is not where the listed PC's fail. They fail on idle/standby power consumption and to be clear - there is NO reason they have to. Similar spec'd PC's can be purchased that meet these requirements.

Authentication errors across multiple Microsoft services

https://status.azure.com/en-us/statusSUMMARY OF IMPACT: Starting at approximately 19:15 UTC on 15 Mar 2021, a subset of customers may experience issues authenticating into Microsoft services, including Microsoft Teams, Office and/or Dynamics, Xbox Live, and the Azure Portal. Other Azure services/offerings that rely on authentication infrastructure downstream may see further impact.

( Read More... | no comments | 2 points | on HN )
Re:Treatment for Covid-19 Using Ethanol Vapor Inhalation on Tuesday December 01, 2020 @05:28AM (#25264040)
This may be a joke comment - but this is not the idea of the study. From the introduction:

  the idea is to use alcohol inhalation as it reduce surface tension on the alveoli and markedly decrease sputum formation with improvement on oxygenation beside its cytolethal effect on virus lipid bilayer.
Re:Google: Open Letter to Australians on Sunday August 16, 2020 @09:39PM (#24183012)
This reads to me more as if though G/FB have to tell news organizations what data is being collected, rather than disclosing the actual data.

A quote from the Q&A seems to clarify:

> give news media businesses clear information about the nature and availability of user data collected through users’ interactions with news on their services;

Re:“We already store data. In a database. It works well” on Tuesday February 11, 2020 @08:05AM (#22298123)
Where does it say that? My reading of the linked page suggests that MSSQL and Oracle are being deprecated, but SQLite and Postgres are supported and maintained.

In fact, SQLite is the first database listed on the detailed install instructions page[1]!

[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Installing_MediaWiki#C...

As other commenters have pointed out below, the issue the ACCC took was not that they didn't request reviews from all customers, but rather that they specifically and actively excluded people who they suspected might have had bad experiences from a program where otherwise all other customers were included.

From the ruling [0]:

On a weekly basis, Meriton provided TripAdvisor with the email addresses of guests who had stayed at its properties and TripAdvisor sent email invitations to these guests to post a review. However, rather than sending TripAdvisor the email addresses of all guests who had stayed at its properties (other than those who had requested that their details not be provided), Meriton adopted the following two practices:

(a) The first practice was to add the letters “MSA” (which stand for Meriton Serviced Apartments) to the front of the email addresses of certain guests. This rendered the email address invalid. This practice was applied to guests who had made a complaint or were otherwise considered likely to have had a negative experience at a Meriton property. I will refer to this practice as the MSA-masking practice.

(b) The second practice was to withhold from TripAdvisor the email addresses of all the guests who had stayed at a property during a period of time when there had been a major service disruption (such as the lifts not working, no hot water, etc). I will refer to this practice as the bulk withholding practice.

[0] http://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdoc/au/cases/cth/FCA/2...

Re:Saudi Arabia's Oil Wealth Is About to Get a Reality Check on Sunday February 26, 2017 @07:45PM (#13741006)
From the article:

> A profitable IPO is meant to anchor a sovereign wealth fund that will, if things unfold as envisioned, generate enough investment income at home and abroad to dominate state revenue by 2030. Demand for oil will peak just before then, according to Royal Dutch Shell Plc projections, as alternative fuels and electric cars gain popularity, putting Middle East energy producers on shakier footing.

So, it sounds like they want to turn their oil reserves into cash before the price of oil begins to fall.

Re:Japan's radiation disaster toll: none dead, none sick on Wednesday June 05, 2013 @09:07AM (#5825266)
From your link:

>Researchers at Fukushima Medical University, which has been taking the leading role in the study, have so far said they do not believe that the most recent cases are related to the nuclear crisis.

Re:How to crash IE9 with some simple CSS on Wednesday March 20, 2013 @08:41AM (#5406834)
Doesn't kill IE10 on my box. V: 10.0.9200.16521
Re:A New Look for Facebook on Thursday January 03, 2013 @04:35PM (#5004821)
This is nice but isn't it basically the design of the new myspace rehashed?

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