skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The most likely explanation is that one of the many widespread contacts between wild animals and humans in the area, likely at a wet market where wild animals were being sold as food, resulted in the virus jumping to humans.

SARS-CoV2 makes a poor bioweapon. You'd want something with a higher fatality (or severe morbidity) rate, both for effectiveness and also to limit it's geographic impact to the target country.

If it's not an engineered virus, the lab isn't a smoking gun. We have identified a very similar virus where bats are the reservoir species, and have identified a couple of very plausible routes by which it jumped to an intermediate wild animal that was transported to Wuhan for human consumption. If it's a wild virus, a lab escape seems less likely than the bushmeat hypothesis.

Both HIV and genital herpes are believed to have jumped to humans due to humans/homonids eating bushmeat. It's known to be a very dangerous thing to do, and it's known to be somewhat widespread in Wuhan.

Another possibility is that it is a virus engineered for research instead of direct use as a bioweapon, and it escaped. It's close enough to the wild bat virus that it's not obvious any engineering has been done.

In any case, we have a very simple and likely explanation that matches the official story.

It's comforting to believe we're in control and that simply being more stringent about lab safety will prevent this in the future. It's also politically convenient to blame foreigners (a favorite tactic of politicians everywhere for every occasion). Those two factors are why the lab escape rumours are so persistent.

The truth is that (1) we keep having dangerous contact with wild animals and farm animals and we will not have control until we cut down on these practices and (2) U.S. officials are largely to blame for the sad state of things in the U.S. Yes, the Chinese authorities should have been more open from the beginning and botched the opportunity to snuff it out early, but there are plenty of countries doing much better than the U.S.
From the very same article you posted

> "As for the accuracy of the death toll, other experts have previously told us that while it’s true that some deaths attributed to COVID-19 likely would have occurred regardless of the disease, other factors — like the deaths of undiagnosed COVID-19 victims, including those that occur at home — contribute to a more significant problem of under-counting the deaths."
Here some relevant links:

- https://serverfault.com/questions/173286/is-arch-linux-suita...

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytfohob38vM

- https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=246164
> I am glad that Flash is gone. Here is Steve Jobs's "Thoughts on Flash" letter from 2010 that brought it down:
https://web.archive.org/web/20170615060422/https://www.apple...

And now we have giant js bundles composed of thousands of little libraries, ad hoc animation, subpar media playback.

The web stack wasn't prepared to match the ease of authorship and distribution of Flash. It still isn't up to the same par, and it's been 15 years.

If Adobe had open sourced the entire standard and the player itself early on, they'd still have the best authorship tool and would have done amazing things. I don't know what they were thinking. They had an awesome tool, but their strategy was so wrong.

Flash was like PHP. Admittedly not the prettiest, but people did amazing things with it. It was a tool that worked for a lot of people. Teenagers were using Flash and getting really good.

Steve didn't want Flash eating his batteries, so he killed it on Apple. He also left us with the fucking robber barron App Store and the concept that we can't run stuff or upgrade our own devices. Seems like Apple shouldn't be able to dictate what you can or can't run on their platform - that's monopoly power. They killed Flash.

Steve was worse than Flash and stole from us.
> The father of the first user, who while everyone was discussing, went to the shop and bought the cheapest lightbulb.

Of course it doesn't end there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbSehcT19u0 (lightbulb scene from Malcolm in the Middle).
> *Given her background/race, we can't actually rule out the possibility that she got carried through the ranks by AA.

This sort of racism has no place on Hacker News. @dang is this the sort of commentary that is allowed to let stand?
I don't think so. But 10y ago, HN was still young, having fun with tons of coffee and beer. Now, HN is gotten older and the latest framework isn't that exciting anymore, coffee is weighing on concentration and depression has taken a toll.
HTTP Archive's annual state of the web report
Stop spreading misinformation please. It’s revolting enough that you eat this propaganda hook, line and sinker. Seeing that you are also spreading it is disgusting.
Ugh, I only worked on one project with a stack-ranking system, it was a joke in many ways.
The smoking → tar causation is a red herring here. It's presumed it's not controversial. The important point is we're able to discover a tar → cancer causation by controlling for smoking behavior without doing an intervention, and combining this with the smoking → tar causation, we can then reason there's a smoking → cancer causation.

Of course this is a simplified example to illustrate the causal logic at play. No one seriously believes there are only ever two possible hypotheses. But the point is the universe of plausible hypotheses is not infinite, either. Scientists in the real world are not dealing with the set of logically possible statements consistent with raw sensory experience. They're building models of the world, and testing and challenging a few of their beliefs at a time, to gradually come closer to the truth.

