skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think there’s some nuance here. The virus could have a perfectly natural origin in bats, but not be able to infect humans in its original form. There are many ways the virus could have come to infect humans, such as by manipulating it directly, via gain of function research, or even just by a random mutation that managed to infect a lab worker (seems unlikely since it’s alleged there may have needed to be an intermediate species). Whether you could consider the virus “lab created” or “man-made” at that point is maybe a matter of debate. Even the Guardian article on Facebook’s policy changes seemed to conflate these scenarios, so I’m not entirely sure what the changes were.

But they’re all a far cry from the more extreme narrative of “this was deliberately engineered to infect humans and/or as a bioweapon”, which is not what is being suggested here (nor, it seems, was that ever what Tom Cotton suggested).
Western Massachusetts is (or was in the case of Eric Carle) home to many famous children's book authors. Mo Willems, Norton Juster and Jane Yolen to name a few.

Here is a good article with more info:

https://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2017/04/05/how-western-...
Good to hear, I failed an interview with them at the sixth step or so because I make a point not to remember easily googleable trivia, bet their engineers are traversing rb trees on paper off memory like crazy right now trying to find a solution
Feds side with Massachusetts in New Hampshire telecommuting tax fight
It’s such a good question, and it wasn’t just the industrial revolution either, a whole bunch of stuff happened in Europe- the development of calculus and physics, new ways of organizing politically, the university system, the new economic system of capitalism, fractional reserve banking, it’s crazy how much Europe changed while the rest of the world didn’t. It’s hard to point to any one thing. Part of it may have been that the rest of the world was sacked and conquered by the mongols, but Europe was spared.

If I had to pick one factor: I’d say the breakup of feudalism in Europe, in which a lot of hierarchies were thrown upside down, was probably the most important factor. If you read accounts of Chinese science, you often see things like “but then that fell out of favor in the court, and was abandoned.” In a society where everyone has a specific place, and roles and hierarchies are rigid, there isn’t much room for invention and change because it’s going to be seen as threatening rather than as an opportunity by the people one step above you. That would be my guess.
Cloud is not just virtualized compute, storage and network (csn) anymore. Most of the services in AWS/GCP offer a lot more than just virtualized csn. I dont think, the article factors in the cost of running a service. Its one thing to rent csn and run your own database. Its completely another to use a cloud service like dynamodb/bigtable etc. I agree, opex cost can go haywire, unless kept in check. But, its not an apples to apple comparison.
> It was the ideas of freedom, of the possibility of liberty for all, of equality of men, that made the whole enterprise possible.

So why did it start in Britain, rather than the United States or post-revolutionary France?
I've always read

1
+ 2
---

as [1 2 +]. I guess it's a difference in perception.
> Reminder that Facebook and Twitter banned users for talking about the lab-leak theory.

Can we define/refine the concept of "lab-leak theory" a bit? Because some of the stuff floating around a year ago was a bit unhinged from reality:

> You’ve probably heard the rumor: The new coronavirus is a bioweapon. Some malicious country—perhaps the United States, maybe China, depending on who’s talking or tweeting—purposefully unleashed the virus that causes Covid-19 on the world.

* https://thebulletin.org/2020/03/why-do-politicians-keep-brea...

> Ebright helped The Washington Post debunk a claim that the COVID-19 outbreak can somehow be tied to bioweapons activity, a conspiracy theory that’s been promoted or endorsed by the likes of US Sen. Tom Cotton, Iran’s supreme leader, and others.

> But Ebright thinks that it is possible the COVID-19 pandemic started as an accidental release from a laboratory such as one of the two in Wuhan that are known to have been studying bat coronaviruses.

* https://thebulletin.org/2020/03/experts-know-the-new-coronav...

"In the Shadow of Biological Warfare: Conspiracy Theories on the Origins of COVID-19 and Enhancing Global Governance of Biosafety as a Matter of Urgency":

> Two theories on the origins of COVID-19 have been widely circulating in China and the West respectively, one blaming the United States and the other a highest-level biocontainment laboratory in Wuhan, the initial epicentre of the pandemic. Both theories make claims of biological warfare attempts. According to the available scientific evidence, these claims are groundless.

* https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7445685/
It's not clear to me what you mean by "they don't overlap at all". If I create a truth table for the two binary possibilities of 'leaked?' and 'created?', I get something like this:

Created, Leaked: It was created in a lab, and accidentally got out.
Not Created, Leaked: It was being studied in a lab, and accidentally got out.
Created, Not Leaked: It was created in a lab and deliberately released (the biowarfare hypothesis.)
Not Created, Not Leaked: The lab had nothing to do with it at all (the wet market hypothesis.)

