skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The evidence is starting to stack up. Maybe the virus didn’t come from China.

China was just the first to discover it.

If this is true, then all the Western countries took a collective dump on China, and accused them of spreading the virus.

Some theories and timelines so far:

1) July 2019, a lot of strange pneumonia cases were reported in Virginia. The symptoms sounds suspiciously like Covid19. Two people die. [1]

2) Three months later, on October 18, 2019, French athletes that attended the Military World Games in Wuhan reported testing positive for the Covid19 antibodies. They are muzzled, and told to not talk with reporters. [2]

3) December 16, 2019, The first documented hospital admission in China.

4) China investigates, and determines this is a new virus. They report it to the W.H.O. on December 31, 2019.

5) China checks past records, and determines an earlier infection was on November 17, 2019. [3] About a month before their previous first known case.

6) A New Jersey mayor tests positive for the antibodies, and claims he got sick in November 2019, a month before China detected their first known case. [4]

7) December 27, 2019, A woman in Seattle [5], with no travel history to China, who tested positive for the antibodies, claims she got sick two days after Christmas. This is 4 days before China reports the virus to the W.H.O. And three weeks before Seattle’s first official case.

8) Jan 26, 2020, The Lancet theorizes that the virus did not originate from the seafood market. [6] Daniel Lucey asserts, “The virus came into that marketplace before it came out of that marketplace.” Thus, this was not from Chinese people eating bats.

Conclusion:

We don’t know anything for sure, but the W.H.O. needs to investigate those Virginia nursing home residents that got sick in July 2019, and test them for the coronavirus antibodies.

If, and this is a very big if, the virus did not originate from China, then, the western nations are going to have a very big egg on their faces. Especially after all their racist attacks against the Chinese people, for eating bats, and what not. And especially for demanding reparations of trillions of dollars in damages from China. Are they going to pay up instead? The mystery continues.

=====

[1] https://abcnews.go.com/US/respiratory-outbreak-investigated-...

[2] https://nypost.com/2020/05/07/athletes-at-world-military-gam...

[3] https://www.livescience.com/first-case-coronavirus-found.htm...

[4] https://nypost.com/2020/05/07/new-jersey-mayor-believes-he-h...

[5] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/antibody-test-resu...

[6] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/wuhan-seafood-market...
SVP responds to sale of a privately owned juvenile T. rex on eBay (2019)
Back in the late nineties I worked with a software called Origin. It had a BASIC like programming language where variable names consisted of single letters. If you now think 26 variable names should be enough: Some of the letters, like X and Y, had special predefined meaning and you couldn't change that. If you used seem you encountered strange behaviour, like values changing behind your back. To add insult to injury I could never find documentation about which variables were special, so I stuck with the few I new were safe, which were not many...
Game Engine programming: What are virtual machines, and why so many?
I think the reason the cuteness is unnerving is because these sites are selling tools. It would be weird to buy a hammer covered in some soft fuzzy material, so why are these digital tools designed to look like children's sites? Moreover, why do they obfuscate key product specifications and functions in favor of vague promises of increased productivity (more goodness as one comment said)? I think the answer is that the low hanging SAAS fruit has mostly been taken and all the new SAAS apps have an increasing smaller niche and therefore increasingly smaller value proposition.
A Bug Caused by the Line Directive in the Visual C++ Compiler
abuse of exercise can be pretty detrimental though.
We've never seen this': wildlife thrives in closed US national parks
Jeez, why did I forget I wrote that. You're totally right I apologize. In my defense it wasn't my idea to call it that, but it makes total sense that you'd start a discussion about it, I guess I was just confused.
Friend of mine. Slim framework not updated anymore. Cannot make it work in recent php versions, so a fragment of a big corp needs to be maintained and isolated. I know, happens everywhere
I think that the test cases included with packages might have the advantage of being able to obfuscate URLs or other strings as benign test dummy data.

