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One of the many problems in poorer nations is the cost to get people to the vaccination centers. Multiplying that cost 3-4 times does not help.I don't know if mobile vaccination teams are really possible for Moderna and Pfizer, due to temperature requirements.


Pretty common maybe, but skiing at 2500 - 3000 m on slopes covered in sand made today a very unique experience .


Does anyone knows the scientifical name for the tree pictured in the article ?


Paulownia tomentosa. Known in my area as the princess tree, but also goes by royal paulownia, foxglove tree, kiri, and empress tree.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulownia_tomentosa


".... 750E profit - 50% tax = 375E profit"[1]. 50% Taxes in DE, nice place to do business ...

[1] https://github.com/jackdoe/baxx/blob/master/infra-and-pricin...


Are you sure this is Germany? The author has their location set to 'Amsterdam' on GH, and has no impressum on their site.

FWIW, corporate taxes in Germany aren't 50%, but 15%. What is close to 50% is personal income tax + health care if you pass a certain threshold. However, even if you're running a just sole tradership (Freier Beruf or Gewerbe), this would only be your personal income - all business expenses are not counted towards your personal income tax base and you get the VAT you paid back.


I would guess it’s someone with a job, and this is hitting income tax.

But corporate taxes in DE are about 30%, not 15. Don’t forget your Gewerbesteuer.


Free school, healthcare and nice infrastructures have a cost..


Too bad that cost is levied on people who don’t even need or want those services. The rich, childless, houseless, and single are subsidizing services for everyone else regardless of whether they personally derive any benefit.

If that doesn’t strike you as unfair I’m not sure what would.


Unfair to me are situations where people die because they are unable to pay for their own needs like food and healthcare. I gladly pay 50% of my income for basic infrastructure, healthcare and welfare for everyone, and i still have more than enough money at the end of the month after all expenses like rent, food, entertainment, etc.


Without government assistance it would be very foolish to not have children, for most people at least. So this cuts both ways. If anything it is more than fair. Rich people avoid most of the taxes anyways also in Germany.


Since they're rich and childless, they should vote with their wallet and move to a country with less taxes.


loving the transparency of this. i'm definitely becoming converted as I'm reading…


If this a calculation is for Germany, it's nonsense.


How so? I pay exactly 51% in Germany (and I’m ok with that).


> As of 1 January 2008, Germany’s corporation tax rate is 15%. Counting both the solidarity surcharge (5.5% of corporation tax) and trade tax (averaging 14% as of 2008), tax on corporations in Germany is just below 30%.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_Germany#Corporatio...


You're paying income tax at the highest rate. The calculation in the linked document is about "business taxes". So subtracting just half of the money "because of taxes" is not correct as you'll probably not pay that much in taxes for a business.


Aha, thanks. Sounded to me like extra income... but I was clearly not paying full attention.


this is the tax for me in The Netherlands, given i am not a company, so it is normal income tax


Yes, SAP seems to be the main selling point ... "SUSE Linux Enterprise Server was the first OS for SAP HANA and SUSE continues to be a co-innovation partner for solutions such as SAP S/4HANA, SAP Cloud Platform, SAP Data Hub and many more. ... "


... and the cloud versions of these products are SuSE based as well.


So if I understood well the concept, this type of amoeba is like an ASIC for traveling salesman problem. Interesting concept, to find bio-organisms that can be used very efficentlly to "solve" a certain type of problem.


Next up: a self driving car initiative called 'horse-and-buggy' that is exactly what it sounds like.


They've been mastering the latter for a while now; the "buggy" part. :D


Hopefully our spiritual and intellectual betters will start to leverage humans this way. The future is bright.


or just let people be themselves and stop trying to play god


ive never heard a convincing argument for why it's necessarily a bad thing to "play god". it just seems like an oft repeated phrase that makes no sense to me and only survived because of some idea that we have no right to try and discern the true nature of the universe and then to control it in the pursuit of betterment of our capacities as a species.


Because a lot of "playing god" is thinly veiled authoritarianism -- the desire to control our fellows, out of our own egotism?


That's not what the term is generally used for.

Generally speaking, "playing god" is talked about as messing with nature and the things around us to better suit our needs. Genetic engineering, climate engineering, etc. "God" refers to the natural order of things and trying to change it.


"Playing God" is often used for activities where we're able to cause some change, have a hard time undoing our actions, and are unable see all possible consequences.


I wouldn't necessarily say "playing god", but we do vaccinate ourselves right? I mean I think the real issue is inflicting a change to a being that will become "Sentient" or "Conscious". When we genetically alter that which has potential for "life", do we know, beyond a doubt, that the change we inflict will be positive for the individual AND positive our species as a whole? If we cannot say for certain, then genetically altering sentient life (who have no choice), is not a good idea.


