skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Did you listen to the podcast? Because I can't relate at all to this reaction, given nuanced take of the original series.

The story is very much the story of an investigation, and it's made pretty clear that the central character's story is suspect.

The second half of the series follows the reporter as she tries to corroborate the story she was told, and weighs the evidence she sees against her own knowledge. In the end the implication is that she believes part of his story is probably true, but never expresses certainty.

I didn't come away thinking I'd necessarily heard the personal account of an ISIS member. Rather, I felt that I learned a lot about the process of investigative journalism, and how incredibly difficult it is to confirm information in wartime.

The fact that it's even being retracted at all seems like overkill to me, and I think that in a different climate, where the integrity of the NYT wasn't under so much scrutiny, the response would have been more measured.
I don't mean "naively" in the "the author is neutral" sense.

I mean that it is not framed like an encyclopedia or conventional investigative journalism print. It is framed as the story of the investigation. It isn't "my conclusions after investigating this for 2 years." This frames has a lot of room for shades of uncertainty than conventional ones.

In that sense, this is actually a better

Meanwhile, I don't think she has any obligation to investigate terrorism in other religious communities at all. The editor might have an obligation similar to do that, depending on newsworthiness. But I don't see how it applies here anyway. Once ISIS/L established territory in Syria they became the most newsworthy topic of the decade. Ot's normal that careers are made on the biggest story of a decade.

I'm not saying she has no biases. Journalists have biases. Political biases, biases to certain archetypal narratives, the importance or truth of their own story, etc. But, moreso than most, Caliphate did portray a detail rich picture. You can make your own judgements with facts she provides, even if they are different to hers. That's honest journalism.

>>Her association with the NYT is also shameful, because she is more Fox News quality w/r/t balance

I guess this is the reason I wrote the comment originally. It's disingenuous to portray this as a low watermark for NYT (or most other big newsorgs). There are many worse offences.

Since you are comparing to fox news and balance, I assume you are comparing to "opinion reporting," and such. If we include that, then half the ship is under water. Opinion writing is outside of the journalistic standards allegedly violated here. But by layman standards, Callimachi is far more honest and balanced than any opinion at NYT... and obviously cable news stuff.
Let’s put the validity of what Greenwald wanted to publish aside for a second. The relationship between an editor and a writer is always one of mutual cooperation and agreement. Not that the editor always must agree with what the author writes, but that there is mutual agreement over the standards of what is being published.

Greenwald and the intercept reached an irresolvable position regarding publishing standards, so they went their separate ways. Greenwald now publishes elsewhere.

You seem to be implying a publication exercising their editorial privilege is proof that they lack integrity. Maybe the intercept is in fact a corrupt publication, but that depends entirely on your judgement of their decision not to publish what Greenwald wanted to publish.
This is what they heard when they decyphered the signal:"We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile."
> ...I can't imagine that was what CDPR intended.

Is it not CDPR. It is 2020 and thankfully it is coming to a close.
Automatic Bill-Splitting App
Short summary for people who don't want to read it: author says that call rooms were for functionality and that they believe that call room quality and medical learning quality are non-correlated. Author does not discuss absence of call rooms.

Only adding that summary because I assumed, given context of GP, that absence of call rooms would have been discussed. If you're like me, hope I've saved you the time.
Ask HN: Cloud providers as personal cold backups
I want to store cold backups cheaply. Every few months I prepare a new archive (10-100 Gb) that I want to upload and forget till something bad happens.

I'm thinking of using cloud providers for that.
Assumptions:

- Data import/export is completely egress (from my local PC)

- Data retrieval time does not matter

Cloud providers offer cheap cold storage:

- AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive [1]

- GCP Archive [2]

- Azure Archive [3]

Storage seems to be ~1$/Tb/month everywhere.

Retrieval from ~20$/Tb for AWS (not sure about that one - first restore from Glacier Deep Archive to S3 and then Download) [4].

Retrieval for GCP is 51,2$/Tb [5].

Retrieval in Azure is 20,48$/Tb [6].

Questions:

1. Is there a GUI or CLI tool to manage my proposed workflow (infrequent cold backup to one or several cloud providers). I don't want to use their web portals as I'm not a frequent cloud user and all three interfaces are rather confusing and change all the time. Also uploading gigabytes from the browser seems like a bad idea.

2. Is there something better for secure cold backups? At 1$/Tb/month the storage price looks so good. Or am I barking up the wrong tree and there are dedicated backup services with similar pricing?