This would be especially easy by using the technique called string sampling that the author mentions. I could choose a "Lorem ipsum" like text for use as dummy data, but ensure that the first letter of every word, when combined, forms the domain name of a server that will be used to download a second malicious payload.
ThoughtWorks Technology Radar Vol.22
I think debugging code is hard enough without having the debug errors cause by using the wrong font.

Have you ever wrestled with MS Word to make you heading appear on the right page? Imagine having to do that to make code compile.
A flat earther will probably argue that it must mean that the height of Mount Everest is a conspiracy since it's clearly the same height as a regular mountain.
Possibly. If they don't rely on glibc, since KISS uses musl. Besides, why would you? They go against the fundamentals KISS.
> for some reason it never tells you what the point of all of this is, so I think many folks might feel turned off by it

I’m attempting to write some hands-on pragmatic no-bullshit articles tackling that.

Why? I’ve been hearing a lot about Nix over the years, how it’s an experiment yet so good it’s actually usable. But every article I found obscure the good parts, either because of too much details and theory or because they’re apt->nix-env but without the whys.

And the good parts are really good. So good that as soon as I was enlightened I simply dropped my lonesome 13 years ArchMac project on the floor.

But it needs a pragmatic approach to explaining what it is and how it can be of value to you day to day. Everything is actually in the manual, but it lacks some ties with existing knowledge for people to make the jump, unless they’re really really curious enough to piece things together.

That’s what I’m writing.
For me, noise cancelling ear phones playing pink noise works to blank everything out.

Music I find too distracting and white noise too harsh (makes me feel like I have a hangover) but pink noise is soothing, almost like being in the womb and really helps me focus
Spandau Ballet, a radio quiz, one syllable – and a $10k riddle
No, GP means "if you think this is a sick joke, look what's actually sick".
I was severely depressed for a couple of years, and moderately depressed for many years before that. What helped me were: a good psychiatrist who was a good therapist, meditation, an anti-depressant prescription, abstaining from drinking alcohol (for 4 years now), and leaving a problematic relationship. I’m still somewhat prone to anxiety, but I generally have more self-awareness.

One other thing I can think of which helps is to try to get off of the “me program”. Directing our compassion and focus to others puts our own troubles into perspective.

Good luck. Everyone has their own journey.
Would an online degree be worth something? If yes, then which would you recommend?
Amazon Crucible: 'Can games be as fun to watch as they are to play?'
I've been developing a visual reactive programming language, Bonsai (https://bonsai-rx.org/) for the past 8 years and it's proven successful in neuroscience research. It is an algebra for reactive streams and addresses some of the issues raised in this thread about GPVPLs:

a) it's amenable to version-control;

b) you can type/edit a program with the keyboard without the need for drag-drop;

c) the auto-layout approach avoids readability issues with too much "artistic freedom" for freestyle diagramming languages like LabView;

d) because its mostly a pure algebraic language w/ type inference there is little complicated syntax to juggle;

e) the IDE is actually faster even though Bonsai is compiled because there is no text parsing involved, so you are editing the abstract syntax tree directly

It definitely has its fair share of scalability problems, but most of them seem to be issues with the IDE, rather than the approach to the language itself. I've never probed the programming community about it, so would be curious to hear any feedback about how bad it is.
> In order to support quantum computing, which makes use of value superposition and probabilistic algorithms, future versions of WysiScript may make use of the alpha channel in color specifications.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure they're not entirely serious.
Ah I'm with you, thanks for the explanation - you're quite right. I've done a fair bit of bash and still I fully expect parts of the syntax to escape my memory. A modern and safe shell would be oil [0], ubiquity is WIP.

