skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really hope anyone with a genetics background, or the desire to go really in depth about what makes a virus 'Lab-made', read through the above posted first article.

https://medium.com/@yurideigin/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-throu...

It takes a long time but explains why the source is not very likely to be an evolved combined bat x pangolin virus, and has curious markers similarly used in other gain-of-function research, even similar techniques as used in past research by Dr. Shi Zhengli at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Natural origin not ruled out as being impossible, but not likely.

Combining it with this possible explanation looking at the possibility of RaTG13 being entirely fabricated altogether by Dr. Shi in January 2020, and you can at least definitely see where the conspiracy arguments come from, and why the CCP has an overwhelming need to create and play up a 'natural origin' argument, along with passing on mountains of misinformation.

https://nerdhaspower.weebly.com/ratg13-is-fake.html

Very convincing articles, scary times if this is actually true.
That's only true if the man made hypothesis was true. It is quite possible we'll find this exact virus in bats or other animals at some point.
In the early 90s hypercolor shirts would change color depending on the temperature.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercolor
There has been a concerted campaign to paint China as the world's bogeyman mostly by the alt-right.

Topics such as BLM often involve whataboutism with many complaining about the lack of support for Hong Kong by supporters of BLM, see Senator Hawley's comments.

This is part of the coordinated anti-globalism, nationalist movement that Bannon and his cronies are promoting.

I am not convinced that they actually care about Hong Kong or the Uihgurs given how opposed they were to helping out the Syrian migrants.

China is doing some bad shit, but it's hard for me to judge them much more severely than any number of other countries.
"professional" can mean so many things in this context though. Could just mean that the way the head, arms and legs were chopped were clean cuts, place was clean etc?
The evidence is pretty compelling and I’ve suspected something was up the whole time in fact I began social distancing November of last year after hearing reports of a mystery virus. At some point in my life I met a mechanical engineer while helping out a friend who lost his job. This guy happened to be his neighbor and was the only one who was willing to run an electrical cable to my friend’s unit for a small sum since his electric got cut off. This guy explains he was working in a lab that did continuous culture experiments and explained how it worked. He had the blueprints in his unit so I had no reason to doubt him and paperwork from the lab. Long story short he quit due to military influence on the project and was pushed out over his concerns which were ethical in nature. He opened my eyes to the fact a virus can be evolved rapidly and made extremely resistant without specific genetic modification. A little bit of googling and I could see the same company was involved in research going on in that Wuhan lab. The point here is how do we define “modified” as it is certainly possible through rapid continuous cultures and selective survival of strains any virus can be modified. This happened in the early aughts and so it’s been nearly two decades this research technique has been in play. If it wasn’t for that chance encounter I’d naturally be more skeptical about possible modifications of the virus but just so happens that I’m not as a result.
>And I think the flip-side is also true, "organized crime" being little different from "legitimate state", except in scale and sometimes scale.

This is well known in anarchist/libertarian circle. Government taking 30% of your income is essentially a protection racket.

People who are born and only lived in a stable single government state just assumes that there is something privileged about the state itself. But that's just frog-in-a-well effect.
ahh no - mistake was mine. Antarctica has been home to whaling colonies in previous time periods.
Type casting doesn't seem to be an issue for you?
If this was just over some money, why did the person chop off his head, arms and legs? That sounds like a lot of effort by the killer.
Yeah I tried AWS and Digital Ocean and they were blocked by Netflix which is really what I care about. A commercial VPN I use actually works for Netflix but only in 2 specific regions.
Siri, Alexa Targeted as EU Probes ‘Internet of Things’
You'll need a source for your aggressive claims -- these suggest that chapter 11 recidivism isn't that rare ("less than a handful" is patently false) [0][1]. And I wouldn't go so far as to abolish it, but to give debtors a stronger vote in the proceedings. Right now, the balance of power strongly favors shareholders, socializing the losses amongst creditors and prolonging the demise of companies that have no future (e.g. JC Penney).