[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/storage-class-intro.html#sc-glacier

[2] https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/storage-classes#archive

[3] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/storage/archive/

[4] https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/

[5] https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing#archival-pricing

[6] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/storage/blobs/
Is this satire? The current situation is the direct result of what you are recommending. California has tried to suburban sprawl our way out of our problems for 80 years. We have service workers commuting 4 hours a day, freeways at a standstill, and all those “buildable areas” that they have to bulldoze forests for get burned down every year.
Drivers are rarely charged or ticketed when they hit people on bikes in the US.

If you ever want to kill someone, run them over with your car while they're riding a bike and say they swerved in front of you. The justice system will bend over backwards to make sure that you don't suffer any consequences.
you are the problem. please set up a charity. feel free to part from your money. there are many of us who cant...unlike some americans, some of us have responsibilities..aged parents living overseas, children, relatives..i would rather use my wealth to make sure that my parents and in laws and aunts and uncles live well before they die. what i am is because of the people who raised me and i owe them a debt before i owe some random homeless person on the street shooting up.

please be generous. the world needs more people than you. immigrants have a different mentality when it comes to familial responsibilites. i have two sets of grandparents and three dozen aunts. and i dont even know how we are related. extended families are really really really extended. and i derive so much pleasure in making their lives better and happier. why should i trade my pleasure for your philanthropy disguised as milking me for tax dollars.

hundred dollars fed half a dozen people in my indian home state for a month. californians complained that $1200/month isnt sufficient. i know where i want to send my money. i feel like what i do is real redistribution of wealth. so..no to your idea.

if you really want to help people, reach out to me..i know where you can send your extra dollars to other parts of the world where people have no job, no means of feeding themselves and their families and their govts are too powerless to take care of all their millions.
I'm a former professional musician and guitarist, whose music has been heard by millions of people, and now a principal software engineer.

IMHO, you have it backwards: the best guitarists explore as many interesting facets of the world as a good mathematician.
Did DeepMind Solve the Protein Folding Problem?
Webots R2021a – Now with Camera Image Segmentation
Webots is an open-source robot simulator:
https://github.com/cyberbotics/webots

Webots R2021a has arrived and it brings camera image segmentation among the other features:
https://cyberbotics.com/doc/blog/Webots-2021-a-release

Download it now and start building deep learning applications!
https://cyberbotics.com/
Beyond just abstractly infiltrating minds, this story directly bolstered real policy changes with real consequences for Canadian asylum seekers including children.

This whole thing is shameful and embarrassing, or at least it should be.

I recommend reading what folks like Laila Al-Alarian and other non-NYT folks have been saying about this cf*k for some time:

https://twitter.com/PeterHamby/status/1340022426223034370?s=...

https://twitter.com/SanaSaeed/status/1339998015399088129?s=2...

https://twitter.com/LailaAlarian/status/1340002570404806656?...

Also worth looking into Rukmini’s funding sources and how she was vaulted into this position of primacy for an eye into the geopolitical machinations that lead to this sort of thing playing out.
But you're still relying on the US military to protect you from foreign nation states. Your little gun wouldn't do anything against a tank or fighter plane.
The TransAm trail is explicitly intended for street legal off-road motorcycles
I tried to make sense of the tutorial with various degrees of success :) Does this mean the components get automatically iterated over in no particular order (for instance the Persons in the example)?
There is incredible pressure to give out vaccine to those with the tallest soapbox from which they can harass decision makers. And of course, said decision makers aren't exactly known for their backbone when handling conflict, so we get situations like this. Administrators often don't even know who in the hospitals spends the most time around sick patients. Entire front-line departments are forgotten, primarily because they don't have any political power or representation.

To see such a highly regarded institution fail this very simple test is another example of how the human creature needs more time to evolve. It's not just a mistake, this is a pattern playing out all over. Anyone who spends time in these environs would not be much surprised, but when the best hospitals still can't take care of their most vulnerable staff because of pernicious political maneuvering, the contrast between perception and reality is all the more stark.
It seems, so far, the vaccine is still relevant.

> Over time, as more mutations occur, the vaccine may need to be altered. This happens with seasonal flu, which mutates every year, and the vaccine is adjusted accordingly. The SARS-CoV-2 virus doesn’t mutate as quickly as the flu virus, and the vaccines that have so far proved effective in trials are types that can easily be tweaked if necessary.
Am I reading this right, you think that if you increase the tax rate on high income people by 10%, you will get 10% more taxes from them?
There is a sticky header with the WSJ OPINION logo as your scroll down the article [1]

What more do you want?

[1] https://imgur.com/a/7uN5UUX
I'm sorry but this is such an unfair take. If they were posting corrections like this daily or weekly, then you could argue for EAFP. But your comment implies that they do zero vetting and just publish whatever they want. It completely misses the nuance that "getting permission" isn't a black and white issue. It's a spectrum and you're rarely ever at 100%. You sometimes gotta make the call to publish a story at 95% or so, and in rare occasions it just turns out to not go your way.

