skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I work for a US-based company that has been trying to expand overseas for a decade or so by acquiring smaller companies overseas.

When we expanded into South America we bought a Brazilian company. I guess it didn't work out because within 2 years the company decided to shut down the Brazilian office and (unfortunately) all of the Brazilian-based developers were let go.

The website was handed over to us, and we were tasked with updating it to reflect the office was shutting down. It was written in a PHP framework I've never heard of, the dev and the prod websites were running on the same server, and it was obvious development was completed via SSH on the box itself. No git repo or pipeline or testing framework or anything like that.

We tried saving it but after 2-3 days we gave up and converted over to a static site hosted via S3.
That these planes were operated only by BA and Air France (and a similar plane to some extent by Aeroflot) was merely an accident. Concorde was developed as a mass transport and there was broad interest. Then the US ban and the oil crisis happened.
You don’t need to be particularly accurate. The cloud is so expensive you have plenty of wiggle room while saving money. Worst case you can still use that hardware on another project. Going the other way adding more hardware 6 months out is generally trivial.
Sure, and that's one good meme. But we also get to make some HAL 9000 jokes about Google now, and that's even better (though ironic, given that it was intended to be IBM jokes).
I've been interested and following the science around this. I've been heavily favoring genetic evidence over other things, those other things tending to be circumstantial, conflicting, and/or not well sourced. So I give the most weight to published scientific studies and information presented by scientists helping me connect and crosscheck those dots.

There's a lot of data. Here's a couple of the specific references throwing doubt on Wuhan as the origin for the pandemic [0] [1]. I know these are from last March, but I don't think that invalidates them, unless there are new studies with conflicting info. Here's another one on how 2.7% of people tested in villages near bat caves had antibodies from bat coronavirus infections during the prior 2-3 years [2], with only 1 person out of 218 who touched a dead bat, and 20 who saw bats fly over their houses. Nobody eating bats. Nature happens, viruses spread.

It's hard for me to blame the lab based on nothing more than
circumstantial evidence at this point, which mostly points towards bats, when it's known that there are hundreds of coronaviruses, and hundreds of mammal species they can jump across, and the history of all kinds of viruses jumping between animals and people, even specifically coronaviruses jumping from bats to people. I just don't feel the need to blame the lab without solid evidence when nature does things like this as a matter of course.

I assume that you would agree this is not definitively proven either way yet - nature vs lab? We appear to base our opinions on different evidence and lean in different directions on the probabilities.

I'm actually kind of flummoxed about your statement that "most scientists (specifically, virologists) say that the lab leak theory is the most plausible". That's not what I'm seeing at all. They pretty much all seem to be saying most likely from bats, lab leak could be possible. Seems like you were exaggerating.

[0] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2020-05-...

[1] https://www.vox.com/2020/4/23/21226484/wuhan-lab-coronavirus...

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6178078/
But where does that say that the British would send Brits back to Ireland?

Edit: The article mentions a single example of an escapee being sent back from Northern Ireland, not GB.

> He had lunch at a nearby hotel, left without paying and made his way to nearby Dublin, where he boarded the first train to Belfast in Northern Ireland. To his surprise, his superiors were far from pleased when he reported at his base and he was quickly sent back across the border to the internment camp.

It seems like the emphasis was on whether the escape came about from (perceived) Irish apathy or as a "legitimate" escape attempt. The Brits would return a prisoner who violated the terms of their day parole, but not those who legitimately escaped.
To the downvoters, I wasn't being sarcastic. GP _is_ right, and I was wrong.
Loved that essay!
C. Wife's childhood friend's husband.
I am getting old. I remember when b2 forked to b2evolution and Wordpress. I remember when cpanel started allowing for installations.

I’m glad they are doing so well.
The whole industry (outside the cryptocurrency sector) has moved in a sadly authoritarian direction over the past decade or so. You would not believe some of the infantilizing and paternalistic rhetoric I've heard behind closed doors at major tech companies from people who believe they have a "responsibility" to protect the public from itself and promote correct thinking.
The 1977 flu pandemic was a known virus though which was released. It was highly plausible that the virus could have been in a lab.

