skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's not true, there were plenty of mainstream media reports of these suspicions and the vast majority of them were correctly pointing out the same as they are pointing out today, namely that there is no concrete evidence for the theory and it therefore remains speculation. We would presumably know more if journalists from all over the world could report freely from China, but realistically speaking their work possibilities are limited there.

It's a bit annoying that so many adults continue to mix up speculation with real evidence, and make up their minds based on gut feelings. That is not to say governments shouldn't put pressure on China to be more transparent, of course they should. But judging from the actual information available, the virus most likely jumped from an animal to humans due to the bad conditions of wet markets in China.

While China is to blame for such markets, people need to bear in mind that the same can happen in many other places where animals are farmed closely together with humans. Even if it was true, the Wuhan lab theory would unfortunately distract from this real problem.
AZ is lying:

Here the boss is telling the UK signed in june : https://www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-europe-inno...

Except it didn't, the UK signed on august 28th, 1 day after the EU (per your link).

In the interview from my link he also says that no vaccines manufactured in the EU leave for countries outside of the EU.

Except he lies about that too: Italy prohibited the export of vaccines to Australia. Last i checked Australia is not a part of the EU.
Cold Fusion or Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions, U.S. Navy Researchers Reopen Case
> Movements like this do need someone that can rule with an iron fist and maintain the core principles and save them from dilution.

Movements like this WOULD NOT EXIST without people like RMS. He has many unpolished and rough edges but he gets things done that move computer science forward.
I think these days high priced apartments are only affordable by the wealthy, unless people are grouping together with multiple roommates, at which point it means they can't actually afford the apartment, so is it really middle class anymore?
"WHO Points To Wildlife Farms In Southern China As Likely Source Of Pandemic"
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/03/15/9775278...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/14/health/WHO-covid-daszak-c...

Historically, SARS-CoV-1 is suspected of being transmitted from bats to civets:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3291347/

In Feb 2020, China shut down its wildlife farming industry and sent out directions on how to kill and dispose of the animals:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00677-0

http://www.npc.gov.cn/npc/c30834/202002/c56b129850aa42acb584...

https://multimedia.scmp.com/infographics/news/china/article/...

Wildlife farming was a $70B industry that employed around 2% of China's workforce. There was a short-lived ban in 2003 in response to SARS-CoV-1, which was later rescinded.
Usable security: How Tor improves usability without compromising user privacy
The definition of 'retirement' is a common debate in the FIRE space. Often (not always!) it boils down to fights over definitions. Would you call daily volunteering at a soup kitchen (or church, or whatever) 'retired'?

By the way, "making the world better" doesn't need to be large or expensive, at least in my opinion: If I talk to the lone, probably widowed neighbour on my way home, I count that as "making the world better".
Archiving this before it’s removed for ‘elevating an idea to the public mind’
Like, so what?

Should we care a lot about the safety and security of places where dangerous infectious diseases are studied? sure!

I think we should care A LOT MORE about our [apparent total lack of] ability to quickly deploy effective public health responses to new infectious diseases (regardless of their source).

Maybe it was an accident at a sloppy lab, ok, so labs on the other side of the planet in sovereign countries we do not control might make mistakes. We should get better at responding fast to save lives.

Maybe it was a sinister bio-terrorism plot. We should get better at responding fast to save lives. Bio-terror/warfare plan looks a whole lot like a good public health plan IMO.

Maybe gasp it really was from bats or something. We should get better at responding fast to save lives. This stuff DOES happen.

Maybe s/.*/I don't care where it came from/g. We should get better at responding fast and saving lives (my opinion).
As always, it is not a 1-0 situation, but a question of degree.

You can catch flu from an asymptomatic person, but Covid has a much higher reproduction factor. During the winter lockdown in England, regular flu was completely eradicated - literally not a single case was detected in entire England [0]. At the same time, Covid was still spreading happily. The measures that stopped flu in its tracks only slightly inconvenienced SARS-Cov-2.

Covid is simply too good at spreading, compared to other similar diseases.

(As an analogy: I can swim, Michael Phelps can swim, we can both call ourselves swimmers, but we are not really comparable.)

[0]https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/flu-cases-covid-en...
Epicenters of a disease like this (respiratory disease with asymptomatic transmission) are likely to be in an urban area, so it's not surprising it's in a large city.

In a typical city the size of Wuhan, what are the odds it has some sort of viral research lab? If this happened in (picking a city at random...) Chicago, you could work backwards, find a viral research lab in say, University of Illinois, and make the same claim. "No link to animal transmission has been found, and the original epicenter was known to have a viral research lab. QED."
Even with the leverage, it is in most cases still not a good investment. There are a lot of calculator out there that shows you the break even point between renting and buying.

