skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The combination of facts is (I’m also giving some references to your points):

1) China is known to have contributed[0] to bat coronavirus research, my speculation is that Wuhan’s BSL-4 lab exists primarily for this reason.

2) There were documented lab escapes of original SARS-CoV from labs in Beijing[1] in 2004, as I recall resulting in at least one death.

3) WHO’s study starts this month, but they don’t seem to mention lab escape (not of some “engineered virus”, just straight up a natural sample escaping on a person) as a possibility[2]. I am not sure if they are playing politics or this is their sincere outlook.

I can’t stress this enough: China may have been unlucky to be struck by the original SARS-CoV, so it’s reasonable that they had the motivation to study its origins; that research is valuable and it’d be absolutely bonkers to criticize scientists for having done it. Even if lab escape did indeed happen to be the cause of SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, I am not sure this should be a basis for prosecution of a particular country (as opposed to e.g. tightening of BSL security practices): there’s human factor, and mistakes happen; if it hadn’t been China it could’ve eventually been another country.

What I find alarming is if an effort to obstruct the study of pandemic origins in order to save face (?) is taking place. If it was a lab escape, humanity’s future could be much safer if we knew how it happened—but how would researchers know it was a lab escape if they can’t look in that direction?

[0] https://virologyj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12985-... (2015, two authors are with Wuhan Institute of Virology)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002–2004_SARS_outbreak#April_...

[2] https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/who-convened-global-...
You're missing that the computer can help, so it's more like a world where everyone is designing their own chairs, and the computer ensures that the chair is constructable, won't collapse, will fit a range of humans and so on, and finally sends it off to the 3D printer.

The accountant example is a really good one: most accountants likely do write their own Excel macros to suit particular customers or one-off situations.
Maybe, qvge (editor for graphs) may help you.

https://github.com/ArsMasiuk/qvge
The early 90s also had SRC's Vesta file system which had some interesting properties: https://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/Compaq-DEC/SRC-RR-106.htm...
CMU's Gandalf project had some interesting "semantic" version-control features.

However: it's easy to build experimental systems with cool properties. It's really hard to make them appealing in practice when you have to give up simplifying assumptions.

In particular a lot of these systems were not well adapted to managing collections of text files in unknown formats, edited by unknown tools. That made sense for research purposes, since you can't have as many cool properties without understanding the file formats, but it made them substantially less useful in practice, which I think is partly why they didn't get adopted.
Who are you yelling at? They're not here.
It's not that wrong though, you could certainly argue that not much has changed since roughly the end of WW2 and "mainstream" oceanic crossings. The de Havilland Comet was introduced in 1949 and is very similar to modern jetliners.

The only thing that would shock a traveler from 70 years ago is the awful service and in flight entertainment system.
There's an unsustainable component to every empire, in that the premise is always growth-centric and stratified; empires do not "prosper together". Growth turns to killing when the psyche of the nation needs a boost, cleaving a harder line into the social constructs of stratification by informing everyone of who is clean and goodly, and who is guilty by default and deserves their punishments. It reallocates praise and blame such that the established in-groups get the most credit by their own reckoning. On this I see Heather Marsh's views as some of the most clear-eyed.

The thing about authoritarian impulses throughout history is that they flare up and, for time, keep a country firmly gripped. Then they relax, and are somewhat forgotten about, even reconciled, until something comes along to trigger it again, in a replica of the abuse cycle. And China is not going to be different in this respect - moments where things get more oppressed for a time, and then moments of relief. The Xi regime has been relatively more oppressive in most recountings by Western sources. This is believable yet also not meaningful, since clearly the apparatus was there before.

IMHO, just because China has gotten this far with its current model says little about tomorrow. There is propaganda coming from all directions these days, so I'm always a little hesitant about "real truth" coming from random sources, but simultaneously suspicious of the official ones too. It's that climate, in itself, that damages the credibility of all regimes; it leaves truth and credit up for grabs to those who can forge a new path that makes the world cohere better. It's hard to defeat the real truth in the long run.
I've worked with several Chinese engineers, who are quietly critical of the CCP. Since they still have family in China they know better than to be openly critical of China.
Of course it is. I'd be interested in hearing your argument as to why it isn't?

Speaking of a straw man argument - heroin isn't a legal drug anywhere in the United states. Like the author pointed out, millions of Americans take legal amphetamines every year, I'd wager a bet that legal users of amphetamines outnumber the illegal users 10,000 to 1 or ever more. But all of that is irrelevant - the app doesn't promote the use of amphetamines any more than GTA promotes committing grand theft auto.
This doesn't make sense. A C compiler that has been compiled to javascript is still just a regular javascript program. It's not given special access to anything.
I'd heard that about Star Wars too, but hadn't understood to what degree it was true before I encountered this article and video: https://www.polygon.com/2017/12/29/16829502/star-wars-wreck-...
All I have to say about this is that China, the supposed epicenter of Covid, apparently stopped having any new cases at about 100k.