This virus is literally unlike any other known virus. The closest known virus to it is RaTG13 which is only 96% homologous and the 4% differences across all its basepairs is very high. We have a closer relationship to apes than SARS-CoV-2 does to RATG13.

And we had SARS-1 in 2003 and H1N1 in 2009 and MERS in 2012, where there's no lab involvement at all. Not to mention Ebola, Zika. It estimated that some 30+ viruses have spilled over from animals to humans since the 1970s, and there's been one lab leak.

And we know that Yunnan province has bats with very similar viruses, with one virus having been identified which is almost certainly the precursor to SARS-CoV-1 and another virus which is the cousin of SARS-CoV-2, and we have a spillover event that happened in 2003 to Guangdong with SARS-CoV-1 showing that this can certainly occur without the involvement of any labs.

What remains that is objectionable about the spillover theory of SARS-CoV-2 is the "wild coincidence" of the WIV lab being in the same city as where the spillover happened. This time. But a large city is likely where it would have been identified first. Estimates from the genetic clock of the virus is that the spillover happened sometime as early as October. It would have been spreading in rural areas before it hit the nearest big city and caused a superspreading event and was noticed. To accurately determine the likelihood that the spillover was in Wuhan and not somewhere else you need to accurately know the distribution of the bats in China, the distribution of the sarbecoviruses in the bats, and the intermediate animals that might have been involved and their movement and the movement of humans. We know from SARS-CoV-2 that the virus jumping from bats in Yunnan to Guangdong can happen. We can expect it would be unlikely for the virus to leapfrog all the way to Beijing.

We don't have all that information, so it now becomes pulling numbers out of butts time. To me that feels more like rolling a natural 20 on 1d20. With SARS-CoV-1 we rolled a 6 and it turned up in Guangdong. If we rolled a 11 or 12 maybe it winds up in Congquing. But we have no idea what the intermediate species might be, which might make spillovers in Congquing unlikely if those animals aren't farmed near there. And we still have no idea of the mechanism by which SARS-CoV-2 wound up in Guangdong, but we know it did, and it didn't involve a lab.
Is this common?

My company recently shifted from on prem to cloud. And we aren’t primarily a software company (although, much like most companies, we are increasingly turning into one).

We outsourced our data center needs, and I don’t remember us ever facing these middle of the night massive breakdowns (we had load balancing between a couple of data centers) and the number of ops issues hasn’t reduced a bit since the switchover.

I do think it’s been easier to improve performance for non US customers, because spinning up servers in data centers across the world seems a little easier around the world, but the millions saved by self hosting would have easily paid for someone to spin us up a Singapore and UK colo servers.
Curious, why isn't it numbered the other way? My programming brain is telling me that if you're reading rfc9000 you can't reference rfc9001 because it hasn't been initialized yet. :D
To a large extent investing is about pattern-matching. You are basically looking at the same situations day-in, day-out for years. You see what works, try to fit it in a box, etc.

This is kind of a doubled-edged sword situation though. After a certain point, you just start blocking situations out mentally. You try to take shortcuts by just looking for X. You don't react when the world starts changing. If you are in an environment where your sample is very tainted (which happens in VC), it is also very easy to actually get reinforced on situations that aren't optimal (this is why most VC funding goes to people who know each other).

I would characterise myself as someone unusually able to switch my thinking when required and I still have a long list of rules that seem basically arbitrary to an outsider (for example, if the CEO has a knighthood, the company will likely do very poorly)...and no pattern is foolproof (the obvious example is Tesla, I don't tend to invest in companies where the CEO is a habitual bullshitter...most of the time that rule works, in that case it didn't work so well).

But investing is about pattern-matching, it can be extremely arbitrary. If you are looking to raise money, I would consult with someone who understands the market you are trying to raise in (i.e. so you can pitch to that pattern...I don't think it will improve your odds of success but it will mean that the funder understands what the situation is), and remember not to take it personally.
Dark matter works just fine.