[0] https://blogs.harvard.edu/bankruptcyroundtable/tag/chapter-2...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bankruptcy-repeats/compan...
This is actually the situation I'm in. Google Play Services are disabled on my device so I cannot use any YouTube premium features anyways.

If there was a way to pay for YouTube premium and make the money go to the creators I watch while using a FOSS client like NewPipe, I'd be willing to pay several more times the current price of YouTube premium for that.
As a hard determinist that believes everything is just genetics, environmental factors and how the order of events/forces play out. I assume an individual is exactly the foregoing. We get patterns, we all share but also unique sequences and that separate what's common from individual status.
You can just convert it on the command line with FF as well.

I didn't even know FF Even Had a GUI until I read your comment
Sounds like Vimeo.
I recall watching a Microsoft talk where they explain how they do exactly this.
As in 10% reduction?
Translate Ancient Hieroglyphs, Google's New AI-Powered Tool
I feel like you consider any criticism of the government which has Uighur muslims in camps, harvests organs from them, sells their hair as "hair extensions", bans blacks from restuarants as "alt-right". You are doing the very thing you accuse others of doing - making any criticism of China as an alt-right bogeyman.

https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/national-media-release/cbp-deta...

https://china.usembassy-china.org.cn/health-alert-u-s-consul...
The guy's history is ripe with backroom deals. Look at all the "acquisitions" he's been involved with.
This is extremely good.
In modern parlance:

Scrum meetings will continue until velocity improves.
Low-sugar candy startup SmartSweets bringing in millions
But ICANN denied the org transaction. What's the problem with the former CEO joining that PE firm?
You can't trust firms hosted in HK anymore. It's as tainted as China is.
So the photos going around showing they have detrending tools might be real?

Is it ethically acceptable that they “curate” what is trending? (Edit: I was actually asking, but apparently got my answer)

Edit: I didn’t believe it when I saw people claiming those pictures were being deleted when posted by to twitter, but verge confirms they’re real. Trends blacklist and search blacklist. Didn’t Jack testify to Congress they do not manipulate trends? https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/15/21326656/twitter-hack-exp...
Doordash went down
It's definitely within the realm of possibility! There's been a lot of research in hypnosis for state anxity (i.e. before a test) so I think it makes logical sense that it would help with the fear of public speaking.

On the anecodtoal I know someone who has had significant success using hypnotherapy for public speaking.

Definitely worth exploring.
Ya I think so. Since there isn’t a way to make html links with a short text .
third-party js no less.
Agreed, Elixir LiveView is a lot like what @sequoia describes. I use LiveView to handle creating the more complex logic, data handling (and caching) on the server. For UI layout you can get surprisingly far with mostly CSS nowadays with small events back to the server just changing a CSS class here and there. Oddly despite the server round trip, the responsiveness is great.

Here’s a demo I built for a small wrapper around Bulgaria CSS. Running on a tiny VPS: http://lacritch.xyz/

Now Elixir/BEAM is an excellent platform for this as the average and 99.9th percentile response times are really consistent. So your UI interactions don’t usually take 70ms with every Xth one taking 400 ms, which would be really annoying.
It's the same as the HN frontpage really
Why give a government with modern day concentration camps, an avoidable epidemic of prisoners with COVID-19, and military occupation of free countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, or more historically in Iraq (again), Somalia, Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, Cuba, I feel like I’m just naming random countries at this point...the benefit of the doubt about anything?
From what I saw most of the “famous” accounts are surely run by PR teams. I doubt Obama has touched the Obama account let alone DM’ed Jesse Jackson some Trump memes.

But I guess it’s entirely possible that people put sensitive things in DMs and inexplicably just trusted Twitter with that info.
Criticizing the Communist party of China is not the same as criticizing Chinese people. Chinese people are just being oppressed by CCP.
I think this is the "postmortem" he's referring to: https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2020/07/13/bug-now...

