skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The United States government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses.

I'd wager several researchers in any research institution because sick in autumn 2019 and had symptoms consistent with common seasonal illness. And guess what new virus also has symptoms consistent with common seasonal illness...
No one has banned political subjects on HN. There was a brief experiment to see what the site would be like without them—it was scheduled to last a week, instead it lasted 2 days, and we've never dreamt of trying anything like it since.
SIGL is not the makers of the Signal communication app. SIGL is a company called Signal Advance (https://www.signaladvance.com/), which makes medical and industrial systems.

Signal, the app (https://signal.org/en/), is a 501c3 nonprofit.
> Turned out to be a massive exaggeration

This is a gross mischaracterization, like almost everything else you have written.

> But at a hearing for Chansley later in the day in Phoenix, another prosecutor, Todd Allison, struck the line from the memo.

> Allison said the statement may very well end up being appropriate at Chansley’s trial, but said prosecutors didn’t want to mislead the court and don’t have to rely on the stricken statement to argue that he should remain in jail. Ultimately, a judge on Friday ordered Chansley to be jailed until his trial.

* * *

> quibble [...] split hairs

There is a dramatic difference between "lit the building on fire" vs. "started a fire in the vicinity of the building". Using the former language to describe the latter is grossly misleading.

I don't really know the details here (maybe they did in fact light the building on fire?). I am just comparing the language you used vs. the language used in the source you linked, which do not agree.

If people get charged and tried for arson or attempted arson in Portland in open court, that seems entirely reasonable to me. Prosecutors and defense attorneys will present their evidence, and a judge and/or jury will decide the merits based on the evidence and the text of the relevant statutes.

> every single rumor and innuendo

When a huge crowd is chanting "Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence!" near the gallows they just constructed that is not a "rumor".

> ready to slap labels on them like "seditionists" or "domestic terrorist" and use phrases like "kill squads".

I didn't use any of those labels above. However, I am happy to agree with you that what many of the MAGA insurrectionists did almost certainly meets the legal definitions of both

"seditious conspiracy" https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2384

and "terrorism" https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/6/101#18

* * *

I'm out. Have fun with yourself.
I've answered this a few times - if you're interested, take a look at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... If you still have a question that isn't answered there, I'd like to know what it is.
I was half expecting to find some kind of rickroll-esque joke, but there is actually a lot of really interesting discussion tucked away in that search¹. I find the open and frank discussion of problem choices to be very refreshing.

¹ https://github.com/ziglang/zig/search?q=design+flaw&type=iss...
I think the more salient question is whether starting a company is the most reliable way to become a self-made millionaire (one of the things they're actually claiming), which could be true even if the chances were low. The parent comment's error (or perhaps an intentional omission if for example they thought it to be self-evident) is in not taking into account the volume of people starting companies vs the volume of people doing other things which could turn them into millionaires.

On that note, I do think there's a flaw in the logic or premises (or unstated assumptions -- maybe "millionaire" is code for some larger quantity of wealth) somewhere. A decade in FAANG with conservative spending habits will easily create a millionaire with a near 100% success rate, and it would be surprising if starting a company would have better odds than that.
Dear Agence France-Presse, "900m" is 900 metres, use "900M" instead.
I find a good way to get out of this tribalist mindset is to realize that the stereotypical member of a given party that believes all of the party's official positions is not a real person who actually exists. (Politicians and political operatives sometimes pretend to be but even they're not in reality.)

Some of the people who vote for Republicans oppose taxes. Just the existence of taxes at all. "Taxation is theft." If you want to help people, don't pay taxes to the government, give that money to a charity.

Others think that the US should have the strongest military in the world. An obviously incompatible idea, right? Good luck crowdfunding your fleet of aircraft carriers. But they're in the same party.

It's not an inconsistency because they're not the same people, even if they both vote for Republicans. The Republican party platform itself is incoherent. So is the Democratic party platform. They're not logically consistent sets of policies, they're just coalitions that evolved to gather enough votes to control the government half of the time.

But here's the secret. Nobody cares about things nobody wants. Both parties aren't just automatically the opposite of one another. It isn't that one of them is in opposition to Kill All Humans and the other one is in favor of that. For one of the parties to advance something, it has to be because there are enough people who think we should do that to make it worth a party's time to try to get those votes.

So screw the tribes. Convince the whole public that good ideas are good ideas and bad ideas are bad ideas. When there is consensus in the public there will be consensus in the parties.