[0] http://www.oilshell.org/
Do you happen to know which antibody test Was used? There are a number of different ones with very different specifications.
Welcome Back, Animals
This is good since no one at Coinbase does anything important anyway. Just wait until the next price drop when the "technical difficulties" begin again.
> I don't think this kind of design is inspired from japan

It's almost entirely a west coast US style if anything, nothing to do with kawaii. I even find it weirdly similar to 90s software illustrations, the ancient Adobe Acrobat branding comes to mind [0]

[0] https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51wSPfBcRRL...
Alma discovers rotating disk in early universe
From the ArchWiki:

> To remove a package and its dependencies which are not required by any other installed package:

> # pacman -Rs package_name

> To remove a package, its dependencies and all the packages that depend on the target package:

> # pacman -Rsc package_name
probably you can have a ML program that generates variable names, given the situation in the code.
> And I know UE4 Blueprints are popular so they must be doing something right.

I'd argue that 90% of it is just that they work out of the box. You download the engine bundle and you can start doing blueprints. Being able to write normal code requires you to compile UE from source, which is a non-trivial thing for any large C++ project.

I'm pretty sure if they embedded Lua or Lisp directly into the engine, and provided a half-decent editing environment in-editor, that it would meet with success just as well.
If you are buying something from another country, you are responsible for ensuring it is legal to ship into your country. A seller doesn't need to know every countries laws.

That said, knowingly buying counterfeits is illegal. If you have good reason to suspect it's counterfeit before buying, you could be charged.
Becoming an advanced photoshop user is difficult too. But I can still fire it up and doing basic image editing with about 2 minutes worth of figuring-out. Excel is almost a full RDBMS, but the basics don’t really need any training.
Kingfig Solves the Worst Parts of Managing Settings Pages
Telegram has the exact same default (allow P2P calls for contacts only).

In my opinion, this is a reasonable default: Relaying all voice calls would use significant resources and might increase latency for users far away from the nearest relay (topologically or geographically).

Also, what's with the snarkiness? Are Signal's security tradeoffs or vulnerabilities somehow making Telegram more or less secure?

The two of them intentionally make different security/usability tradeoffs (the most significant one being Telegram's choice to provide a server-side message history visible to the service operator).

Of course this tradeoff isn't inherently bad, but weird communication and branding on Telegram's side in the past has given this a weird aftertaste that, at least for me, is still sticking around.
WysiScript: Programming via Direct Syntax Highlighting (2017)
Lads, this happened for a single day, it was lovely but is not a regular event. The city still has pollution issues however many now agree that it's caused from burnings that occur in northern India.

I've lived here since the earthquake, have only seen Everest from my rooftop in the capital one single time.

There are about 99% fewer vehicles on the road as we are in complete lockdown however the brick kilns that are located in the valley are probably the bigger polluters. Local neighbourhood garbage pickup guys regularly burn plastic.
Yeah, the lack of self-reflection is pretty palpable.
Bluetooth Battery Level in Linux
"I heard one doctor say"?

like in person? or on TV?

and from this you draw the conclusion that "tons" of deaths are misreported?
I would say so. For me (in the US), the amount of TikTok reposts on platforms like Twitter and Instagram seems to grow by the day and I rarely, if ever, see the concern about it being a Chinese app raised.
> There are not a lot of successful examples where the host company actually profited from the invention.

Maybe we should not hold on to the bureaucracy patents bring. Especially considering in some countries international patent are used as recipe to copy innovations.

Tesla has moved their patents into open source because they are under the opinion that competition is won by attracting the best engineers.

> Elon Musk: "After Zip2, when I realized that receiving a patent really just meant that you bought a lottery ticket to a lawsuit, I avoided them whenever possible."

https://www.tesla.com/en_GB/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-y...
The virus originated from chinese horseshoe bats. It can't just randomly teleport to some other country on the other side of the world to start an outbreak, before existing in human population of China.
I like xkcd as much as anyone (I've even got the books!) but this isn't really HN calibre imo.
Actually, at the time, once other potential user groups saw how beneficial the technology could be for them (airlines, farmers, on and on) these groups threatened to send up their own GPS systems unless the government agreed to enable full accuracy. The government faced with losing control entirely or meeting the demands of industry chose two work with industry as the US legal writ did not extend to space.
From that link:

> The generally adequate vitamin D status in the Nordic countries is due to the use of cod liver oil and supplements (46) and vitamin D fortification, leading to a great improvement in Finland during the last decade (47).