GDP is about the only thing we can measure objectively from this country, and air pollution when we point our satellites at them.
That would be completely logical. Predictions can be self-fulfilling, and he would have nothing to gain by placing his predictions for biological immortality out of his own reach.
Top tip: install mutool and run

mutool clean -d your.pdf clean.pdf

Now open clean.pdf with a text editor.
I use my own secular simplified technique inspired by Tibetan dream yoga and wake induced lucid dreaming (WILD).

It’s as “simple” as learning to remain aware and observant when falling asleep, without rousing oneself. No deity worship or chakra alignments necessary.

Meditation practice helps tremendously, but my first success, I accomplished by trial and error.

A lot of instruction on the Internet suggests focusing on something, visualizing something, counting, eating supplements, etc. I have found all of that unnecessary.
> The world has changed and corruption is more severe

Are you sure? This rather smacks of the "good old days" fallacy.
The purpose of these images is not to help individuals to avoid emotional discomfort, it is merely to teach individuals what a term means. In this case, terms like 'state killing' and 'execution' are supposed to create emotional discomfort when read.

The association with the horrible imagery needs to be created or else people will not understand what they're reading with the appropriate degree of emphasis when the term comes up in the future. We will be a nation of apathetic, sedated cowards.

In the old days, people actually saw these horrors with their own eyes, not merely seen pictures; so they understood very well what 'war' meant. Probably why we haven't had a major war for so long.
This is very good although the title definitely promises too much!
Actionscript is not the flash player though.

It is just a scripting language. So did they actually use flash player tech?
Possession and ownership are two very different things. Physical control can be transferred without loss of ownership. This is what happens when somebody rents a car, or when somebody deposits money with a bank. Sovereignty is a concept very specific to political science. It doesn't make a lot of sense to use it in other contexts. You can use it, if you want, but it's usually a sign that the person using it doesn't really know what they're talking about.
I would expect something running in iterm to be causing this rather the app itself.

And id the op suspects it’s indeed the app’s fault then I’m not sure why this is on twitter and hn rather than a bug report.
I love this kind of articles that take a tool I use often but never had enough motivation to figure out what it exactly does.

I learn best how something works if I try to re-create it. But there is not enough time to do it for all the things around. Explanations like this kind of simulate that process for me.
They used to have far fewer. But over time, CHI began to include more disciplines, especially the social sciences, evaluated papers with different value systems. The technical HCI people didn't use the same values as the social scientists, for instance. Rather than try to settle a war of values, they simply increased the number of papers that were accepted, and also increased the number of best paper awards.

More fundamentally, evaluating HCI research is very subjective. That means it's harder for a diverse audience to even agree on what constitutes good HCI research. Many HCI researchers have grown frustrated with the value of their research being discarded or overlooked by review committees. As a result, they tend to favor lowering the bar to entry, and accepting more papers, thinking that it's better to have false positives than false negatives.
Maybe if you bury the page deep within a forest, so the compiler could hook into the distreebuted CPU cluster in order to facilitate more effective computation.
perhaps they shouldn't be tied to a specific WM or even a DE.
Sounds great; sign me up!

I'd love to watch a Star Wars movie with a budget under 10 million.
I have written an application in PostScript once.

As a newbie developer I decided to use PostScript to generate badges for all our employees. There was a list of employee names in a text file, there was a PostScript file with the program and a Perl script to join them together.

The PostScript program would take the names, generate 8 badges per A4 page, scale the name of the employee so that it fits the space perfectly, generate procedural background, etc.
> freshwater body

This implies volume. Baikal doubles LS in this respect.
It's not only common it's still the way PDFs are usually saved. Open a PDF in a text editor (PDFs are text not binary files) and you can see any edits appended as "trailers".
I wonder how a SOM [1] would lay it out.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organizing_map
Don't know about the UK,but here in Denmark they are quite different degrees (even if they have the same etymological origin). A PhD. here does not give you the title Doctor, while a doctorate does.
Regarding the expensive shipping in the EU point.
That really depends on the country one is shipping from.

Shipping from Germany is extremely cheap - even internationally (even cheaper than the rates you mentioned).
But shipping the same thing the opposite direction can easily cost many multiples more.
I find cue lang [1] very practical/useful/terse, their idea of lattice based type system is very intuitive and expressive with very little code.

[1] https://cuelang.org/
Random online penrose tiling tool; scroll down for a picture of a bathroom with penrose tiling:

https://craftdesignonline.com/penrose/
Subject: ban.ai
Issuer: Let's Encrypt Authority X3
Expires on: 26 Dec 2020
Current date: 2 Jan 2021

Also from the website:

> What is Multics?

