skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks! I've added these two to the above list:

Wuhan lab did research on bat viruses, but no evidence of accidental release - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23070031 - May 2020 (76 comments)

Experts disagree on whether Covid-19 could have leaked from a research lab - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22695825 - March 2020 (6 comments)

The others seem to either have no comments or in one case (the Montagnier one) to be more of a distraction. If I missed any other actual threads, please let me know.
It was thought for decades the anomalous precession of Mercury could be due to matter, including an entirely new planet, Vulcan.
>Subsidize food

If the goal is reducing carbon emissions, this is one of the most counterproductive policies imaginable.
> What incentive would the US government have to lie about this though?

It's not the US government here, it's some unnamed official that we don't actually know, and if they work for the government, are a contractor, a former CIA employee, could be anything. Could be someone like Rand Paul or Tom Cotton who is politically motivated to both implicate China and embarrass their own government, as long as they can blame "the other side".
An Analysis of Bitcoin’s Use in Illicit Finance [pdf]
The virus had global implications with a massive economic and global impact.

If a single institution was responsible for this event then it would be clear that we need to improve regulations and safety standards around the entire field of gain of function research.

If a lab leak is a possible explanation, the implication for future gain of function research and associated regulations are massive. It's not as simple as letting the lab in question make their process changes to avoid future global pandemics.
Moms family lived in Vegas in the 50s. It was a thing to go watch the detonations. My aunt told me she had her hand up in front of the explosion, and the flash was so bright that she could see through her hand.
We got to do this, in the United States, when each of our kids were born, living in a village in desert Southwest.

We were very fortunate.

And as the area had been designated as economically distressed, there were other support policies in place, not optional, and covered by either private insurance (via my employer), or public grants (from state or federal government programs) -- 48 hours stay in hospital, a quiet, private room. It was a slow day for the hospital. And a social worker would come visit our house a few times, a few weeks later.

Posting these personal anecdotes because it might be of interest to know how different things can be, out in remote locations of the US, different cultures and history.
> Does this mean that one could make the page interactive with server side rendering, but it's not normally done?

It can be done, it is actually, how things were done a quarter of a century ago: server-side rendered content with tiny triggers for interactivity directly embedded in the code. In the next step, as complexity grew and as an attempt at separating concerns, you would send the content and along with it a bundle of code for interactivity (which may have been sent in the same request or as a separate resource). Then, we got frameworks. Technically, these could do this as well, but it doesn't match their basic pattern.
firefox "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?limit=500&profile=all&search=spa"

At the top is the link to the Disambiguation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spa_(disambiguation)

A more specific search, e.g., "single page", will not redirect.

In some ways, for discovery, Wikipedia's search engine is better than Google's. For one, it is non-commercial and does serve ads based on past surveillance of the user's activity. Second, the user can retrieve larger numbers of results and page through them quickly without triggering a (false positive?) defensive measure than temporarily blocks her IP address from retrieving results for a defined period. Third, it is curated to remove commercial content rather than curated to further a business purpose in online advertising.

No wonder Google steals Wikipedia content for "instant answers" or whatever they call it. Wikipedia search works quite well.
This is some impressive mental gymnastics.

Why was the lab leak claim labeled “fringe” in the first place?

You want Zuckerberg deciding what ideas you should and shouldn’t see?
This is a pretty strong case for not adding generics, and I say this as someone who doesn't particularly enjoy the range loops splattered everywhere.

What was pretty straight-forward code, just a bit verbose, becomes a tangle of library functions being composed. It's not shorter, it's not easier to understand, adds dependencies, and most likely will not perform any better. There is nothing gained.
People see fish sauce and are shocked but Worcestershire sauce is a fish sauce.
Yes you can, simply as a string.