> Last week we made a server-side code change that triggered crashes for some iOS apps using the Facebook SDK. We quickly resolved the issue without requiring action from developers.
i think an open source app can easily be published on altstore.
Funny that the dna that gives us these abilities is copied almost perfectly in comparison
They are.

1. HandyBrowser (supports handhshake): https://github.com/HandyMiner/HandyBrowser

2. TorBrowser: https://www.torproject.org/

3. Opera: https://unstoppabledomains.com/opera

4. Status.im: https://status.im/

5. Brave: https://brave.com/

6. Unstoppable: https://unstoppabledomains.com/browser

7. Blockstack: https://blockstack.org/install

Probably few more - maybe dozens.

For major DNS providers, nextdns supports handshake.

0] https://handshake.org/

1] https://nextdns.io/
Ask HN: How did you setup custom domains and SSL for your SaaS?
Head of DevOps at a major financial exchange where latency & resiliency is at the heart of our business, and yes, we pay Cloudflare millions. I see two things here:

# Just be ready

Most definitely not the first time Cloudflare has had trouble, just like any other system: it will fail eventually. If you're complaining about the outage, ask yourself the question: why were not you prepared for this eventuality?

Spread your name servers, and use short-TTL weighted CNAMEs, defaulting to say, 99% Cloudflare, 1% your internal load balancer. The minute Cloudflare seems problematic, make it 0% 100% to bypass Cloudflare’s infrastructure completely. This should be tested periodically to ensure that your backends are able to scale & take the load without shedding due to the lack of CDN.

# Management practices

Cloudflare's core business is networking. It actually embarrasses me to see that Cloudflare YOLO'd a BGP change in a Juniper terminal without peer reviews and/or without a proper administration dashboard, exposing safe(guarded) operations, a simulation engine and co.? In particular, re-routing traffic / bypassing POPs must be a frequent task at scale, how can that not be automated so to avoid human mistakes?

If you look at the power rails of serious data centers out there, you will quickly notice that those systems, although built 3x for the purpose of still being redundant during maintenance periods, are heavily safeguarded and automated. While technicians often have to replace power elements, the maintenance access is highly restricted with unsafe functions tiered behind physical restrictions. An example of a common function that's safeguarded is the automatic denial of an input command that would shift electrical load onto lines beyond their designed capacity - which could happen by mistake if the technician made a bad assumption (e.g. load sharing line is up while it's down) or if the assumption became violated since last check (e.g. load sharing line was up when checked, became down at a later time - milliseconds before the input even).
No, no, please don’t waste time constructing persons of straw. One insinuating that my position is “get rid of healthcare” is especially odious since the counterfactual I raised was one considering impacts of preventative care missed due to lockdowns. You made a rhetorical claim: “locked in for 6 weeks and if that had prevented 50000 deaths, how is that not worth it?”

How do you know if it is worth it or not if you don’t know the cost of being locked in for 6 weeks? Ignoring the other track doesn’t seem a path to a well considered decision.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem
> What I am suggesting is that it is immoral to take more when others are given less.

You mean like how America takes more than the rest of the world?

I think the underlying problem here is that executive salaries and bonuses are at too higher multiples. Much higher than historical norms.

Not many would complain about an exec getting a bonus during this time if it was actually reasonable in the first place.
Some posts on medium are not hidden. I think they only get paywalled if you monetize your blog.
Ask HN: Ventilation Systems to help with re-opening
I am not sure if this is the best place to post this, but figure a good place to ask the question: Is there a way we could use ventilation systems to help make it possible to open schools earlier?

The hypothesis I am working from is that the spread of Covid is based on air transmission. If we could make being “inside” similar to being “outside” (ideally with high grade filters), perhaps that would help justify opening of schools.

The added longer term benefit would be a reduction of other germs, and would likely increase learning by students as well (there being studies showing increased air quality seems to have a measurable increase in academic performance).

Thoughts on this? Costs aside could it even make a difference?
> did the attackers see any of my private information? For the vast majority of people, we believe the answer is, no.