You forget all the horrible fees that come with owning a place (HOA, maintenance, property taxes, 6% lost to agents at every transaction)
And I ask myself if announcing a fix with a few days lead time: 1. increases searches for the exploit 2. causes those with the exploit to utilize it as often as possible before its planned enddate.
Network effects. Medium and Substack help discoverability. It's trivial to geta site online, but difficult to have people come across it.
You may want to read this article:

https://jglobalbiosecurity.com/articles/10.31646/gbio.41/
Not only this is untrue, but most media outlets repeating this lie didn't ever bother to correct and apologize.
The price students pay for a prized IIT seat
Prism Compiler: Server Components for Rust with no double data
One of the dangers is that it turns out audiences actually prefer writers constrained and filtered and checked by editors.

But by the time they realize that, editors won’t exist any more.
If I’m walking down the street and get surprised with a punch in the face I assume it was intentional, even if there are many scenarios in which it could be accidental.
That's totally fine, but they could have finished the Phase-3 testing for old people, or at least offer alternative vaccines if the measured immune reaction is too small.

Right now my parents are opting waiting 1-2 months more for the Pfizer/Moderna vaccines, because after they decide on a vaccine, even if the antigen count in their blood is small, it doesn't give them the right for another vaccine (in UAE the government provides a 3rd dose of Sinopharm for people with small immune response).
> It's common for us that our 5k lines app, take >1m to build in release mode

Yes, for this reason I think crystal could be one of the best languages for microservices or faas.
Right. The last case of smallpox was from a lab leak but people knew better than to fuck around with that.

Covid is asymptomatic and mild enough in enough people that masks get political
>No. But I also do not know what MinIO is, nor mc, minio or iko.

MinIO is an S3 compatible-ish object storage. `mc` and `minio` are command line interfaces to administer it and launch the server. The project has a Python library that invokes the server to manipulate buckets and objects for specific credentials, but lacks the administrative capabilities that `mc` has, such as adding "S3" policies and managing "users", and cannot launch servers as `minio` does. The library is a "thin wrapper" that makes it possible to manage policies and users with Python.

>It also does not say why it is called bmc.

What does IBM stand for? Nothing. It just sounds professional /s :) [0]

Joking aside, the library is to expose a Python API to a binary named `mc`. The `b` stands for BIGmama Technology. `bmc`

- [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lb0sDIuEf_A
I think exist a lot of small things to improve of RDBMS, like native support for algebraic types, including a indexable view of enum-rows that could cover a lot of what "unstructured but in fact not" use cases exist.

Also my dream is build a Foxpro/excel like tool to recover what a true effective data-first programming environment can give in modern times.
> Why are people so defensive of any criticism of EU?

Or any opinion these days? Social media. The mute button, echo chambers, confirmation bias, lack of critical thought, and so on?

I think the events of the last few years will keep psychologists in business for decades.

A Douglas Adams quote feels apt:

"So long as you can keep disagreeing with each other violently enough and slagging each other off in the popular press, you can keep yourself on the gravy train for life. "
You can be both critical of the EU vaccine rollout and still find it unacceptable that the other countries are not exporting but the EU is supposed to.
> There are a lot of bats in Wuhan.

Except everything I've read indicates the bats carrying the most closely related virus are not in Wuhan, not even close:

> The SARS-CoV-2 virus is most closely related to coronaviruses found in certain populations of horseshoe bats that live about 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) away in Yunnan province, China. [0]

[0] https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-wuhan-lab-complicate...

So why would the virus so strongly appear to originate in Wuhan, and not in another city, closer to the bats' native regions? Appears quite statistically unlikely.
I really don't know anything about the availability of Zigbee chips for DIY projects, but I would just like to say that I paid just 20 EUR for Ikea's gateway [0].

But if you do go Wi-Fi, why use a cloud service at all? Is there a specific reason not to go with mDNS/DNS-SD and handle everything on the local network?

[0] https://www.ikea.com/de/de/p/tradfri-gateway-weiss-40337806/
previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26440397
It's probably because of speculation. If there is a chance that the moratorium will end in July it's better to not have any tenants for a few months than bad ones you cannot evict and will trash your place. Also, unoccupied properties are always more valuable.
Ask HN: How to evaluate a startup risk as an engineer?
i basically want to answer whether or not the startup has a good chance at an exit and exit at a price where i can walk away with 7 figures.
I would rent for a bit just to get your bearings in the new place. It's hard to know what part of town you really want to live in, until you experience it for a bit.
This link says that the contract are comparable: https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/astrazeneca-signed-va...
Recursion Pharmaceuticals files for $100M IPO
Card results might be a good thing overall, but they certainly aren't only good. In many cases, adding the cards takes revenue away from the exact people who collected or created the content to make them possible in the first place. We'll never know how many websites shut down or never got created to begin with given Google's history of crushing the revenue from various sites on a whim.
Däng, that posted the list, is a moderator. It is probably pretty safe to say he is posting the list for the sake of curious readers rather than for marketing purposes.
FDA authorizes first AI-powered armband for Covid-19 screening
Bitcoin is not anonymous. there are strict KYC rules in place.