Here's your parsingMatrix from your other comment:

{
"if":[
{
"or":[
{
"===":[
{
"var":"credentialData.rapidSarsCov2PCRTest.testResult"
},
"negative"
]
},
{
"===":[
{
"var":"credentialData.covid19Vaccination.hasVaccination"
},
true
]
}
]
},
"valid",
"invalid"
]
}

Here it is rewritten in a way more similar to how a human writes Lisp:

{ "if": [{"or": [{"===":[{ "var":"credentialData.rapidSarsCov2PCRTest.testResult" }, "negative" ]},
{"===":[{ "var":"credentialData.covid19Vaccination.hasVaccination" }, true ]}]},
"valid",
"invalid"]};

Here it is as an s-expression, which you can store in a string:

(if (or (= (var "credentialData.rapidSarsCov2PCRTest.testResult") "negative")
(= (var "credentialData.covid19Vaccination.hasVaccination") #t))
"valid"
"invalid")

But, if you really have an intense hatred for adding an additional parsing step on top of the JSON, you can still improve over JsonLogic with just JSON primitives used in a cleaner way that more directly represents that s-expression.

["if", ["or", ["=", ["var", "credentialData.rapidSarsCov2PCRTest.testResult"], "negative"],
["=", ["var", "credentialData.covid19Vaccination.hasVaccination"], true]],
"valid",
"invalid"]

It's still uglier than s-expressions where you can tell symbols and strings apart with more ease, but without all the syntactical noise of JSON objects combined with arrays.
From what I understand, this lab and those like it likely have/had a large backlog of samples they had received from field researchers but had not yet had an opportunity to identify, sequence, or otherwise mess around with. A procedural error in handling a sample in that backlog could have occurred, at least in theory.
And I can't even count the number of web sites (from companies with plenty of engineering budget!) that render the gray placeholder UI, but when the real data comes in, it doesn't even remotely line up with the placeholder UI (which is the whole point). I totally get how it happens: the placeholder UI and real data UI isn't sharing code, and just relies on dumb luck that the next person who changes the real data UI also changes the placeholder UI to match it.
I think it's an unfortunate effect of mass media. If anything however I think the internet made it 1% better, not worse.

I wrote about the change from a world of actual dialogue to one of mass media, here: https://simonsarris.substack.com/p/are-we-still-thinking
So, from what I was told. It has to be shown with the actual extension. For example

https://medicare.com/

This i why I use medicare.dev and medicaid.dev and NEVER just use the naked terms.

This is also what I have seen everywhere else, can you point me in the right direction on this? I really appreciate the input.
A bigger cost failure is Spatial OS, from Improbable. They spent about $400M of VC money to build the underpinnings of the Metaverse. You had to host your virtual world/game on Google's cloud, and there was a complicated pay-per-transaction scheme, billed to the game operator.

Three reasonably good free-to-play indy games were built on it.
They all went broke within months, because the operating costs were so high. Now, as far as their website says, they have no real customers. But they have enough money left to fund three in-house game studios, in hopes of getting a hit.

They did license the technology to the NetEase unit of Tencent in China, where it was used for Nostos, a MMO with great art that a good player could finish in a few hours. It began shutdown on March 17th, 2021.

I'm interested in seeing the Metaverse of Ready Player One/Snow Crash happen. Second Life is the high water mark of that idea. Most of what's come out since has been worse. Facebook Horizon, anyone? Virtual worlds turn out to be expensive to run from a compute standpoint. Most games are able to offload much of the work to the clients, plus much of the asset processing is done once when the game world is built. Fully modifiable multiuser virtual worlds have to do much more server-side, which costs.

On the other hand, the Well, mentioned on HN today, once cost US$6/hour. For a text only social network. Compute progress marches on.

Incidentally, Linden Lab is still looking for a VP of engineering for Second Life.[1] As a user, builder, and someone coding a third party client for it, but definitely not an employee, I'd like to see them get someone good.

[1] https://www.lindenlab.com/careers?gh_jid=4448559003
Harvey Schlossberg, Cop with a PhD in Defusing a Crisis, Dies at 85
Stored in what form.