You're implying that they should never post a story unless they are 100% certain, which means most stories would never get published, defeating the entire point of journalism. Obviously the threshold needs to be high, you don't want to post every single rumor, but just because they have 1 or 2 correction a year does not mean "they'd rather ask for forgiveness than get permission".
They’ve seen a spike in infections in a densely populated mega city in the busiest shopping weeks of the year, when (anecdotally) people are not taking precautions and social distancing. In what way is that unexpected?
What...is this true?
> that resulted in an outcome we did not anticipate," they wrote.

I bet the "outcome" they're talking about is the _protest_, not the allocation.
As a hedge to inflation of currencies controlled by central banks. This is less of a concern in widely held currencies (e.g., the U.S. Dollar) and has greater application to less stable currencies.
It's not. There are genetic changes, including to the spike protein that it uses to attack.

> The new variant has mutations to the spike protein that the three leading vaccines are targeting. However, vaccines produce antibodies against many regions in the spike protein, so it’s unlikely that a single change would make the vaccine less effective.
I’m not a huge fan of libraries that use attributes as a hook for code generation in C# either, though thankfully there’s less need for something like Lombok.
For those (like me) who are looking for some more details of this new strain, I found 2 papers from the `COVID-19 Genomics Consortium UK (CoG-UK)` of great interest. It seems like the prime reasons for concern are increased frequency of mutations, increased proportion of cases, and possible change in immune response

> Several aspects of this cluster are noteworthy for epidemiological and biological reasons and we report preliminary findings below. In summary:
The B.1.1.7 lineage accounts for an increasing proportion of cases in parts of England. The number of B.1.1.7 cases, and the number of regions reporting B.1.1.7 infections, are growing.
B.1.1.7 has an unusually large number of genetic changes, particularly in the spike protein.
Three of these mutations have potential biological effects that have been described previously to varying extents:

> - Mutation N501Y is one of six key contact residues within the receptor-binding domain (RBD) and has been identified as increasing binding affinity to human and murine ACE2.

> - The spike deletion 69-70del has been described in the context of evasion to the human immune response but has also occurred a number of times in association with other RBD changes.

> - Mutation P681H is immediately adjacent to the furin cleavage site, a known location of biological significance.

> The rapid growth of this lineage indicates the need for enhanced genomic and epidemiological surveillance worldwide and laboratory investigations of antigenicity and infectivity.

https://www.cogconsortium.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Repo...

https://virological.org/t/preliminary-genomic-characterisati...
you will get an answer if you delete the 'is this satire' beginning to your comment. because then, i will read the rest of it.
Why are some people so obsessed with every little thing that NYT gets wrong? It's the same with California, any bit of bad news out of California is blown up into a national story.

To me this obsession with NYT and California is obvious propaganda. It's what 1984 would call "two minutes hate".
"I have nothing to hide."
Of the difference in scales of the bad things are six orders of magnitude, yes, probably.

If you think it's a risk, quantify and measure it, and compare it to the risk of not doing anything. People love to grouse about vaccines, bit they never seen keen on doing the math. (Because it consistently does not support such an argument.)
> I don't consider collectivist to be a pejorative term and don't know of any context where it is. You picked a synonym, selfless.

Oh I don't know, socialism scares republican voters shitless, I wouldn't be surprised if collectivism did too.
Have you ever used an ECS system? This isn’t unique.
We are the cannon fodder.
Deterministic builds can be done with closed source too. It doesn't directly help the users, but if they had setup a second build machine and noticed the build output was different, they could have addressed this sooner.

Of course, if following best practices, all build machines should be equally compromised. ;p
Very few people are reading this as some engineer wrote an opaque piece of software that made this decision. They're reading it, based on what the article says, as we came up with a set of prioritization criteria which were flawed.
I've got to be honest with you: this thing can totally be solved with a human pass. In fact, give me the list, your employment rolls, and I'll fix this for you for free in a couple of hours at max.

Government workers are particularly vulnerable to this sort of failure mode: assuming everything is hard. This is not that hard. It's pretty easy. But big company workers are also usually susceptible to this. They don't get things done very fast so they're used to things taking a long time to do and assume that even trivialities must take a couple of days.

But that's why companies like Tesla and SpaceX succeed to these peoples' surprise. They look at these companies and say "They can't do that. This is hard. It takes maybe a half century of engineering."

