> Have they? It's a horrible back and forth, not based on any evidence. (...)
You're grossly misrepresenting the facts. If you take an objective look at recent history, you'll realize that politicians have been trying to juggle public health guidelines with economic and political topics. The bulk of these arbitrary measures result from politicians caving in to issues completely unrelated to public health guidelines.
Take for example how some countries mysteriously relaxed COVID restrictions during major public holidays like Christmas and new year's eve celebrations to afterwards hastily reintroduce additional restrictions to contain the expected hike in infection rates.
> Couples were arrested for sitting at the beach.
No they really weren't. People were charged for endangering public health by purposely violating mandatory lockdowns and social distancing requirements. Trying to frame this as punishment for sitting at the beach is like complaining that drunk driving is punishing people for enjoying a drink now and then.
> Even if this is true, the very fact that it was even an option that came up in discussion in Cabinet says a lot.
Not really. Two years ago, when COVID started to spread outside China, the initial concern was the potential impact it would have on saturating national health services and there was no concern regarding it's death rate, which led to the "flatten the curve" political talking point.
Keep in mind that "flatten the curve" implies that everyone is expected to contract the disease sooner or later, but only in a way that doesn't overwhelm health services. Back then it was presumed that contracting COVID was not a cause for concern, and that after the first infection then everyone was finally immune and everything was back to normal.
Only after COVID was experienced first hand outside of china, and thus without being subjected to the CCP's censors, did the world learned about it's true fatality rate, transmission rate, reinfection rate, and lingering health problems. Afterwards there were subsequent variants which again became pandemics.
When the real impact of COVID started to become noticeable, the approach to the disease changed radically to one based on containment at all cost followed by mass vaccination campaigns once the first effective vaccines started to become available.
> Masks in general provide very little protection. I recommend you listen to the explanations by infectious disease experts Dr. Monica Gandhi and Dr. Michael Osterholm. (...)
It literally takes less than 5min in Google to realize your criticism is utter bullshit, and even come across statements by Dr Monica Gandhi complaining that her comments were misrepresented and distorted to come across as authoritative anti-mask assertions.
Please be more responsible and stop contributing to spread blatant misinformation.
Stop lying. I haven't posted any misinformation. You can literally listen to Dr. Gandhi's own words at the link I posted above. She spoke on the subject at some length, and answered several direct questions from a panel of other physicians.
> Stop lying. I haven't posted any misinformation. You can literally listen to Dr. Gandhi's own words at the link I posted above.
Again, google it up. You can't fake this one. You do not need to take my word for it. Just have a shred of honesty and stop cherry-picking stale and debunked myths.
Stop posting misinformation about a serious public health issue. If you have a valid scientific or medical reference then let's see it. Otherwise you can't be taken seriously.
Telling HN users to Google something is just sloppy and intellectually lazy.
I vividly recall from the start of the very first lockdown, when the only people expected to be outside were those attending pressing matters like restocking provisions on supermarket, the local police caught a middle age man who was avoiding the lockdown by strolling around repeatedly with the same days-old loaf of bread under his arm. He didn't even bothered to actually spend a few cents on his scheme, and reused the same loaf of bread every single day to go for a stroll.
And let's not get started on refusals to adhere to simple basic personal higiene measures such as washing hands and wear a face mask, let alone vaccination rates.
People might have the age of an adult, but too many people do not have the personal responsibility expected from adults.
You've sorted people who disagree with you into the category of "not adults". Should they be able to vote?
The example you chose is funny because, in my view, it's utterly insane that we ever had lockdowns preventing people from "going for a stroll". That you think any reasonable person ("an adult," apparently) agrees with you just shows how far off the reservation you've wandered.
> You've sorted people who disagree with you into the category of "not adults". Should they be able to vote?
No, I'm the kind of person who is well aware that reaching adulthood is not a magic elixir that automatically grants everyone the ability to act responsibly or rationally, let alone a sense of common good.
Throwing adulthood around as if it implies everyone will do the right thing is blatantly unrealistic.
