skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, Feynman was the first person in any discipline to give lectures accessible to a popular audience. Goodness knows why no-one in the whole of the humanities has ever done this.

(There is actually a much longer, and arguably more successful, tradition of humanists engaging with popular audiences. We remember the scientists who were good at it because they were so exceptional.)

I suspect you haven't read the article, which in fact is at the level of a freshman humanities student. Not everything has to be dumbed down to the lowest common denominator. Feynman also wrote plenty of stuff vastly less accessible than this article that you and I wouldn't understand - at least not without investing a lot of time and effort. But God forbid that anyone in the humanities write something that requires you to (gasp!) use a dictionary.

The sheer arrogance and imbecility of the typical attitude towards the humanities on HN is really something to behold. Oh, why can't you all be more like this cool physics dude who we think is God's gift to literature because he dictated some amusing anecdotes about strip clubs and colored paint?
Just letting them “be”, and guide their learning themselves. And taking more time to call them over to watch me do something like using socket wrench to tighten up some bolts in a dining room chair, or see me or my spouse making something in the kitchen.

We’ve also found some great stuff in my Great Courses subscription that do a great job teaching math or listening to classic children’s stories that he’s been interested in, but overall just letting him drive whatever he wants to do for the most part.

If we’re still doing this in the fall maybe we get more structure, but for now I’m more interested in letting my kid be a kid, especially since he can’t play with his friends.
> Unfortunately, a buyer can't get a 33% discount by only buying 66% of the house.

I think we both know you can :) you can either buy a larger house and portion off an in-law unit, which you can then rent. You could buy a smaller house. You could even build on a fresh plot of land.
To create pseudoviruses which are able to infect under lab conditions, but not able to replicate, or to survive in a human or any other organism.

If this were one of those, as has been claimed on the basis of the frequently mis-cited October 2019 WIV paper, anyone in the world would be able to see that by comparing the SARS-CoV-2 sequence accessioned in NCBI's database with one of the many HIV sequences also available there. I've done the alignment myself, against several HIV sequences. So can you; you don't even need a local toolchain, you can pick them and BLAST them right on NCBI's site.

When you do, you'll find the same thing I did: there is no significant similarity between any HIV strain and SARS-CoV-2. So the "escaped chimera" theory is not only implausible on its face given the nature of pseudoviruses, but disproven by genomic evidence, besides.

Please don't spread disinformation.
I was under the impression that they started intentionally calling it the Wuhan virus only after the Chinese government started making propaganda that the virus came form aboard.
> trying to lay the blame onto China

How exactly is the Chinese regime not to blame for this mess? Between the blatant cover-up and falsified reports and underreporting deaths by a couple of orders of magnitude and knowingly stating that the virus didn't spread when they knew full well it spread like wildfire and intentionally leaving out demostratedly infected but asymptomatic cases out of the statistics while simultaneously blaming new cases on infected foreigners, how is China's regime not to blame for this whole mess?

And should we now just forget that the Chinese regime has been trying to pin the blame on their covid19 mess on Italy of all places?
That's not a disprovable statement so I won't try to argue that it didn't happen that way, but pandemics have happened in the past. We should expect that they continue to happen even in the absence of bioengineering accidents. And we should be ready for them.
That solves for the protest problem, not for the demographic crunch or China's desperate need to deleverage its economic system. [0]

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/17/chinas-corporate-debt-is-big...
Yet you let your dog lick your mouth. Why is this?
My man this stuff has already been published. It's a deliberate PR campaign. No better or worse than any other country does in similar circumstances.

https://i.imgur.com/dwEpRnb.png
I don't think you read anything I wrote. It wasn't very long even. You certainly aren't responding to it if you did, you're having some other conversation.
> I really love the idea that pure mathematics and nature are the same thing. On a philosophical level, our daily lives are the expression of the differences and inefficiencies of our systems compared to an optimal end-state. Also, sometimes I think that religion and science have more in common than people think.

The first of these isn't a coincidence; pure mathematics evolved from applied mathematics, which originally was the only kind, and which was specifically designed to handle nature. It has since departed from those roots, but is still guided by human intuition and æsthetic sense, both of which are deeply shaped by our experiences in the natural world.

(For a counter-argument from a much better source, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness... .)
tukufgj
> It's not even an argument. It has no basis in reality. It's a fantasy. History matters and affects the present. It's as simple as that.

I was going to rebut most of your angry ramblings. Then I read this and I remembered why it pointless with talking to people like yourself. You think there cannot be any discussion on a topic outside of what you think it correct because you have decided that you have the correct opinion.

