skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you trust a former director of the US CDC,

"

When the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last week unveiled a report documenting multiple safety breaches at its labs, its director for the first time suggested the country turn back the rapid-fire proliferation of such research units, which have tripled in little more than a decade to at least 1,500.

“One of the things that we want to do is reduce the number of laboratories that work with dangerous agents to the absolute minimum necessary,” said CDC Director Dr Thomas Frieden. “Reduce the number of people who have access to those laboratories to the absolute minimum necessary. Reduce the number of dangerous pathogens we work with.”

"
from https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-anthrax-labs-analysis...

Or we could go further and impose a complete moratorium on gain of function research until such time as better technological and operational advances can be made to prevent potential leaks. These pathogens could be viewed with as much risk as nuclear proliferation is. But they are not.

We may or may not be seeing consequences today, I am not here to speculate.

What we know is that there were ongoing gain of function experiments with bat coronaviruses in Wuhan and elsewhere. What we also know is that there were leaks of SARS-1 from research labs in Beijing studying it. What we do not know is if Covid-19 was leaked from a lab.

When we convict someone of a crime we use innocent until proven guilty to make our decision. Absent evidence we therefore presume humans to be innocent of creating this virus. But that does not mean we shouldn't act under the presumption that this virus could possibly have been or future viruses may be leaked and rethink our positions on research safety.
Do you have a history of suicidal ideation, either in you or in your family? Consider this when you get a gun. 60% of gun deaths in the US are suicides [0].

[0]https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/08/16/what-the-da...
Possibly. When I worked in radio there was no shortage of engineers willing to violate all of the safety rules and do tower maintenance without shutting down the transmitter for a little extra money. They often had the RF scars to prove it.
Which makes sense. Black people have historically been and currently are scapegoats for a lot of crimes they did not commit. Kinda makes sense to give them more leeway.
I can't read French, but the abstract states "dogs remember who and what happened but no study evidenced yet that they remember the precise time it was done."

That is a much lesser claim than "they're more or less completely unaware of it (the past)"
I use a VPN to keep Comcast from logging and selling my data to third parties. The client is always on and running on my PC.
It blows my mind that there are multiple organizations that are so large and well armed that even the Mexican government won't touch them. Keep in mind that the Mexican military has the 17th most active duty personnel in the world (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...) and spent $7 billion last year (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Armed_Forces), and still isn't willing to take on drug cartels stomping on their own sovereign territory.

These guys just throw up repeaters and not only do they not try to hide them, they actually mark them to show who is going to be destroying your life if you take them down. Oh, and you have to pay if you want to work on your own legitimate equipment that is rightfully on that tower.

The illegal drug trade exists on a scale unimaginable to most people. Imagine if we could figure out how to legitimize it- we'd save countless lives over stupid stuff like having your life threatened just because you work for a telecom company and need to do your job. If we could tax drug money at just a couple percent we could invest in all sorts of social programs and infrastructure, rather than funding thugs. The crazy part is that a lot of the drug lords don't even spend a good chunk of their fortune, they just store massive amounts of money in houses they'll never even live in.

Edit: To clarify my point a little, the reason the Mexican government isn't willing to do anything is that they couldn't do anything about it even if they tried. The Mexican military has fewer people than the cartels and have a smaller budget. According to this article from 2012 (https://muse.jhu.edu/article/485071) the Mexican cartels employ 450,000 people and make $25 billion annually (these numbers have probably increased in the last eight years). The Mexican military would have to be incredibly skilled to take them on with 177,000 people and a $7 billion budget. And even then, that's just the Mexican cartels, there are more in South America and the rest of the world. Stopping the illegal drug trade would take a unified policy effort from every government in the world, we're past the point of being able to be able to fight the cartels with military power.
What makes you optimistic?
Just recently found an adafruit guide to building a solaris 2.6 setup using QEMU. The nostalgia!

https://learn.adafruit.com/build-your-own-sparc-with-qemu-an...

edit: just remembered that you sadly don't get to see Sun Gallant Demi in all its glory, because it boots using the QEMU openfirmware.
I have no doubt China would weaponizing a virus even against their own citizens.
Who are the bosses you are talking about here?
> The contractor had disrupted a small link in a vast criminal network that spans much of Mexico. In addition to high-end encrypted cell phones and popular messaging apps, traffickers still rely heavily on two-way radios like the ones police and firefighters use to coordinate their teams on the ground, six law enforcement experts on both sides of the border told Reuters.

How will Mexico ever have peace while it lives next to the largest drug consuming country in the world? While it’s illegal here, the money will go to these cartels.
Especially if you post it in the middle of a gibberish tweet storm.

