skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would imagine they would say to an intern once they joined, "yeah you won't work on THAT project, but here's some other thing for you to do". It's like the estate agency putting a listing of a nice place on a website and then when it comes to viewing the place they say "well that one was just taken but let me show you something similar".
The email trail is damning. Fauci knew that the possibility was there. Instead of pushing for discovery and transparency of what actually happened, he publicly and vehemently denied the possibility and gave fuel to those who wanted to call the "lab leak theory" people "conspiracy nuts".

Fauci's elevation to sainthood was way too premature. His constant media appearances where he hasn't been questioned on any of this should be an object lesson to the public on media bias and the subsequent narrative bubbles that impact our society.

It's not surprising that the same people pushing Michael Avenatti as the next great politician have been the same people promoting Fauci.
This was done 20 years ago. It's kind of terrifying how it is just as relevant today, as it was then (replace Outlook Express with Slack).

I used to have this up on my office wall.
Other warehouses don't pay minimum wage. Target's starting pay is $4 higher than Amazon in my area. Home Depot is like $1 lower than Amazon.

It is true that they have a pretty decent healthcare package as far as warehouse work goes.
Coding tests aren’t uncommon at all as a prerequisite to talking to a human, I’ve had them as the first step when applying to Twitter, Akuna Capital, Asana, Airbnb, Yelp (though I asked for it from a recruiter so perhaps not the same), Dropbox, Zoox, Robinhood….
Meanwhile I'm sitting here after 4 visits to every dashboard I can find deleting and turning things off, and I still can't figure out where the fuckers are charging me from, because they don't care to improve that.
>A clear violation of anti-trust abuse of a dominant market position if I ever saw one!

Is it that clear? What if these links were flagged for other reasons, or erroneously? Or are we just taking headlines at face-value?
My favorite go-to example is advertising industry. It's a highly competitive market sector that's also thoroughly bullshit in at least two ways:

- Advertising is mostly zero sum; if you have competition fighting over the same pool of potential customers, any marginal dollar you spend will work mostly to offset the marginal dollar your competition spends.

- Ad attribution - figuring out who should be rewarded for getting a customer to buy something - is a really tough problem. On the Internet in particular, you probably shouldn't even try to do it without some skilled statisticians on the team. Which hardly anyone has. What happens instead is, people bullshit each other. An ad agency will prepare a report about their effectiveness, using data they're not capable of actually understanding, and give it to a client, who's also not capable of understanding the data. Said data came from a platform the agency uses, that's often bullshitting them on purpose. Whether or not the ads were effective, or any value to the end-customer was created, is immaterial - no one in the chain is capable of truly determining it. Instead, everyone just tell each other stories about a job well done, everyone is happy, money changes hands.

And yet it persists and grows, because there's still money to be sucked out of legitimate economy, to fuel a legion of companies competing and cooperating to run in circles, bullshitting each other.
It does it because it's profitable and because it can.

This is literally what a successful market looks like: a small number of much richer people at the top, and a giant pile of damaged and discarded people at the bottom.
I own a lot of gold. But the effect you're seeing might be economies of scale. We produce more gold than other similar elements. Bulk production is cheaper.

When thinking about materials science, it is worth reflecting that the periodic table is very large but we produce very small amounts of most of it. In a bad year a country's annual consumption on Osmium could be smuggled in a small suitcase.
Time and motion studies go back a long way in industry
The article you posted and quoted amounted to 1+1=3. How do you expect to have a conversation about it?
This is why we define things mathematically to measure them when we're doing science.

For everything Graeber did well, Graeber's concept is pseudoscientific pontificating at best. Anyone can argue what bullshit is or isn't and try to fit their narrative to it.

This isn't what an academic should be doing.

And don't get me started on his debt book
The price of lithium-ion batteries has declined by 97% since 1991
Those who look at politics as sport and are mostly concerned that their team has lost this round.
The “Two Girls” conditional probability problem
Google Analytics is here to stay
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I have heard a similar story or two and they all have involved google.

I'm not sure when these leetcode style interviews became pervasive but it makes sense that recruiters would figure out quickly where to find people that would excel at that interview process.
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Same, and with each new article the X or Y reasons get that little bit more abstract. Eventually I'm sure we'll see articles that say "They failed because they didn't _care_" or "They succeeded becasuse they _listened_" and that's as much depth as we'll get from them.
Insights – these will save you time and money
I may be a zoomer but im pretty sure smallpox is a punk rock band and not a virus
People can also derive meaning from their work and feel that it's essential, while in reality it might make very little difference if they show up on Monday.