When they can conduct randomized controlled trials, that's great. But it's not always feasible or even possible, yet it's still often possible in those cases to test competing causal hypotheses via observation. The Eddington experiment tested the (causal) theory of General Relativity against the (causal) theory of Newtonian gravity, but there was no intervention. The discovery of iridium in a giant crater off the coast of Mexico was a key confirmation for the (causal) dinosaur meteor extinction theory, but there was no intervention there either. These were causal hypotheses tested by observation. A scientist is always free to propose an alternative hypothesis, but in the mean time, these were tests of their predictions.

The point is RCTs are a special case of a more general causal logic. RCTs work because they sever the statistical link to confounders, but only provided your assumptions about the RCTs are correct. In particular, your random number generator must not itself be confounded with what you're measuring (how do you know there's not a hidden variable simultaneously controlling your coin flip and the outcome of your experiment?), you must do the observations double-blinded, your results must not be a statistical fluke, etc. etc. All of these assumptions can be challenged, just like the assumptions in my smoking/lung cancer example. In the real world scientists often accept, at least tentatively, that these assumptions hold. For if they don't, they can never learn anything.
Break up Google.
Umm what's the incentive or motivation behind making this trade able?

At first glance this seems incredibly concerning, especially if we ever get to a point where some people can 'afford' water while others can't.

While we don't need oil or gold for our immediate survival, they do play key roles into how our society operates. I'm hoping to understand more on why we should treat water in the same way.
> It's a good financial incentive to better your installations.

No it is not. The cost of water is so tiny compared to anything else on earth humans make that every single country on earth should be able to provide it to their citizens.

This is not a problem the market needs to solve. This has been solved since prehistory, and some of the first non-religious constructions celebrated in human history are waterworks.

This is a solved problem. All futures do is allow traders in faraway places make money off of a substance every human on earth ought to have a fundamental right to.
What else do you suggest as a business model?
A common trap for people in general. "My grammy smoked for 67 years and died at age 102!"
As an SV local, I am overly jaded about the place. South Bay is wonderfully boring suburbia to grow up to- and would be to raise a family, if not for the housing prices- and S.F. seems pitifully small, and everything closes so early for a supposed world-class city. Not to mention, BART ends before last call, which is just crazy. The outdoors here are great, but how many times can one climb Castle Rock, Mission Peak, or visit Angel Island, Rancho San Antonio, or Point Reyes? And Muir Woods is always full of tourists, it's like Disneyland in a forest.

Of course, the grass is always greener. But I think natives are entitled to grouse a little bit, given the circumstances. It's just a little scary if this is the best the U.S. has to offer.

"Despising, For you, the city, thus I turn my back: There is a world elsewhere."
It's not hard at all in Germany, I already had to do it a few times. It's just regulated, i.e. you have to follow a defined process (two written warnings first, only then the dismissal) and have proof of what happened.

The range of reasons include coming too late to work, insulting coworkers and even underperformance.
But have you tried turning off and on the power for at least 5 minutes? There is a known bug that happens with some vendors causing malfunction of the bus, losing power or bricking your device.

/s
I used to do research on how students use educational technology, like video lectures, in moocs. So I guess I'm probably biased because I know a lot of the edx people and some of the behind the scenes stuff.

I agree that interactivity at scale is super difficult. The problem is that in a course you are teaching more or less solved problems to bring students up to speed to where the field is. So the same questions get asked from class to class and group to group. There's the idea that you can compile all this knowledge and questions and then provide that as a resource to students. But actually the hardship of getting through those questions, even though they are the same, is how they learn. So the resources are nice for instructors but not as useful for students directly. There's definitely a lot of space for innovation but most of the people doing that either lack the technical expertise of developers etc because they come from education departments or they lack the domain knowledge of education research. There's a somewhat large space to fill with people who are good at both.
It doesn't have to change the UI much to fix the pagination visibility issue.
> I would expect that if a researcher at your company came up with a paper that concluded "Our work at this company is sexist, racist, and bad for the environment and we should abandon it" that your company would prefer it not be published

I'm not really sure what your point is. At a very basic level: Of course they would not prefer it published. Just like they would prefer not to have transparency, pay competitive market salaries, give free lunches, have an HR department, etc. We all prefer things if we can get them.

I would, however, expect that if a company hired a researcher to study whether their work is ethical, then it's silly to get in that researcher's way. If my company hired someone to ensure their supply chain for manufacturing does not involve sweatshops, then it certainly wouldn't look good if my company prevents him from saying so. If we aren't prepared for uncomfortable truths, we should not hire people to look into them.

