skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To do that, we would need to trust the USA to have our shared best interest in mind. I don't have that. The EU is notoriously bad in protecting their self-interest, the US is notoriously good at that.

I want to the EU to be a close ally to the US, but it is not the EU who is the problem here.
> There are USB drives that do vaguely similar things but it's all in software.

Sigh. When are people going to accept that software switches are inherently not secure? How many times must these fail?

> It's difficult to do that unless the filesystem has append only functionality, metadata blocks are rewritten all the time even if data isn't.

There's no reason to continue writing anything to a hard drive once the backup to it is finished.
The UK (and the US) used emergency provisions to grant temporary approvals early. The EU pretty much followed the normal procedure but with an accelerated schedule.

The EU branded the UK's emergency approval "reckless".
FemtoVG: 2D Graphics API in Rust
>Not sure why they'd do that - there's far more infrastructure for ARM.

It'll be about patent licencing fees. Those couple of dollars per chips really add up when you have hundreds of thousands of machines running all over the world.

>RISC is a backwater.

RISC-V has been gaining a lot of attention recently. These chips are shipping in hard drive controllers now, and they're only going to spread.
> The EU nations generally like to work together and negotiate as one, as doing so saves money; money was the wrong thing to optimise for in this case.

Right. Probably should have optimized for human life. Hindsight is 20/20.
There's a big difference between "If I lose/quit my job I really need to find one in the next few months although it shouldn't be too hard" and "If I lose/quit my job, I don't really need another one but maybe I'll find one if it's a good enough match someday... or not."

The second is a lot more relaxing.
William Shatner Taps AI to Preserve Himself for Future Generations
The EU actually signed a contract with AstraZeneca on August 27, a day earlier than the UK: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/02/17/europe/uk-astrazeneca-vac....
> The US is getting those doses faster by preventing the Pfizer factories in the US from exporting any doses

With democrat president? Who would have thought.
Restart your services or better reboot your server to be sure.
What's your point?

If a bio research lab is accidentally allowing the public to come in contact with anything it is studying, this is something we need to

1. investigate

2. identify

3. prevent

Saying "it's possible this could have happened anyway" is not meaningful. I would prefer we identify how it did happen. If a lab leaked it, this would inform future discussions on what lab practices and research projects have acceptable risk/reward.

Ignoring the possibility this leaked from a lab until you have bulletproof evidence is nonsensical, particularly when investigator access is restricted. This, more than anything, is the point the article is making. Lab containment failures have a well documented history.
Do you feel that I was misquoting you because you don't think of it as a belief as you prefaced it with "IMO", or do you take issue with me translating "very likely" to "P>0.5"? (Or maybe something else?)

I wasn't trying to be confrontational about it, just trying to understand why that's your opinion. In particular I was curious about your "very likely", because my priors are that most infectious diseases are not caused by lab leaks, and that there's no particular evidence of a lab leak here (though as you say plenty of reason to believe such evidence would be suppressed). But it's not my field so I'm not strongly attached to those priors.

I'd certainly agree with the article's premise that the lab theory should not be dismissed out of hand, but I think that's a different conclusion than saying "it's very likely to have originated in a lab leak". My takeaway from the article is "it's possible, but still not very likely", though I suppose I'd give a higher % of probability now than before reading the article.
Hmm, what can you do with pointers in nim that you can't do in Crystal?
>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

Do you imagine a future where nobody is able to drive cars? Not even for fun?

I want all serious software that's written in C to be replaced with something like Rust, but I write C for fun. It's fun to do dangerous things. It's just bad to have danger as the modus operandi.
> 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).

Then we shouldn't be doing _gain of function_ research on the types of viruses that can cause these outbreaks.

> 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.

What's the cost-benefit analysis for running the lab in the first place? Was any of it's research used in producing the vaccine? If it's all about saving lives, can't we be mad at both the lacking response and the laboratory at the same time?

> I don't care where it came from [...] We should get better at responding fast and saving lives (my opinion).

Those two goals seem in conflict with each other. Good offense is something we should aspire too.. but that doesn't mean we should entirely ignore defense as well.
Yeah, but to read the backup you've got to attach it to your compromised system. Boom, it's corrupted.

A physical read-only switch is required.
Virus is absent in blood or urine.
How bad of a deal it is to sell your credibility should have been obvious since April 2020.