Imagine immediately following the “going private... funding secured tweets” if a malicious actor wrote something about Saudi funding, or cashing out of it’s rejected. It’d be much hard to separate fact from fiction when the baseline is already crazy sounding.
Why would there be a market for such work?
And continuously training models is very hard, practicality in RL environment, even then cloud services over long term is possibly more cost effective solution, then hosting your own small cluster (few tightly packed racks).
This isn't the first time VPNs with those claims have turned out to have them, they've been used as court evidence IIRC.

Edit: https://proprivacy.com/privacy-news/no-logs-ipvanish-hands-l...
Oh! I have never looked an HN frames, etc., but I assumed the header was separate. Thank you!
Hong Kong demands Taiwan officials sign 'one China' document for visa renewal
Piggybacking off of this, Private Internet Access (PIA) has actually had their no logging policy "proven in court" via this method multiple times. [1][2]

Full disclosure: I work at PIA.

[1]https://torrentfreak.com/vpn-providers-no-logging-claims-tes...

[2]https://torrentfreak.com/private-internet-access-no-logging-...
There is a setting to automatically switch to the Picture-in-Picture player when one switches to other apps or presses the back button.

So i've never had those issues, because videos simply never stopped playing!
Management never wants to invest in the tooling
> Their No. 1 rule when discovering cartel equipment on a tower is simple: Don’t touch it.

They never follow up on why they shouldn't touch it! [edit: OOPS yes they do, sorry!]
As I understand it colonization in this context means self sufficiency. Are they without delivery of food and other essentials by ship and plane? Could they grow their food there in greenhouses?
Nobel laureate James Watson insists black people are genetically stupider than white people and Watson made arguably the most significant scientific discovery of the 20th century along with Crick.

Even Nobel laureates are humans prone to mistakes.
There is evidence in both directions, but the data isn't great, because one of the reasons that boards offer large bonuses is to attract 'talent' to troubled or stagnant companies (which don't look great on the resume). Jim Collins (author of "Good to Great") has made the case that other factors are much more important.

The other thing to keep in mind is that the 'huge' bonuses usually aren't very large from an income statement point of view; if you bought an extra 0.5% growth (or savings), it was easily worth it.

As to why this is allowed, I think it's seen as a private transaction between well-informed and consenting parties, so there needs to be a compelling reason for legislation and regulation.
How the Unix philosophy gave us “web apps” instead of “software”
What you've done here is demonstrate why Cloudflare cannot be trusted: You do not get to decide for the rest of the internet which use cases are valid and which are "bonkers" -- you probably just thought to yourself "Oh, but I did". This is a pattern of behavior at Cloudflare (cf. Cloudflare CEO waking up one morning to remove a domain from the internet because he didn't like the contents -- which is a polite way of saying he caved to the Twitter mob). You and Cloudflare made a business decision that supporting the DNS standard was too costly, despite DNS being a core offering of Cloudflare. You appear to be saying that you personally made a value judgment about someone else's use case, used that as an argument to drop support for the standard, then pushed draft changes so that Cloudflare could retroactively claim to support the standard.

You have forced changes in the DNS standard based on your own personal value judgment, and Cloudflare was duplicitous in its support of this relative moral position. I could not have made the argument against trusting Cloudflare better, myself.
Why yes, the executives do want to retain the executives, it turns out. While retention bonuses are actually fairly common for leadership of a company in crisis, it still doesn't look good to be making that decision while also plotting to lay off the lower tier employees.
Except a NYT journalist was willing to dox Scott Alexander for no reason at all..
The cartels drill into gas\petrol pipelines. Sometimes they spark. google huachicoleo explosion
“It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness; that is life.” - Jean Luc Picard

I'm not saying everyone of those people in charge are in the same boat but maybe we shouldn't be too hasty in judging them without knowing the specifics.
Little bit of extra info...

I served mandatory military service in the Bundeswehr back in the day.

Every single bullet was accounted for: All bullets were numbered, and when we would go to the shooting range we'd get bullets from a batch. We made sure that all bullets handed out were actually used, and all of our names were recorded with that batch of bullets - if any bullet of that batch ever turned up anywhere else, they would know who to check.

With that in mind 60k bullets is large number of bullets to be lost.

Edit: Grammar and spelling.
Edit: Back then these were 7.62mm rounds for the G3, and (I think) 5mm rounds for the uzi (or uzi-like).
True, that was a poor argument on my part. I should say, lack of evidence that it did. Which weakens my argument, so thanks for pointing it out.
What I'm saying is that if Sec. Clinton were in office the red states would be doing exactly what they're doing now. It wouldn't have made a lick of difference.

I should have been more explicit on that.

> Contrast this with Andrew Cuomo of New York...

Exactly. I think this is part of the problem on the left. The desire to do something, anything, when sometimes doing nothing, or less, is the right thing. And then if it doesn't work out saying "yeah but we did something!".