I honestly think there are other reasonable reasons to get rid of this researcher than what you are positing.
Oh, come on. Anyone who worked with FB ads system as "client" understands the power and price of the data that they collect. This is not conspiracy theory but fact. And I can't imagine the amount of data that browser owner able to collect. I'd guess that even MS knows less about me than Google despite of the fact that I use Windows.
And 1/4 (Safari) already only implements declarative request blocking, and has done that for years while being touted as the alternative for privacy conscious folks.
I strongly believe that this is a result of Mark Zuckerberg just being strongly disliked, for reasons that seem entirely focused on his person ("Zuckerbot") and not his company's actions. I think the reason you see this coming down on Facebook and not Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. is just this intense anti-charisma that he has.
We're so lucky that this has changed (narrator: it hasn't).

It definitely doesn't happen anymore (narrator: it still happens).

And it definitely doesn't happen in absolutely every browser out there and it can't really be blocked (narrator: it does, it is just done with JavaScript, which only hermits disable).
Also usually on any given day in the US on average 7500 people die.
Yeah, no. It's same dead just like Flash and Java applets. It's just Microsoft keeps it around since, unlike Apple or Google, are hoarders. I mean you can, if you want, spun up VS2019 and write an MFC application just like it's year 2000.
The same reason grain and cheese have derivative markets

Michael Burry, of Big Short fame, is well known for moving his interest to water investment/trading many years ago

https://www.killik.com/the-edit/why-michael-burry-is-investi...

This article goes some way to explaining the rationale
If you ignore payload capacity, I'd say New Glenn is much closer to Starship than it is to Falcon 9 in terms of technical development, mostly because of its novel engine, the BE-4. Like the Starship's Raptors, they are powered by a fuel that can be produced in-situ at the intended destination. Though in the case of the Raptors it's Methalox from Martian atmosphere (via Sabatier), whereas BE-4 engines are Hydrolox that they hope to get from ice on the moon.
I don't know if this is true, but I read somewhere that Pornhub/Mindgeek was a "fake-it-til-you-make-it piracy site", and still is for studios that aren't active about takedown requests, except with their money they were able to buy a lot of the IP from studios that had shut down due to streaming.
I think people are afraid that instead of "tragedy of the commons", this will turn into "tragedy of the anticommons". e.g. a solution to global water shortages might be possible, but if it's not profitable then it won't happen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_anticommons
This is true, however Mike who runs the project seems like a wonderful overlord for it. He's really kind and welcoming with new contributors, gives meaningful and thoughtful PR feedback and I can see that he'll foster the community required to see the project through. Hopefully sponsors help to make sure it gets there.

Certainly I've enjoyed contributing so far, and I think this is my pet OS project for the next while.
Exactly. It's the last past I was getting at as a rebuke to the grandparent comment.

Reserving service isn't straightforward. Especially not when it comes to sharing private medical information e.g. when someone wasn't vaccinated because of an autoimmune disease.

Your exact medical condition is no concern of that business, and one shouldn't be forced to give up that information lest risking to be barred from service.

It's for this reason why many businesses have terms and conditions pointing out to customers the role of personal responsibility, and asking them to waive their right to legal action. Moreover, let's not forget the existence of business insurance that protects from calamities.

If vaccination can't be mandated through public action because there's not enough support, then that comes with consequences for the general public. One of them would be that the relationship between owner and patron gets burdened by a new liability. The question then is whether or not the harm of publicly mandated vaccination outstrips the harm caused by that liability in everyday life.
> Duration 4 years (02017-02020) ... a single event within a six month period starting no later than Dec 31 02020

Am I the only one who finds the terms above terribly ill-defined?

Let's suppose an event happens on Dec 31 2020, and a million casualties accumulate over the first few months of 2021. Does that count? It counts because it's within a six month period starting Dec 31 2020. It doesn't count because the duration of the bet was 2017 to 2020, and therefore wouldn't include 2021. Wouldn't have been less confusing to state the terms as "within a six month period ending no later than Dec 31 02020" (if that's what was intended)?

What if the event happened on Jan 15 2021 followed by a million casualties. Does that count? Jan 15 2021 is within "a six month period starting no later than Dec 31 02020". If that's the case, the duration of the bet is 2017 to Jun 30 2021.
Not everyone is blessed with such connections, without data caps.
Maybe it was earlier in the summer. But, as the weather has grown colder, many restaurants have gradually enclosed their "outdoor dining" areas to the point that they're practically indoors again.
Isn't that a bit too private to ask from a random person to a random person?