Doesn't surprise me; here in the South we don't get deficient enough to cause obvious issues, so we don't pay attention to it.
(pilot here) Cessna was a badass plane 50 years ago, but it is no longer; for the past 20 years is is lagging a lot behind in terms of weight, engine power and fuel consumption.
I have very little time on 152 and 172, definitely not an expert, but from the ~ 10 plane models I flied as pilot the Cessnas were at the bottom 3. For 2 seaters an 152 is twice as heavy as the other planes, the engine is obsolete giving low power with high fuel consumption, practically for a 2-seater Rotax 912 powered LSA's are better from any point of view: lighter, faster, cheaper to buy and operate, have shorter take of and landing (better power to weight ratio), fly longer (better mileage) and nicer to fly (fast and agile).

For the 172 there is no much competition and that is a very bad thing; this is the only reason the 172 is so popular. When a two-seater can be bought for less than $100k new, a 4-seater is crazy expensive for no particular reason.

A legend among the pilots and plane owners is that for every plane sold Cessna was covering the manufacturing cost with half of the money and litigation with the other half. I read that in a couple of magazines too, it is hard to confirm if it is entirely true but there is something there. Also the biggest recent fail of Cessna, the 162, was built in China and still extremely expensive - almost double the price of a similar plane built in Europe (Comco Ikarus and Flight Design in Germany, Pipistrel in Slovenia or Evektor in Czech Republic).

Overall, Cessna is the Harley Davidson of the aviation world: the company that is going on inertia building obsolete products based on a brand image built decades ago.
> the threshold to build a document-web-browser from scratch would be so much lower

Wouldn't it be easier to just clone the normal Firefox/Chromium and strip everything out that is not needed? You wouldn't even have to do it all at once. Just turn things of and rip the code out/refactor later.
It explicitly says this, though:

> while much of that build time is attributable to Nix's way of building dependencies

And that part just doesn't make sense to me. I can't see any way in which specifically Nix's way of building dependencies would contribute to this. The compiling of the universe, sure, but then why mention Nix?
“ The problem is, what if you have depressing thoughts that are totally rooted in reality?”

I thought the point of CBT was to avoid making negative assumptions or falling into thinking traps. For example, “I’m on the street and hungry. I’ll probably be like this for the rest of my life.” This is a thinking trap - thinking that bad situations will last indefinitely. Instead, we can think, “I’m on the street and hungry, but I’m alive, and I can probably turn things around.”
The Most Unfairly Treated Person in the History of Science
Developing Multitile Creatures in Roguelikes
This is a really phenomenal lens to look through. This has totally changed my perspective. Thank you
do you have more details on that? I haven't been gaming for a while but you got me interested about the setup and how it works
Designing Apps for Kids
Go and educate yourself about the actual details of the procedure, which are in some of the grey comments at the bottom.

But you are deliberately diverting again, so I assume stupidity or bad faith.

I don't understand why these passive aggressive pseudo-innocent comments are tolerated here.
For Spy Agencies, Briefing the President Is a Test of Holding His Attention
Jilted woman dumps tonne of onions on ex-boyfriend's doorstep
http://www.sigbovik.org/

Tom 7's video descriptions mention this conference, he has quite a few fun topics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDxjbXAqTPg
Seriously, piss off. You clearly don't understand the tools you're loudly complaining about, and it's interfering with what was otherwise a productive discussion about Nix and build times.
Yeah. Though. It will have a free plan. And our hosting cost quite a lot so (imho) it’s almost always must cheaper to buy a ready solution.
> Social aspects of offices are overrated.

This might be true for you but it’s not true for everyone.
sure, it's basically the principle of an infinite scroll, you preload the content you will scroll to next so it is just rendering.

you could also preload with the link element https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Preloading...
Sphero Names New CEO
> I can't figure out if this is completely serious.

