skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for the link.

I read the article, but it only states that the first case from December was not linked to the seafood market ("wet market"), but not that it occurred outside of Wuhan. Did I misread something?

By the way, early on I believed that the virus jumped to humans at the seafood market, which was the prevailing theory at the time, it seemed. But as evidence like the above article came out - noting that many early cases had no link to the seafood market, while still being in Wuhan - it raised suspicions, and lent credence to the lab-leak theory.

> There has been rigorous scholarship done on this question. I recommend reading it given your interest in the subject.

I do, but I'm not convinced. A lot of reporting either relies on appeal to authority ("I'm a PhD, and this couldn't possibly happen, so don't question it"), or is purposely obtuse, confusing lab-leak with lab-synthesized, and by dodging the point, hardly alleviates suspicion.

You must understandably excuse me for being a sceptic. I started wearing masks back in February or March, against the advice of the CDC who was telling me masks increase the rate of spread. At the same time I believed that borders should be closed to limit the rate of spread, while the WHO was telling me that closing borders would do no such thing.

So I am not going to believe something just because an expert tells me to, nor do I find it at all scientific to dismiss politically inconvenient possibilities.
"But the whole goal of auto-upgrading is to avoid the spread versions,
it's a mess to investigate when you have reports from 1 year old version,
that's the main reason why we choose to do that."

I see this all the time, especially in open source products. A vendor decides to screw over its users because the vendor wants less work and doesn't feel like finding a better solution. And they usually get away with it, because big open source projects are incumbents that are very hard not to use.

If you make a product, please prioritize solving the user's problems and pain over your own. Not only is it the compassionate and ethical thing to do, but it also helps engender goodwill for your product. People often choose a product solely because of their feelings for it (branding 101).
Can you explain why you are calling a plausible theory a "conspiracy theory" when it is something that indeed has happened in world history more than once?
Join us or your API will stop functioning.
Do you support ppc64le? WebAssembly? Not a requirement for me, but the fact that ring has no portable implementations is concerning. How do you verify correctness without a baseline? Evercrypt seems like a much better option on that front.
What if the "man from the TV network" is really a "man from Amazon" only it isn't a man. It's a Ring doorbell, clearly labeled when you came through the front door. Or it's a little Echo in the corner of the room.

Does that mean Amazon was invited to the conversation? Should you as a visitor to the home expect that every logo you see in the house means that you agree to have that company present in your conversations during the visit?

Does a Facebook icon or a Google icon or an Amazon icon on a webpage give them the right to participate in your conversation? Does a Windows logo in the corner of your screen give Microsoft the same right?

Is it ok if they don't record audio or video, just metadata?
The Times newspaper (UK) has also some pretty good investigative coverage with a well-produced podcast episode covering Covid origins - https://play.acast.com/s/storiesofourtimes/failuresofstate-t...
Bogus metric when search results might contain enough answer to majority of sincere queries.
IIRC you can't copyright facts
> The ethical thing would to be minimise the number of people dying of covid-19.

Yes and when the EU delays signing contracts, and focuses so much on price, they cause more people to die from covid by slowing the process along.

I agree that the best way forward would have been to minimize deaths of covid, by them not worrying so much about prices and instead supporting development of the vaccine as quickly as possible.
It looks like at least libsodium implements constant-time array comparison in C.

https://github.com/jedisct1/libsodium/blob/ae4add868124a32d4...

Edit: I'm not disagreeing that C compilers are free to optimize stuff like this out; this comment is for people who (like me) thought that serious projects always used assembly for constant time operations.
False choice fallacy.
Alright, nevermind then. I see the ITAR rubberstamp is nicely well warn over there. ITAR all the things.
Every C compiler these days will warn about unchecked enums in switch statements. This is, effectively, what the comment was saying.

Pattern matching has nothing to do with security or program safety.
https://github.com/ziglang/zig/pull/4929#issuecomment-649191...

