skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> if these lapses are so common and so many countries possess the capacity for serious mistakes, why don't we see more regular outbreaks (if not full-blown pandemics) caused by labs? In other words, what makes COVID special?

Perhaps it is not special. One might as well ask what was special about a coin that lands heads three times in a row in its first three flips.
"During its 140th meeting in January 2017, the Executive Board of the WHO shortlisted Tedros as the front runner out of six candidates through two rounds of secret voting. He collected the most votes during both rounds.[citation needed] Tedros "was supported by a bloc of African and Asian countries, including China, which has considerable influence with those members" while "the US, UK and Canada... lent their support to... the British doctor David Nabarro." One observer called it "a really nasty" election."

Basically: "Oh, someone else can play the same game we've played for a century with UN, WHO, IMF, etc. - how dare they?"
> - tooling is abyssmal ( IDE etc ... )

As others have mentioned this is a side effect of how young it is.

> - no real support, I'm not even sure if there is one paid guy anymnore on the project

If paid support is all that counts then most languages would fall into that.

> - it's still immature

Tautological. Nothing can become mature without first being immature.

> - they break the API all the time

Isn't that what a 1.x is for? A stable major version?
Vaguely off topic, but why do so many programmers use substack and medium to write about programming? Why not use their own programming skills to create their own website, rather than consume a service?

I used to love visiting programmers' websites, where programmer's would use their skills to not only write, but create. Now it's largely a drab stream of medium posts.
The power of a software is in composing things via powerful abstractions. When you write a useful library in a PL with GC, you automatically make it unavailable in all applications that can't use GC. What's worse, other libraries that could've built something around yours have to choose whether to limit their applicability to applications with GC or find another way.

But if you have a clever language that navigates this tradeoff and lets you build powerful zero-cost abstractions (C++, Rust, Zig), then it attracts significantly more talent that compounds.
> I've always thought of it as a tax on people who are bad at math. Is that OK?

A weird question considering that you answer it negatively on its own literally in the next paragraph.
Erik Finman became a Bitcoin millionaire at 18
The thing is, it doesn't.

Also, the thing is, our immune system isn't exempt from false-positives. I'm not sure we want a society with as many false-positives.
>I don't apply to places unless I am really confident I am definitely going to be the best candidate, and that's generally been true.

Same. I've been extremely lucky that the only layoff I experienced was on first job out of school and on the first day ("we hired too many people").

The worst rejection I experienced was for a consulting position with a Big 4 consulting firm 10+ years ago. I bombed the brain teaser/problem solving question in the last round (IIRC, why are manhole covers round?). I could tell the interview went downhill after that exchange. At the time I had no prior consulting experience therefore I really wanted to pivot into consulting with that opening.

Come to think of it, I have never asked any brain teaser questions like that in any of the interviews I conducted - maybe that's why. :)

>just get practice interviewing and learning how other companies run the process

I did it a few times but never felt the experience is comparable to looking for work "for real".
> Do you consider Amish people to live in communes?

Nope.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish

I see no mention of sharing equally. They own property, run small businesses, pay income taxes, etc. They do help each other out, but that is not the same thing as sharing everything equally.
Those downsides aren't intrinsic to the design of the language, and are likely to be present for any new, immature language.

The compile times are largely a side effect of the underlying language design, and it isn't likely to get significantly better, which is why I mentioned it.
I'd argue it's vital to front-load the why question; before you can lead an effort you must believe yourself.

The importance of asking why is that you validate whether a project is some ego trip or a legitimate finding worth pursuing.
> but it isn't actionable advice for 99% of the population

Should we stop giving advice unless it’s actionable for 100% of the world’s population?
No, don't have a financial advisor, but considering one now. Before I burnt out, I was also planning to early retire around 50, when my nest egg should be at least $5M. Thanks for your insights. What kind of financial advisor did you use? Fee-only CFP/CFA?
OK but I doubt that Warhol's fame rests on his exceptional screen printing skills.

I get your point but I'm sure we could swap out another example that illustrates the point a little better.
> The fact is that EU is too slow, too risk adverse and 28 countries must agree.

Not strictly true, as for these purposes the UK was still bound by EU rules until Jan 1st this year and did its own thing for the vaccinations without breaking those rules.

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.
I'm currently running a FSBO in a Denver suburb. Listed this past Thursday and with high likelihood I'll be under contract this evening. I can offer a couple interesting stories on how I continue to see the perverse incentives for real estate agents.
> No computation results in first person perspective.

But how would you know that?
"It will be opened up and just raring to go by Easter"
On the other hand, bicycle sales went way way up, and I remember my friends complaining at the start of the pandemic that there were so many people out exercising.