I said "this shouldn't matter".
Ah I didn't think about increased usage. That makes sense, but I wonder how much of the price is speculation/using gold to store value versus industrial usage?
A lot of their information was scrubbed, but user laowhy86 on Youtube found their identity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpQFCcSI0pU

He believes this scientist was the first person infected, who it spread from.
200+ opportunities to work on COVID-19, and 60+ places to get funded
probably...most likely...
your wild guessing leads to your point with no trustworthy evidence ...
Running doesn’t (substantially, probably) increase the rate at which you shed the virus, though – so the droplets are spread over a larger area, at a lower concentration. You need to keep a greater distance to guarantee zero exposure, but that doesn’t mean that higher speeds equal greater risks. The car analogy is inappropriate.
> vocal fry and nasal voice for women. For women in certain age groups there is culturally adapted creaky voice or alternatively nasal voice. It's possible to get rid of it with very small amount of practice. It's almost never normal voice, just adopted mannerism

I know it is petty, but god does it really irritate me when someone speaks like that. I have to consciously keep in mind not to be prejudiced against an accent, but no other innocuous thing ruins a first impression for me like that aspect of a person's voice.

To the two already mentioned ones, I will add the hoarse voice often caricatured in the stupid frat bro in movies. The breathy "hey bruh" sound is one that most more clearly evokes it in my head.
Support indie developers!
> Your prior is also exactly what you're trying to calculate, though.

Maybe I should have been more explicit, but they're not the same. The prior here is the probability that the virus originated from WIV, knowing only that the virus originated in China, and not accounting for the location of the outbreak. I'm trying to calculate an adjusted probability given the outbreak location.

> I don't think you can just try different numbers picked from a hat for that value.

My goal was not to convince anyone that a prior of 1% or 0.1% is appropriate, but rather to suggest a framework in which people can insert their own priors.

And sure, it's a simplified analysis, but it's better than just asserting whatever our intuitions say about coincidences.
China tightens grip over coronavirus research, amid US-China row on virus origin
Added who is currently talking! and able to see who is in the room!
China didn’t let taiwanese citizens leave Wuhan then. What’s the excuse there?
Care to explain what this screenshot actually means?
I think that what camera is used doesn't depend on the app but on the browser. In mine (Firefox) it asks me if I want to give permission to the app to use the my camera AND it asks me which camera I want to give permission to. Chrome also has something like that (I think it's in the URL bar, an icon that looks like a video camera?)

Anyways, hope this helps!
Agreed, that wouldn't be a very smart thing to do at all.
>The problem with pipelines of objects is that it is inherently a more strongly typed, defined, interface. And therefore special-case.

Not true. While I am somewhat of a novice at powershell, I didn't find that to be the case at all.

> Streams of characters is as loosely typed as it gets. And for processing text files and gluing disjointed tools together, it may seem crude, but is very effective. Especially for quick text processing jobs, or automating series of commands.

Well done for the Pavlovian regurgitation of how piping text output is supposed to work.

I don't like working with it. It is okay for small scripts. However if it is mildly complicated I would use something like Python (not powershell).

Powershell is great for small scripts where you need to do sysadmin tasks e.g. I have a script where I setup my SQL Database aliases for development. Piping text about doesn't help me in these sorts of tasks. I need to go "I need to find where the real database is, and then map those properties to an alias". That works better with piping objects. It works kinda like functional concepts such as map(), reduce() etc.

You should use the right tool for the right job.

> The UNIX shell concept has been honed and refined over 50 years to do exactly what it does, and it does it very well. It is also extremely generic. This choice was on purpose and has stood up well to the test of time.

You know not everyone thinks that Unix was the pinnacle of human achievement.
This isn't some kind of weird, esoteric form of argument. It's an underlying principle of empiricism that you should try to provide evidence for claims you make rather than making the accused prove something is false.

Someone accuses you of murder and says "prove you didn't do it". You didn't do it, but can't satisfactorily prove such a negative. Maybe you were outside taking a walk and no one can provide an alibi. Does that mean you should be assumed guilty?
r/China is very much an echo chamber of its own though. These days the line between criticizing the Chinese government and full blown sinophobia is getting rather thin.
That’s a fairly absurd example all around. As a practical matter, any public company of any size will probably have at least one Asian shareholder.
The money spent on smartphones and videogames results in revenue for companies and paychecks for employees. So yeah, some people are going to spend their UBI irresponsibly. But that spending directly and immediately stimulates the economy.

In contrast, we currently are dumping vast amounts of money onto corporations, banks, and investors to try prop up the economy. That money just ends up bidding up stocks, bonds, and real estate prices. The stimulative impact is minimal, and mostly results in inflating asset prices.
Not on earth, where the ground is relatively warm... but lunar subsurface temperatures are -20 or -30°C. You could sink heat into that pretty fast.
True but I think he meant each country does it’s own ubi.
Prospective employee turned down for job because his name is Jeffrey
I like things like this because they're different. It feels like the sort of silly website you'd stumble across in the early 2000s. But I agree with some of the other posters that the limitation of choosing from canned phrases makes it feel boring almost immediately.

