I have been working with the Tink API recently as well and wasn't super impressed. Maybe it was our use case, but I noticed a few gaps in their documentation and am not a big fan of how they handle permanent users.
Then we had to integrate with a hot-shot European startup banking provider and I started to appreciate Tink's API a bit more. God, that one was a clusterfuck of misleading/wrong documentation and horribly inconsistent API design.
What are you talking about? Ever since the first big Munich cohort, Germany has done extensive testing and scientists like Dr. Drosten have confirmed multiple times that we've been testing from a very early point on and are probably closer to the number of actual infections than many of our neighboring countries.
Mask shortage is a global problem and will remain so for some time since we'll have to limit making them available to where they are actually needed (hospitals, doctors, nursing homes).
All in all, I think Germany has dealt with SARS-CoV-2 in a responsible way, and the numbers so far seem to agree.
Regarding your question about if we might accidentally test for flu or other, already existing corona virii:
This was a topic of discussion in yesterday's talk [1] with Dr. Drosten, a virologist who played an important part in the development of the currently used PCR test. He said that there were extensive studies done with hundreds of samples from both flu patients and patients infected with other corona virii and none returned a positive result. The only other positive results were from corona virii that are special to certain animals (bats, some cows IIRC), but none of those are present in humans. So the accuracy of our current PCR test for SARS-CoV-2 seems to be extremely high.
Here's a quick (and slightly condensed) translation of the relevant parts:
"There was a big validation study [for the PCR test]. We tested with a big number of patient samples from patients with flu/cold diseases and other corona viruses. Not once did we get a false positive. [...] It is true though that [the current PCR test] would yield positive results against the old SARS corona virus, but that hasn't been confirmed in a human for 16 years. And theoretically, the test would give a positive result on some bat corona viruses, but they do not affect humans."
Prof. Drosten is the chief virologist at Berlin Charité.
I'm confident that somewhere in his medical education the concept of false negatives came up, and I'm also certain that he doesn't word his answers in an interview for the general public to the standards of the nitpicking HN population.
That's a bit weak though. Right now what the world needs more than anything is precise, clear, accurate information. It's really hard to do that, I got called on making a vaguely worded and misleading statement here on HN just the other day. But then again it's not my job to make such statements. When it is, I take more care than I do in this little box.
(1) Now, in the present context, quite broadly, the testing is important.
(2) The news media reports lots of testing, e.g., from China, South Korea, Italy, the US, etc., e.g., lots of the testing from early on.
(3) IIRC in some important respects, the good tests are super tough to do: E.g., Dr. Brix mentioned in one of the White House task force presentations that the test the US is using involves amplification which likely means the PCR (polymerase chain reaction), which before 1983 by Kary Mullis, was essentially impossible and remains astounding, amazing, and non-trivial, and then analyzing the results of the amplification, likely also non-trivial.
(4) So, we have to suspect that a lot of the tests done early on were not so good. By not so good, we have to mean rates of false positives and/or false negatives too high.
(4) IRCC, Dr. Brix did mention at one of those presentations that they, the US efforts, are willing to use only "approved" tests and that some of the tests submitted had false positives of, IRCC, 60%. Here we are on the way to coin flipping range.
E.g., there is a news story about a guy offering to do tests in his college dorm room. I can't say that that is impossible, but it sounds not so good.
Also for some days, a big news media issue was essentially "Where are the tests? Why can't we all get tested? When will we all get tested? What is the big hangup on the tests? Why do the tests take so long? Where has the Administration messed up? ...."
(5) And of course, it is easy to get a rate of false positives of 0% -- just always report no virus found. Presto, bingo, 0% false positives.
(6) The media has been reporting the results of lots of tests, getting headlines, news stories, eyeballs, attention, creating anxiety, getting ad revenue, etc. -- that is, dirty stuff.