Turns out lots of things, even if they're hard, can be done pretty fast. But not by those who've been damaged by their own slowness not being punished.
Tim frequently shared stories with no truth to them, eg. 2020 Election fraud. He also frequently tells his listeners to distrust the “Democrat Media”. His arguments would typically be considered in bad faith on HN. Linking to Timcast from and article about the NYT is definitely pushing an agenda.
I don't think social credit is enough to describe what this and other proposals like this are. It doesn't go far enough. This isn't social credit. It's life credit or maybe existence credit.

You're gaining or losing credit from merely the way you exist or live. It's essentially a hidden tax on life itself and everything you do.

Every thought, belief, action, piece of information you read, media you consume, basically every single thing you do will have some kind of value placed on it.

In my opinion, this goes far beyond social credit.
It's the irony of people arguing that California is making them a "slave" and then advocating moving to a literal military dictatorship where jail for minor infractions like spitting on the sidewalk is routine. The drug laws are even more totalitarian.

California has problems, but individual liberties and lives are treated with respect.
The Sacklers’ group chat of pain
It is definitely being used as an excuse. The whole country’s restrictions have been changed whilst the “new strain” is focused in London.

Regardless of the recent uptick in London, the rules needed to be changed, everyone knew it, Boris didn’t do it, and then to mask another U turn they seized on this.

Chris Witty said today the idea that the new strain is more contagious is “just a theory”.
While this idea is obviously an outrage and an abomination, it's the result of another economic factor. Modern creditors take very little actual risk, and that asymmetry of risk creates a power dynamic that is itself a kind of tyranny by a protected class. Creditors can organize, conspire, conduct surveillance, slander, and do pretty much anything a state can do, and that's a set of perverse incentives. Unsecured debt is servitude, and so is debt without an expiry. Some people may be fine with it, but very few who understand it are.

Creditors' low risk manifests as low interest rates, which everyone loves until they create bubbles and other forms of hyperinflation, which burst, and the costs are socialized.

The IMF was a pernicious organization from its very beginnings, basically using "cheap" subsidized debt from central banks to subordinate developing economies to a neoliberal order and force social policies that enabled globalized businesses (resource extraction and financialization) to in-effect loot them. This used to be a major progressive cause, and one that I supported, but it too seems to have been co-opted by the same interests. Now anti-globalization is abandoned by progressives, who used the activism as a stepping stone into institutional power, where now it's no longer necessary to have the popular support of maker and builder classes. Trade tariffs and economic borders have been banished to the backwater of right-wing populist causes, where people still believe in unfashionable things like nations and the responsibility of government to secure a perimeter for growth.

This IMF scheme would seem like a troll, but it's not. The people behind it have an institutional contempt for anyone outside their power games, and to them we're basically livestock. The difference between the 1990's and 2020's is that leftist led populist revolts against this exact kind of IMF driven policy were largely performative, critical, and non-violent because they were carried out by feckless flower children, whereas in the 2020's, I'd predict they will be carried out by men with little left to lose.

If that sounds scary, it should. These IMF people just don't get it.
> Great. Just one more reason to get off the current financial system.

Be careful what you wish for. The replacement might be worse.

Seems we're moving towards a system with Central Bank Digital Currencies in which people own accounts at central banks and governments can use policy on an individuals' central bank account to incentive people to do the "right" thing.
If you’re applying game theory here, I’m curious what the objective function would be? (What are you trying to maximize/minimize?)

I think a potential flaw is assuming people are static beings. Consider if you passed me shortly after my dog died...I may not be in a mental state to even notice you said anything. If we passed weeks or months later I could be in a completely different state but we’re still not connecting because you’ve already concluded it wasn’t worth the effort.

I feel like there is a fundamental issue if people look for interactions to be transactional marketplace. It’s completely different than deliberately acting from a place of compassion
It can take many forms.

Folks each have their own "schtick," but it's what they are after that matters.

1) Money

2) Property

They want me to give them money or goods.

3) Prestige

They want me to feed a need for prestige. This can be as simple as agreeing with them in public, an endorsement or referral, or a requirement for some kind of submissive fawning.

I started to write up a detailed description of how this can happen, but realized that this is probably not the best venue for that. Suffice it to say that I have spent my entire adult life amongst some very aggressive and manipulative people, and keeping a good relationship with them, while gently enforcing personal boundaries, has always been a challenge.

For me, I have a personal ethical code that revolves around rigorous personal and "cash register" Honesty, as well as Integrity.
Here in Denver, we're trying to get passenger rail service to connect northwards through Boulder - about 35 miles. We've been working on it(and paying for it) for 10 years, and the estimated completion date is sometime in 2050.
Trump downplays impact of hack, questions whether Russia involved
I lived near a rail trail like this, but over the last 15 years or so, the separated segments were connected to the trail instead of roads.
The ergonomics are certainly top notch. The only other ECS I've used is the in-progress Unity one, and boy is that _painful_ by comparison.