Bitcoin is not for speculators, it's primary use case is a Store of value. There's large demand for a store of value, especially now that the bond market is finished.
If higher priced apartments lower in price, doesn't that make it more affordable for more people? Isn't that a good thing?
Immediately it’s the sleep deprivation which is basically a form of torture, remember. Then there are anxieties about their well being and their health on occasion. Later in teenage years about how they are starting to run their own lives and are they maybe veering into dangerous areas (eg hard drugs). Then there are worries about how their life is turning out as adults. The anxiety doesn’t stop but it’s also the most important adventure in your life that no amount of traveling, home improvements, social media bragging can match despite what the child-free crowd seems to believe.
Home brands copying popular products is common in grocery stores, down to the artwork and label design (to show similarity). Does anyone argue that a grocery store is using, much less abusing, its monopolistic power by doing that? No.

Anyway, Amazon renamed it (see the other comment's link to the 18-day-old thread) and calling it a "camera bag" probably nets them more than riding on a botique store's branding.
Really looking forward for VSCode full blown merge reviewing.

Impatiently wafting for this so I don't have to use sluggish browser any more:

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-vscode-extension/-/issu...
SQLite: Code of Ethics
It's not a conspiracy, but a not improbable covered up accident. I.e. something pretty normal in any authoritarian state.

I don't think anyone suggests the CCP unleashed the virus onto its own city on purpose.
Well this doesn't make sense.
This port is for 64 bit aka double precision floating points. I am talking about supporting 32 bit floats. Maybe this can be achieved in the same codebase, I don't know
If that was a condition of the contract between two parties and the two parties agreed, then what's the problem?
Thank you for the reply. More information in the reply above[0]

- [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26547179
It's even more in China's interest to not have more such leaks, or to have other countries have similar leaks.

Their manufacturing economy does not benefit from being locked down on a regular basis
Throwaway because reasons.

I "failed" my first four (edit: onsite) FANG interviews. 5th time was a charm, have been happily employed with a senior title at FANG for a couple years.

Not exactly new information to HN, but the job itself is quite a bit easier than the interviews (wrt to technical knowledge). It can be just as stressful though (I actually think stress response / teamwork is one of the main things FANG interviewers are looking for after a certain bar of technical competence is met, YMMV).

This isn't for everyone, but if it's something you really want to do, don't let the rejections get you down. You'll get in eventually :)
We should be writing our emails in some programming language I guess
What sort of rich person rents a house, except whilst between selling old and new?

Think apartments, not houses. Think young single people in tech making $100k+.
You're also forgetting that these people are scientists. Scientists only look at the facts and are completely unbiased - they aren't like normal humans, who might be worried about their entire livelihoods being cancelled (or worse) if the world realises their research is too dangerous to exist. And scientists who work for political organisations are the most unbiased of all. /s
Can't believe that, in God's year 2021, 3rd millennia, Earth, we're still using security libraries written in what is essentially a portable assembly language, doing silly things like pointer arithmetic, manually allocating memory, and other chainsaw juggling feats.

I swear some day we'll look back to this period with bewilderment: son, in those days people used to smoke carcinogens for their taste, drive their own cars and treat mental disorders with an ice pick in the prefrontal cortex. Trully mad men would even implement X.509 in unsafe languages.
I had to accept a huge volume of rejection, both doing in job applications (hundreds of applications) and online dating (thousands). All the while being alone during Covid-19.

My advice to those who might be reading is to find a mentor or best friend who you can update on your progress on a semi-regular basis. Those people helped me so much to remain positive and upbeat during the really disappointing moments of 2020. They can also give feedback on your approaches.

The other tip is to accept it's going to feel terrible, but to let the disappointment that you feel flow through you to help move on.
How are these Fact Checkers to decide on a complicated and political question like a Wuhan lab leak hypothesis? They have a claim to truth, based on what credentials or mechanisms, that the rest of us don't have access to?
This is a great article, but it felt needlessly defensive on the "lack of assertions" thing. Admitting that something is missing makes the rest of the article feel more believable. No need to say stuff like "maybe the lack of asserts makes the test code build faster so it's actually a good thing." Just say "unfortunately, no asserts."
You don't need to bypass regulators, all countries can approve it themselves. That's also how the UK approved their vaccines before the Brexit deal took effect.
Substack is a great move for a columnist but a terrible move for a reporter.