Something to consider: maybe being able to string random small-talk related words or phrases together, ala magnetic poetry[0], would result in more interesting chatter.

[0]: https://jayisgames.com/review/farragomate.php
Right, so if they blow it all on chocolate or Steam games, and they become ill, should they just be forced to be sick and homeless?
I think this is completely missing the point. I believe it was named the Spanish flu as this is where it was first reported. That we learned later on that it originated from somewhere else is completely irrelevant. The point is that it was named after where it was believed to be first observed.
You miss the point entirely. Nothing in the Nature piece is in conflict with the theory that it accidentally escaped a lab were Coronaviruses are studied.

Not that it was a weapon. Not that it was man made. Simply someone working at a research lab, screwed up and released a dangerous virus.
They have been very successfully control who. With the same technique controlling access, we might never know and any whistleblower ... china not open up and free, we are playing Russian or shall we say china lottery. With humanity fate.

No freedom of press and academic research and human rights, china pose a danger to humanity. And regards to they might kill themselves, noticed that they have kill 30m+ in Great Leap Forward. Not even one Memorial Or Day is in. How many 30m we have outside china.

Wuhan virus is the 2nd wake up call. Hard to wake up people who pretend to sleep. I would try again WakeUp.
This is a fair point. But the Fed has been playing funny money during all this time, backing dollars with garbage real-estate, so I don't think it's fair to say this is just a regular 'new normal' as in asset prices were marked properly.

'New Funny Money Normal' - maybe, but the massive Fed balance sheet first enables those with assets, not those who don't i.e. 'the rich'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexspeak

There are some fun entries there for hex values used as magic numbers.

Apple have some great ones used in their crash report exception types - 0x2bad45ec (too bad for sec) and 0xc00010ff in the event of being killed for overheating.
The CA SC didn't address that..

our opinion does not preclude Square from disputing White’s factual allegations. ... Nor do we express any view on whether a defendant violates the Act by discriminating on the basis of occupation or on White’s adequacy as a representative for a class of bankruptcy attorneys excluded from Square’s services. The question of an individual plaintiff’s standing under the Unruh Civil Rights Act is distinct from the question of that plaintiff’s ability to serve as a representative for a class of allegedly aggrieved individuals.[0]

White only won standing to bring his case. He's still prohibited from using Square; and he needs to win his case against Square before that'll change.

0. https://law.justia.com/cases/california/supreme-court/2019/s...
Ask HN: Need Volunteers for Bhagavad Gita App
️The Gita Initiative is a non-profit project devoted to serving humankind by creating interactive digital experiences that encourage and challenge people to practice the presence of God in everyday life.

Currently, we are working on redesigning BhagavadGita.io which is a modern Gita app/website with a simple, beautiful and easy to use interface, helping you focus on reading.
You can have a look at our roadmap here (https://github.com/gita/BhagavadGita/wiki/Roadmap) and our plan here (https://github.com/gita/BhagavadGita/wiki/BhagavadGita.io-v2-Plan). Also, you can join our Slack channel here (https://join.slack.com/t/thegitainitiative/shared_invite/zt-dclsan2f-gL2s3oj1P3UQsc5v2fKpDQ).

We are actively looking for developers, ️designers, 🧑 project managers and everyone else who can contribute in some way. If you are interested, please comment below.
We really need some design/frontend people. So, if you have any sort of experience in this area, please feel free to reach out.

You can check out the Github repository here (https://github.com/gita/BhagavadGita) and read more about the initiative here (https://gitainitiative.org/).

Thank you!
> Tinfoil hat: I'm not keeping active track

It's been my experience that everyone who prefaces their comment with statements like this usually are lying. "I'm not X, but ... "

> along with a streak of random US-critical posts ("What is the worst thing the US government has done?") being massively updated on Reddit

Anyone can go on reddit and see the very opposite. This is what I don't understand about propagandists, why lie about something that can be verifiably proven false? Go on worldnews or any major subreddit, what are the ratio of pro and anti-chinese submissions? What are the ratio of pro and anti-china comments? The exact opposite of what you claim.

> This is from the country which forces foreign companies to remove flags of countries it likes to bully (Taiwan, Japan) from their products.

You obviously know why they do for taiwan. As for japan, lets see some examples. If "removing" flags is called "bullying", then your definition of "bullying" is rather naive.

> It's not inconceivable, and certainly probable, that they are filtering the narrative about themselves in something actually serious, such as this pandemic.