A lab having a bunch of samples in a refrigerator doesn't mean that a spill causes them all to spontaneously recombinate.
Almost any product that is built without input from the people who are going to use it is going to be inherently worse. Imagine a team creating a camera from scratch who are not photographers, and who never included any photographers in the design process. It would be a functioning camera, I’m sure, but it’s usability for real-world use would almost certainly be worse than those developed by teams that include professional photographers.

The effect may be less for accessibility features, but it would still be there. I’d highly suggest anyone building out accessibility features to at least consult with disability advocates and other end users.
I agree they need to be lazy. This is why it's problematic - Go is only adding generics and not laziness.
MobX does this for JS, in a more generalized way that can be paired with any DOM-update strategy (or other arbitrary side-effects)
Anyone else think we should jail the entire company in the name of public safety? We have officers who actually work for the government running roughshod over individuals why would we allow corporations to do this?
> design JS frameworks to not take over the entire application.

Facebook did just that with React. React doesn't have to be used only as a single page app. Use it for just a single component on a page if you want.
This ad might be illegal because you can't just discriminate against people like that. It disqualifies pretty much anyone who isn't a cis white male.

(please consider this my application, thank you for your time and attention. QED.)
Matt Yglesias' slowboring.com is amazing.
> That said, one "trick" is to have your SPA silently listen to your server for app version updates, and when there's a new version, just make your client-side Link component do a full page load (instead of a client-side route transition). Then at least you'll have the same behavior as traditional HTML websites.

I think the author’s point is that it’s sort of a bummer that we have to deal with this just to get back to “normal”. I agree that it seems under-discussed, too.
Interesting, I did look at MobX briefly but pretty quickly concluded it seemed like overkill for our use case where Redux, Redux Toolkit and Thunk would pretty much solve everything we needed and seemed comparatively simple to follow, I'll definitely take a look into useReducer and useContext though, that looks like a potentially viable option for the majority of cases.
> So here's the thing: the more improbable thing about the lab leak hypothesis is that the lab would even have had enough virus, in virion form, to cause even 1 human infection.

I reject that. Lab leaks have been known to occur, with human casualties:

> "After the outbreak of SARS in 2003, labs around the world began studying the virus, which had come perilously close to causing a global pandemic. Since that time, there have been no less than six lab leaks of SARS. The first took place in at the National University of Singapore, where a graduate student contracted the disease from a contaminated sample. This was followed by an incident in Taiwan, when a researcher contracted it, most likely during a botched decontamination of laboratory waste. Then several leaks took place at China’s National Institute of Virology. In one case, a researcher passed the infection to her mother, who died of SARS. In each case, human error, most likely exacerbated by inadequate safety protocols, accounted for the leaks."

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-05-27/covid-...
Because much of it is fake news being pushed by the elite. Look at precisely what we're discussing: the lab leak scenario, which Facebook labeled with warnings (at best) or simply banned/deleted/removed (at worst).

And now, the media establishment is doing some kind of re-think, and it turns out that while far from proven, a lab leak (which covers a variety of scenarios, most not involving any kind of "engineered" virus) is a reasonable hypothesis. If that's so, why the capricious banning and warning labels?

We've seen similar situations play out in the past year with masks (at first, they were unnecessary and racist, then absolutely critical, now it's changing again). How about just let people decide for themselves? There will always be some conspiracists on both the left and right, but most people figure this stuff out in a reasonable manner.
The problem is that the considerations are never adequate when they don't actually involve people who are directly affected.

I remember one time my mom told me about a meeting she attended hosted by an organization in our state called ‘The Council for the Blind’. I think it was about how and where to get your COVID-19 vaccines.

