skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is also one thing that I dispute: knowing the origin will not make the world better, because a lab leak is theoretically impossible anyway, given the lab safety standards.

So I doubt that knowing the leak would change the outcome in the future or prevent the mistakes.

It is also highly plausible that China has already taken steps, internally. Like, the Wuhan lab is closed now.

So, in the light of this fact, too, calling out China will not make them do more than they already did to address the issue.

If the problem is the lack of enforcement of security (maybe because of deeper lingering problems, like the fact that local authorities are too much autonomous, behave like little tyrants themselves, etc), then adding even more security policy will not do anything.

If the answer is to change the whole way China is administered, this will just not happen (unfortunately).
There is a guy on r/China I think who archived a bunch of disturbing videos from last January /February. I think I saved them or links, but I'm away from my computer. Will update if I find it.
I was in shock, and a bit furious at being ripped off, but didn't feel there was a lot I could do about it. I edited this bit out (I was trimming the post):

"You might wonder why I didn't talk about this first case publicly at the time. I'd already informed them of the problem privately and how to fix it, so there wasn't more to say. Also, Sun was the number one employer in town, and to be publicly critical could be career ending."

I don't know what happened to the US developer. But I didn't think it made sense to burn bridges with Sun about it. I was more worried about giving people a bad experience with DTrace by running older versions of my software.
16 years ago, it must have been pretty refreshing.
One thing that's baffling to me is that I've not seen any discussion from scientists who actually know what they are talking about. All we get are articles who talk about the political side, and try to prove things by how certain actors behaved.

Most of the actual science that all the articles cite are pop-sci simplifications at best. People talk about how parts from multiple viruses would be joined together etc, how base pairs are 97% identical, etc. These are all very high level summaries that don't really allow for detailed conclusions.

Now I'm not a subject matter expert myself, but from what I've learned about evolutionary genetics is that some scenarios would be pretty obvious when looking at the genome. For example, you could look at where in the genome the mutations occur.

I'd love to read an article that goes in depth on the actual scientific arguments, rather than just rehashes of rehashes like this.
Ok, maybe i'm too old or experienced with these type of things to really enjoy this article. The author might honestly be sincere as he wrote this but I felt it was a bit overblown and coming from negative feelings of being brushed off and rightfully so being upset that his code was stolen. It could just be there are some cultural misunderstandings as well.

He mentioned this "VIP" is a "Developer and dtrace expert". But reading that and the other details, I think this is probably not the reality and maybe was communicated incorrectly to him. I really doubt this guy was a "VIP" as he says.

My guess is this "VIP" was actually a pretty normal member on the dtrace project, could be a little senior and got the opportunity to go around and talk about it. I am sure they had a team somewhere who put together most of the software, maybe he was involved a little bit, but probably he was just as confused as everyone else about using that open source software - he probably knew enough to teach it, and how it worked, but so many people work on these type of projects, unless they sent the lead engineer he probably didn't know it deeply except enough to evangelize and teach how it works.

He mentions about being slighted by this guy a lot, saying things like "He wasn't impressed", "gave me a look like he didn't really believe me" etc. This might be true, but i suspect it's coming from his negative interpretation of the situation. This guy just traveled all the way around the world, was super exhausted, was possibly honestly confused what's going on - i certainly have been in that situation before.

The author also mentions he felt it odd that he (the author) was producing more dtrace tools than Sun was. This almost sounds a bit like indirect boasting. Large companies are slow. A dedicated passionate developer who is working alone or with a small team will always run laps around huge companies. This isn't odd at all. Companies often get distracted, can't focus on what's important, or decide not to do what is important for a product due to other business reasons.

In fact, as he found out, some engineer somewhere just ripped his stuff cause it was faster and easier for them to do it. Sun's team was not professional at all, even possibly breaking the law, which I think is the point of the article but the descriptions of the Dtrace guy who's job was to show Dtrace around the world lessened my enjoyment of the article.
Yep. But some elements will keep blaming crypto currencies for all the ills in the world. No matter what you think of blockchain money: banning it will not solve this.
And you wrote it for someone in the future. Who would eventually comment in the present after reading in the past.
Running SerenityOS on macOS
The Kurzweil stuff is amazing. He has been predicting things publicly for a long time, here is a summary (2010) of how his predictions have worked out http://www.kurzweilai.net/images/How-My-Predictions-Are-Fari...

Its scary how much stuff he got right
Brothers Are in Fight Delphi and C++ Builder Comparison in Prime Test
The irony is the GPLv3 does more to address some of the problems we have with open source than most other licenses, but was rejected by many due to a lack of concern for these issues.
Thank you for the comments. I am actually writing a book (The Software Mind) covering, well, quite a lot of ground, and would be interested in getting a real perspective on this area - can I reach out to you?