The bulk of the conversation happened in Discord around that time. Initial attempts to bring this up were met with "zig is perfect"-type conversation, none of which was very technical.

Finally, the conversation grew to be so large and fiery that Andrew had to step in and say "everyone play nice, now!" and then head back out.

Then this PR was filed. Invalid user input should not be classed as undefined behavior and concluding that the standard library's UTF decoder shouldn't be used if you want a safe execution is just absurd.

There were a few other run-ins on discord in the same vein. It made a few people at the time leave, including myself.

Andrew's smart. Zig is a cool idea. But I don't like when this laisse-faire attitude is taken when designing a programming language that places so much emphasis on being safe.
Aaron Bartel Is a Faggot
Definitely a fair point, and I'd certainly believe that OP & his wife's radically diverging lifestyles from their friends accelerated that often-natural process.
It sucks at searching for exact things, it would often subtly by essentially change the meaning of the search. Like confusing searches for the desired "weight of scooter" with the max "weight of rider" on the scooter. What a shame, it was even a shopping related search, where the money are. They could have led me to a sale.

When people are trying variations on a search it's a clear sign of failure. They should do something about it, like use a verbose natural language interface or select a different strategy for ranking or enable the exact in-depth mode. Apparently the NLP community can do natural language Q&A in papers, but Google can't do it in search.

Other pain points: searching in depth all results on a query, not just the top skim and remembering context between searches.

And Google Assistant itself is too poorly integrated and dumb. Where's the GPT-3 like language skill? So many TPUs what are they doing all day long? They have more text and images than any other entity on the internet, Google bot has been sucking it up for so long (not to mention links, keywords and clicks). It should show in the quality of their AI. It's a shame to have OpenAI steal their thunder like this.
There are many ways to compose software and libraries, it doesn't need to be static linking all the time.

Everyone praises UNIX for pipes in the shell and forgets about OS composition APIs.
Docker does not run on macos. It runs in a VM on mac. Podman also runs in a vm on macos.
> yelling at someone who is the only person who can solve your problem is not a good negotiating strategy

Sadly, I've seen this. Not first hand, but it happened to a friend and I have no reason to doubt his version of the story.
Sadly, this article is behind a paywall..
Do you seriously think Scala has fewer features than Java and Kotlin?
Have you ever tried Drupal?

For years I fought against WordPress, thinking I could use a framework to make a better product. (Codeiginter, laravel, drupal)

Anybody trying to push headless CMSs or what ever is probably a developer.

To start a blog and change the world...
1. A resentment
2. Internet connection
3. 5 minutes to build your word press site.
(or you could just rant on twitter/facebook)
"Suppose I visit the website of Company A intending to do business with them (perhaps this is the only way to contact them). Their website contains the Facebook "like' button somewhere on the page. Is Facebook really a "direct participant" ..."

The term "direct particpant" is not from the statute. Those are the words of Facebook's defense lawyers.

The statute provides an exemption for a "party" to communication, but it does not define the term "party".

The 1st and 7th Circuits, when faced with cases similar to this one involving third party "tech" companies that subsist on internet advertising, have interpreted the term "party" to exclude third parties such as Facebook. The 3rd Circuit however has interpreted it to include them. The 9th Circuit on hearing Facebook's case followed the 1st and 7th Circuits. Facebook wants the 3rd Circuit's interpetation to be the law of the land. The Supreme Court denied Facebook's appeal.

As such, the hypothetical requires some more facts. Where is Company A domiciled? Where do they do business? What state do you live in?
Varta aims to charge the 21700 battery in six minutes
the appropriate time scale would more likely be milliseconds
All gatekeepers are subject to corruption. This is a human issue.
> You could write a similar story about pro athletes probably,

That's my question too. When it comes to studying, "toil" is a four-letter word for American people. Oh, you study too hard. Oh you have a lost childhood. Oh solving math problems is not FaIr to other kids, for it shadows the true talent.