Created/leaked are independent, but since both or either could be true or false, there seems to be 'overlap.'
Another political article about how it's not possible that the Chinese were studying the virus and some underpaid lab tech screwed and and exposed himself and then did what humans always do, the tech tried to cover up the mistake.

Nobody has still explained how the Chinese knew they had a problem in early December when they only had a handful of cases, like less than 100 cases. This is the question that needs to be answered. Until this question is answered satisfactorily the lab leak is the most reasonable explanation.

The normal ways you detect a new virus is because:

a) you have novel symptoms, COVID presents as the flu and early on tests didn't exist.
b) you have a statistically significant number of cases, early on the number of cases didn't exceed the seasonal variability of the flu.
c) you have a statically significant number of deaths, early on the number of death's didn't exceed the seasonal variability of the flu.

When the Chinese knew they had a problem, there was NOTHING that would indicate anything out of the ordinary was taking place, so then how did the Chinese know they had a problem?

If the virus really jumped species in the wet market, the Chinese wouldn't have known they had a problem until either the cases or the death totals started to exceed the normal variability of the flu. If that had happened we wouldn't have know about COVID until Late Jan or early Feb, and then it would have been really, really ugly. But that's not what happened, the Chinese knew about it in early December. The only way they could have known is if they had prior knowledge.
Look, I absolutely encourage questioning religion and the Bible, but this particular hill is not one I suggest you die on.

Genesis chapter 11 (allegedly) recounts the lineage of Abram. Shem (who was on the ark) lived to be 600. His son Arphaxad lived to be 438. HIS son (Shelah) died at 433. Et cetera. Abram is only eight or nine generations after the Flood, depending on how you count.

To my eye, there's a clear dampening effect on ages after the Flood. Within a dozen or so generations, mostly everybody dies before age 120.

Some of us have actually studied the Bible in depth. It has its contradictions, but IMO this isn't one of them. :)
I have a very good idea of how the web used to work 10 years ago.

But when I try to learn Modern Javascript frameworks, the tutorials rarely do a good job of explaining that they won't teach me how to create a normal, traditional website, or if it's even possible to create a normal website with the framework. They simply assume that the modern way is the standard way.

I want a modern alternative to PHP, but the JS community doesn't make it easy to learn JavaScript.

At least I know how things used to work. Imagine a newbie that never developed a normal website and now thinks React/client-side rendering is how the web is supposed to work. They won't even be able to understand the tradeoffs being made for them.

I want a modern language and framework that still makes sane decisions, and when it does weird things (e.g. client side rendering being the default) at least tells you upfront that it's making those decisions, and their implications.
Carousel team was huge. My roommates was at Dropbox and said it was 100+ while he had a handful of engineers supporting him for enterprise features. Mailbox was another consumer investment that was largely a waste. Drew really didn't like enterprise.
Specifically I'm referring to the argument that standardized tests discriminate against African Americans.

Still, does it really justify doing away with meritocratic standards because some proportion of the population cannot compete? Does that benefit society overall, especially in the long run?
Also I think it's crucial to clarify that in my experience the vast majority of audio troubles on Linux are due to how buggy and shitty (and ubiquitous) Realtek soundcards are. Those integrated cards are junk, and they are buggy like hell, if you read the source code the drivers have to resort to doing what's basically black magic to get them to work, each single damn configuration has its own quirks, etc.

This is also true for Realtek NICs though, almost everything those guys do is shitty as heck.
The Nanopayments Hackathon
It’s not about hosting. It’s about distribution and eyeball minutes. As long as social media sites deliver content through an algorithmic feed, there are a limited number of slots available for the “next page.” The user will stop scrolling eventually. Their limited attention is valuable real estate. It’s also why social media has an incentive to maximize the time on feed.

The best regulatory approach to social media is simple: any algorithmic newsfeed must be opt-in. It must default to a chronological option. The default preference must also be applied retroactively for all existing users.
I love that my other comment is at -4 already. The "MAGA" side of HN is flooding in, desperately thinking this is their moment of redemption.

"but it had to be a ban on all travellers who'd been in China within 14 days and not just direct travel"

Weird to call that "Trump-style" given that Trump's travel "ban" excluded Americans and their family members which already comprised the bulk of people traveling to and from China. One critic of the ban pointed out that in a single day, 30 aircraft from China landed in San Francisco, full, during the "ban".

"Also, remember that the current US president literally went from using the idea that travel bans were dangerous, counterproductive and made things worse"

This is either ignorance or an intentional lie. Which is it?

Contrary to the shrill lies from a certain camp, zero Democratic leaders opposed the "ban". They opposed that it was the singular action taken during a very dangerous period. That quarantines or even tracing weren't put in effect. Etc. That the literal implementation of it was "only people carrying other passports can possibly be carrying COVID".