It needs to be "matter" in the cosmological sense [1] because of the ratio of protons and neutrons to photons produced during Big Bang nucleosythesis. We know the ratio of the number of protons to number of photons. We know the number of photons in the universe (most of them are in the CMB), and we therefore know the number of protons. That means we know the amount of "normal" matter in the universe, and it is far less than the total amount of matter in the universe (that must have survived from baryogenesis). This requires there to be "dark matter" in the universe.

The other effects like galaxy formation and stellar motion in galaxies are just things that might be caused by dark matter (though that's come into doubt).

Sean Carroll discusses it here: https://youtu.be/tZQadPmTd84?t=4642

[1] "Matter" in the cosmological sense is "stuff" that moves slower than the speed of light, as opposed to "energy" which moves at the speed of light.
I always have cognitive dissonance about this kind of stuff. I read this article and “In defense of the modern web” and I feel like I agree with both of them.

I think new things don’t necessarily make older things obsolete. We have printers, for example, but it’s not like pens, pencils, and even chalk aren’t useful.

Whenever I start a new project (admittedly, these are personal projects so not the same kind of scale—but in my job where the where the scale is bigger I’ve noticed a similar sentiment), I like to think about everything I have available to me. I could make a Vue SPA, a generated static site with 11ty, a backend CRUD app with PHP (I like Fat-Free Framework), WordPress (haters gonna hate), a site with no JavaScript, a site with only vanilla JavaScript, or anything in between.

I at once feel like a wide-eyed optimist ready to plow into the future and a curmudgeonly get-off-my-lawn skeptic who’s been burned too many times.

It's a good thing I consider building websites/apps good fun or else I would be really stressed out. :-)
And anyone who ever operated a stateful firewall cried a little bit inside.
IMO unelected officials aren’t meant to represent voters. They’re employed roles.
One of the explicit goals of Stack Overflow when it was founded was literally to fight this phenomenon: The preponderance of wrong/outdated information on the Internet. To a large extent, it has succeeded. Even if the chosen correct answer is no longer correct, there usually is a comment/answer further down pointing out what now works.

So while creating noise is necessary, there is value to curation.
The New York Times had two years of bad RussiaGate scoops and everyone still trusts them.
The lab leak theory is not Occam's razor. We've had many, many pandemics and epidemics and none have been associated with research labs. We've had SARS outbreaks in China that are not associated with a lab. There is also no proof beyond circumstance to associate it with the lab.

And it's not wrong because Trump said it. He may end up being partly correct. The fact remains he had no reason to be as confident in his pronouncement as he was aside from political expediency. Cotton was far more measured in his statements even if he was still stretching. I'm also saying that the MSM and scientific consensus only really threw a fit over the bioweapon theory and inflammatory rhetoric. Even the infamous WHO study said accidental lab leak was possible.
I think I’ve been using it for my personal site for most of Wordpress’ life, wow. Certainly at least half the project’s life.
Montana cryptocurrency producers back a utility-scale solar project
You don't want to read Pravda or GlobalTimes, and I'd rather "Weapons of Mass Destruction" New York Times and "Secret Microchips" Bloomberg stay in America. Perhaps you should stick with what's allowed in your own country instead of shoving your propaganda down everyone else's throats.
80M 512 byte I/O per second. That’s 10M 4KB I/O per second. That’s not groundbreaking.
How are you not attacking gain-of-function with “the real problem vis a vis Covid19 is not the lab leak. The real problem is "gain of function" research, using gene splicing to make more virulent-to-humans pathogens.”?

Perhaps I’ve misunderstood but you seem to be saying it’s a problem without any caveats regarding any potential benefits.

Artificial splicing is common, I agree, but we are talking a handful of mutations per paper rather than the billions of natural mutations that occur. I wasn’t arguing for frequency of mutations that follow the exact path of Covid 19 genetics, I would expect those to be very uncommon, but you only need one in a billion or more.