No shit. Just like you are filtering a narrative. Just like the US government is filtering a narrative. We are involved in a major trade war.

You are doing the exact same thing you claim "china" is doing.
Watch “making a murderer” on Netflix to get a good look into Wisconsin justice.
You might want to read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17636029 if you haven't seen it before...
If you look at where the article was published, it's unlikely that it was written with HN readers in mind.
Yeah that’s what I’ve been trying to explain to all my reasonable friends who think that the moment I say “it came from a lab” that means this is a bioweapon that was intentionally released. No, actually, there is a chain of evidence that makes an accidental lab leak more plausible than the theory that the virus jumped straight from an animal in a wet market hundreds of miles away from its normal habitat that just happens to be in the same city as a lab that holds samples of virus from that strain.
I think it may matter more if you are zinc deficient when you are infected.

But Zinc does not need to be in the cell to help. It will also increase ACE2 activity, which is more important they are finding. When the ACE2 is destroyed, there is a build up of ANGII, which seems to be causing a majority of the issues. They are in a trial giving ACE2 directly to patients.
Would be nice if the page included more examples of what this is capable of.
White Gold: How Chinese porcelain became a worldwide sensation
No normal person would, but accidents do happen especially if you’re lax with protocol and also there crazy people like Amerithrax incidents back in early 2000s where presumably someone with access seems to have had a grudge or something.

That said, it’s one possibility among others, though the animal reservoir theory is the most viable and accepted at this time.
The twitter post interestingly seems to disclose the company name.
If it affected their own people less, gaining a net advantage over other nations. A totalitarian/authoritarian state will always be able to manage an epidemic more effectively than a democratic one.

Disclaimer: I don’t believe this, just playing devil’s advocate
Do you not think people come from out of town, sometimes from quite far out of town, to sell food at a city market? That's how they work here in Baltimore, and anyone who's ever been to Lexington Market, or even seen a picture of what the crowds are like there (1), can have no trouble imagining how effective a transmission vector it would be for any contagious pathogen hitching a ride in an out-of-town vendor there. Why should things work differently in Wuhan?

"Held accountable" is a rhetorical phrase that was much used then, too. (2) So it's an interesting thing to find in an argument that this situation and that one are totally unalike.

(1) https://www.wypr.org/sites/wyprmain/files/styles/x_large/pub...

(2) https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2001/nov/28/iraq.brianwhit...
PI is Tau/2
> You obviously know why they do for taiwan

To bully them?
the ADA doesn't require that...that was Berkley's choice of response. They took their ball and went home
Are you implying (or implying they are implying) suicide?
yes, indeed.

however, you'll note by the downvotes no one here wants to be reasonable. it's a trend i've noticed on hacker news. this site claims a lot to be unbiased and evidence based, but i have noticed when it comes to china, all reason floats out the window. it's a dangerous effect because there are actual problems that are exacerbated and confused by propaganda and unfounded claims from the other side, which also hides problems with the other side. it's just not good for anyone and creates a cess pool of misinformation.
Rails, GraphQL, and TypeScript: a monolith worth trying
The guy was in police custody. And he died shortly after. Come on now, at least try to follow along.
You’d presume so, but in fact they cannot. The reason that so many companies adopted forced arbitration was explicitly because it made such actions uneconomical for consumers to actually enter arbitration.

The moment large groups of individuals start making use of the forced arbitration every company has tried to get the courts to let them get out of arbitration that they inflicted on others.

It is well established that forced arbitration has nothing to do about efficiency for company vs individual and is specifically because it is a system designed to protect companies from culpability.
The good old xscreensaver has quite a few which I really want(ed) as high quality prints, e.g. "Substrate[1]". I never got around to making it render into a file, and the screens were too far from 4K back then to make screen grabbing useful. Plus I was too afraid to bug jwz himself :).

1: Crystalline lines grow on a computational substrate. A simple perpendicular growth rule creates intricate city-like structures.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=xscreensaver+substrate&iax=images&...
Is there a Valora gallery somewhere? Your links here show that it's far more capable than the linked tutorial suggests.

BTW following the link to your site in your Instagram profile leads to an HTTPS error.
You might as well complain that a novel wasted your time because the main plot points could have been summarized in a couple of pages.

The article you link to is obviously supposed to be a personal story told with some literary flare, not a concise journalistic report.

If you really lack this bare minimum of genre sensitivity then, well, no wonder you think there is a lot of bad writing.
Over the last few years Xcode has dropped support for older versions of macOS very aggressively. It requires upgrading to a new major version within the year that the new version came out, and quite often requires the latest minor version as well.
Bringing Leap and SUSE Linux Enterprise Closer Together
I can't see anything in that image.
Who is running the Pandemic Survival fear-mongering spam campaign