Frankly, I think the outcome in NY was inevitable regardless of policy. So I don't blame Cuomo but I also don't think he's a hero. He just did his job and showed up. The way the data has shaped up against other jurisdictions around the country/globe I think they would have gotten about the same outcome regardless of the policy.

> It was a choice by Trump, which then filtered down into Trump leaning local politicians, to turn it into a proxy war

That's fair. He did "start it". He's a real problem for sure. Anything he touches or recommend almost can't be touched by the left for fear of keeping him in office.

But same for the right. There's no way the red states would have saddled up with Clinton.
Why would I assure myself that Tor is safe either? Do we know for a fact that government agencies don't control the majority of the egress points?
Gangs don't need to follow safety standards and pay more than legitimate work
> it's frustrating that the current culture in science isn't "present the best argument for your position no matter how crazy it is" but rather "your arguments better agree with the established consensus unless you have overwhelming evidence that you are right."

That current culture of science has gradually driven me toward skepticism. Unless I see converging evidence from various independent sources, a claim is just a big "maybe". How many of the claims have been peer reviewed, or replicated (when everyone is busy publishing their own papers, or competing to make the news, or signing book deals)? How much of what is repeated by those with a platform just a gambit, riding on the reputation of those claiming it first? How much is just unchecked assumptions (e.g. that others will have certainly verified the claims)? As you start looking closer, the level of imposture and bullshit is just too high. Scientists are as human as anyone, with everything it implies.
Don't get me wrong about the efficiency gains. To a point I think it is great. But when everything is maximally efficient there is nothing to gain. Sure we could disrupt yet another industry but for every winner there is a loser.

Starvation and malnourishment are drastically lower due to industrial farming. But that was to the detrement of destroyed ecosystems, pollution, and greater government regulations. Heck, I believe that I was Michigan that was trying to prevent people from purchasing seeds to plant their own gardens.

Don't worry. I'm not actually all doom and gloom. I just don't think we are on the right track and we are heading of course. And this has been going on for a lot longer than 2016.
This is exactly how I work - albeit on my own projects - vanilla html/css Go and Postgres for all server side operations with a few modular web components here and there for the interactivity you mentioned. No frameworks, build tools or config files ...
So a VPN provider needs to do something to get a police investigation, prove they're clean (not logging) and you're good to go.

Unless ... could be First for Business Internet VPN services ... ;o)
If you're talking about US, that's 275,688 person days in lockdown per death prevented, although that seems so extreme I'm afraid my math is off.
Mask wearing made Covid death rates 100 times lower than projected
And yet, the NY Times is threatening to do exactly that to the guy behind https://slatestarcodex.com/

We're at the point where the NYT is doxxing random bloggers. I don't think this is a good time to be relying on journalistic integrity for your safety.
How does having your own SSD save on bandwidth? You have to send the data to and from the cores where the computation is taking place.

There are certainly some workloads where it makes sense to own your own storage and rent computation, but you can't assume that by default for a "powerful AI" workload.
I'd say that the "Proximal Origins" paper makes a very weak case especially given what we now know. The essential argument is that it's more likely that the RBD came from a lineage that includes the Pangolin-CoV than that it was designed by a human. That does seem reasonable. They suggest that the virus was the result of a recombination event. However, that recombination could have occurred artificially at the WIV. The WIV and Shi Zhengli specifically have recently published papers about performing precisely this type of work on SARS like coronaviruses.

Now the closest known viruses to SARS-CoV-2 are RaTG13 and Pangolin-CoV. Pangolin-CoV is a very close match in the spike protein, and RaTG13 is a very close match on the rest of the virus. RaTG13 and Pangolin-CoV were both discovered by WIV but their sequences sat unpublished until after the pandemic started. The grafting of the spike protein onto a "backbone" of another SARS like coronavirus is specifically something Shi Zhengli has been involved with and published with Ralph Baric in 2015.

Furthermore, the spike of SARS-CoV-2 is better adapted to humans than to any other species, and it's better adapted to humans than any other published coronavirus. This doesn't make sense unless the virus spent some time evolving in humans or in human cells. Interestingly, passaging SARS like coronaviruses in human airway cell cultures is also something that has been done in recent years. Ralph Baric's lab specifically has published work on this. The only real other possibility is that SARS-CoV-2 somehow spent many months circulating in human populations undetected while it adapted to human ACE2. There has been no evidence published that this occurred.

Finally, it is quite a coincidence that the lab where both Pangolin-CoV and RaTG13 were discovered is in the same city as where the outbreak started. Yes, both of those viruses were discovered in China, but Pangolin-CoV was discovered about 1000km from Wuhan, and RaTG13 was discovered about 1500km from Wuhan.
Do you have a public example of the online repository viewer?
What batch functions are you talking about?
And that is exhibit A. Ingrained into the culture.

Rational, even, when considered within an utterly flawed framework.

That's the scale of the challenge to dig yourselves out of.
> that graph can look like good news when it isn't.