I've read the Yuri Deigin paper now. It touches on convergent evolution as a possible explanation for the existence of similar protein spike morphologies, but dismisses it without argument ("Talk about Intelligent Design!). It also seems to miss the key point of "computational analysis" when deciding exactly which viruses to synthesise.

The problem isn't synthesising a virus given its genome, it's choosing the genome of the virus to synthesise. As Yuri states, it took 30 days for a Swiss team to synthesise the virus given the genome. You just can't iterate this process very many times, and the chance of getting a virus that spreads effectively is not very high with each mutation (or recombination).
You think heavy HTML responses are cheaper than one extra-heavy initial JS request?

I'd like to see some analysis on that. I'm assuming if you're building an SPA or any kind of app, many of your visitors and clicks are repeat visitors and won't have to download that bundle... probably once a day, M-Th assuming daily release schedule w/ lets-not-break-it-before-the-weekend policy.

I think all that client-side caching would outweigh the cost of the initial bloated bundle.
Your first example there is literally an attempt to mass produce live virus for biological weapons, with human infectious viruses. As are most of your examples. This all changes if the literal goal of research is "mass produce liters of viable virus".

But viral research in general doesn't do that, because it's a huge hazard, and unnecessary (and expensive, labor intensive etc.)

What I am drawing contention on is what physically would have to happen for a lab leak to occur (and the other side problem: if it's a natural borne virus already capable of human infectivity...then it was already in the wild).

Take the 1977 issue: the suspicion is not that it was an accident with a preserved sample. The suspicion is that the Russians were actively growing up the virus (a human infectious virus) - for some type of work, probably a vaccine trial.

So we've got two basic problems: why would the Wuhan lab be growing up large quantities of this specific virus (and is there evidence they were?)...and if it was already human infectious though, why is it more likely it escaped the lab, when such a thing would already have to be in the wild to have been recovered?

There'd be no reason, having discovered COVID-19, to start growing up the virus before it had been sequenced. And there'd be no reason, without already knowing what it does, to not publish a paper describing the act of isolating and sequencing a new coronavirus, which is the type of research the Wuhan lab put out all the time. Researcher's operate on publish or perish, and Chinese researchers publish everything they can.
Are you just guessing that third parties have enough resource to release proper patches quicker?

Not sure what the "rework" is about when a bug is found in Stream, the "rework" is toward older versions of the package in RHEL.

I always wonder how the statements to dismiss Stream is quite weak.
https://quicwg.org/base-drafts/9000_missing_a/rfc9000.html

Is this it?
The devils were introduced to the mainland (a National Park in NSW) intentionally in 2020.
Can you expand on what you're doing on an exabyte scale?
Perhaps in general, but in this specific case, when the confusion arose, this was not yet a partisan issue.

What happened us that the initially nuanced criticism of some lab leak speculation had its nuance erased by increasingly sensational headlines and tweets. As this occured, lab leak speculation was repeatedly and increasingly conflated with theories that it was man made. See recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27307175
We have also had 30+% global population growth in the last 20 years and massive reduction in property.

Around 1980 people assumed rising standards of living would result in dramatic increases in CO2 per person which didn’t happen. Even as recently as 2000 models assumed as much as 10% increases over current levels where likely.
How to Become an iOS Developer: An Essential Guide
If the audience is other developers/engineers (which it sounds like it is)... I like to document the code within the code itself and use automation to generate that documentation. If it fails to generate or documentation is missing, the pipeline itself will fail and prompt the developer to write docs before it gets merged.

I'm usually programming in Ruby or Golang. For Ruby my tool of choice is the Yard gem... and for Golang it would be GoDoc (built into Go itself). But most languages have their own equivalent tools.