Personally I'm fairly sure there's a large number of "bullshit jobs" and I have my own, unfounded, opinions regarding which jobs that might be. I'm just not convinced that we can identify these jobs by asking those who work in those position.

There's also the jobs that truly are essential, but only because something somewhere else is broken.
Yes the world would be free of climate change if there were again only 100 million people. However that isn't a solution I would advocate.

> Perhaps the most cost efficient way to combat global warming is lifting the world's poorest out of poverty. It's been shown as populations become richer/educated their growth slows and shrink over time.

Exactly. And we do that by more technology development into superior technologies that don't suffer the inefficiencies of carbon sources. And we will get there faster with more people, more people working on these issues.

Btw more population also usually results in more urbanization and more efficient energy use per person.

I also believe that the effects are not gone be as bad as some people predict, as was the case with most of the 'this is gone kill us all predictions'. Slow adjustment over decades is gone mitigate most of the issues.
Yeah, compare Amazon today with Walmart from 15 years ago. Amazon FC workers make 3x minimum and have pretty decent healthcare coverage (I have the same plan, which is considered bad by other software engineers).

I think these people, many of whom grew up upper middle class, genuinely can’t understand why people would take a job that’s difficult - just see their treatment of military vets and police offers.
80,000 planes use the same bolts to secure the engine pylons to the wing. It is found that the bolt can sheer in cold weather due to a casting defect. This does not cause a catastrophic failure because the aircraft are designed in such a way that an individual compromise will not bring down the entire system. Bank vault doors don’t open to the street for a reason. If your entire system is relying on the security of that one vault door, you have already failed. If you are storing sensitive data on millions of users in plaintext, you have already failed.
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> It gets worse - gain of function research was banned under Obama until the ban was lifted in 2017 under Trump

It was never really "banned", there was a moratorium on such research after a string of safety lapses in US laboratories, moratorium's are always only of a temporary nature [0].

The often mentioned "GoF research" involving bats with US participation and funding, didn't even fall under that moratorium [1].

> you have Fauci making the case for creating viruses in a lab

Of course he would make that case, because that's a useful tool to have in research. No offense, but trying to make this out as something so binary and only bad, reminds me a lot about the more radical and clueless takes on GMO that see "All GMO as bad".

[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2014/10/17/3570109...

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.18787
I'm calling BS on this. Total lack of any specifics, and I don't need to know what brand of hardware is giving them fits. I've been responsible for tens of millions of dollars in hardware over the years of my career and PCIe has never been the source of my headaches. Disk drives, memory, and firmware bugs are the usual suspects. They can get right out of here with their holier-than-thou attitude on this.
Don't be silly. Obviously the bans were not perfectly enforced and you could still find hushed conversations in the corners. This was true on all platforms. What, exactly, is your argument? Or your point? Are you really going to try to claim that the lab leak hypothesis was not widely censored in social media? "We have always been at war with Eastasia"...
Pulumi?
It pissed me off as a non-iOS developer that it doubled in size overnight because of the ARM stuff. I'm not even writing Mac Apps, I just need the system libraries so I can install Homebrew GCC and get on with my work.
>the virus could be of natural origin but leaked from a lab, that scenario is still very much possible even in the context of the Lancet statement.

That's absolutely true, but one of the main corollary claims is also that SARS-CoV-2 may have resulted in part from gain of function research. People making that claim have said that the virus seems to be particularly effective against humans despite no intermediate forms discovered yet and that a natural virus leaking from a lab would be less likely to spread so widely. They've also cited the fact that the lab does do gain of function research on coronaviruses.

If it were true, that definitely wouldn't imply it's a bio-weapon (such research happens everywhere all the time, etc.), but it would be important to know.
If you read the book, it mostly contends with this idea, that competition is supposed to root out these inefficiencies, and it claims that it doesn't.
Maybe it is intrinsic to human nature, to create these bullshit jobs. In fact, isn't this exactly the same argument against so called "socialism"? That once you have a big government bureaucracy, public sector employees start working for themselves, rather than to serve the public. Well the same is true of big corporate bureaucracies.
Almost been there. I was once hired and given some sources to work on by a company, and those were the same exact sources I wrote at another company years before, although my name and all recognizable comments were stripped, save for a few almost invisible traces I left like my initials paired with reserved words to make them appear like directives, pragmas, etc.
The guy who had given me the "new" sources was without any doubt responsible, since he was PM at the old company having access to everything, but almost certainly he had no right to use them over the old company. It took like 10 seconds to me to recognize them as filenames, function names, network usage, variables and structures all were the same, so it went like. "Hah, no problems, I recall this very well, in fact there should be my name somewhere... oh rats, it got deleted somehow, no probs however, consider it done":=).
Yes. The article gets off to a bad start by comparing Graeber's people who didn't believe "their job made a meaningful contribution to the world" to a different group of people who did not "have the feeling of doing useful work" (and weirdly attempts to excuse this leap by saying that Graeber's "meaningful contribution to the world" was a high bar to clear!)
If you honestly believe shutting down the likes of Coinbase and Kraken requires "outlawing math", you're gonna be real disappointed.
The problem with the shell to me is that it started like a good idea, and then just stopped improving. Things that should be the bread and butter of scripting are oddly arcane. Some examples.