Yeah, I remember a thread elsewhere. Someone was complaining about a large party early in the lockdown. The homeowner (note: very expensive area) felt that they were only risking themselves and thus it wasn't anybody else's business what they were doing.
Among the various objections people made to this I pointed out that my wife is in the medical field, albeit not on the front lines--his recklessness is a risk to her. His opinion was that doctors knew what they were signing up for, it didn't matter. Unfortunately, the moderators zapped the thread before I got a reply to my pointing out that she had not signed up for dealing with reckless idiots in a pandemic.
There was never any valid justification for the police to harass a man going for a stroll. Real adults actively resist overbearing authoritarian governments instead of meekly submitting.
> There was never any valid justification for the police to harass a man going for a stroll.
Have you been living under a rock for the past two years?
There was a pandemic killing hundreds of people per day, and the only effective way to stop it from continue growing exponentially was to ensure everyone stayed put for a few days.
How is that "not a valid justification" ?
I mean, think about it for a second: law enforcement impose lockdowns on neighborhoods when a shooter is on the loose without any complain, and asking everyone to stay put to avoid hundreds being killed is not "a valid justification" ?
How many days is "a few" exactly? Do you mean two days? Two weeks?
There is no actual proof that forcing everyone to "stay put for a few days" actually saved any lives. Your comment is a complete non sequitur. And, hypothetically, even if it did save lives that is not valid justification for violating the fundamental human right of peaceful assembly. (And no, there is no human right to be protected from risks.)
>There was a pandemic killing hundreds of people per day, and the only effective way to stop it from continue growing exponentially was to ensure everyone stayed put for a few days.
...it didn't stop it. Lockdowns didn't do anything. We had 14 days to stop the spread, and that was roughly 700 days ago. There isn't any evidence that lockdowns work at all.
> As GP states, they engaged in "noble lies" in order to drive vaccine adoption.
Can you point out what was in your opinion the best example of what you described as "noble lie"?
I've seen people throwing baseless accusations by misrepresenting basic guidances, such as how avoiding scarcity of personal safety equipment like latex gloves and surgical masks in hospitals was distorted into "first they state masks don't work but now they flipflop into arguing they do".
Thus, to avoid personal subjective takes and keep this discussion on the facts, what exactly do you see as the best example of this "noble lie"?
Natural immunity works. It's settled science, and has been for some time.
Many countries acknowledge it as a valid alternative to the vaccine. But not the USA. There has been no change in policy. Not even a public acknowledgment, let alone an apology for getting it wrong.
Is this out of ignorance? malice? Neither, it's simply pragmatic.
Reliably testing for prior infections at population scale would be really slow, expensive, and faulty. Further there's no real downside to vaccinating someone with a prior infection (slightly higher incidence of side effects notwithstanding).
Further, people will lose the urgency to get the vaccine if they think they have antibodies.
Monolithic policy is cheaper than nuanced policy, and monolithic policy only works if its dead simple. So, better to have everyone believe the vaccine is the one and only solution than to actually concern themselves with the truth.
There are also many examples of "verbatim" lies, such as these:
> Moderna's chief medical officer, Tal Zaks, said last month that he believed it was likely the vaccine would prevent transmission but warned that there was not yet "sufficient evidence" of it.
> The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday walked back controversial comments made by its director, Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, suggesting that people who are vaccinated against the coronavirus never become infected or transmit the virus to others.
> Natural immunity works. It's settled science, and has been for some time.
What exactly do you mean by "works"?
I mean, it's well established that those who contract COVID and didn't died from it will have a good immunity response for subsequent infections.
But that is not the point of a vaccine, is it?
The point of the vaccine is that it trains your immune system to fight an infection without undergoing the risk of a real infection. So that the odds you die from COVID are lower, if not residual.
Consequently, we see the bulk of all deaths from COVID comprised of unvaccinated individuals.
But other than all the dead, those who survive a COVID infection do end up with an immune system that is able to handle COVID.