The lies about masks may have helped with shortages in the short term. The result is now that people rightfully distrust everything their governments say.
Yes, but getting better at dealing with infectious diseases that we had ~1.5 months of advance warning for doesn't score political points among the base. The base does not like most of the machinery that is required to 'get better' at epidemic control.

If your goal is not good governance, but getting re-elected by your base, that is not something you need to optimize for.
Who says? We used to could.not measure light precisely, only vague notions of color. Maybe we are just in a similar state.
Maybe, just maybe you can care about two things at the same time? Maybe, just maybe, a Wuhan lab leak was concealed by the Chinese gov't to save face, thus shrinking the amount of time we had to respond fast in order to save lives?
The free market saves the day again!

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/20/world/europe/europe-vacci...

> While Washington went into business with the drug companies, Europe was more fiscally conservative and trusted the free market.
We need more Brokers in California.

For years, a Broker’s license could be obtained by 8 courses, An easy test, and a four year degree.

The Realator's Lobby decided their were too many Brokers.

They introduced a bill (A bill requiring years of training under a broker in order to get the license) to Arnold Schwarzenegger. Arnold said he didn’t see the need, and didn’t want to stifle competition.

Governor Brown signed the bill though. (I stopped judging a politician by there party that day. Both sides take a lot of money.)

I would love to see the entire real estate industry decimated. We have given a very few of these people so much money for what? In the mean time, I would like to see more Brokers. More competition for the popular cheerleaders, handholding, and Omission and error insurance?

Sorry about the tone. Realator’s have always irritated me, and most people pick them out by a personality contest?
I think it sounds interesting. Do you really like to spend your days trying to bring people down? Is that fulfilling?
I think you mean 1 out of 4?

Swift is the only one on that list that really feels tied to any particular platform.

C# has been extremely portable for years now thanks to .NET Core. Even SQL Server runs on Linux these days, if you really just enjoy spending money.

Java has always had a strong focus on portability, of course.

Nim... I don't know much about. Doesn't it compile to C? I don't think it intentionally has any particular platform affinity, although I wouldn't be surprised if it worked best on Linux.
They promised us that the candidate of the strongest party will get the job.
Respectfully, there is still a sizeable contingent of the US population that thinks that the pandemic is "no worse than the annual flu" and that efforts to combat the pandemic are at best a wild over-reaction and at worst some kind of sinister plot by the government.
Agree. I think a fair approach rather than targeting price would have been to pre-allocate a percent of the economic impact of the lockdown.

If pandemic lockdowns cost about 10% of annual GDP, then pre-allocating 1% of GDP to vaccines seems pretty conservative if anything. That means something like $100-200 billion for the US or EU.

The EU should have just pre-allocated $100 billion on vaccines. That would have been enough to secure every adult a vaccine from the big four manufacturers, plus leave a big pot of money leftover for contingencies.
Do you have a source on that? I was under impression that the UK manufactures their entire AZ stock and the only vaccine produced in the EU for the UK is Pfizer/BioNTech
Let's say you do eek out some amount that could be called profit. You get taxed on it according to your highest rate bracket. Then you have maintenance costs. These can be substantial and come as a surprise. If you get good renters and they pay for ten years you might get to a point where the whole deal was worth your time. You can always skim a little but it's really a long term prospect. Maybe you get lucky and are building significant equity each month as well. I don't really count that. Maybe a tennant implodes and you are stuck with a huge repair bill for some fucked up reason. It is perilous and fraught with inconvenience...not easy money. Forgot to mention insurance.

Oh yeah, one of the towns where I have property just pulled a new rental regulation out of thin air requiring a notification filing and fee for each rental property per year or on each new tennant lease. This country is turning into regulation hell.
Atorvastatin+Mechanism+of+Action+|+Health+Lines
Worrying about where it came from is misdirection to distract us from the real issue that you pointed out: That nearly all countries totally failed to effectively deal with it and contain the spread, resulting in a body count that should be totally unacceptable. We got extraordinarily lucky that it wasn't super deadly. Imagine if the next COVID is 20X deadlier and hits uniformly across age ranges. We're doomed if we take the approach we took this time around.
I'm not sure what part of what I said you've misread as only helping the EU. For the avoidance of doubt, I think we should act with compassion, trying to save lives regardless of the place those people were born in.
In some markets, e.g. San Francisco, it does not make financial sense to buy and renting is a better option.
ActivityPub by definition doesn't work with a static site. But check out this project which offloads the ActivityPub parts for any site assuming you can make a request there as part of your static site build process https://fed.brid.gy/
> it would not be able to be reconstructed in the archive