Was this just gym displacement or was it everyone with exercise availability?
Dropbox Completes Acquisition of DocSend
This looks like it understands more about programming so you don’t need to spell everything out

https://serenade.ai/
Sell, then what? Another mortgage if they want to live in the area, or uprooting entirely. That 2 million dollar bay area house might have been a 20k house among 10-40k houses in the 1970s; today it's a 2 million dollar house among 2-10 million dollar houses, so at best you'd be doing a lateral move or downsizing into something grossly overpriced, or line up to become one of the 40 people trying to throw a cash offer somewhere in the stratosphere above list on some midwestern home.

It's a zero sum game unless you upzone and build more housing to meet the demand, because the population of this country has only gone up.
That is anti-free market activity. Unethical by US standards.
There was no point, just a request for clarification which you provided. Thank you.
I think practice interviews are a thing but people generally do it only when they're actively in the process of moving jobs.

e.g., I want a job at Facebook, so I'm going to go interview at some random startups first for sharpness.

I haven't heard of anyone actually taking that advice literally and just randomly giving out interviews even when they have no intention of actually moving from their jobs.
There is actually some talk in the cyber policy space about this topic. [1] In a sense, all the spam, ransomware, and banking trojans that are thrown by other nation states (or their sanctioned criminal groups) raise the noise floor for what U.S. and allies need to address. This helps mask high-skill high-impact attacks (0days) since everyone is trying to figure out how to get their employees to not click spam emails. The U.S. is kinda missing out on creating this noise for our adversaries to deal with.

1. https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2019/october/gran...
So did many other countries. The US is getting those doses faster by preventing the Pfizer factories in the US from exporting any doses, so they have no choice but to sell all of that supply to the US. That's why Canada is getting all of the Pfizer/BioNTech doses it purchased from the Belgium factory rather than one right across the border in the US.
In about 2 months I suspect the US is going to flooding Canada/Mexico with vaccine doses.
No, it's doing bad.

Canada should, by all means, be doing much worse than the EU, being a politically low-power country. Being roughly the same as the EU is bad.

Australia basically has eradicated covid.

Japan has the pandemic largely under control as well.

The EU, for all its socialism and condescension of the US, should by all means be clobbering the US. But it's getting clobbered.
Free public event: “Data and the future of Cities”, Apr 7
Please join us for a free public event:

"Data and the future of Cities" at Orange Silicon Valley, Apr 7, 8:30 AM PM

* Joy Bonaguro, Chief Data Officer, State of CA
* Julie Lein, Managing Partner, Urban Innovation Fund
* Joe DiStefano, CEO, UrbanFootprint
* Host: Will Barkis, PhD, Principal, Business Group , Orange Silicon Valley
I've done security audits and related consulting work upon research labs in my past and the biggest issue they had was - extremist animal activists.

Now I was aware of some reports (nothing official or confirmed) that the Wuham lab was broken into in the summer of 2019.

Interestingly enough their was a lot of political tension at that time involving Hong Kong.

I'm also mindful how China has been rather good at sweeping things under carpets.

So I could speculate how things played out in a way that fits events, but without any smoking gun - it would be just speculation and joining dots that may or may not of been there.

Though even if it was something along the lines of what I'm thinking happened (animal activists with HK connections being politically motivated/manipulated and possibly no idea what type of lab it was beyond they may be hurting animals), the lab was researching virus's from the wild - seeing how they mutate and progress in an effort to see what lays ahead.

So lab event or no lab event - this virus was already in existence in some form and was not a case of if, but when.

One thing I do know, it sure did shine a spotlight upon how connected the World is and also how fragile many supply lines are.
How?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyme_disease#History

> The 2010 autopsy of Ötzi the Iceman, a 5,300-year-old mummy, revealed the presence of the DNA sequence of Borrelia burgdorferi making him the earliest known human with Lyme disease.

Unless it's got conclusive evidence of a functional time machine, it's gonna struggle to explain how a town in Connecticut predates a prehistoric mummy.
I've always wondered about this too - I feel like I am wasting their time.

> And what if they make an offer?

I guess you choose whether to accept it or not. An offer does not oblige you to accept.
This is false. There are many other one party consent states. See https://recordinglaw.com/united-states-recording-laws/one-pa... for more info.
Sure, but does a bunch of "best effort" guesses without enforcement or auditability actually converge?

My experience trying to package things in Nixpkgs by upstreams that don't care about knowing their dependencies says no. Remember that sloppiness is infectious: if I can't wrangle my deps there is little marginal benefit from trying to keep my own packages in good shape. Also Docker being total snake oil. All these things tell me it's loosing battle without a severe course correction.
I know you're being humorous but....

If only there were a big sign on every such device saying "We are spying on you!".

Otherwise how is the average consumer to know which ones to apply boot to?

(Also, the boot needs mass and velocity, acceleration is orthogonal :-))
You can still go to programmers' sites where the software is written by the programmer as well as the content.