Is that what you mean by "Natural immunity works"? That if you ignore all those unvaccinated people who died then the ones that lived through a COVID infection didn't died?
Because the whole point of a vaccine is that people don't have to die from a preventable disease, isn't it?
You've chosen not to address the (very clear) point made by the previous poster. Instead you retreat to familiar talking points. Genuinely disturbing to witness an interaction like this.
There is more nuance in your fact that a person who survives a COVID infection has immunity. That nuance is that most people who think they were infected actually did not ever get tested. Additionally, testing for previous infection takes more time and is more costly and adds additional complexity to the cheaper and simpler one step plan of "just go get vaccinated".
yes .. I cover that a few comments ago -- hence the "noble lie".
i.e let's lie and say natural immunity does _not_ work, that way people are more likely to get vaccinated. It's for their own good, the common folk don't know any better!
So in your opinion, is there no such thing as a noble lie? While I don't know if I would consider this one of those cases or not, I do know with a pretty strong certainty that this particular lie can and most likely did save lives.
No, I strongly disagree that this saved lives and everyone keeps getting this wrong about the pandemic.
Look at Japan and Russia. Japan was highly compliant with lockdowns, masks, and vaccine inoculation. Russia was the exact opposite. The difference being trust in institutions. You could argue lives were lost in Russia because of the inherent distrust.
In parallel, the USA was caught telling blatant lies. This is exactly what spooked and outraged so many people ultimately fueling the anti-vax movement. "If they're lying about this, what else are they lying about?"
No truth, no trust. The USA lost trust, and lost lives as a result.
There are examples of masking and lockdowns that could go either way. The part that I am quite certain about saving lives is telling people that you still needed to get the shot even if you had COVID before.
Many more people would have skipped out on getting it because they thought they had COVID. Because their immunity had waned or because they never really had COVID. I personally know someone that didn't get vaccinated because she had COVID previously. She caught it again in the Delta wave and it killed her. She never had a verified diagnosis the first time, so she may not have had it. But, even if she did, getting vaccinated would have likely boosted her immunity.
Natural immunity will only work if the virus doesn't mutate quickly, and what your immune system learns about the virus can be applied to future infections.
The former is clearly not true with regards to COVID. That is why we have been having waves of high infection rates, as the new variants get quickly distributed widely.
Have you seen how bad Sweden's numbers were? It was vaunted as a story of the success of let it rip approach, but the end result was to show the failure of the let it rip approach.
And note that it's not that good in the first place--plenty of reinfections because the immune system locked onto a part of the virus that changed. The vaccine has enough problem with immune escape, natural "immunity" fares even worse.
The immune system doesn't "lock onto“ part of the virus. That's just misinformation and displays a fundamental misunderstanding of how the adaptive immune system works.
There is no way around it: Sweden had more covid-related deaths than Norway, Finland, and Denmark bundled together.
Denmark had 500k more cases than Sweden, but only endured a quarter of Sweden's death count.
This does not fit the definition of "quite good". These are awful numbers. Awful numbers that were easily avoidable if Sweden followed the example of any of its neighbors.
I made no mention of Sweden and have no idea what that has to do with natural immunity given their vaccination rate is 75% and their death rate is comparable to Germany and France. [0] [1]
> And note that it's not that good in the first place--plenty of reinfections because the immune system locked onto a part of the virus that changed.
You've got it exactly backwards. The vaccine uses only a part of the S-protein, whereas a natural infection exposes the body to the full S-protein and N-protein. In theory and in practice, the immune system can train on more viral features via natural infection than it can via vaccine.
> The vaccine has enough problem with immune escape, natural "immunity" fares even worse.
It really doesn't. [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
> We present a systematic review and pooled analysis of clinical studies to date that (1) specifically compare the protection of natural immunity in the COVID-recovered versus the efficacy of complete vaccination in the COVID-naive ... it supports the pooled findings in finding superiority of natural immunity over-vaccination ... Consequently, no study could conclude the superiority of vaccination protection over natural immunity with statistical confidence, but observational studies endorsed an advantage for protection by natural immunity. [7]
Me too. The author shows a deep misunderstanding and even obliviousness to testing, particularly from a practical point of view, that takes any credibility from any argument listed in the article.