Much the same way as if one were to look at our own neural connections, it would not reveal our memories. The recall of some pieces lead to a reconstruction of the feeling or the memory itself, and so it is with archived data of the Internet. Maybe this article reveals how accurately archives work when used in conjunction with our own mental ones.
My favorite conspiracy theory bend on this is that it’s the best place to intentionally release it too, especially if WIV is absolutely not studying anything like COVID-19 because it looks so appealing to dig into the bio safety level four lab, but there’s probably nothing there so it will be eventually dismissed.

All that said I think it is really unlikely and a pointless effort as government bureaucracies wouldn’t be able to even formulate a reaction to an intentional or even accidental release so I think we will not try too hard to imply that for political reasons.
Again: Soriot is lying. This link says the UK signed in june : https://www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-europe-inno...

Except it didn't, the UK signed in august.

The link also says they wouldn't export EU manufactured vaccines, except Italy blocked an export to Australia a couple of weeks ago.
I Looked Through All 5k Images in Beeple's $69M Magnum Opus
Interestingly enough, 'du pont' would basically translate to "from the bridge". And these do connect (bridge) two sources. Sometimes history works backwards?
I'd also assign a small but non-zero probability to the US not wanting to point the finger because they prefer the scenario where the general population comes to believe that the lab accident was responsible, but no hard evidence is ever produced.

Why? Because it seems like US institutions and people (right up to Fauci) were involved in this research and may not want the domestic blowback.

Conveniently the CCP don't want a paper trail either.

I'd be pretty sure the various scenarios have already been gamed out in both countries.

Edit: Not sure why this is being downvoted, but just in case it’s a reflex because I mentioned Fauci: yes, he was head of NIAID, and yes, the NIH did fund this type of research at the WIV. The grants are public information.
First some countries refused to give the AZ vaccine to people over 65, then they recklessly suspended it altogether, now some countries refuse to give it to people under 55. That's ridiculous.

Distribution is no more a problem than in the UK. The EU has probably the best infrastructure in the world and vast resources, while being smaller than the US.
One likely explanation, Schuetz and others say, is that when the economic crisis hit, more people decided to move down the housing ladder to save money. There was already a shortage of affordable units, though. So, this surge in demand for lower-price-point homes ended up bidding those rents higher.

Housing experts say other factors may be at play, too. Some lower-income areas were gentrifying even before the pandemic, leading to higher rents.
>However, the overall incentive structure is for property owners to keep housing supply low, to increase the value of existing properties with minimal investment.

For single non commercial property owners. This would be news to the commercial real estate investors that keep trying to develop residential areas and apartment buildings. If you're in a city with high rents and land costs, see who is trying to build and who is trying to block. It's all public information.
Exactly. This is one the first things we have to fix. The relationship between the nations government and the EU is in parts absurd.
In the example you gave, I have the opportunity to interact with this third party, demand to know why they're there, and may choose to leave, with my privacy intact, if I don't like their presence. This is all part of the process of informed consent.

Clearly this analogy, particularly with respect to "informed" and "consent", does not apply to a Facebook widget on a site.
Embedded systems can have their software burned into ROMs. It can't be corrupted. But nooooo, people put it into EEPROMs with a software write-enable switch.
No, that is not my claim.
If it is indeed "sloppy lab" leak the virus and we don't care, it will happen again.
Yes, but knowing others, particularly in other companies, expect downtime on Tuesdays as a result, wouldn't you also pick the day everyone expects that downtime?
A government could have a “burner” account where all tainted money could be sent. A system where you are warned of tainted deposits (for example, use a micro-transaction from a “US taint detected” account as the message). You have x days to pay the received tainted money to the burner account, or your account gets tainted too.

Of course every jurisdiction would want to be in on the “free” bitcoins so lots of complications...
I don’t think many people begrudge people who ride horses for fun or write security software in assembly for fun.
This is not common for anyone, not even in SV.
Nonsense. This isn’t really about countries exporting/not exporting. These vaccine deals are with private companies who produce their product around the world. Just because vaccines are manufactured in a specific country doesn’t make them property of that country.