How do you find where the script itself is? Because if the script comes with files, we want to find those when the script gets called from somewhere outside the current dir. Stack overflow suggests this as a first approach:

SCRIPT_DIR="$( cd "$( dirname "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}" )" &> /dev/null && pwd )"

Then follows with 7 lines of arcane looking code containing a loop for a better solution. That's a ridiculous hoop to jump through for a common need.

Dealing with filenames? Hope you enjoy pain. Spaces, newlines and quotes are a horrible pain to deal with properly, and regularly cause trouble.

Dealing with correctly passing parameters? More of the same.

Dealing with long file lists? You run into the command line length limit.

Obtaining some incredibly common system parameter? Some insane combination of grep, awk and cut, probably.

Personally I find it amazing that people invented this thing, then spent decades tripping on the same quoting and filename handling issues and not finding that to be a good reason to fix it.

These days if it's more than 5 lines of code, or if arbitrary filenames are involved I go straight to Perl or Python, because the amount of completely preventable pain is drastically reduced.
Everyone is batting an eyelid at Facebook. Your entire premise is false and I wish these attempts to deflect any time criticism of China comes up would stop.

It’s big news the same way that it’s big news that other tech giants are doing it. Pointing out when a Chinese company is doing something shady or problematic is not sinophobic.
In my opinion, the truly beautiful concept involved here is Euler's formula:

e^(ix) = cos x + i sin x.

It unifies algebra, trigonometry, complex numbers, and calculus. Euler's identity is only a special case of Euler's formula, i.e., Euler's formula with x = π gives us Euler's identity:

e^(iπ) = -1.

This is cute but Euler's formula is truly beautiful. In fact with x = τ = 2π, we get another cute result:

e^(iτ) = 1.

From Chapter 22 of The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Volume I:

"We summarize with this, the most remarkable formula in mathematics: e^(iθ) = cos θ + i sin θ. This is our jewel. We may relate the geometry to the algebra by representing complex numbers in a plane; the horizontal position of a point is x, the vertical position of a point is y. We represent every complex number, x + iy. Then if the radial distance to this point is called r and the angle is called θ, the algebraic law is that x + iy is written in the form re^(iθ), where the geometrical relationships between x, y, r, and θ are as shown. This, then, is the unification of algebra and geometry."

See the bottom of the page at https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_22.html for the above excerpt.
Japanese government agencies suffered breaches after Fujitsu’s ProjectWEB hack
This could really use an instruction page on 'h' and/or '?'. Without going to the website I couldn't figure out how to zoom.
Yes that's the theory, yet currently any company with sufficient capital or geopolitical advantage can be an effective market leader, while at the same time operating inefficiently at a loss.
> annotate using the minimum of JS to set the minimum of ARIA attributes that clearly improve accessibility

Yes, like aria-expanded="true" on a <button> that opens a custom disclosure widget instead of using the CSS-only :checked ~ .foo hack I was responding to. The actual hiding/revealing of the related content can still be done with CSS alone using [aria-expanded="true"].

Here's a bunch of checkbox hack examples [0]. The custom radio buttons and checkboxes and the push toggles are fine (the use-case is fine, I didn't closely examine everything about the implementations), the rest should be done some other way that probably involves buttons with JavaScript.

[0] https://css-tricks.com/the-checkbox-hack/
No and is completly irrelevant for the subject of security being discussed.
I thought of the other Euler's identity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler_characteristic

..which I think is beautiful too.
This would only be true if the market share of a company is inversely correlated to the number of bullshit jobs in said company. There might be such a link because less money spent on bullshit job salaries means more money available for the marketing budget but it's not at all clear IMO that such a correlation exists and if so, how strong it is. Case in point: We can observe that there are many extremely profitable companies (say, Disney or Oracle) that nonetheless do not have a reputation for being all that bullshit-free.