And I mean...we all know how things turned out, right? Maybe this "he was right" victory lap might be in poor taste, 600,000 dead Americans later.
If you don't think the CCP handling of the case is suspect, why has Huang Yanling disappeared?

If we knew SARS-CoV-2 was leaked from a lab, that would add a lot of weight to the calls for tighter restrictions on lab security and gain-of-function research, worldwide, that have been going on since before COVID.

Sure, Chinese labs might go on doing whatever they want, but science is an international community. Scientists who break international norms aren't able to collaborate with other scientists or receive cross-border funding.
I'm not sure this anecdote is meant to be taken factually. It originates (apparently) from an interview with Eric Carle for a literary magazine,

https://www.theparisreview.org/the-art-of-fiction-carle

But the tone of the article is clearly tongue-in-cheek, and also it has a publication date of April 1.
Programming is always trade-offs. Having programmed interactive web UIs for over a decade now, I really enjoyed it the most when programming using BackboneJS. Enough structure to avoid the JQuery spaghetti, but the library didn’t treat you like a moron. Coffeescript was popular back then too, glad to see the better parts of it make it back into JS (and not the semantic whitespace).
I think you should start thinking more like an ally and embrace Total Equality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzpMRCeTHYE
I use it to filter out candidates when hiring assistants from the Philippines. I get so many applicants that I don't have time to talk to all of them. Have you been on the hiring end? You get hundreds of applications within a couple days when you have a good position and are paying well enough.

There is a strong correlation between IQ and professional achievement whether you want to believe it or not.
Politics has made it very likely that we will never know where it started, but that's okay. More important is how the next one could start, which is being investigated more thoroughly now. If we survive the current and future variants of covid we'll be better placed for the next plague. If not for the systems put in place because of SARS-CoV-1, SARS-CoV-2 could have spread far more widely before being detected.

Regardless of the politics, it's likely that many labs have reviewed their procedures to be sure people won't be infected by their work/contaminate their work.
> The problem with SSR, as I understand it according to this article, is that it still removed native link handling from clicks

This is not true.

SSR React still returns HTML. You can set hrefs on a tags. They all work fine.
> Representing verification logic in the schema flawed

The "verification" required is one of tamper proof, cryptographic safe certificate chain verification, something like the one done using Certificate Authorities, certificate revogation list and the surrounding infrastructure used in TLS.

Encoding anything Turing complete is out-of-spec.
If they haven't invested already you might have just found one more investor :)

https://a16z.com/2021/05/27/cost-of-cloud-paradox-market-cap...
Is it? We can assume that both things happened and prepare better for both types of development in the future. In the case of lab release, details would have to emerge to be reactive about fixing any issues with procedures. That doesn't mean that we can't be proactive in analyzing current procedures and trying to find and correct weaknesses.
Isn’t the article about misreporting by multiple organisations? Rather than about the source of COVID-19?
It's not expressly racist. Look up mobs lynchings from either the past or recent times in various countries, including America, or the definition. You probably just aren't aware of all the non-racist cases.
> are considered more powerful and modern

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word
This is.... gibberish. What's going on here? Are we being trolled?
I was amused to see you trash-talking COBOL on your blog, because the language snippets I've seen read a bit like COBOL.
- There's no evidence that WIV had live RaTG13 virus either, they took samples from the mine in Yunnan and sequenced it, but that isn't cultured, viable infectious virus.
COVID was detected as SARS when Wuhan doctors started harboring suspicions and requested analysis of some patient samples. So it was immediately known that a SARS outbreak or something very much like it was in progress.
Skyscrapers specifically (tall buildings depends on definition of height), but they’re very energy intensive. You can only operate, construct, and maintain them with cheap oil.

The problem isn’t density (most European towns are perfect here actually) but too much density. Manhattan is the opposite spectrum of suburbia, and neither are very desirable. France actually does this well in Paris, as you mentioned. The American thing to do would be tear down every arrondissement and replace with skyscrapers. Paris sort of made that mistake with part of the city before they stopped.

I have to imagine that it's not that skyscrapers are great for emissions, but that the suburbs are just abysmal and so everything looks good in comparison.

Walkable neighborhoods and bike-friendly development in mixed-use medium density areas is probably the best. The main issue with suburbs is that you have to drive everywhere, not necessarily the density.
One thing I've seen happen again and again in a lot of technologies is a "framework gravity". A lot of people see this as engineers just wanting to work on "hype" technology but I think what is actually happening is a reflection of global engineering time.

React is great for SPAs. Most large companies are working on honest-to-god SPAs. By extension most engineers are working on SPAs. So most tooling is created for SPAs. Now if you aren't building an SPA you look around and find almost every resource is around building an SPA. Even if you know you don't need an SPA, it's easier to hire, iterate, and even use other open source solutions if you are building an SPA, so you try to hamfist your project into an SPA.