The answer to your question is the same as the one to "Why do software engineers use libraries?"
Here is the registration link:
https://app.livestorm.co/orange-business-services/hello-wedn...
Please check the actual cables before jumping to conclusions https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26447042
Just be honest with yourself and them. Say that you have a job that you are happy with, but assessing other opportunities. If they make an offer, you should be able to decide if it's right for you or not and move truthfully from there.
And half the time I click the wrong thing because the related pages thing slides into view just as I click. That javascript can burn in hell
I don't see FIRE as literal retirement but as 'taking the bull by the horns' in terms of doing what you really are passionate about without having to worry you'd end up old and destitute. If I could FIRE I'd still do software development but I wouldn't do boring digital plumbing work and go through corporate cringe culture. And no, right now I could not do that because I have responsibilities that need me to slave away at a corporate job. It's sad when I think about it but I think I adapted and just go forward with it. FIRE seems like a liberation from all that.
not to me. sounds like someone who is tired of dealing with a user that has an axe to grind for years
I'm not claiming that they don't! The article has multiple examples of viruses escaping either individual containment or the lab outright.

What I'm claiming is that the volume of attributed escapes indicates that the average escape has relatively local consequences. In other words: historically, when everything goes wrong, it hasn't resulted in a global pandemic. What, then, made or makes COVID special?

Maybe the answer is raw numbers, and that it was bound to happen eventually. But "one of these incidents was bound to cause a global pandemic" is the exact same reasoning as the (original, still mainstream?) "wet market" theory. What I'd personally like to know is why I should believe one over the other, apart from human propensity to believe conspiratorial claims.
Wait, Wolfram has a physics project? Like, with a lab and everything?

Oh, no, not like with a lab. Like with "make some assumptions about what's going on that match Wolfram's pre-conceived ideas, then run some simulations and see if anything that looks somewhat like reality falls out". It's quite a stretch to call that a "physics project".

From that starting point, I'm skeptical that anything that falls out is going to shed light on actual real-world consciousness.
Note that HIGH severity isn't the highest severity (that's CRITICAL) [1].

The last high severity fix in OpenSSL was this past December.

[1] https://www.openssl.org/policies/secpolicy.html
Falcon 1 got funding from DARPA. Falcon 9 got funding from NASA as part of the effort to develop resupply for ISS. For both efforts there was significant private money put in as well. Musk has said they would have succeeded w/o government money but it would have taken longer, which is debatable.
Or you can search for the event and get to it from the Orange Silicon Valley homepage.
They're fact-checking goddamn memes. Recently they "fact-checked" a meme with Joker on it and text "The truth will set you free. Except on Facebook, where it will get you a 30 day ban", and called it "missing context". Now the entire fanpage is gone.
Also, sorry it's so early! Many of our audience members are in Europe. :)
No, the evidence is there's a relevant viral research lab in the epicentre with known history of safety issues and no animal transmission link have been confirmed.
> China has absolutely no chance to meet head-to-head against a US Carrier Strike Group on neutral territory. Absolutely none, and the US has TEN Carrier Strike Groups.

Right now. But take a look at the shipbuilding output they've achieved. In ten to twenty years, China could easily rival the US Navy.
I'm not a philosopher, but I don't understand why we need an explanation for subjective experience, how could we exist without it? If someone were to shove their hand into an open flame, but they also happened to lack the subjective experience of pain, it's conceivable they might not immediately recoil from the flame. This type of reaction doesn't seem compatible with our evolutionary history, the subjective experience of pain is unbearable because if it wasn't it wouldn't function as an efficient guide for avoiding damage to the body. All other subjective experiences seem to follow from the same logic.
Dont worry. He probably mentioned "tremendously secure" as a requirement to his team.
Its very difficult maybe impossible because China is trying very hard to make it that way.
1. It has nothing to do with being zero-margin. Utility and money are different things, that’s why I said to learn economics.

2. Learning math doesn’t seem like an efficient method of coping with an addiction.
Look, dude, leading experts have looked at this claim and said there is nearly zero chance this has was a lab leak:

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/04/23/8417296...

I mean, yeah, five out of 6 cited experts have ties to EcoHealth Alliance, which in turn has funding ties to one of the two virology labs in Wuhan, but that's, like, just a coincidence. If it wasn't, I'm sure NPR would mention it.

And then Peter Daszak himself went to Wuhan with WHO team to investigate and didn't find anything conclusive. Peter fucking Daszak. You're not going to tell me that someone who was interviewed and cited on this subject by NPR, CNN, CBS, Slate, Democracy Now, Washing Post and The Guardian could be full of shit, right?