Edit: I would be interested in real experts correcting my poor understanding of important subjects - can we talk ?
Sorry, I meant the text based Clonezilla User interface, and even its command line switches.

For a project, I once made a bootable usb stick config of clonezilla that automatically started up restore of an image to the one ssd in the machine. To get that to work I had to bring up stuff with the boys down in Taiwan (clonezilla team) because there were several things that were documented wrong or did other things than what it said on the tin. The difference is pretty huge between the old and venerable Powerquest Drive Image versus Clonezilla.
>The marketplace of ideas is better than trusting gatekeepers of knowledge.

That's such a simplification of the real situation that it's harmful to apply as an axiom.

There are many levels of the marketplace of ideas. Ideally, the gatekeepers of knowledge also create a marketplace of ideas so that expert opinion is varied and shifts as new information come in. This is in inline with what we're seeing here.

The marketplace of ideas with no experts to guide discussion often results in crank ideas that seem plausible but heavily influenced by our biases bubbling to the top. That's how things like the Anti-vax movement gained a foothold.
See, at least you realize you are a tiny country with a small population and the ego adapted to that.

I am French and we are a country with a great past - but not looking ahead. We still assume that we radiate across the world and that our voice counts.

It does not, and this has to be clear. There are countries that can influence events, but this is not ours.

A typical example is how angry we were after the recent pirate act of Lukashenko (Belarus forced a EU plane flying form one EU country to another to land when above their territory to arrest an opponent of theirs). Our president said that there would be consequences and there are no consequences.

This is not to spit on my contry but sometimes egos are much bigger than the reality. We are in good company there.
In this specific case, the files were under the CDDL, which is copyleft. The only thing that Sun did that was not allowed by the license was to remove the copyright notice. Had the scripts been under GPL, nothing would have been different. Anyone can sell GPL software, as long as they allow access to the source code and allow further motification and redistribution.
Most/all of those methods have (often much) greater friction than cryptocurrency. I'd guess that, if cryptocurrency were banned domestically, the payouts would significantly decrease, and probably reduce the frequency of these attacks.

But, even then, such a ban would probably have a negative effect on cybersecurity progress, since these incidents are motivating fundamental changes to cybersecurity awareness, policies, procedures, and technology.
Thank you for sharing @yannikyeo. I originally wrote this for the Cutter Journal, and i wrote over 100 pages, including a long piece about the history of IT architecture and how its broken. The editors took a large pair of scissors to it, so the is what survived. I did get a nice note from Kent Beck about the article, which was a genuine thrill.
> The other astonishing things is the sudden about face by the media. I'm glad they allowed themselves the liberty of looking at alternative origins. But... they were SO adamant and complicit in any discussion about alternative theories being shut down under the guise of conspiracy, Trumpism, anti-China, etc.

I agree. However, I can empathize with the media's position. Their business model has been under intense pressure for decades, so they're far too understaffed to do the kind of job we'd all like them to do; and viral disinformation/misinformation has become far more prevalent and influential in the last several years. Donald Trump also acted as a siren (in the Greek mythology sense) during his presidency to greatly exacerbate both difficulties. It's not surprising that, when they were faced with a crisis where they were arguably on one of the front lines, they were forced to take shortcuts out of expediency that were ultimately mistakes. After all the lab-leak theory is both 1) extremely plausible, 2) conspiracy-theory bait.
Want to stop automobile accidents? Ban personal automobiles.

Banning crypto will not stop ransom attacks.
I'm also talking about sizes that aren't hardcoded. I don't really know what to tell you except that in my experience the rules governing the sizing of CSS elements don't tend to be very complicated. If you're in a default (block/inline) context, and no width or height is set, then if it's display: block it will be the full width of its parent and its height will be determined by its content. If it's inline or inline-block, its width will also be determined by its content. Flex contexts have their own rules that are a bit more complicated but remain very predictable once you learn them. Etc.

Generally, nearly every element's size comes down to some combination of:

1) Explicit width/height properties (and padding/margin)

2) Special layout mechanisms like filebox or grid

3) The element's contents

4) Its direct parent's dimensions

That's pretty much it. There's really no case I can think of where a grandparent directly drives an element's size (it may drive the parent's size which drives the child's size, but the reach at each individual stage remains short)
> If you really want to, you can put some JS right in the HTML file, immediately following the elements it is going to operate upon, changing the display of the elements before they are even rendered to the screen.

This is indeed a cool trick I have seen in use in the wild. Can it work with CSP, however?
Obviously this article isn’t making a comprehensive argument for gain-of-function research, but it’s interesting how the arguments made in favour of it seem to have been demonstrated so poorly during this pandemic.

The argument that it’d help detect risk doesn’t seem very good, we know these researchers published work on similar viruses and it doesn’t seem to have caused anything to change and increase safety.