It's a bit like having a bike commute in America. A bike might be the best thing for you to do - cheaper than a car, keeps you healthy and you don't need a garage. But you quickly find that everything is built for cars and it's easier to deal with the disadvantages of a car than try to commute with a bike.

I remember thinking the same thing about Hadoop 5-6 years ago. If you had "small data" you could get what you wanted with SQL and fast disks. But everything else assumed you were on Hadoop. Newgrads were trained in hadoop. New tools were Hadoop first. New research was all hadoop. If you hit a small issue with your DB, almost every solution would be "this is how it's solved in Hadoop". It was hard to even know if what you were trying to do what even possible without Hadoop.

The only optimism I have is that maybe in 5 years we will all collectively wake up and stop trying to shove React everywhere just like we stopped with Hadoop.
The most important benefit of microservices is that allows development teams to work and deploy independently of each other. For example, instead of having 100 developers working on a single app, you have 12 teams of 8 working on one microservices each. But you have to be careful how you structure your teams, since that is going to drive the overall design of the system. (See Conwayś law)

In real life many companies break their apps in too many small microservices and you end up with a "distributed ball of mud". Which is way worst than the original monolith.
Honestly i'd be more interested in how she managed to make them cough up 11M for dogs vitamins.

I mean, if they had solid science why wouldn't they work on human? Or would that sounds to much like theranos?

She is ok with taking money from people who are know sexual predators, but can't find a female investor interested in the project.
"female investors were harder to find, slower to reply, ghosted me more often, did much more diligence, and were harder to convert."

Weird
Ether.

X-rays.

Black hole.

Dark matter.

I think it’s going to stick as a name even when the details have been largely worked out, especially considering the other examples I listed.
Proof of stake will not save us
Clicking through some of those pictures, I swear I can smell some of them!
This implied diagnosis is very similar to Bowling for Columbine's thesis about the news in America, its hunger for sensationalism and viewers making it amplify the perception of threat so that people felt they needed to be armed.
The problem is not pure cost with a competent team: It's that many companies can't even tell that the team they have is competent. And when the team is not competent, prices, and opportunity costs, are so much higher than what you describe. Imagine a world where adding the equivalent of a 4 core VM with 8 gigs of ram is going to take 6 months from the time a team say they need it, until it's actually available. The meetings, the arguments and other minutiae (like trying to get things installed on the server, because of course you need to play telephone games to get a single command run in a server) make the costs of the server look small.

And those companies are in situations where either people have no idea that their teams are performing badly, or lack the political will to do something about it. Adding the services in AWS is just easier, and might be worth every penny.

When you go to a high performing firm and explain the procedures and decisions of a low performing one, people think you must be lying, but it's true: Broken IT departments are everywhere in enterprise companies, and paying double of what a good team would take to do the right thing is a bargain, given that they can't even get a whiff at a good team.
Despite the sex-baiting in the title, really good article with tons of actionable, non-obvious advice! I like that the founder/writer is so technically oriented, she clearly strategizes & structures her thoughts very well and I think that probably helped her with such an amazing deal (well, it looks amazing, given her starting point - though I don’t know how much of her company she gave up for that...)
This is a great example of how companies really are.
Nobody is important enough in the end.

Work for a company for what you get from them, not for what you can give them!
So why the hundreds of thousands of mouths of Chinese Doctors and Nurses and medical researchers are kept shut now?

Well, apparently the CCP told the truth, the whole truth to the world. Authoritarian regime doesn't work.

/s
Ian Miell's blog https://zwischenzugs.com
Tbh I generally vocalize (+ 1 2) as "one plus two". Casual English usually uses infix notation, but I think "add one and two" is valid and generally understood.
BobbyTables would do well here..
This is classic “nurse vs. feminist nurse” cognitive distortion. Whether the virus was developed as a bio weapon, or simply as a product of well-intentioned gain-of-function research, is irrelevant to the factual basis of whether or not it escaped from the lab. We don’t need to establish how and why it was created, only that it was, in order to assess the likelihood of lab release as a root cause of the pandemic.
React forces you to write code a certain way. jQuery does not force you to write your code a certain way. In my experience, that’s the single biggest difference between a library and a framework.
Yeah, I don't understand the allure of point a to point b self-driving. All I need autopilot to do is to keep me in the lanes on long tiribg drives or in traffic when it's mind numbing.
Or rent an ICE car, that's always going to be an option.
> Unionisation like this is always a positive for the workers

Except when the unions actually actively try to destroy the company.
Personal website which looks like Windows 10
Hopefully the finished code also didn't make Mistake #4: skipping the zero first byte of the first non-zero 16 bit integer. i.e. it should only skip zero words (byte pairs), not zero bytes. This error would probably go unnoticed for a while if it did.