But when it comes to sports? Oh man, the tone totally changes. "Toil" is da word! Mileage matters! If you train hard, you get better results! Have you seen LA of 4am in the morning? Do you know the kid next door trains 5 hours every day, and breaks his bones at least 3 times and still does not give up? Mommy wants you to know the story of whoever practicing free throws a thousand times a day. Daddy will use all the retirement savings to hire a coach of this bullshit sport that you would never make it to the top of, but hey don't be like that Asian family who spend all their money hiring science tutors even though their kids will have a decent chance of becoming a good engineer.

What a nation of hypocrisy
"A stable equilibrium" might as well read stagnation.

How do you suppose we incentive competition in stagnation?
That is a half-decent practical argument for those with means to donate to charity, though it presumes that the "less privileged" are inherently irrational. Guillotining the rich (or just taking their money and turning them out on the street) isn't likely to do much at all to aid their survival. Barring some regrettable but ultimately trivial examples of conspicuous consumption, the mostly-paper wealth of the rich is tied up in capital investments aided at producing goods desired by the masses. Liquidate that and you have a bunch of useless cash and no goods to purchase with it.

It isn't in any sense a moral justification for taxes.
> elite colleges basically have to have positive sentiment. a purely meritocratic admissions process wouldn't be conducive to this, because "rich" people generally do things that increase the sentiment of their schools, like become president or start famous companies.

Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, the LSE, Sciences Pos, X, ÉNA are all counter examples. You can select purely on academics just fine.
An Astronomer Just Laid Out a Navigation System for Interstellar Space Travel
If he had emigrated to Canada, he gets a 30% boost in currency and his medical bills drop to closer to $0.

1.2M is more than most people earn in a lifetime, so seems he should be set up for leanFIRE.

That said, the article seemed pretty hilarious. I think this guy might be a little bit unobservant. The cracks form early but he insists that he's blissfully happy. It seems like he didn't really know his partner that well to begin with.
shenanigans like this is why I switched all my projects to use Podman, docker is just trash software
Safety without context is Apples-to-Oranges. I could write a compiler which simply rejects any possible source-text you send it and check "compile time" for every box and offer "greater safety guarantees" than Rust.
> HIGH Severity. This includes issues that are of a lower risk than critical, perhaps due to affecting less common configurations, or which are less likely to be exploitable. These issues will be kept private and will trigger a new release of all supported versions. We will attempt to keep the time these issues are private to a minimum; our aim would be no longer than a month where this is something under our control

So something to make sure you update, but not a Heartbleed level concern
If it was just about the money, it would be better to invest the downpayment into a margin trading account with 1 to 5 leverage.
> Did UK export vaccine doses to the EU?

I'm not commenting on Dave as I've no idea what he said/wrote, I'm replying to the above as it's a commonly held point that the EU shipped does to the UK and the UK has not reciprocated. And this is very much not true.

The EU does not make any vaccine, and so by definition has not shipped any doses to the UK.

A private company (AZ) has contracts that include manufacturing in the EU and shipping into the UK.

This has nothing to do with the EU as an entity at all; it is simple private trade. If the EU couldn't come up with an enforcable private contract going the other way, that's on them. And even if AZ are somehow in the wrong on the EU contract, it's still private contracts between them and the EU and has nothing to do with the UK government, so why should it be 'obliged' to send any back? After all, the UK (as an entity) also doesn't produce vaccines and so has none to send in any event.
Ask HN: Video Platform Book Recs
Any good books on the founding, growth, and teams of prominent video platforms (e.g. YouTube, Vimeo, Twitch, TikTok, etc.)?
> the latter can choose where to create jobs

Jobs such as "city councilman," for example.
As data, here is a list of each year's top-ranked student in the IIT "joint entrance exam" (JEE) since 1979, and what they're doing now: https://dev.studentgiri.com/last-38-years-iit-jee-toppers/

I know a couple of them personally, and a fair number of other IIT graduates besides, and while many of them did work hard, all of them did/do have hobbies and all that, not quite fitting the "No life, no hobbies, burnout, lost childhood" headline or the rest of the picture painted here.
The healthcare issue is a huge one in the US in holding back folks. The patchwork of ACA coverage still being brokered through private insurance companies is a PITA.
Static analysis tools should also be a normal part of the development process regardless of the language being used. Unfortunately, the good tools cost money and that discourages developers (and managers) from using them.
For Israel it's actually 140 is the finish line because kids under 16 can't get it yet.