It's even perplexing how the best example the author could come up with was this absurd chain of strawmen that a) it's impossible to test code that uses instances of HttpClient, b) dependencies used in dependency injection "serve no practical purpose other than making unit testing possible."
There are plenty of people talking about unit tests. This article is not one of which justifies any click.
That person never wrote portable code. I wouldn't envy anyone maintaining or refactoring it to support more platforms.
Main reasons to have dependency injection is to have properly runtime switchable code with less shared state.
That it makes testing easier is a side effect.
> Dan Luu also elsewhere makes the argument that most of the impactful engineering work done in large companies is performed by a small percentage of the engineering group.
The keyword "impactful engineering" needs some clarification though.
It does not mean there's a 100x guy walking around the office while everyone is slacking off.
A specific proof of concept hacked together by a guy in a week might eventually become the company's flagship product. That's impact. However, the thing needs to be rewritten from scratch to become production ready or even deployable, and that takes far more work that does not fit the definition of "impactful".
I personally know a principal engineer of a FANG which single-handedly wrote the proof of concepts of more than a few projects that thousands of users use every single day. From his own words following one of his recent presentations, "this needs to be rewritten from scratch as this would get me rejected from our job interviews".
The 100x impact isn’t usually with proofs of concept, it’s with surgery. 1,000 lawyers would likely never identify and execute the life-saving graft, all while avoiding side effects that eventually kill the patient.
A surgical ten lines of code across 5 services can absolutely create billions of dollars out of thin air. The combination of technical, political and domain expertise required for such changes is relatively rare.
(I mean political in the purest, non-controversial sense, i.e. the communication skills to answer objections and acquire group consensus on the required change.)
I disagree for the following reason: without the proof of concept, the change in production would probably never come about. You can't really separate the impact of the proof of concept from that of the production change because they don't exist independently.
> When you have engineers working into the wee hours of the morning because you don’t want a cursor to blink on a text field, (...)
You're grossly misrepresenting the problems being faced and what forces engineers to work into the wee hours of the morning.
Just because stuff seems done to you or you notice no change, that does not mean nothing is being worked on.
Let's take basic A/B testing. To you, it's a blinking cursor. For the company, it's a bunch of business metrics being reported from N different components feeding into a data lake, with different versions of the same feature being deployed simultaneously to specific subsets of all customers based on their profile. But the cursor blinks differently depending on the market, and needs to comply with accessibility guidelines, on all X supported browsers regardless of their quirks. Some markets might not even have a cursor at all. Perhaps your cursor is only expected to show in a specific geographical location.
But you see a blinking cursor, and as you are oblivious to everything then you think it's just a tag somewhere. To you that's just a line of HTML, right? How hard could that be?
Imagining boatloads of complexity involved with the blinking cursors according to markets, profiles and geographic locations and whatever else really doesn't make it sound any better at all.
> Imagining boatloads of complexity involved with the blinking cursors according to markets, profiles and geographic locations and whatever else really doesn't make it sound any better at all.
These basic everyday requirements are oblivious to those who have zero first-hand contact or experience with professional user-facing problems imposed by business requirements.
However, just because you're oblivious or unfamiliar to these requirements, they don't mean they aren't requirements.
Think about it for a second. If it's necessary to target a service to specific geographical markets to comply with legal and/or business requirents, and given it's considerably more profitable to target a shop to a customer based on their personal interests, why would you ignore that and naively presume that the hypothetical "blinking cursor" is straight-forward to implement? And I'm not even touching hard technical probs which most developers aren't experienced or competent in, such as security and reliability.
There is a widespread problem in software development which is this this tendency to be very opinionated over all problems in spite of being totally ignorant and oblivious to the underlying problem domain. Everyone is an idiot except themselves, who always hold the answer in spite of not even knowingwhat the problem is, let alone understanding it.