Multics, the Multiplexed Information and Computing Service, is the quintessential interactive time-sharing mainframe operating system.

> Without exaggeration, one could say Multics was the Project Apollo of operating system development.
> T: ‘a is T outlives ‘a; but types are not generated at runtime.

Yes, that’s true, but you can make it a bit more specific by saying “all the references in T outlive ‘a”. Then it should make more sense, as references are generated at runtime.

This gets to the heart of what makes Rust an interesting language, as references are generated at runtime, but how long those references are valid for is checked at compile time using lifetime bounds.
For a historical example of US "rugged individualism", see the lengths Huey P. Long went to just to convince the people of Louisiana that paving roads at public expense wasn't some kind of socialist waste of money.

(Long was clearly a demagogue, but on this particular point I have to agree with him that a reasonable road network is a public good)
Yes, it's totally possible to write good abstractions for this sort of basic operation, which handle both endianness and alignment. (QEMU's version of them uses memcpy(), again relying on the compiler to optimise this to a simple load where the host CPU supports unaligned accesses.) I agree that doing that kind of thing so code can be endian-agnostic and keeping the ifdefs to a minimum is better style and easier to understand.

But if the big-endian case isn't run through CI then bugs will still creep in, where people forget to use the abstraction and just cast a buffer pointer to do a 32-bit read, or where they don't keep the distinction between 'a 32 bit value in host endianness' and 'a 32-bit value in host-independent endianness (eg network data, or pixel data)' straight and forget a conversion step. QEMU's testing on s390 and ppc64 catches a steady trickle of this kind of bug before it goes into the codebase.

(You can catch unaligned-access bugs on x86 with clang/gcc address-sanitizer, I think, but it can't help with endianness bugs.)
Not talking about the article, just asking for your insight that you have by looking at Weibo. Just wanted to know if there are cases of political dissent announced, and if so, what are their reactions.
for me it was always clear that masks were effective, but institutions were trying to accumulate enough for health workers by flat out lying to the public. maybe they shouldn’t have lied so blatantly, but it doesn’t make me skeptical about the effectiveness of masks itself.
I clicked around a little, and it seems "icc 21.1.9", "x64 msvc x19.28", "risc-v clang (trunk)", "armv7-a clang (trunk)" compile it to four separate byte loads, it looks like. It's not that I don't trust my compiler (usually clang) to optimize it this way, it's just that the level of variability between compilers makes me think I shouldn't really rely on this behaving this way.

I wonder what the arch difference is between the clangs that do it and the ones that don't, I don't know much about arm and risc-v.
How to Make Landing Pages in 5 Minutes on WordPress
Ask HN: Why does print (0.1 and 0.1 and 0.1 == 0.3) evaluate to False in Python?
> For example, if I wanted to read a little endian 32-bit integer value from a byte stream, I could write a function like this

But for the longest time people would basically dump the raw bytes of their structs from / to the network whenever possible, e.g.

struct my_data {
int foo, bar;
float x,y,z;
long dontdothat;
} data;

write_bytes_to_the_network((const unsigned char*) &data, sizeof(my_data));
I bought the first computer I ever wrote a program on
The person you're replying to didn't do the research themselves. They said as much.

They were just sharing something they were surprised by/interested in. I was surprised to read that's how editing PDFs works too.
Sounds like the computer game mud runners was inspired by a similar story.
> wet markets and traditional Chinese medicine (in which raw animal parts are mixed together etc.) are huge pandemic vectors?

Ofc, that's why they were reformed, current meat and grocery markets commonly found are nothing like the markets of SARS

And yeah, huge reforms took place on Chinese Healthcare policy[0] alongside South Korean and Vietnamese Healthcare policy, which is why all three countries have been doing so well, they learned all the lessons from SARS which were ignored in the West

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK92479/

Overall sad to see that you are clearly not engaging in good faith, as these discussions are very important :/

> And that it's not impossible that the virus could have escaped from a lab by accident?

And no, once again you show the conspiracy angle, no, it is not the case because the virus has been genetically analyzed all over the world now and not datasets have been produced which could show manipulation, let alone the fact that patient Zero was found a while ago[1], but of course I am sadly not expecting you to actually accept it, as I am sure you will pivot to another branch of the broader "China == Evil" conspiracy-adjacent beliefs :/

[1] https://amp.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3074991/coro...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21930189 2020

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18801531 2019

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16966271 2018

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
At least we got a comic-book adaptation.
Death is perhaps the most rational concept I can think of.
They have all those specialized teams, because in the industry customers have very high expectations and low tolerance for failure.