Whichever country is contractually at the front of the line will have their order fulfilled first/according to the terms of the contracts.

The EU wasted months negotiating lower prices and then took longer with approvals.

There is no good guy or bad guy (at least until the UK or EU blocks exports preventing execution of the private contracts - at that point the country blocking the exports becomes the bad guy).
The number of people that I've seen off in their own worlds doing their makeup or tapping away on their phone using Tesla's Autopilot was reason enough for me to avoid those cars while driving. I've seen someone using Autopilot nearly drive another car off the road when lane switching before, and the driver was just nodding off as if nothing happened.

Tesla's FSD scares the absolute shit out of me.
I've been waiting for this. I played around with Crystal earlier in its development, and even threw some money the devs' way to help with costs.

Now I'm going to spend time writing something non-trivial in Crystal. Very excited!
We had 1.5 months [1][2][3] of clear warning that this is a serious epidemic.

When China locks 35 million people in their homes, and this makes the New York Times, and we don't do anything to respond for another month, and we don't do anything meaningful for a month and half... What we have is a domestic, not a foreign problem.

These articles made the news on January 8th, January 23rd, and February 7th. The first travel ban, that only covered China was on... January 30th. The first travel ban on Europe was on March 11th (At this point, Europe had ten times the active COVID cases that China did at the end of January. Why did we wait so long to stop travel from it?)

The first state lockdown was in New York State, on March 22nd.

Exactly how much advance warning did we need to deal with this pandemic? Three months? Three years? Do you think that a president who would constantly deny reality, to the point of claiming that there would be zero cases in the US by April would have handled this crisis any better, regardless of how much lead time he was given?

I'll also eat my shoe if the CIA and/or the NSA weren't at least as aware as the NYT of the seriousness of the situation in China (It can't be hard, my co-workers with relatives in China were all aware of it from, you know, talking to folks back phone. On the phone.) And if they weren't - why on Earth are we wasting billions of dollars on their cloak-and-dagger budgets, when I can get a better take on current events by having lunch with my team?

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/08/health/china-pneumonia-ou...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/23/world/asia/china-coronavi...

[3] https://time.com/5779678/li-wenliang-coronavirus-china-docto....
The article does cite eviction moratorium effects, but from a different angle:

Landlords stuck with tenants who can’t pay may try to offset these losses by raising rents on everyone else. Rents in lower-end units tend to already be close to operating costs, Schuetz noted, so landlords may have slim profit margins.
First of all, I don't know if this is purely contractual or not. Perhaps it is, perhaps it's not. But I remember earlier in the vaccination campaign the news talked about how the companies will be free to export after they have fulfilled their 100-million-dose obligation to the US, but later that changed to 300-million doses. Perhaps this was part of the original contact, perhaps it was forced on them later on. Regardless:

The problem with this approach is that if this becomes the norm, which so far it seems it will, the next pandemic, the rest of the world will be mega super screwed. Right now, the saving grace of us folks in Canada is that the EU, unlike US and UK, did not prohibit vaccine exports. If they had put the same barriers, we Canadians (as well as most other nations on earth) would have had to wait for the great powers (US/UK/EU) to finish vaccinating their 16-year olds before we could start vaccinating our 90-year olds. So many would have died who would have survived if the vaccines were shared between countries based on population or elderly demographics. It would have been a net gain for US/UK/EU, a net loss for Canada/etc and a net loss for the world as a whole. That's because when you prioritize not-at-risk population from country A over at-risk population from country B, for every A citizen you save, you cause 7900 citizens from country B to die [0].

Also, let's not pretend any country could have signed such a contract with the vaccine manufacturers. If Canada tried to sign a contract with a US manufacturer that said they would give Canada their 96-million-dose contract before selling a single dose to the US, I bet the US government would have ripped the contact to shreds and imposed their own rules on it. Only the countries in which the vaccine producers are located can sign such contracts. So in practice, there is little difference between contract and rule-making in terms of who can do it and what the outcomes are.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investi...
no, more like state-subsidised highbrow-culture-focused TV channel, which will have to be heavily curated and hard to get into, but which will pay reasonable money to the lucky ones who managed to get commissioned

UBI would provide peanuts for everyone and devalue the content even more. Everybody and the fleas on the backs of their dogs will be streaming and influencing.