Except it IS good news. But good news doesn't mean we solved the problem. This is a small victory, but doesn't mean it isn't a victory nonetheless. We need to break away from this binary thinking. Good news and bad news are a continuous spectrum. My issue here is that people are saying "well we're not done, therefore the news isn't good." To me this is fundamentally wrong and distinctiveness the human psychology.

> if you're accelerating toward a wall it doesn't help your situation if you switch to merely maintaining current velocity.

Except it does. The force you hit the wall with is proportional to the velocity you strike it. It is better to hit the wall at 100mph than 200mph. For a more accurate analogy consider that the peddle has been stuck to the floor this entire time and we've dislodged it. This is the first major step to slowing down (there's been tons of minor steps along the way).

For a more logical view: to be effective moving forward we have to look at the past to see what has been successful so that we can better focus our resources.

A battle is not the war. Celebrating the victory of a battle is not celebrating a victory in a war. You celebrate your victories along the way because otherwise you lose hope. I think this psychology should be very apparent considering the existential crisis and hopelessness that people have. Maybe we shouldn't be encouraging that attitude.
Sorry is the implication that the US is in the state it’s in because infected people are continuously walking across the border and infecting more people?

If no, then being an island isn’t really relevant here.
Especially if it takes a week to get a test result.
I follow COVID-19 data. I notice an interesting trend: Cases increase. Deaths and hospitalizations have not increased much.

It seems the US has come up with good enough cures for COVID-19. The cost of shutdown is high. The trend is reopening.

https://vida.io/dashboards/ckbk04mht00000ul63lr6m53w
>...and sent out pictures of Twitter’s internal dashboards as proof that he had taken control of the requested accounts.

Screenshots - The internets best proof(TM)
Don't we want better groceries for lower prices?

The question is if there is a net benefit in educational outcomes for the combined charter and public system.
Were rioters looting private homes? I don't think it makes sense to buy a gun to defend your local Wal*Mart.
> The source declined to say exactly how many Taiwan officials were asked to sign the paper but said its acting chief, Kao Ming-tsun, had returned to the island late on Thursday after he refused to sign the document upon his visa renewal.

Good on Kao.
i stopped counting at 15 (over a dozen) cities in this list [0] and had just finished the letter c so there are scheduled a380 flights to many more destinations than you imagined...

0. https://www.iflya380.com/a380-destinations.html
I want to be clear, I draw a clear line between protestors, rioters, looters. They are not all the same and even then I can sympathize with some of the property damage (from the perspective of the people doing it).

I’m far less concerned about rioters or protests getting out of hand than I am the police/government or some crazed person who read something or FB or Twitter deciding to take matters in their own hands.
I don't share your admiration for "the top".
Twitter does or at least did aggressively ask users for their phone numbers. They also retain information such as email addresses too. Presumably some people give them even more information about themselves.
MoVE FaSt AnD BReaK ThiNGs.

startups founded by young ppl add features so fast and are encouraged by Angels/VCs to move fast?
Compare that to 'grown-up' companies where things like auditability and common sense prevail?

What we're seeing at Twitter now is something that pretty much every single SV startup is prone to.

Don't waste time thinking deeply about the problems and systems - just bang out features the product people think up as fast as possible.

There was nothing sophisticated about this attack.
I'm waiting for the day when I can buy a toaster and get subscriptions on toasting modes.
Wouldn't that just put all the trust in the last one in the chain?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21326484 still valid
Curious to know your top 3?
The Floggings Will Continue Until Morale Improves
I bet if they can catch you closing your eyes or turning away or thinking of something else, they would.

They are absolute scum.
Is there any way to prove that is not NSA, say, and set up to only catch the biggest fish, or to always present parallel construction for criminals caught this way?
cartel retaliation
Most bad kids feed off an audience and distract the class. 8 hours in near silence, with no peers to feed off is a punishment.
As someone who uses none of the above, "Hey bro, let's chat on Element" and "Hey bro, let's chat on Riot" have the same ring.
Wouldn't the B variant show higher session count? If your A/B testing tool doesn't detect imbalances in cohort size I would imagine you have a bigger problem, since it's easy to accidentally measure the A and B groups differently.
There is no exact cloud equivalent - the researchers used commodity hardware for their GPU, something that NVIDIA doesn't allow for use in data centres.

The closest you can get on AWS (more like System #3 in the paper with 4x GPUs) would be something like a p3.8xlarge instance [1] that'll cost you $12.24 (on demand) or $3.65 to $5 (spot price, region dependent) [2].

A single GPU instance (p3.2xlarge) only 16 vCores, though) will cost you $3.06 on-demand or $0.90 to $1.20 (spot).

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/p3/
[2] https://www.aws4less.com/AWS/AWSCurrentSpotPrice.php
Or you can pay the creator directly.