"Most programming languages in use today use only a single color for all numeric literals, which is unnecessarily confusing and makes it impossible to distinguish different numbers using only a spectrometer"

:)
Yeah, I've been using labview for almost twenty years. I use it because I can hand it to a biologist and have a modest chance they can understand it, plus for me it's easier to make a UI with it since I just never learned that.

But trying to do much in the way of complex logic, unless it's already a built in function, is horrible. Imagine writing a math equation in a visual programming language out of three terminal visual functions for "+". It's hard to be sure you even have the order of operations right! Of course they bandaid this by offering inline equations (which are clunky but I use sometimes) and some support for incorporating textual code for functions, but after twenty years I've never tried to do it because it is more complex than an inline code editor.

It's great for showing people just above the level of excel who need to do something custom and don't know a real language or need a quick GUI. But I guarantee they will screw it up badly since the clean visuals cover a lot of hidden behavior that will screw you up. I usually write them 98% of it since the design is hard to guess a good paradigm for, and let them practice on modifying the remaining 2% as they change their mind about what they want it to do.
Very true. I think there is also a lot of hindsight bias in the article and the comments
* Based on musl libc, busybox and the Linux kernel.

As some one who is working on Go ecosystem, this drops my interesting immediately. Using musl libs means a lot of tools can't be used on this OS unless we install the glibc.
Top Resources to Find Data Science Jobs During the Recession
> consider the fact that the press is reporting the issue. And that we are freely discussing it

consider there is a "press like apparatus" working very hard to polarise the issue into dead lock. "teams" were already drawn up before the issue even started.
I think you mean feedparser. It knows how to parse the feed. So you have to give it the feed’s url
U.K. Fast-Tracks New Road Laws to Get Scooters on London Streets
ITM House
I feel certain domains lend themselves better to visual programming. Reaktor is a great example in the audio space, but I'd hate to use a tool like that to write a csv parser.
I think you’re being too narrow in application. People exclaim kawaii liberally —about as liberally as “oishi” for food delicious or just so-so.
VC money mixed with open source software again. It didn't end well for Keybase. I hope Matrix has a monetization strategy.

Edit: for people interested there are company docs at https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/10873661/filing-h... eg. "25 Mar 2020 Total exemption full accounts" document (2.2) shows a yearly loss of almost 2M pounds.

Edit 2: it seems Matrix people no longer control 50% of their company shares, or I'm reading it wrong: https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/10873661/persons-...
Yes, infantilization is the right term. And it's main function is to suppress critical thinking of the product.
Well no, but also in the US there are research facilities working with Coronaviruses [1]. I am not advocating for this theory because there is zero credible evidence for it but there are scenarios that would make this theoretically possible.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4797993/
What makes XKCD so great? Is it that he sticks to noncontroversial subjects - everytime people pull up a "relevant xkcd" it's something most of the people agree on.

Even with controversial subject - the covid lockdown, he chose to highlight facts where everyone (well ~90%) agree on.
> Imagine if every WP site automatically came with its own Matrix room or community? Imagine if all content in WP automatically was published into Matrix as well as the Web?… Imagine there was an excellent Matrix client available as a WordPress plugin for embedding realtime chat into your site?”

I want to imagine it, but I really struggle to. Matrix is just too slow, bloated, and heavy. I cannot even fathom what a snappy experience with Matrix would be like. I look forward to something like this if it happens though!
This warning helps attackers the most. They should have waited with publication until upgrades are available in major OS distributions - RHEL, Debian, Ubuntu.
R&D is not dead.

R&D has been rising globally for over 70 years with no major declines. Globally, $1.7 trillion USD a year is currently spent on RD; roughly 2% of the global GDP. There is more research going on right now than at any point in history at any scale.

R&D, similar to startups, is full of broken dreams, surviver bias, etc. — those complaining their source of funding dried up, they never got lucky, etc.

There is no magic recipe for success in R&D — and anyone that tells you they are able to outperform the market at scale as it relates to R&D outcomes is lying.