So, we all have to wonder, for a lot of those early tests from out in Wherever Land, what the heck was the quality? Were they really doing PCR? In particular, what the heck were the rates of false positives and false negatives? We just CANNOT just take for granted that the tests done had any meaningful quality. Then we have a tough time using the reported data from such questionable tests to evaluate the transmission rate, etc. of the virus and, thus, plan how and estimate when we might defeat the virus. In this context, important, quite broadly important.
(7) So, very briefly, I mentioned, as Dr. Brix did in one of the presentations, that the rate of false positives is important and even at 0% can be from a silly (technical term, trivial) test.
This mention never claimed that the medical profession is not aware of the rates of false positives and false negatives. And I'm fairly sure that the medical statistics people, some of the best statisticians there are, are quite aware of the now classic Neyman-Pearson result on how, for whatever rate of false positives specified, can get the lowest possible rate of false negatives. I have a relatively general proof from the Hahn decomposition from the Radon-Nikodym theorem (Rudin in Real and Complex Analysis gives the novel von Neumann proof).
And for such things there is a lot more, e.g., the A. Wald work on optimal sequential testing* (a stochastic optimal control problem).
Moreover I have some qualifications in the field since I published peer-reviewed original research, in Information Sciences, on anomaly detection, both multi-variate and distribution-free. And there I used the S. Ulam result tightness that even in the medical statistics community is likely not well known (it's in P. Billingsley, Convergence of Probability Measures). So, I have some technical qualifications to talk about test quality.
But here I'm not trying to address, comment on, inform, educate, or critique the medical profession. Instead:
My real point is, as Dr. Brix also seems to have had in mind, for the news media reporting we just must keep in mind test quality in particular rates of false positives and false negatives.
Simple point. Maybe some people here read in some other intentions and objected to those. Again, simple point: In this context, we have to be careful about test quality, not just within the medical profession but, now, especially for what comes from the news media. Simple point. And in the context, an important point.
It appears that some people have missed this simple point and presumed I was making some other point.
Know of anything wrong with that simple, important point?
There are fuel taxes which mean that cars pay a disproportionate amount for road maintenance. But cars also put 99.99% of all the wear and tear on roads.
Fuel taxes (which never pay for all of a road - general taxes pay for them as well) don't even cover the disproportionate wear and tear for necessary maintenance from vehicles. So in reality bike riders and people who don't ever use roads subsidize the roads for car drivers. It's NOT car drivers paying for all of it, they don't even pay their fair share based on the ongoing maintenance burden they impose on the roads.
It’s funny that the parent poster mentions this - it’s likely that either the cyclist has a car, payed in the same manner as the driver and is in the moment using the road for “leisure or sport” - or the cyclist really needs to use the road and bike for transportation.
There really is no acceptable, rational reason for animosity towards cyclists. I think it comes down to the same gut instincts as racism, sexism and xenophobia - when there’s a problem people look for whatever thing seems most different in their current surroundings and blame that thing for the problem. It’s just a lack of thinking.
>There really is no acceptable, rational reason for animosity towards cyclists.
No rational reason for drivers in a road predominantly used from big vehicles to not like smaller, hard to see, vehicles with greater flexibility and much more fragile going around them?
The added care you need to have as a car driver, and danger they impose of accident, is not enough?
Especially since most of the time (e.g. in highways, interstates, etc) you get to have the road to just cars and don't have all this?
It's some of both. We have fuel taxes which pay for roads, but it's not nearly enough (because the taxes are too low) so a lot of the funds come from general taxes, which everyone pays. So the drivers are paying more for the roads, but the cyclists are also paying for those roads with their income taxes, sales taxes, etc.
> So the drivers are paying more for the roads, but the cyclists are also paying for those roads with their income taxes, sales taxes, etc.
And cars also put the vast majority of the wear and tear on the roads. So while they might pay more overall, they don't pay their fair share compared to bike riders who fund the roads from their taxes. Bike riders (and people who don't use roads) end up subsidizing roads for people who drive cars.