This is such a weasel-y answer. “Yes, most of Earth’s population was not affected by this breach” - sure, but those that were affected, how would you be certain that they didn’t have their private information, such as DMs, pulled?
Residential CO2 Heat Pump Water Heater
Primal Grow Pro: N1 Product {2020} *99%-Result* Ingredients
Does Primal Grow Pro Really Work?

Primal Grow Pro accomplishes appear to fill in to the extent being a decent generally speaking enhancement and may absolutely have some drive boosting impacts, in any case, I am a long way from open to stating that it conveys on the entirety of the cases that it makes as to male sexual wellbeing.

http://wintersupplement.com/primal-grow-pro/

https://specialoffer4health.wordpress.com/2020/07/17/primal-grow-pro-2/

https://youtu.be/869k192TUwE
Very neat! How much work would it be to write ROS bindings so you could control robots easily with it? Googling around, I found one team that has done it with Pharo: http://car.imt-lille-douai.fr/category/software/pharos/
I think it likely varies on the person we're talking about. Is Obama personally tweeting and sending private memes in his DMs? Doubtful. Kanye or Elon Musk? I'd guess yes, actually.
I haven’t seen this, do you have a link?
Ask HN: What cool browser extensions have you created to simplify your tasks?
I just want to know how you automated or made your work simple through a browser extension.
> It actually embarrasses me to see that Cloudflare YOLO'd a BGP change in a Cisco terminal

The output is from a Juniper router, not Cisco.
> He hasn't ever governed as a "unity" president.

Obama never governed as a "unity" president either.

Bush immediately after 9/11 was probably the last time there was some semblance of political unity in this country.
> Attackers were not able to view previous account passwords, as those are not stored in plain text or available through the tools used in the attack.

They so carefully avoiding mentioning how they do store passwords that I have to wonder what their security practices are on that front (and the rest). What tools are they available under? You'd think they would've said "passwords are hashed and salted" to rule it out entirely if that was a thing.
Thank you, that's very kind.
It's still happening. I just saw this blue checkmark account linking to cryptocurrency scams only 2 hours ago: https://twitter.com/sephr/status/1284310424855343105
This is so cool.

We know that smalltalk message passing was inspired by biology, and the ultimate design vision was for objects to be ephemeral machines themselves.

Would it be possible to create a farm of Pis, where some objects were on some subset of them, and some objects on another? Even a simplistic example with two Pis, with the object space split between them? Can we use the network to perform language-level message passing?
This blog is well worth exploring. There is something immensely satisfying about the work the artist does.
Cheers. I didn't know that.
You Can Prepare This Nutritious and Medicinal Soup with Just 500 Naira
To be clear, you saw a lot of that regarding Brexit in the UN? If you meant from those in the EU, then that's a completely separate organization.
Can someone explain to me why third party JS has such a big impact on load time? I thought browsers deprioritize third party JS and load it after all first party assests have been downloaded and the site has been rendered. If that's the case why does third party JS still have such a big impact on page performance?
If this was a dress rehearsal for a WW2 repeat it certainly doesn't look good. In 1941 the US had enough societal fabric to conscript every fighting age man and send everyone else to the factories to make munitions for 4 years. Today, the US can't even get people to agree on using face masks and staying 6 ft away from each other for a few months.

As a percentage of the population more Americans have died from covid than the Vietnam war. The wartime comparison is apt.
Exactly. I have no illusions that the food is better than something on the ground but it's really not bad at all. Flying first class on ANA, it's actually fantastic. However, that's not why you fly first. You fly first because it's completely stress-free from the moment they pick you up at your house until the moment they drop you off at your hotel halfway around the globe. You arrive rested, clean, fed, and relaxed. All problems get magically taken care of.

That Porsche that picked me up? I landed late and was about to miss my connection to Italy. No problem. The driver told me he could hold the flight or reschedule me for later and bring me to the First Class lounge to pass the time. He picked up his phone and everything was handled. Zero stress.