If the audience is business folks and not developers... oofffpppph.
70's and 80's were peak of humans I believe. It will be hard to undo all the crap we've built including the internet which I have mixed feelings about.
They just had very low jitter networks. Displays in that age didn't even have enough space to buffer a single frame. The ads loaded no faster than real-time.
Here’s the best explanation I’ve found: “How I learned to stop worrying and love the lab leak theory.” https://donaldgmcneiljr1954.medium.com/how-i-learned-to-stop...

Edit: part of the issue is “what is a lab leak?” It’s not a bio weapon, or a failed vaccine. The respectable “lab leak theory” is that the virus was identified in the wild, brought into a lab, but safety procedures were not followed.

So it’s not a “Chinese created virus” theory. It’s a “someone wasn’t following proper procedures” theory.
Brook v20210601
Yeah, I learned about that after I wrote that post.
I really doubt that's the issue. As if a fly or an ant has never set foot on a menorah before? It's a non issue. It's not like we eat menorahs anyway.

I assume it's an AI mistake, but I don't get what the AI thought it was seeing.
Hm. In 1969, you could watch a Harrier jet hover the water and shoot out of sight and several emancipatory legislations were a direct result of these era. (In fact, you could watch Apollo 16 going to the moon and celebrate the equal employment act passed just the previous month.) And it's also the 1970s, when awareness rose for environmental issues (like leaded gasoline and many more).

Regarding pixels, well, there were still some high-res vector displays left (otherwise, there weren't any compression artefacts, at least). ;-)
I think one of the benefits of cloud is (in theory) the agility that it brings. So much is abstracted away that you truly can start to focus on what's more important to your business. There's a cost to that value. So for example, while the cost to serve may be lower with your own infrastructure, it may be that the opportunity costs go up and your ability to grow that revenue stream or customer base is diminished without cloud.

Another thing that came to mind reading this was - what would I need to make such a switch (from cloud to your own data centre)? And then I thought, you could provide a business doing this - commoditised hardware and services, providing the real-estate and the engineers, and more importantly, providing the same kind of service stack you find in the cloud. Then I thought, that could be a cool business for someone. And then I thought - there's nothing stopping Amazon or Microsoft or Google from offering that.

I guess if you have a very clear understanding of your needs, a mature appreciation for what it will take, and a good handle on your likely growth, then taking control of it all may make sense. But for a lot of business (especially those not actually tech businesses per se), it would more likely be a return to pain.
I've got a poll for folks in the thread who are interested in the space - what other services would you use for your dog that aren't out already?
- Genetic testing to understand the best diet (and then a subscription for that food)?
- Insurance so you can pay for surgery + clone your dog when it passes away?
- Something else?
"Just", because the blog post sounds like it was doing fundamental basic research on longevity based on brand new ideas ("I was chatting with some friends about how I thought I had an idea for how to make dogs live longer."), instead of commercializing on existing research. It wasn't my intention to be dismissive.
It's simple, the orange man is no longer president. Our media has lost all credibility but they got the mean tweeter out of office so I guess yay for them!
I personally think it’s cool you got to see all that in real time OG :)
Christmas Eye
I think you're right.

I believe (with no way to prove it) if Trump had, with his trademark tone and delivery, blamed China's Wuhan Seafood Market and thrown in a few choice insults about China, that theory would have been the one Big Media shut down and filtered out. Instead it was the lab leak theory.
> But I think you are discounting how effectively they use the mechanics of HN to shut down criticism of their deity

I don't care about Modi but I flagged your comments because I'm tired about the endless whining about "them" supposedly manipulating HN. If you don't like Modi tell me why, don't go around strawmaning and generalizing Indian tech workers.
And the FDA recently raised the age limit to 45! If you missed it when you get it’s now an option.
I now pre-judge a site based on its styling of checked/un-check-all functionality. Things that try hard to make me check all (or hard to uncheck stuff) immediately seem skeezy.
To paraphrase Feynman, the odds of winning the lottery are essentially the same whether or not you buy a ticket.
A labor of love like few others:

http://www.dogstar.dantimax.dk/

Fred Nachbaur's website.