Yes, that's somewhat correct. I think it's more correct, however, to say that trucks (commercial ones) account for the vast majority of wear and tear. I've read that the wear and tear scales with exponentially with the weight of the vehicle, and trucks can weigh up to 80,000 pounds, far more than your typical car that weighs 3000 or so.
Of course, on residential roads, they don't usually have many large trucks. Also, in areas with snow, it seems that snowplows actually cause most of the potholes.
I live in Colorado (Larimer County) and there is a county and city level road use tax when you register your car and it aint cheap my registration was $450.
Interesting, I didn't know that. What's the legal status of a cyclist on the road then? Are they normal participants in traffic?
I generally find the tone of the discussion about cyclists here surprising. I'm from Germany, and while there is animosity between cyclists and car drivers, both are equally accepted on all roads (except the autobahn, of course). There's a movement in big cities towards more and more specific lanes for cyclists. I don't own a bicycle myself, but with regards to a car's emissions and the omnipresent wasteful parking slots, I'm all for strengthening the status of cyclists on roads.
Fort Collins where I am is the third most "bike friendly" city in the US, there are amble bike lanes and a strong bike culture but its amazing how many of them think the rules of the road don't apply to them, running stop signs, lane changes without hand signals, using the road lane rather than the bike lane. I get very nervous driving around town because you never know if the persons going to follow the rules and stop or just run the stop sign and slam into the side of your car. I'm all for bikes but they need to follow the same rules as the cars if they want to share the space.
Blendle is nice in theory but their article pricing is really off-putting. I know that it's the publisher's choice to set prices for individual articles, but I'm not going to pay half of the actual paper price to read one single article.
I use it to read a select few things that I'm really interested in, but I'd love it to be more of an individual aggregation of stuff (think Flipbook) where I don't mind reading lots of articles because they're essentially cheap enough for me to not care. Not going to do that, though, when a 300 word article costs up to 1€.
I'd love to be able to support individual authors, or 'collectives', regardless of where they publish. I suppose that's hard for Blendle to arrange though.
It's interesting to see how no one even seems to try. In Europe there's Blendle [1], but that's only an aggregator and you still have to pay for each article you read (with hilarious differences in pricing).
I've always wondered if they'd be more successful with a flat fee for complete access to all articles for all their papers and zines. But I guess the publishing houses don't consider this viable as it would hurt their subscriptions (who's gonna subscribe to just one paper when there's access to ten more for roughly the same price?).
At least for my part Blendle has been a huge win for publishers. I've probably spent more money on Blendle articles in just a year or so (even asking for my money back a number of times) than I have on regular subscriptions.
Considering the fact that I'm generally not too interested in mainstream news, and somewhat frugal, I imagine there's quite a number of people who spend even more.
I was looking at buying an ultrabook and had the same problem (but living in Germany). In the end I decided on a Lenovo X1 Carbon, though, but faced the decision to either get one from the Lenovo store (which allows you to get a US keyboard) or buy with an education discount from a retailer. Since the discount for the latter was really steep, I saved 500€ and settled on a DE keyboard, although its layout is a major pain for programming. But I couldn't justify shelling out 500 bucks more just for the different keyboard.
It's a shame but I guess we're really a minority.
The X1 Carbon is a beautiful laptop, with the best keyboard in business. I am still using my original (i7/8/256) one from 2012, and it's holding up incredibly well. Build quality is second to none.
I would love to upgrade to the latest quad core goodness, and better energy saving tech, but as long as it works I'll keep on using it.
It would be good to see a toughness comparison of the MBP against the X1 Carbon, especially in a "milspec" dusty environment. I hear they're not having the best run with their keyboards in less than pristine environments.
I just got an X1 Carbon that I use with an egpu dock for work, and I absolutely love it. Thinner and lighter than a MacBook, the keyboard is great, and it runs Linux. Only complaint I have is that the egpu doesn't support hotswapping, but egpus are new, so I'll give it some time.