>These basic everyday requirements are oblivious to those who have zero first-hand contact or experience with professional user-facing problems imposed by business requirements.
Could you paint me a realistic scenario for such multifaceted complexity revolving around this blinking cursor in a particular field?
I can see how this might depend on a language/writing system but kind of get lost beyond that.
I do have experience with such "professional user-facing problems imposed by business requirements" btw but they tend to be more related to desktop and factory software each used by hundreds which is probably a few zeroes less than what we're talking about here.
>And I'm not even touching hard technical probs which most developers aren't experienced or competent in, such as security and reliability.
I know more than most that software can behave in weird ways but don't you think if there's a reasonable worry that altering this blinking cursor affects security that something is off?
If you have the infrastructure to manage multiple versions and collect and analyse related information, adding/removing a blinking cursor or any other UI change and analysing the results should be trivial, because most of the process should be automated. Even in multiple territories and/or different user demos.
Unless you're reinventing the wheel for each modification.
> If you have the infrastructure to manage multiple versions and collect and analyse related information, adding/removing a blinking cursor or any other UI change and analysing the results should be trivial (...)
What leads you to believe in that? I mean, you have zero insight or understanding how things work or were designed. You have zero idea of where that blinking cursor comes from, let alone who owns that particular bit of code.
Let's think things through for a moment. Let's imagine you're talking about a blinking cursor in a random page from Google or Amazon. These are organizations where you have teams owning small widgets that show off only in specific pages, and that the page that you see in your browser come from a lengthy page engine pipeline that has all sorts of tests and failsafes, not to mention regional and localized deployments managed by whatever deployment policy.
This doesn't even take into account the whole workflow from product managers, who often demand data on the impact of touching a button.
You don't just edit a HTML file and hit save, don't you?
It wasn't my intention to dismiss the engineering challenges, I'm aware of how difficult something like this can be at a scale like Airbnb. I was more venting about the fact that all the engineering effort is directed at such a seemingly minor thing to begin with.
> But you find a few 1,000 people online with bad experiences (...) and assume you have a complete picture but you're only looking through a pinhole of information returned with biased search results.
Oh I know a good story.
I know a woman who unfortunately isn't the most educated person in the world and happens to have a nasty health issue where both her feet are all swollen up and makes her hard to walk around.
She's been seeing doctors left and right to solve or mitigate her condition.
One time, when she went to an appointment at the local hospital, her doctor handed her a form for her to sign and told her just to sign on the dotted line and don't worry about it.
The form was a consent form to amputate both her legs.
I happened to come across her when she was going to get a second opinion with the very form in her hands, completely furious.
She still has both her legs, even though she still suffers from the same issue.
Oddly enough, the hospital which handed out the leg amputation form also had a malpractice suite where they amputated the wrong leg of a patient.
Moral of the story: even though medical professionals are expected to be more knowledgeable about health topics, they are still human and far from infallible. More importantly, ultimately you're the person responsible for your personal health, and you need to have a say on what's done with your life based on the info that medical professionals make available to you. If you do not take an active role on these decisions on your health, others will eventually make these decisions for you, and they may not be good or have your best interests in mind.
You're grossly misrepresenting the facts. If you take an objective look at recent history, you'll realize that politicians have been trying to juggle public health guidelines with economic and political topics. The bulk of these arbitrary measures result from politicians caving in to issues completely unrelated to public health guidelines.
Take for example how some countries mysteriously relaxed COVID restrictions during major public holidays like Christmas and new year's eve celebrations to afterwards hastily reintroduce additional restrictions to contain the expected hike in infection rates.
> Couples were arrested for sitting at the beach.
No they really weren't. People were charged for endangering public health by purposely violating mandatory lockdowns and social distancing requirements. Trying to frame this as punishment for sitting at the beach is like complaining that drunk driving is punishing people for enjoying a drink now and then.