The presenter was a sighted man on the council. Apparently, although he could see his own notes, he had some trouble getting his PowerPoint presentation to display on the Zoom call. He spent 10 or 15 minutes fiddling with it before an attendee finally butted in and said ‘You know, most of us won't be able to see your slides at all even if you get them working. Why don't you just go ahead and post a link to them after the presentation?’. There are lapses of judgment that are possible even when you have every reason to, abstractly and externally, ‘consider’ the position of someone with a disability you don't have, but that just never occur when you have that disability.

I know it's a silly story, but that kind of stuff happens ALL THE TIME. It's also really common for websites or software to have accessibility features that are so ill-considered, they're practically unusable.

You're right that positions for, e.g., blind software engineers, could be hard to fill for small companies. But you don't have to involve disabled users only at that level to make sure that they're part of your development process. You could have disabled users as testers with much less difficulty, by reaching out to relevant organizations for (perhaps paid) volunteers.
Gay can still mean that, but in the context it does not.
That's not what "null hypothesis" means.

The null hypothesis in this case is certainly animal origin. The idea of a null hypothesis is to identify what the data would look like if they are purely due to chance, if there's no intervening effect to be discovered.

In fact this is part of what makes the lab leak hypothesis weak: it'll be difficult to rule out the null hypothesis without fairly direct evidence of a lab leak, and the lab leak has low probability for many reasons, not least of which is that it's a low probability occurrence in general.

The whole idea is just an excuse for people to larp as CIA analysts.
A dictionary is supposed to clarify meaning. How many people know what the meaning of fop is these days? It’s not very common in books these days. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Fop&year_start...

A synonym for fop in that article is macaroni. If the entry said “a sandal worn by macaroni” it would be extremely confusing for a modern reader.
I know you got downvoted into oblivion but I enjoyed that short movie. It changed the way I look at the moon. Thanks for sharing.
Very interested in the new API to run dynamic scripts. I wonder if Chrome will release a privileged API to run RHS to allow userscripts to continue working.
Never bothered me.
Move the function name into the parens, delete the commas. Nothing to it.
Note that the NIH funding was cancelled under the Trump administration. That administration also attacked its own public health officials, denied the science, catastrophically failed in its response, and was generally incompetent. There's no reason to believe the cancellation was anything other than posturing for political reasons, coming from an Oval Office that never stopped referring to COVID-19 as the "Chinese Virus" while pushing hydroxychloroquine and suggesting that a cure was as simple as shoving a flashlight up your butt while drinking bleach.
Remember - people were called fascists + racists for mentioning or discussing the lab leak theory.
Related meanings of break are older than the telegraph.[1] Maybe the printing press.

[1] https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/break+it+to+you
The history of lab leaks
Yes, not that I want him to kick one off either though. His cabinet is no nonsense, he has 8 years in office working with the top mill brass already, and also he doesn't tweet the first thing on his mind. It seems like an inocuous jab, but let's not forget Trump literally tweeted a classified intel picture from our mill satellites. That's the type of incompetence that can't be tolerated.
lol "legit company". I think the post proves otherwise.
There was plenty of evidence from the start.[1] There isn’t really much new evidence now, the only thing that changed is that Trump is gone.

[1] https://project-evidence.github.io/
Computer science is essentially a management science, and vice versa.

---- Lin Pengcheng

Creator of Computer Science Management School

Creator of Management Science Computer School

The Grand Unified Programming Theory: The Pure Function Pipeline Data Flow with Principle-based Warehouse/Workshop Model

https://github.com/linpengcheng/PurefunctionPipelineDataflow
Well there's also what might be called the "eschatological perspective on technology": time in development is spent only once, but user life time and technical resources are spent million times (at least, if it's a significant project). In this context, we may also speak of the "eschatological debt" of a project.
Sad indeed, there is a huge problem lurking for youtube as this industry spreads and too many creators will get pissed off and move on they will have to find a way to factually deal with it or die a lingering death.
The Chinese way has some merit. True verified name only and one account will cut out a lof of the anonymous arracks. Look at how many people get throwaway HN accounts...
If we can entertain the possibility that this disaster came from gain of function research then surely that field should be reconsidered regardless of what actually happened in this particular case.
> it is incumbent upon them to provide a reference, not the reader.