Unfortunately not all journalists are completely clear which of those they are.
Occupying a home reduces its value. Letting someone live somewhere "for free" (to them) is still worse to the owner of the house than leaving it vacant.
I did not like this article.

"Thank you for your understanding" before the person has shown their understanding is manipulative. So is "thank you in advance".

Also I could not care less that you hope I find someone else to do the job. Don't give me those "I hope this email finds you well" etc. It's disgusting.
Commission president was decided by the heads of each democratically elected government - so Merkel, Sanchez, Johnson, Macron etc.

Just like in the UK where the PM is elected by each democratically elected MP
So why help the EU - why should they jump the queue before Africa or India or China?
China is a big country. Wuhan is 900km away from the bat caves that are believed to be the breeding ground for these viruses.
No, but the alternative is that they would have stolen the data anyway. So it's either neutral or positive.

>let's sanction crime against them

If it were legal it wouldn't be a crime.

>Are you sure kindergardens are punished reliably enough for lapses of security?

Given that I rarely hear about children being kidnapped out of kindergartens, I would assume so. I'm not well educated on this, though, since I don't have a personal stake in the matter.
I believe several EU Countries have still not cleared AZ for use on (false?) fears of blood clots. And then there is the problem of distribution - not so easy in a place as large as the EU.
ive been here for a decade... its my opinion that HN very much does NOT get things like this right more often than not. its very hard to even guage what the hn opinion is to begin with
The thing most people don't realise is that the EU is almost completely undemocratic, which is pretty crazy when you think about it for a minute.

On the other hand it's also no surprise considering how it evolved: a producer's cartel for the coal and steel, and later agricultural, industries.

It's a miracle it even works so well as it does.
In Buddhism, there are separate words for consciousness and qualia. Moreover, many different consciousnesses are recognized.
Hi everyone. I am new here.

It is my opinion that, while we made important progress (although definitely not enough) in raising awareness about misogyny, systemic racism and certain other great evils, there have been a few injustices in between. As in many other situations, the answer is in neither pole---we must listen to everyone and make a synthesis. In that spirit, I welcome many of the ethical advances of the last decades, I greatly oppose unenlightened people such as Trump and Bolsonaro (whom I call "President Joker"---murderous clown), and I generally resent those who take pride in being "politically incorrect" (which often means "ignorant bigot"). Yet at the same time, I believe there have been relevant mistakes in this struggle, and Richard Stallman was caught in a "perfect storm" (sorry for the cliché) that caused his real flaws to be judged far too harshly. Please see the text I carefully wrote on the subject, based on the ideas of the great Nadine Strossen---the prominent feminist and civil rights activist who was the first female President of the ACLU---and Suzanne Nossel---CEO of PEN America and former executive director of Amnesty International USA---among others: https://gitlab.com/jorgemorais/justice-for-rms
I personally think your most senior devs should collectively “own” less than 10% of the code, otherwise they become bottlenecks of both feature development and career advancement.

Outside of those you want a bus factor on everything else. Which also helps control meeting size and coordination. (I can’t have this meeting at 2:00 because Steve is in another meeting at that time.)
>Is Facebook really a "direct participant" if I have no way to know that their widget is even on the site until I visit it, at which point they have already participated and I have no way to avoid it?

If you meet someone at some office for an interview or a negotiation or something, and a third party is there whose presense was not announced beforehand, aren't they a "direct participant"?

And didn't you also had "no way to know that they would even be there" until you visited that location?
I'm not doubting that at all, see also this statement by a US embassy [1].

What I'm saying is that we don't have strong (any?) evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is the result of gain of function research. It is entirely possible but the majority of the scientists who do gain of function research say it's unlikely (given what we know today, which might change).

Again, a credible source saying the opposite is appreciated.

[1] https://ge.usembassy.gov/fact-sheet-activity-at-the-wuhan-in...
Are you saying EcoHealth/Daszak do not have material conflicts of interest in this matter? On what basis?
I am with you. There is a huge lobby to make people buy houses. Not enough people question if it is a good investment. The opportunity cost to buy vs rent is huge.
I suspect the poster was saying that 80 year olds in India should receive the vaccination before 50 year olds in New York
>Before Elon came up with StarLink, even the Falcon 9 was a relatively boring concept, from the economical perspective.

http://personal.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/constellatio...

I'm pretty sure that the idea behind huge fleets of commercial LEO internet communication satellite constellations had existed long before Elon tried his hand at it (first proposed in 1994).

Even starlink was only brought in-house after a cancelled project with OneWeb (formerly WorldVu)
https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/elon-musks-next-mission-int...
documentation is required but not sufficient. also, documentation is usually outdated really fast if the person maintaining the system leaves and/or does not care