Clearing EU immigration was a cinch. When I flew biz class into Lisbon the previous summer, I waited 4 hours in line in a sweltering terminal to clear. With Lufthansa First, the Porsche driver drove me to what looked like a security kiosk. We got out of the car, a woman stamped my passport, and we were back in the car in seconds. That's what you pay for, not the champagne and caviar.
Vuesax 4 New Component SIDEBAR (framework vuejs)
Initially when we developed Mindset we could only program in Swift so Mindset was built for iOS only.

We are now moving to React Native so should be getting Mindset out on Android soon. Ideally we want to have a single codebase for all of our apps.
Yes and these sort of excuses applies to ALL industries. Any Sales people or Support Staff should already know this. So I am often surprised people are arguing about it.

At the end, your customer, assuming it is a SaaS, just need an excuse for "their" customers or the End User. And there is nothing better than a big household name's fault so no one get the blame.

So the whole thing is written off, everybody is in the clear, and everyone can get on with their other business. :)
Right now, I'm aware of problems in Texas. Don't know how widespread or if other states are, though.
Ah okay it's like the difference between a forensic argument vs a scientific argument.
Ah, Elon, forgot about that one. I fully believe he runs his own twitter. How else is he going to control the stock market!? ;)

You’re right, I assume his would be one of the accounts that was exfil’ed
Due to massive pressure from governments and NGOs, not because it was wrong. If they could have gotten away with it, they would have.
People have lots of conspiracy theories on motives out there.
Thank you! Now who's embarrassed? ;-)
A pro would get the job done without screaming.
The complementary scenario is also plausible - the employers that are decent have low attrition, write reasonable job ads, and fill positions quickly, so most of the ads (on a number x unit time basis) are from clueless employers with self-defeating criteria.
You're missing the nuance. Doxxing is not a crime nor is it a call to action. Do news stations censor the names of alleged criminals or even suspects out of some juvenile fear that a mob is going to rise up and take swift extra-judicial action? No. People are free to allege whatever they want. And in the case of Krebs, it happens to be his job. Reasonable citizens should not harass, threaten, or otherwise harm an innocent-until-proven-guilty person. Taking up an internet moniker does not enter you into some sacred contract with society whereby you shall never be exposed. I'm sick of treating issues like the rest of the world is a cesspool of ravenous lunatics and they can't be trusted to act like adults. Like there's a global expectation of ill intent. I know recent times have demonstrated otherwise but it's no excuse. We need to hold people who actually abuse others accountable for their actions not tread lightly around them because they are scary. Full disclosure for all. Full accountability for all. Confront the boggy-people.
What if people used a de facto whitelist of IP addresses locally mapped to names in, for example, /etc/hosts? This is how the internet worked in its earliest days, after all. I'm not saying this is a good idea, but it's interesting because it also serves the interest of Google and Facebook, so they might promote the technique. Since people will only be able to see content from a small portion of the internet (the part they have in their local file), and would give content hosted by the big players a huge advantage. It would also have the interesting effect of making "raw IP" addresses more visible, and special, easily remembered IPv4 addresses more valuable!
This is not the first time human error on BGP routing configuration which then caused a significant portion of the Internet down. Is there any kind of configuration validator that can be implemented to prevent and catch this type of errors? I am fairly sure this won't be the last time we will hear about human error on BGP routing config causing Internet down.

Or is BGP intrinsically a unsafe protocol without builtin protections on this sort of human mistakes?
Was smallpox also man-made then?
Thank you for this summary.

A slightly tangential question I'd love to get more perspective on is the impact of the virus being "man made" on our current predicament. Even assuming that the virus was not naturally evolved, and its characteristics are partly caused due to human interventions we're still stuck finding a vaccine, medication and ways of reducing transmission.

Is there still a thread here that this virus is evidence that humans can possibly create chimeric viruses? In my limited understanding, using protein sequences to modify viruses is generally believed to be possible.