Even if he would ask for donations to keep it going, disclosing other revenue streams is a bit much to ask for someone not involved in the project.
Which resource(s) would you recommend for someone who wants to learn crypto?
I remember hearing about Michael Burry [1] also looking into aquifers and future water shortages.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Burry

> Burry has focused much of his attention on investing in water, gold, and farm land. Burry has been quoted saying "Fresh, clean water cannot be taken for granted. And it is not—water is political, and litigious."[20] At the end of the 2015 biographical dramedy film The Big Short, a statement regarding Burry's current interest reads, "The small investing he still does is all focused on one commodity: water."[20]
Most people misunderstand how the futures work. This fee podcast explains well why it is a useful tool and not a fraud as many think https://fee.org/shows/audio/words-numbers/a-game-of-risk/
I'm sure you know who built those cages :[0]

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/kids-in-cages-deb...
An excellent backgrounder on how the shift to an exclusive focus on "consumer welfare" came to be, watch or listen to "This is Neoibeeralism":

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLATIVW2S3zKMbVlnAHAPR0sHZ...

Bork's tedious tome on antitrust was birthed directly from Aaron Director's Antitrust Project at the University of Chicago. (Bork credits Director fatuously in his introductin.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Director
With three raptor engines, probably not very many. Though if I remember right from the Starship user manual posted here a couple days ago, a launch could experience up to about six Gs (and about 2 Gs or so sideways or backwards). That would be with the super-heavy booster. I'm not sure if the landing and belly-flop maneuver were included in those figures.
Can anyone more familiar with this area explain what it says about the IP. What sort of things are shared with the regulatory bodies that could be extremely valuable to other companies developing vaccines?

When a new car engine is developed you don't need to share exactly how you make the parts or how it works (of course knowing how it works for a vaccine is probably important), it just has to meet certain standards regarding efficiency and emissions to be approved by regulators.
Is there any good service for making & sending you a nice print given a download link to one of these (or similar)?

Quite surprised this site doesn't seem to be doing that itself, not monetised at all afaict.
https://www.ordo-militaris.net/2020/12/09/exposing-the-scamd...

The above would be the Truth, if only someone on HN had the balls not to fight it to death.

BTW: this headline will become very popular soon:

+ + + RIP MSM. Cause of death: the TRUTH + + +
According to Wikipedia, "Musk was severely bullied throughout his childhood and was once hospitalized after a group of boys threw him down a flight of stairs."

To quote a Fish Called Wanda: "Good."
>Am I the only one who finds the terms above terribly ill-defined?

Yes.
"Proponents argue the new market will clear up some of the uncertainty around water prices for farmers and municipalities"

ahahah. sure, setting up a market like this will surely reduce uncertainty and not increase it exponentially.
I try to understand "intellectual curiosity" here but I just find it very off-putting to bet on whether millions will die, no matter how sound the arguments of both sides might be.
Haha, the pope, Rockefeller and Rothschild. Let´s get our tinfoil hats. 2020 doesn´t dissapoint.
>> quantities in millilitres, mystical cups and a oven temp in unknown centigrade scale

As somebody who likes to cook and has not the slightest idea of what Farnheits, Ozs, Yards, Feet, Gallons, are, nor anything about how Freedom Unit Related & Co. converts to simple decimal metric measures, you are speaking Klingon.
I find it interesting that the squeezeserver (or more correctly LMS) gets so little attention. It's fascinating that several projects try to build a new framework to achieve multi-room streaming capable systems, while ignoring the existing, well working open source solution and building on that (I'm aware that several of these projects do allow to install LMS, but it's often a somewhat of an afterthought and not well integrated).

If the effort for integrating the different components (MPD etc.), which still is not close to the capabilities of LMS would go instead into improving the front-ends for LMS (which do need an overhaul IMO), we would be so much further.
It's not about switching languages but making a language the default when people don't have the same native language.

So instead of dealing 24 languages, EU can make English the default for everything international. Local stuff will continue with the local language but all the international dealings can be conducted in English.

That's pretty much the standart on the internet and the younger generations are already used to it. If a website, an app or a game doesn't support your language you simply use English and it's all good. From the admin side it'a also good, many people who are not native English speakers who want to build projects for the global audience would simply start with English as a base language and localise from there.

It works fine for the most international thing we have: The Internet. Should work fine for the EU too.
Downsides to the tech don’t negate the millions of great experiences flash enabled
You know, tech includes things like trains, aeroplanes, biotechnology, power, scientific instruments, chemistry... But yeah, it's HN, tech here means only FAANG.
1 year ~= PI 10^7 seconds

Earth's orbital diameter ~= 1000 light-seconds

The PIs cancel!

So Earth's orbital velocity ~= 0.0001c ~= 30 km/s
>Pinker is a jackass and a jerk

He might be, but this comment provides no argument as to whether he is, nor does it say anything about the subject matter.

Not to mention that even a "jackass and a jerk" can be absolutely correct, since those accusations are mostly about behavioral and/or moral failings, not intellectual.