They are pretty close - around 115 right now.

They are hoping to start immunizing 12-16 in about 1 to 2 months.
Isn't the widely accepted solution to this to just have a limited number of LTS versions?
index += 1;
if (index < strlen) {
ch = str.charAt(index);
} else {
ch = 0;
}

If I was using kotlin, I'd do it even cleaner:

inline fun String.at(index: Int): Char? =
if (index >= 0 && index < length) charAt(index)
else null

[...]

index += 1
ch = str.at(index) ?: 0;

The bytecode is exactly the same, but I’d argue it’s much cleaner
It means culpability. A better understanding of the dangers of experimenting with deadly viruses.

All of this contributes to the history and scientific corpus of what not to do, and lessons to learn from in the future that we can point to as what can happen in lab leak scenarios.

It's hard to accept in good faith the proposition that not knowing the truth of what happened is preferable to knowing the truth.
It's quite a radical suggestion, but it's not throwing merit out the window. Top 15% is still pretty good.
“If you actually read the cables [...]”

Link?
Ask HN: Can you share your meditation experience?
Any particular style you follow? What effect has it on your life? Any experience that you'd like to share - good or bad
The Rust type system can define parts of the state machine that can help guarantee certain states are true at compile time.

This is very helpful for not using cryptography libraries incorrectly, or not accidentally using the wrong data at different points of implementing functions.

Generally more applicable to higher level use cases, the ring[1] library is a great example of how the algorithms (same impls as OpenSSL) are exposed to end users.

[1]: https://github.com/briansmith/ring
Hell yeah. Agree a lot, and when the fear of losing life is reduced or gone you can go out and do what you want and what needs to be done with your remaining time.

Enjoy your time, relationships, and the beauty of the planet!
And yet from the US tech side of things there is basically a complete lack of awareness on the part of American (or European) staff of which schools are considered good (or the equivalent of Ivy League) in India. I would bet if you asked any engineer or manager who conducts interviews for a FAANG to name the equivalent of MIT in India they would be stumped. (Unfortunately I count myself in this group.)
Then there's also a general lack of trust in credentials - does anyone actually check that you went to the school that you said you did? I suspect this is one reason for the notorious whiteboard interviews - it doesn't really matter where you went to school, you just have to be able to reverse a binary tree.
I'm becoming convinced by the idea that meritocracy itself is bad and a terrible way to organize society. But perhaps I'm biased by being a failure in the meritocratic system.
I'm just vaguely talking about 2 very high-level perspectives and you look for loopholes like I came up with a whole set of rules!

I'm not suggesting that artists should be paid unconditionally per piece, obviously that'd be ridiculous. I'm not suggesting _anything_. I'm just saying that maybe (maybe not) society as a whole finds enough value in art that it wants to make sure that artists can survive. Maybe "the market" is the whole answer, maybe we want the market to have no part in artists' income, maybe it's just one part of the answer (lots of countries like Italy and France heavily subsidize culture & art).

> How do you draw the line?

By drawing a line? We manage to draw lines on unemployment pensions, retirement pensions, research subsidies, children benefits, universal healthcare... It's nothing magical, we draw lines by writing laws that seem to account for different cases, and we know it's not perfect and that there's loopholes in laws, that some people get too much and some others too little, but we iterate and adapt.