No, if I understood right, this thing is a quantum computer solving NP-complete problems in linear time. And the article claims to have a simulation doing the same, but they are not sure whether this is actually only a special case scenario.


It's not a "quantum computer". It's an analog computer instead of a binary computer. It can be simulated with a normal (binary) computer using floating point numbers (remember that the amoeba has a finite precision).

(Form time to time there are articles that try to explain why analog computers are better than binary computers. Usually they assume infinite precision, that is impossible in a real system.)

The article claims that the time is linear, but it use quadratic space. So if you campare thy to simulate the algorithm with a big system in a sequential computer you will get probably cubic run time.

A better way to understand this is that the amoeba uses a good heuristic to solve the TSP in a small case. There are many heuristics out there, so it would be nice to implement this heuristic and compare with all the other one is some kind of standardized example set. It's more easy to find a good solution in a small system.

(Under the hood, the amoeba is a quantum system. But if you consider this a quantum computer then your phone is also a quantum computer.)


Yeah I guess in order to make this into a simulation, one would effectively add all the exponential time back, since it requires all that to "run" an amoeba on a classical computer. In that article they mention the organism communicating across its body, i.e. reacting to stimuli in all parts in a correlated fashion, that is the bit referring to a quantum system. Of course all physical systems are quantum systems (if I actually had a phone that one too yes, although the operating system does not make use of its nature). So there is no question whether we can simulate that algorithm, it cannot be possible without calculating all the parts, and that is no longer linear time.


> In that article they mention the organism communicating across its body, i.e. reacting to stimuli in all parts in a correlated fashion, that is the bit referring to a quantum system.

The internal communication inside the cell is classical, not quantic (classic, like your phone). I guess it use some kind of internal hormone, but it may be some signal that propagates in the cell membrane. IANAB.

You can't have a good quantum correlation in something that is as big as a cell (unless you freeze it at ridiculous low temperature that are not posible for now and would kill the cell anyway, or you have a more ordered system like a extremely pure crystal, or you only want some correlation for ridiculous small amount of time).

You can have big entangled systems, but they look more like pair of very clear optic fiber, not like a cell with a lot of water and crap moving randomly inside.

There are also some interesting "big" quantum effects in molecules like chlorophyll. (I'm not sure if they are 100% confirmad yet.) But a molecule of chlorophyll is much much much smaller than the cell and the effect is very short lived.


It found a solution. Not an optimal solution.


Similar to the way my NN (brain) can solve the TS problem by just guessing the best route. Sure that's <i>a</i> solution. edit:typo


On Hackernews you can use asterisks to produce italics, like in markdown.


Right, it is not guaranteed to find _the_ best solution possible, but at least it does find _some_ solution to NP-complete problems in linear time, which no classical algorithm is expected to be able to do. Now they claim in that article to have made a simulation of this running on a classical computer exhibiting the same characteristics, which frankly should not be possible. so where is the catch?


You can always find a solution to the TSP. All cities are connected with all cities, so you can travel the cities in the alphabetical order (or the order in list). It's (usually) a very bad solution that is much longer than the best solution.

There are good heuristic, specially if the distances are not chosen at random but are the distance between points in the plane. So it's posible in some cases to find quite good solutions.

The problem is NP-complete only is you ask for the best solution.


You can't say anything about the runtime of amoeba because they only solve a finite number of instances and you have no accurate model that would allow you to say something about the asymptotic behavior.


You can install pretty easy the F-Droid repository / store and download DNS66 from there. ( FOSS Ad-Blocking via DNS ).


I was using DNS66, much is user friendly and very effective. Unfortunately, it is implemented as a VPN, and Android will allow one VPN to be active at a time.


You can buy horse meat at the supermarket in Switzerland and I think in Italy also if I'm not mistaking.


Romania - without paying rent - 550 USD will suffice for 1 month of daily spending. He mentioned that he has a low mortgage which probably splits with his girlfriend and for a 1 bedroom apartment can be as low as 250 USD per month. 750 USD is the average gross monthly income (before taxes ). Usually software developers earn double that.


Okay, but then it's just naive to think that it's enough to have the most minimum amount of money to survive. Before I'd quit my job, I'd make sure that I have at least x months of at least the average income on the side, plus calculating all the required spending for taxes and fees.


Totally agree with you. But based on my experience most Romanian people do not have a very good "plan ahead" culture. Usually they start something as soon as they have the minimum requirements met and that is because they really want to not let the opportunity pass, because in the past opportunities were very very scarce (in every domain) . And this lack of opportunities made a very deep dent in the Romanian culture.


You can use a script for setting up an OpenVpn on a Digital Ocean box in max 2 min. Check this one https://github.com/Nyr/openvpn-install .


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