If the party who already agrees with a good idea is in control at a given time then you take the win, but if you can't convince most of the country then it just gets reversed in a couple years and we can do better than that.
JavaScript is used to fetch, initialize, and run the wasm module. As long as the module exports functions, they can be called from JS. There are JS libraries that will automatically setup up bindings for you.
Thanks for the detailed info. I had read once that some large animals (e.g. blue whales) have surprisingly little cancer.. any idea why this is the case? Or is it just the rarity of us testing large animals for cancer?
google uses stubby (essentially gRPC), not http, for internal APIs.
If anyone else is wondering when "autumn 2019" is, in an international format: it's the fourth quarter of 2019.
State department have warned about poor security at WIV before COVID-19 outbreak https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-dep...
Great claims require great evidence
Just don’t make them out of plastic.
Cunningham's law is a beautiful thing, cheers :)
I wouldn't say no, because it's built with the right spirit in mind. But at the same time, it's different from languages have native support for sum types. Advantage of sum type is that it can be matched exhaustively like an enum, but at the same time it's flexible to contain any data like a data class.
Things I've learnt from the movie Soul as a developer
> How sympathetic are the Signal developers to the concerns of dissidents, really?

There’s a known problem where the majority of Chinese Android users use a third-party IME to enter text. This is vulnerable to eavesdropping and easy for Signal to detect and warn the user about. Chinese people have been asking them to do this for over a year, telling them that they know of people who have been detained by the government after using Signal, thinking it was secure. Signal have constantly ignored and dodged this. Just lately, their attitude seems to be that somebody needs to prove it is being actively exploited before they will look into it.

Until I saw their behaviour on this, I was recommending Signal to people. Now I can’t help but feel it’s security cosplay. They pride themselves on strong encryption, but won’t lift a finger when people unwittingly use Signal in an insecure context and are being extraordinarily evasive about it.

More info: https://community.signalusers.org/t/signal-should-warn-users...
Byju's to Buy Aakash Institute, Amazon in Edtech and Lava's New Smartphone
Hypothesis: "redacted" in the original because of changed/abandoned phone number.
>The legal firms representing the plaintiffs asked to get about $110 million of the settlement money.

>And there it is.

Would you rather that there's no profit motive, and they don't get sued at all?
Does It Matter to Test-First or ToTest-Last?
New research shows the robots are coming for jobs – but stealthily
Seems like the easiest way would be to emulate a linked list. Have a pointer to the next surrogate id.
Single letter variable names are throw away variables which you don't actually care about except for maybe a line or so.

I think to use them when I'm trying to "show my working out" and it takes me back to algebra class days so I don't mind
My own for example. I do business online. Everything stopped for a year. Had to pay employees out of pocket because letting them go would mean their families go hungry. In all fairness, I could not do that so took a major hit.
Same for restaurants, hotels, travel agencies, everyone doing wfh, tourism, we have a bunch of software development businesses, like huge ones and they simply closed shop and moved hundreds of employees outside the valley. Anyone who couldnt do that, like ours suffered. Simple as that.
Please omit personal swipes and please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. We're trying for something different here, and it's not possible to have both.

Also, please stop using HN primarily for political battle. We ban accounts that do that (regardless of which politics they're battling for), because it destroys what HN is supposed to be for. I had to go quite a way back in your comment history to get to a place where you weren't doing that. Fortunately I eventually found it so I'm not going to ban you right now, but can you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN in the intended spirit?
and transparent investigation
Following with interest. I have a basic level of trust towards Uncle Sam and a basic level of distrust towards the CCP, but we are still very far from a reasonable bar of evidence to be cleared here yet.
I find some of its syntax choices pretty hostile and the lack of generics is a problem, unless that has been solved already, I'm not sure.
Weren’t people being deplatformed for saying this back in March?
I know how fashionable it is to shit on the USA, at least for another week. But you are implying the CCP does have credibility in their claims this is not true?

What advantage do you think the state dept has to put this out if it is not true? The new admin can walk it back in 1/2 a second if that’s the case.
Depends exactly what symptoms they had. Rhinorrhea or cough are extremely non-specific, but if they had loss of taste or smell, or significantly abnormal low oxygen saturation, or multifocal pneumonia in young people - those are all a lot more specific given what we now know about covid
Dnstwister – The anti-phishing domain name search engine
By your argument, doesn't that mean that states/cities with completely blue government would have the lowest numbers? Or are those pesky Republicans all over california interfering with that?
Notes on Cryptography Ciphers
> it's literally been trying to stir up shit however it can to make things difficult for the incoming Biden administration