According to who? This is not a debate class. If you are motivated to understand another you may well want to look up what they are saying. What are you adding when you reply with “never heard of her” instead of doing a quick search?

I regularly put sources in my comments but this time I was in the middle of other things.
I actually left a job once because not only was the code bad, but my manager wanted me to effectively lie to make him look better.

Ran out as soon as I could. In general it's worth remembering that if your overall team isn't performing well you still can be fired regardless of what your immediate manager thinks.

For better or worse I had a childhood which taught me not everyone's going to like me, but you just need to find people who do. In the case of employers I've left several places where I just didn't like the culture. It's worked extremely well for me.
Just a reminder that a lab leak of SARS had already happened in Beijing in early 2000s, and for which Chinese CDC officials were publicly punished.

It was even reported in CCP owned China Daily:
https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-07/02/content...
For dynamic websites, React should always be SSR first with optional client hydration. Next.js makes React SSR easier, if you're using Next.js for non-static sites, and not doing SSR, you shouldn't be using Next.js.

Browsers have decades of optimization to show HTML to you as fast as possible. Before scripts, sometimes before stylesheets. Browsers can't optimize the extended network dance you need to do to download and parse KB of Javascript before you can _start_ fetching data.

SSR with partial client Javascript hydration. It's a solved problem, but few people do it.
The one thing that’s bugging me about this is the particular JSON structures employed. They’ve gone for this:

{"*operator*": [...args]}

With one special case:

{"*operator*": single_arg}

(This special case confirms that JsonLogic isn’t using arrays as a top-level construct, otherwise it’d be ambiguous. Well, it confirms either that or that it’s even worse-designed than it looks. Anyway, I’m going to assume arrays are free to use as a top-level construct.)

In short, you end up using an object and an array for each element. Yet the object is strictly being used as a two-tuple, and objects are a roundly bad idea for this application: the only way you’re ever going to be looking at it is “it’s an object, confirm that it has only one pair in it, then pull the first key out, and pull its value out”. This is quite inefficient in both memory and runtime performance. The only thing it really has going for it is that it guarantees that the key is a string, which is significantly overrated given the other more expensive bits of validation and access costs that it forces.

So the whole thing would be made more efficient (and arguably even more robust) by just changing it to an two-element array:

["*operator*", [...args]]
["*operator*", single_arg]

And then the natural next step is to say “why are we using two arrays rather than just one?” and flatten it into this:

["*operator*", ...args]

This is conveniently shorter to type, and eliminates the nasty single-argument special case too.

That’s very probably going to be more efficient on fixed-arity operators (which is most of them) and on potentially-unary operators, though it’s possible that it may be more expensive on larger calls if you need to slice the array during evaluation in order to exclude the operator.

So the end result I’ve suggested here is simpler, more consistent, smaller on the wire and in memory, faster, more robust across diverse languages and environments—in short, superior in pretty much every way. The only real place it might not be superior is auto-formatting, where you lose probable separation of arguments from operator (subjectively often desirable) but reduce the indentation level by one (more strongly desirable). It’s also more S-expressiony!
Russian argument: If you're going to throw a hissy fit and refuse to fly over Belarus, you can just fuck off then.
Webshits continue the war against people who aren’t webshits, is the lede you were looking for.

Wow, flagged in 30 seconds. Touchy crowd. Getting a little close to reckoning on the Web’s impact on your neighbors, eh? Don’t worry: I know you showdead, those of you most responsible for where we are.
Nobody teaches that.

You don't offload things to the client in order to save money. You offload things when it will improve performance. Most of the processing power and bandwidth will still be incurred by the server, just at a different time in the lifecycle of the app.