Stuff Made Here is a great channel and produces a lot of fun projects, but that only works in a context of prototypes where you need a wide range of skills (but not necessarily a deep one for each of them). E.g. the hair-cutting robot is fun to watch, but barely works (and needs human intervention) and is years away from being a viable end-user product.
Perhaps GNU/Linux should decide what it wants to be, besides yet another UNIX kernel clone.

That is how Android and ChromeOS happen, or FOSS developers end up buying a BSD based proprietary desktop OS, or even Windows based systems, to develop software for GNU/Linux based cloud environments.
Different kind of map.
Yes. It's called JJ Abrams sequels.
I think the preceding part is more worrying:

– the sequence of the operations is: first encryption and then signing,
– the encryption algorithm AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) with 256 bit key length and RSA with 1024 bit key length shall be applied for symmetric and asymmetric encryption respectively,
– the hash algorithm SHA-1 shall be applied.

Really?
It’s probably a joke about a diesel fan heater, blows hot air and sounds a bit like a hair dryer. Common in yachts and bigger camper vans.
Observer Design Pattern – Explained in Five Minutes
Creatures (Video Game Series): Anyone Remember This Artificial Life Game? Alife
The ones I've heard about ("accepted by a biology journal, and then rejected because the editors found out") are usually due to subterfuge or some undermining of the system.

Eg, using terms that obfuscate the YEC aspects of the paper, which isn't obvious enough for the reviewers to understand what it actually means.

There are also journals which accept anything, with little or no review (eg, some conference papers) and societies which allow their members to publish anything, and use post-publication review to retract papers.

Or sometimes someone with YEC beliefs gets editorial control and start green-lighting YEC papers not on merit but because of those personal beliefs.

Can you point to the incident?

Do you think it was rejected merely because it was YEC? Or because the evidence presented didn't actually support a YEC claim?
It's been flagged?
Yes, I prefer to release regular updates and this isn't helping.
Yeah sorry if I'm unclear or misinterpreting. My comment is about the researcher not the person I replied to.

I do agree that it's surprising behaviour to regular users of PDF that it usually maintains a history of sorts. Apps should make this clearer.
It's not about the power, it's about the fact that a hair dryer seems like a weird item to take on such a journey. However, the comments on the article(if they can be trusted) clarified that they meant a heat gun for fixing equipment.
A PhD does allow you to use the title in the UK. Ironically medical doctors are allowed to drop the title if they're qualified surgeons.
> Larger companies that employ more than 20 people, have revenues above $5 million and a physical presence in the US, are exempt from the act. Churches, charities and other non-profits are also exempt.

Those seem like extremely non-negligible exemptions. Which is not to say that this law is useless, but it could use more teeth.
Basically everything that is banks, governments, insurance companies used these machines.

They’re not going anywhere.
Perps want to continue the abuse. It gives them happiness.
You're getting downvoted because somehow people think that restaurant owners shouldn't have to handle basic aspects of operating a business such as establishing a trademark to operate their business under. Without a trademark, what are they going to do if, say, another restaurant opens up a few blocks away with the same name?

(And as I understand it, you get some trademark rights just by establishing a business, so you don't have to register the trademark to sue UberEats or Grubhub or whoever)
Any migrants from Haskell to F# who have used it for larger projects and can compare the two? I’ve used Haskell on and off for a number of years for a number of small projects, and I’m considering moving to F# for better IDE and debugger support, and I’m wondering whether there are any downsides in comparison to Haskell which I should consider. Any result-based advice would be appreciated.
Demoscene Trends
Hotwire/Turbo for creating modern web apps without using much JavaScript
Ah, yes, it was so hard for authors to benefit from their works 95 years after their death. Now it's so easy, and inspires authors to produce great new works even in afterlife.
How about theory? On the opposite side from systems, anyone have recommendations for best-of this century?
This would be of big interest to this community, since it's one of the earlier effort at creating a machine learning game. Where each creature has it's own neuron based brain and can interact with kids who play such games.

There is quite a few debate on whether these creatures are sentient or not... even if these creatures are dumber than an ant.

------

Other Links:

* openc2e is an open-source game engine intended to run all the games in the Creatures series. https://github.com/openc2e/openc2e

* Article about the creatures AI: https://www.alanzucconi.com/2020/07/27/the-ai-of-creatures/

* Brain in Creatures: https://creatures.fandom.com/wiki/Brain

* Visualizing Brain Structure In Creatures 1: https://web.archive.org/web/20200927195326/http://discoveral...
- Drive Lobe: https://web.archive.org/web/20200129235836/http://discoveral...

* How Brain Works In Creatures: http://double.nz/creatures/brainlobes/intro.htm

* Utilities to inspect brain: http://double.nz/creatures/brainutilities.htm