Examples, please? Pompeo certainly taking a more hawkish and strident stance of late, but I’m yet to see anything that suggests they’re salting the earth rather than just trying to ram through some policy aims at the end of an administration
How do you convince management to focus on improving workflows? There's often a huge focus on shipping features with that being the primary criteria for promotions.
It needs to do a check in order to decide to panic. C/C++ just allow undefined behavior which means they don't need to bounds check because the generated code is allowed to have any behavior in this case (either the read just reads some random memory out of the heap or the kernel kills the process since it tried to access unmapped memory). In rust, panicing involves unwinding the stack. The compiler must generate code to do the bounds check and then also generate code to do the stack unwinding for the panic in the case where the bounds check fails.
I wholeheartedly agree. When I had 25+ minutes added to a trip while I needed to use the bathroom because OSMand told me to drive off a bridge, I just gave in :/
The plaintiffs in the case argued that Facebook violated that law when it introduced the "tag suggestions" feature without gaining express consent from users.

I'm going to step out on a limb here and say the outrage police are getting out of hand. Tag suggestions are incredibly useful. If I have a library of pictures (and I do), I want software to suggest tags for them. They're my pictures, FFS.
Open Source DIY VR Headset for $200
The OP was an experiment from 4 years ago. We haven't done anything like that since, nor will we.

Even at the time there was no intention to get rid of politics on HN permanently, but it turns out if you say "we're just trying X for a week", people hear "we're instituting X". That's one lesson it taught me.

In the end, I think we got to the right place about how to handle political topics on HN. It isn't entirely simple, but it's as simple as possible, and it works, and it has proven stable. More on that in the links up here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25785637.
I'm fascinated by the layers of ownership. Do "usual" providers, e.g. Cloudflare, have such obscure ownersip?
The Lusty Creativity of Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem
is that a threat? :)
https://rustwasm.github.io/wasm-bindgen/api/web_sys/
Suit yourself
I built my own PKM tool to solve this exact problem. I spend a ton of my time in VS Code and GitHub, and I wanted a really simple way to store/access my code snippets and notes, without having to leave the editor, and in a way that I could manage them as GitHub gists and repos: https://aka.ms/GistPad.
That's a very general statement. I wouldn't accuse you of implying that it would also apply to e.g. Date.now(), but I firmly disagree that it applies to hooks.

I get that hooks are declared in the form of functions, and that pure functions are the desired pattern in many cases. But I like to think of hooks as hooks, not functions (emphasized by the naming convention of prefixing with "use"). We are in the context of React, after all, and I think it is comparable to critique of JSX because of "separation of concerns". Yes, valid critique in many cases, but not necessarily applicable to React.

Having been a React developer for over 5 years now, I think hooks solve a lot of problems that before would typically have been solved with Redux, Redux Saga and other libraries. Or with home made solutions, leading to various degrees of mess. From what I've seen, hooks have enabled React devs to write code that is even easier to understand, while also keeping things simpler and external libraries fewer.
> Every programmer uses an editor or IDE with autocomplete.

This is news to me. I use JOE and, occasionally, vi (sic).
But when I use short variable names it's often because they're idiomatic and expressive. In C for example, i, j, n, src, buf, cp, etc.

Many moons ago I used IDEs. Eventually I tired of installing, configuring, and maintaining bespoke environments.

I'm confident I'm not alone.
This sounds like a work of genius. Unfortunately I have not resurrected my Abby's so I great I may next movie the thrush.
My experience parallels the writer's... I did a foray over the holidays to try to make some base-layer and generic on top of rocket then actix-web then tide. I can get any of their toy examples to work, but building up a complex system with mixins to genericize some boiler plate code wasn't possible for my tiny brain. I may be hide-bound, but the lack of inheritance is a pain. I know I'm not right, but OO inheritance solves some problems well.

In the django ecosystem, I can take an existing component with a vast API surface, inherit from it, tweak a tiny part of it and then put it back in the system and I'm off to the races. With rust, you have to re-implement the entire API surface to experiment with a tweak or go upstream and modify the original source, which isn't a great long-term solution -- maintaining patches. The diesel ORM is great, but it seems that each api returns a different type and doing a builder pattern generically across different functions and getting the types correct is like being in the worst C++ templating hell.

I love the speed of execution, the type checking, the borrow checker, but the coding friction is real. I'd love to see more complex examples in all the rust web frameworks that do real work with good function partitioning in addition to the simple examples.
I used wasm bindgen to make rust code callable from js.
https://rustwasm.github.io/docs/wasm-bindgen/
Soonish. Maybe. https://blog.golang.org/generics-proposal
Don't prematurely optimize. Make your code work, make your code readable, and then profile your code.