/s
The UK has been vaccinating for more than 12 weeks now and the evidence shows that people aren't getting infected in that time period once they've had their first dose.
Writing a library and using it as a Meson dependency directly from upstream Git
You can find some benchmarks here: https://github.com/kostya/benchmarks

With the caveat of course being that benchmarks don't always reflect real world performance.
Upgrade Your SSH Key to Ed25519 (2018)
I used to sell real estate during the last bull cycle of '03-'07. People got the same attitude towards agents then, when the supply is so low and buyers are high, it's relatively easy to sell on your own.

But during a bull market being a buyer's agent is more work. People have full time jobs and can't spend all their time researching or managing multiple offers. Buyer's agents put in dozens to hundreds of hours of work per client and get no guarantee of a return (if your client goes to another agent, you have no recourse and you get no income from that transaction).

If you're getting 20 offers on your house, then 19 of those buyers are gonna be disappointed and gonna have to regroup and find something else.

During a bear market, the opposite is true. Being a listing agent now takes better marketing, networking, presentation and sales skills and it is easier to be a buyer's agent.

At any rate, there are countless numbers of obstacles that can cause a deal to fall through, from financing, inspections, FHA approvals, title issues, personal issues, etc that skilled agents can much more easily navigate and close a deal much more reliably. For me, no two deals were the same, and it was always interesting to try to thread the needle when it at first seemed hopeless.
AT&T claims a phone made in 2019 will stop working[,,,] [Jul 22, 2020]
> I don't understand why WHO is selling it's creditiblity in trade for politics. What is there to gain?

You reason about WHO as an institution, while disregarding the principal-agent problem. The leaders of WHO are very strongly influenced by China, and as a result the institution is working to please China, rather than working to fulfill its nominal mission. Its leaders will see ample rewards for corrupting the institution.
Pre-pandemic, I'd take 3-4 weeks a year. I've only taken a 2 weeks off this past year, mainly because there's no where to go, so I've taken the 2 weeks just for mental health.

Everything you say makes sense and I am considering all of it, especially taking a lower paying, lower stress job.
Not so. Only 12 states require two-party consent to record conversations. Federal law is one-party. There are caveats and rules around all of it, but on a board scale, most of the country only requires single party consent.
There's no issue with the infrastructure, the Pfizer vaccines are not coming, because Israel has priority. I'm not saying Israel did anything wrong, they are protecting their population and payed the price for it, while EU was trying to get the price of the vaccine down instead of thinking about the consequences of every lost day.

Also if infrastructure whould be a problem, US solved it by just hoarding vaccines: at the end of the year they had 40M Moderna vaccines on stock, they weren't able to use it, but they didn't give it to other countries.
The US is exporting vaccines (AstraZeneca) to Canada and Mexico.

https://www.dw.com/en/coronavirus-digest-us-to-send-first-va...
full title = [AT&T claims a phone made in 2019 will stop working, urges users to upgrade
AT&T email about phone shutoffs was so confusing some users thought it was a scam.]

another similar read as well:

https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/07/24/att-tells-customers... [This story was originally published on Jul 22, 2020 and last updated on Jul 24, 2020]
You cannot compare this just by contracts. The US is blocking all exports of COVID-19 vaccines (except for AZ to Mexico and Canada just now). Pfizer/Biontech were until just a few weeks ago only producing in one location inside the EU so they were bottlenecked in fulfilling EU demand. Meanwhile the EU doesn't block exports.

The EU did a bad job but we have to keep the facts straight.
Furthermore leanFIRE is at least somewhat irreversible. Not literally, but if you retire at say 35 with a bare minimum nest egg and you decide 10 years later that this isn't how you want to spend the rest of your life, it will be at least more difficult to insert yourself back into whatever career track you were on.
This is, unfortunately, one of the issues that's been extraordinarily moralized. I've encountered more than a few people who argue that questions about the lab leak theory are inherently bad faith.
"Most of the rest of the web is junk."

Google today limits how much of "the web" (their index) they will let you see.

You are only seeing what they choose to allow you to see.

Google, not the user, determines "relevance" and Google automatically excludes results. in theory this sounds useful. In practice, Google is now limiting max number of results to 200-300 or 500 if you add &filter=0. Retrieving 501 search results for a single search is not allowed. Sorry.

Try a search for some common phrase like "the web". Surely this phrase occurs on more than 500 web pages. Yet Google will limit you to only 231 results. Does that represent the entire www. Then you try "repeat the search with the omitted results included". Google then limits you to 466 results. WTF. What if you searched page titles for some string. Is every string you search going to be found in less than 500 pages.

Google search results today are not representative of the entire www. Not even close.
> the EU is trying to be good and is sharing its vaccinations more or less fairly with other countries

The AstraZeneca factory in the Netherlands is owned by AstraZeneca, not the EU commission. World War 2 ended a long time ago.