The argument that it could contribute to vaccine research doesn’t seem to have held up either, AFAIK there’s no link between such research and the Covid-19 vaccines we now have.

I’m sure there are other arguments for the research, and I’m sure it won’t stop regardless of what people want given how the article says Obama’s moratorium was treated and the obvious military applications. But it seems that the experience of Covid-19 does drastically alter the risk/benefit calculation of that research given it seems to have had no benefit in practice.
Common Voice is Mozilla's initiative to teach machines how real people speak
Great, so now we can't even trust the clothes we buy not to track us.
yeah that makes sense. I was actually planning to do it based on hyper-geolocation as opposed to using the camera
How Data Labeling Services Empower Manufacturing Industry 2021?
How to Start a POS Business in Nigeria
From the pie chart 40-50% of the total expenses look fixed, so selling more units would obviously increase profits quickly. As would selling power and HDMI cables and other sundries that have a good markup but give buyers convenience.

50% profit margin on the hardware is reasonable - but it means you can't really sell wholesale (although an EU reseller that can take care of delivery, import and VAT may get you more customers there).

Obviously it's very hard to raise prices for the existing product (unless it was a version 2) - Can the device be redesigned to reduce cost? - i.e. a custom single board capture and CPU etc. but that would involve development costs
The tech debt interest rate
I am thinking about the big problems they had with getting J2EE transferred to the Eclipse Foundation. In the end they had to rename it (to Jakarta EE) and even change all the package names (!). Nobody can know for sure, but I have the suspicion that in an alternate timeline in which IBM bought Sun, the same transfer may have happened, but probably much more smoothly.

The days of Solaris and SPARC were always numbered but I wonder if IBM might have managed their decline with more grace and less abruptness than Oracle has. I was particularly struck by Oracle's decision to suddenly (and without explanation) discontinue UNIX V7 certification for Solaris, after investing so much effort in obtaining it.

Given IBM already has POWER, it is unlikely IBM would have wanted to keep SPARC going long-term. It probably would have absorbed some of the technologies, patents, and engineering talent, and transferred that to POWER. Still, at least all that would have given all that somewhere to live on, Oracle's semiconductor division ended up being obliterated.

Likewise, the fact that IBM already has AIX would mean they probably wouldn't want to keep Solaris going long-term. I wonder if they might have somehow tried to merge AIX and Solaris. That could have been interesting. I also wonder if IBM might have, unlike Oracle, kept OpenSolaris alive. And I also wonder what the ZFS licensing situation would have been with IBM as its owner (would IBM have been more likely to relicense from CDDL to GPLv2?)

(Disclaimer: Former Oracle employee, although I never really had any personal involvement in the topics I'm discussing.)
2 + 2 = 4 isn't an abstraction. I think we just have a different idea of what an "abstraction" is, which is fine.
Ask HN: Anyone Using Hashnode?
After some... interesting... experiences with a prominent tech, I wanted to write the blog post that would've saved me a lot of time, for any others that follow in my footsteps.

Hashnode looks good, but I'm not sure how well they play with Googlebot. And I want this to be easily found.

E.g., when I google (without quotes) the exact title of the most recent post[1] on their current #1 featured blog post, it doesn't show up.

[1]: https://sayedalesawy.hashnode.dev/top-5-lessons-i-learned-while-working-with-go-for-two-years
Brendan Gregg has a lot of clout. Besides that, he did eventually work at Sun proper, and later Joyent. I have no reason not to believe his account.
I dreamed about owning a palm pilot when I was a child. I would sweat at the thought of owning one of these one day: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cd/Palm_TX.... I recall they used to be about $200. Forgot they existed.
In one of these recent articles (the Wade piece?) they explain it's not the presence of a furin cleavage site, it's this particular furin cleavage site pattern including its flanking regions. There's discussion about the existence of furin cleavage sites in other coronaviruses, but also explanation for why it's unusual in SARS-CoV-2.
The criticism is of forks that are done in order to re-brand and re-sell a project, and then never contribute anything back to the original, and likely, never pull improvements from the originally forked project (which can include critical bug fixes) after that.
Yes, building a safe airplane is doable. But this is not a good comparison.

Securing a company is like saying that you have to chnage all of the wiring in a country without impacting power supply. ALL of them - the house wirings, the cables transporting power, everyting. At once.

Security in a company is not a single system, it is a messy interaction of unknown dependencies nobody understands. And this mess runs a business.

Of course, there are plenty of things one can do but even for simple tasks such as "let's reset all the 100,000 accounts to make sure they are long/complex/whatever". This is asking for apocalypse.

How it is difficult is visible when you work in information security and have to balance the "we MUST NOT be hacked" and "we MUST NOT impact the business".
What’s the advantage to running windows virtually in Ubuntu/ZFS vs just natively with backups enabled?

Is there a specific flow you use that makes this more optimal?