In many cases, things like customer lock-in, natural monopolies or intellectual property catalogs serve as significant barriers to entry even for well capitalized new businesses, and these barriers can more than outweigh the costs of having half your employees being essentially useless. Finally, an argument could be made for resilience in staffing. The very leanest organisation would have bus factors of 1 for every single job and the first sick employee means problems. Even raising the redundancy to "only" two people per critical function means that you just created a ton of bullshit jobs. (since most of these people will be severely underutilised)
SolarWinds Hackers Return
> Yes. Obviously you don't put an arsonist in charge of fighting fires

Sure, but to go back to my analogy, you absolutely do put the guy who hit the power button by mistake in charge of pressing it again - they know exactly where it is and they're already in the datacenter. You put the team that deployed a new service that's DoSing your infrastructure in charge of rolling it back. You don't say "You broke the system, so we're finding someone else to do the rollback."

If the allegation is that Fauci intentionally funded a lab in Wuhan to work on gain-of-function research with the express purpose of having the virus escape and cause a global pandemic because Fauci is a murderer rivaling Hitler, that's a very different (and much harder to substantiate) claim than that he merely was causally involved in an accident and like anyone else wants the accident to not have happened.

And if that is the claim, the "conflict of interest" argument becomes clearer: Fauci is on the side of COVID-19 and in charge of stopping it. It's the same conflict of interest as putting an arsonist in charge of fighting fires.

Short of that, the idea that he had a conflict of interest is like the idea that the team that accidentally DoS'd the infrastructure has a conflict of interest because they each get Fauci-scale salaries and they might be fired. Technically yes, but we all know that firing them wouldn't help solve the problem and losing their expertise would make other things work, so it's not even on the table unless we suspect malice is involved.

(And if it is on the table, either at my workplace or in Fauci's case, so is criminal prosecution. Loss of salary is the least of your worries.)
Training T5 model in just 3 lines of code with ONNX Inference
In somewhat the same space, there's FUZIX[1], which supports the Z80, 68k, and 6809.

Also, recently, someone ported it for the Raspberry PI pico, which makes it easy to get it up and running with something modern: https://cowlark.com/2021-02-16-fuzix-pi-pico/

Edit: Also ported to the 8266: https://cowlark.com/2021-02-09-esp8266-fuzix/

[1] http://www.fuzix.org/
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That image manipulation example is really cool! Not knowing much of either J or APL, I do like how the non-ascii symbols can visually represent the operation in APL, but using ASCII does seem more practical.
Seconded. Reading books will show you how to write Clojure code but exposing yourself to Rich Hickey's presentations could change your approach to programming in general.
The article mentions the state department had Steven Quay present an analysis of the origin of the virus:
https://zenodo.org/record/4642956#.YIa66ehKhPY

The “engineered” component is about the Furin cleavage site on the sars-cov-2 spike protein.

The virus shares 92% genetic similarity to bat coronaviruses, except the spike protein, which is nearly identical to a pangolin coronavirus(which is otherwise only ~38% similar) with one key exception: The Furin cleavage site using “lab standard” sequences.

The gene sequence for the amino acids in the furin site in CoV-2 uses a very rare set of two codons, three letter words so six letters in a row, that are rarely used individually and have never been seen together in tandem in any coronaviruses in nature. But these same ‘rare in nature’ codons turn out to be the very ones that are always used by scientists in the laboratory when researchers want to add the amino acid arginine, the ones that are found in the furin site. When scientists add a dimer of arginine codons to a coronavirus, they invariably use the word, CGG-CGG, but coronaviruses in nature rarely (<1%) use this codon pair. For example, in the 580,000 codons of 58 Sarbecoviruses the only CGG pair is CoV-2; none of the other 57 sarbecoviruses have such a pair.
The origin does matter.

If it evolved in a lab, it is highly likely that the virus is better at infecting people in lab conditions, for example that would mean inside.

Which, coincidentally is exactly what we're seeing. People with masks on get infected inside buildings. Outside the risk is much much lower.
A 40% discount on RSUs at a public company is perfectly reasonable: you will have to sell to cover the taxes as soon as they vest, meaning for every 10 shares in your grant, 3-4 will be liquidated before you even see them just to cover the taxes on the vesting. Add a modest discount for the fact that you might leave prior to the next vesting date, and 40% might even be a bit optimistic.