Without profiling you're guessing where the most impactful work can be done. You don't want to spend a week shaving 150ms when you could have spent a day to make your program 10s faster.
> Most former presidents keep quiet out of respect.

Not the 44th.
SQL is pseudo-readable by people like PMs, non-technical analysts, marketing, customer success, etc.

As a test: I just showed my non-technical wife the following snippet of SQL, and she was able to tell me what it retrieved, as well as modify it to find a different player or statistic.

SELECT
player_name,
COUNT(*) as num_hits
FROM
baseball_players
WHERE result='base_hit' GROUP BY 1;
Not to play into the metaphor, but that feels a little like saying every brand of cigarettes is dangerous, why should Marlboro take heat?

Sure, it may not literally kill you, but I think a lot of people agree that ubiquitous data harvesting is not great. Illinois took a small stand against that with its biometric data law.
lit-html also returns a data structure - strings and values. You can interpret the strings however you want.

JSX actually doesn't return a data structure. It's syntax only and some transforms do things quite different from what React.createElement() does. And this is part of the problem with it and why it can't really be standardized - there's no semantics to standardize.

lit-html as an render implementation does indeed target only the DOM, it's not trying to target non-web platforms.
Well, one more example for the TV show I spent time translating: It's a teen high school drama, but it's a Norwegian high school, not an American high school. The characters have all just started high school, but during your first year in Norway, you and your classmates will vary in age from 15-16-17, and high school lasts three years, not four.

If you use "freshmen" to describe them, you get the "new at school" aspect, but viewers will get the completely wrong idea about their age. If you use "juniors", you get the age aspect right, but their role and social standing at school would be completely off.

So in a case like that, domesticating the translation simply doesn't work, you'd get super confused as a viewer if you use American high school terms. So you have to foreignize it, you have to call them something else, and you have to make up new terms when translating the various Norwegian derogatory terms for first-year students that exist.
It's being discussed mainly in the WICG web components GitHub repo. There are recent issues in here: https://github.com/WICG/webcomponents/issues
The ability to trivially cross-compile in Go, and get a single-file executable artifact, is often mentioned but still not appreciated enough. This is still a multi-hour project, minimum, for most languages, especially if you are introducing a second platform to a well-established project. In Go, it‘s a compiler flag.

I think between http, encoding/json, and the io libraries, it’s also very simple and straightforward to do most of the things a typical command-line program does, in a cleaner way than shell or Python (both have their place) and with less fuss than Rust or C++.
> One tip: Be sure to not make your free tier too generous so you don't have to go back on it later :-)

With a mere 40 cards (+20 for each referral) in the free tier, I hardly think they're in danger of being 'too generous'. 40 cards seems barely enough to outline one set of related thoughts. Maybe two sets if the ideas are relatively shallow.
Its not just business online. 8 million people includes millions of school children who have not gone to school since 5 August 2019. Then since March the corona happened and they had to stay back again. 1.5 years of no formal education but with a twist. While the world across everyone was on zoom, here in the valley the kids had to suffer because "buffering", no video, only either audio on zoom calls or the teacher snaps photos of Notes and forwards on WhatsApp, students copy that photo and work done. Same for audio messages on WhatsApp.

Point is, we dont know when schools will open but students are being prevented from getting some semblance of an education. I have a 4 Yo kid in the extended family and he's been in school for 8 days only. Hits out at anyone who mentions school.
IIRC, yes, ZeroHedge was. They claimed it came from scientists at Wuhan and many called it a conspiracy theory. They were banned from twitter if nothing else.

Not even March, February
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/twitter-bans-zero-hedge-coronav...

Now, I don't read that site. I don't know what evidence the state dept has now. I don't know where the virus came from. —- BUT, I do know CBS/Media, Twitter and critics didn't know then nor now either. To be fair ZeroHedge was guessing too.
This is exactly why trust and credibility is so essential.

I want to believe that they have the evidence to back this up, and that we can trust what the administration says. But the United States has been trashing its own credibility on the international stage ever since 9/11 & weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The Trump administration did nothing to help this.

It's so easy to lose credibility and so hard to build it back. I wish we would stop blowing our credibility by making politically motivated statements without the evidence to back them up.
I like Carl Bergstrom's take on this:

I have reason to believe that if the outgoing administration claims to have reason to believe something but refuses to provide the evidence behind it, they are lying.

https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1350292056782954498

Here's a very serious, legitimate review of the possible origins of SARS-CoV-2: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-01205-5

Unfortunately, from my experience, most people are going to believe what they want to believe, based more on political affiliation more than anything else, and the empirical facts don't register too strongly.