How is performance?
I think there are lower expectations of Aus/NZ because they're relatively small and out-of-the-way countries (Maybe less so for Aussie), so it's surprising how often they seem to excel in things.

The obvious examples that come to mind would be sports. NZ excels in Sailing, Cricket and Rugby against much larger countries.

Though it could be that in general, Aus/NZ have the same skill distribution as other countries, but they just stand out more because there are lower expectations or highly skilled people are rarer overall due to lower populations.
While escape analysis in Go is finky, you can make it part of the CI/CD to keep it under control.

https://medium.com/a-journey-with-go/go-introduction-to-the-...

No different than running other kinds of static analysis for well known languages, unsafe by default.
On the flip side inflation and wealth inequality has gutted the average workers relative pay check. 200k today is comparable to 100k a short time ago. SWE has at best kept up while other white collar jobs are not only underpaid but completely tanked relative to executive earners.
Companies generally do not have a sufficient tested backup strategy and plan (though backups have only one part to play). Those same companies have probably never suffered any major consequences as a result - which might explain why it’s so usual for this to be a common gap. Sloppy/incomplete backups can probably wing/firefight the more common ‘single server dies’ ‘single directory needs recovering from accidental deletion on file server’ ‘need to restore database following botched upgrade’ type scenarios creating a false sense of security.

In the same way companies do not have sufficient HA for their critical systems or processes. HA means being actively resistant to events impacting availability by having (typically automated) redundancy to remove SPoFs. It doesn’t mean HA owing to luck the server hasn’t died in 10 years owing to lack of/poor maintenance. But both with HA and backups companies can dodge bullets (until a real emergency) and maybe never even have a major incident.

Ransomware kind of exploits this lack of organisation level sufficient backing up of all critical information assets.

It really is as you say, low hanging fruit.
Any rational person would give a bit of consideration to the lab leak theory, as some one said upthread

1. Corona virus outbreak started in wuhan

2. Wuhan has the WIV which does research on coronaviruses

At a minimum this should make someone think that the lab leak theory is probable, instead of outright dismissing it.

Also there were concerns raised by the US state department officials who had reviewed the protocols at the lab that the standards were not upto bar.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-dep...
As a Greenland Shark, you're even looking forward to something like 250-500 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_shark
What a beautifully written paper. The tone is unusual and works wonderfully well. The author makes it look easy, but it is not.
There are several viable candidates. The reason this is hard are more related to a lack of infrastructure than fundamental technical issues. Producing vast amounts of fuel and putting the infrastructure in place to get it to airports around the world is a non trivial effort.

Here's a list of things that could work:

- Hydrogen has been used as rocket fuel and e.g. Airbus is working on adapting jet engines to burn it. Green hydrogen generated from wind/solar would be zero carbon and sustainable. It probably would not be that cheap though. It might also be interesting in combination with fuel cells. Airbus is working on that as well. Late 2030s are apparently what they are shooting for for this.

- Methane, also used as a rocket fuel (e.g. SpaceX). There have been multiple attempts to use liquid gas as aviation fuel and if you use e.g. bio gas or synthesize it, it could be sustainable. I don't think there are a lot of companies working on this for aviation but it has definitely worked in the past as a fuel. Of course fossil supplies of methane are plentiful but not very sustainable. Synthesizing it would be similarly expensive as other synthetic fuels.

- Ethanol (what boom is apparently proposing to use) is also suitable as a fuel. Corn based ethanol is of course controversial (i.e. only sustainable if you don't look at the production process with too much scrutiny) but there may also be ways to synthesize it in different ways as well. Currently mixing a portion of ethanol in fuels is a popular way for oil companies to green wash their business. Therefore, there's good reason to be wary of companies promoting its use.

- Kerosene could feasibly be synthesized long term (just like a lot of other carbohydrates). Technology for that exists but there are a lot of scaling issues to solve. E.g. Shell is working on that. This would obviously be great for powering legacy planes for the foreseeable future. Planes produced today could fly well into the 2050s or beyond. So there is an obvious economic incentive to make that work.

IMHO hydrogen is the most obvious path as there is a growing momentum to use it in many other applications and some serious effort to product it in sustainable ways. E.g. Airbus bringing planes to production in the late 2030s could inspire a lot of airports to start investing in related infrastructure. Relative to kerosene, it would be lot less polluting. Co2 is not the only issue associated with burning kerosene. Synthetic Kerosene might be a good second option. Everything else could work but seems less obvious right now.
These videos [1] were published by a number of tabloids such as The Daily Mail [2] and The Sun [3]. I also remember that a very popular french TV show (Quotidien [4]) published them as well.

[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/people-collapsing-coronavi...

[2] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7923981/Coronavirus...

[3] https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/10808633/coronavirus-wuhan-zom...

[4] https://www.liberation.fr/checknews/2020/01/31/les-videos-di...