But in summary, I don't know! I'm not a politician, an economist, an artist or even a particularly keen art consumer. I just don't believe "the market" is the One True Answer.
> I really don't get their macho developer culture.

I'm inclined to not recognize that as a distinct culture and rather call it an infectious habit. Auditable, maintainable code is a skill, after all.
Some earlier discussion here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26191570
Interesting take. I did not interpret their statement as vindication of being correct but rather that this version of events is a possibility that can't currently be dismissed.
"Look, dude," RNA mutates due to many environmental factors.
It's why living organisms typically now use DNA and only short-term usage of RNA for copying purposes, certainly not as the primary data store.

RNA mutations mimicking proteins are precisely how a non-living entity can, like a bike-thief trying combinations randomly, unlock the lipid or protein sheaths on animal cells and gain direct access to the inputs of a genetic reproduction machine inside the cell.

So, aside from the fact that these folks only have some circumstantial evidence and woo to suggest a lab hypothesis, (not EVEN a theory, not EVEN a hypothesis, nay, mere speculation with a vested political axe to grind, hello) and that fact that all factual evidence of how all previous cross-species virus hops occurred point to this being a relatively common occurence (1918 avian-porcine-human connection occurred in Kansas by the way, not "Spanish")

umm sure

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_hydrolysis
Hold the Code #7
No worries. I too found the article a little bit on the hard to read side. I can't say why specifically, but there seemed to be a lot of details that didn't really add to the story. Perhaps that's the "nuance" you were referring to.
It's a fork of swiss-army chainsaw juggling with training wheels. It is a slowly-dying project because it's not keeping up and distros are dropping it. It's not a viable alternative.
The president could prevent that though and could ask for a re-election in case of a candidate change after the election. So not nothing ;)

Almost no one would argue that because AFAIK that never happened. Pretty sure people would argue that way as soon as this happens.
It was 4.5 in 2019 (the last non-COVID cycle).[0]

[0]https://qz.com/1584304/acceptances-rates-at-top-us-colleges-...
> if there is a bug in a security library nobody dies in the end

The University Hospital Düsseldorf (UKD) in Germany suffered a ransomware attack on September 10, 2020. The attackers exploited a vulnerability in the Citrix ADC that had been known since January but the hospital, unfortunately, had not got around to implementing the fix.

Unfortunately, one patient with a life-threatening illness was diverted to a distant hospital after UKD was deregistered as an emergency care facility. The additional hour’s travel may have been the cause of the patient’s death. On September 18, 2020, German prosecutors launched an official negligent homicide investigation which, if confirmed, would make the patient’s death the first known case of death by hacking.

:|
The only war with China is a trade war and that is only fought by convincing the public to endure the pain. I think everyone would welcome the ability to cut China out of the global supply chain if they could, it’s just about getting the people to go along with it.
Recently from MIT Technology Review ... worth a read:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/03/18/1021030/coronavi...
https://github.com/docker/roadmap/issues/183#issuecomment-74...

> Blocking outgoing network connections to desktop.docker.com can keep you on on the functional 3.0.1 by not allowing the auto-upgrade to 'find' the broken 3.0.2 version, this can be used as a temporary patch.
You'd need somethling like Little Snitch to achieve it, but at least you won't lose a Monday.

I use Little Snitch, usually on "Alert Mode", and I almost breathe a sigh of relief whenever I block an automatic outgoing connection to an upgrade server. It can be distracting and annoying to block connections at a granularity to keep the application working correctly, and sometimes I get a bit fed up and just allow all connections, but usually temporarily. Since I even want to be consulted for outgoing network connections, you bet that I want to be consulted before a software upgrade!
That might begin the next major exodus. Digg -> Reddit -> ???
An addendum by another developer later on doubly misses the point:
https://github.com/docker/roadmap/issues/183#issuecomment-75...
250k/inmate/year still seems high and that would be worst case putting 100% of expense to there wages so yes it'd still be outrageous (outside of the outrage of a constant level of workforce for that long).