skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That report is completely deferential to the administration. It reports on their decision, cites administration officials exclusively, contains no counterpoints whatsoever.

Retrospectively, most analyses that I've read have said that travel bans had essentially no effect, something most epidemiologists at the time were saying too. Was that covered? No. The administration said that a ban on travel from China was a good idea (it likely wasn't a bad one), and that was the end of the story, more or less.

Months after that announcement, Trump was proclaiming that the virus was no worse than the flu.

March 24th, 2020:

"We lose thousands and thousands of people a year to the flu. We don't turn the country off," Trump said from the Rose Garden. "And actually, this year we're having a bad flu season. But we lose thousands of people a year to the flu. We never turn the country off. We lose much more than that to automobile accidents… I would love to have the country opened up and just raring to go by Easter."
We didn’t have the same confluence of other circumstantial evidence we do in this case. There’s no good reason to think Ebola came from a lab.
These are DC fast chargers. You won't be walking home while it's charging.
At first I thought you comment was sarcasm but it does appear to be serious.

There's nothing "imperative" (as commonly understood) in 98% of Clojure code out in the wild.

"Contexts" or "context updates" are also very rare, unless required by a non-Clojure JVM or JS library.

Can discuss further if you reference a specific open-source code example with "context" or "imperative style".
A gentle reminder to anyone dismissing this theme of making websites work with less javascript:

Amazon.com works great with NO javascript. Seamlessly.
> Also what evidence do you have that “brown” people are targeted more than others?

I tried to engage with you upthread assuming positive intent. This comment seems like deliberate baiting and I don’t think it’s the least bit authentic. I don’t think there’s any question that non-white people in America are selectively policed more than white people except by those arguing in bad faith.
To paraphrase one of my favorite comedies, Super Troopers:

“But Trump’s lies are cheeky and fun!

Yeah, and the establishment’s lies are cruel and tragic.”

Of course this is an overstatement; Trump’s lies were not pretty but the point is that obvious lies are significantly less damaging than well-hidden lies. It’s the skillful liars that one needs to be wary of.
We know enough to calculate a joint probability. Just update your estimate with new information. This should be pretty non-controversial. Everybody does this every day especially in the face of uncertainty.
> Why?

You've artificially limited the number of possible labs to those doing bioweapon research. If this isn't your claim there is no reason to do so and if there are more labs studying coronavirus it's far less coincidental.
> Sure, 4chan got a lot wrong: but better to get all the (possible) facts, and sift through them.
This is a good article. There's been so much junk over the past couple of weeks or so that it's been very frustrating. I've mostly been watching the debate unfold on Twitter, and it's confirmed for me that Twitter is a terrible place for real intellectually-curious discussion (probably social media in general).

I've been wondering certain things, especially why Marc Lipsitch (one of the most consistently trustworthy voices throughout the pandemic) signed that Science letter, knowing that it would add weight to the "it's a lab leak" propaganda, and stood by the assertion that lab leak is plausible[1].

I hope we do get the true answers to these questions, though think it's not especially likely.

I'll say a couple other things. For an audience of honestly intellectually curious people, the Trumpian right-wingers did enormous damage to their theory, even if it was correct, by being racist and scientifically willfully stupid. Similarly, the Chinese authorities, even if they were correct did enormous damage to their theory by being authoritarian and stifling real communication. But it is very easy to see why both sides acted as they did: these mythical honest intellectually curious people are a tiny fraction of the entire audience, and have relatively little power, so they were quite incentivized to act as they did. And, maybe a little too early to say for sure, but it probably worked.

[1]: https://twitter.com/mlipsitch/status/1398455815959367683
If this is the most shocking article you have ever read in your life, I feel you haven't read many articles in your life.

There is absolutely no evidence in it. Just a pile of conjecture. It is absolutely the stuff of conspiracy theories.

The truly shocking thing is that world does not hold China liable for this disaster. It really doesn't matter if it started in a lab or in one of their wet markets; it was incompetence and negligence on China's part in either case. China should pay reparations to the world for turning it off for what looks to be like multiple years, and killing millions of people.
> It's not a conflict of interest because Dr. Fauci wasn't gaining anything. The agency he is head of is specifically interested in infectious disease and has a large budget for grants. $120K per year pays for a couple plate of genetic samples and tech time to run them. Maybe in China you can run a few more for that cost, I don't know.

So it is not a conflict of interest because of the sum of money? Someone doesn't need to gain anything to be in conflict, by definition: "a situation in which the concerns or aims of two different parties are incompatible."

Do you at least think he had a duty to disclose his involvement/investment in gain of function research? Specifically with the Wuhan lab at the center of this?

> As head of that agency, it's also his job to share his professional opinion with the public. For this, his reward is a public servant's salary. Seriously, what's he getting here for his supposed "deception"?

Did you know he's the most highly paid government official? His measly public servant salary only paid him $417K. [0]

[0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/01/25/dr-...
http://archive.is/y1Gw7
Also: almost all of these are actively in use on my personal site, they’re not just stuff I mention academically. They’re great for places you might progressively enhance with JS but want to provide reasonable no-JS fallbacks.
That’s not how this was quoted to claim he’s an antisemite. See this:

https://mobile.twitter.com/StopAntisemites/status/1400065933...
> I’m not sure why you introduced homes to the analogy. That’s a very different scenario.

In what way is a home that you fill with stuff you bought in a store different from a computer that you fill with stuff you bought in a store?
iOS builds?
I'm a adherent to the idea that nothing teaches system design except experience and having to fix your own mistakes in sufficiently large systems.

In most software development courses, the student is learning how to make something (and then after that is done, its thrown away for the next homework assignment).

System design is often about writing the glue between different constraints - frequently through another constrained component... and then having to live with the consequences of that design for a year or more (possibly trying to fix it).

Take the "I've got a relational database here with mixed transactions and record updates and a document database there that I want to reflect the current state of an object in the relational database." And so you get to figure out how to use GoldenGate ( https://docs.oracle.com/goldengate/c1230/gg-winux/GGCON/intr... ) or Postgresql to amqp ( https://livebook.manning.com/book/rabbitmq-in-depth/chapter-... ) and then write something that consumes that and writes it into CouchDB or MongoDB (which do you chose? why?)

Once you've got that working... keep it working for a year or two.

That's how you learn system design.
https://drasticresearch.org/ to see some real hackers at work.

Media, governments, and scientists should take a stronger stand now, or they will not protect amateurs against the full wrath of more unsavory elements of hostile state actors.
Are you familiar with the Sverdlovsk anthrax leak? The Soviets successfully blamed that on tainted meat, and the truth wasn't revealed until after the fall of the Soviet Union. Before that, the Western scientific consensus agreed with the Soviets, discounting speculation otherwise as a conspiracy theory, with reasoning similar to yours above.

(For emphasis, nothing above is meant to imply that SARS-CoV-2 was a bioweapon. An accident in reckless but not malicious basic research seems far more likely to me, and natural origin certainly hasn't been excluded either.)
Well, obviously.
Of course you get the technical equivalent of the TSA. Even if you had Bruce Schneier setting it up, he won't run it in perpetuity; government in the long run descends to maximum power exercised with minimum intelligence unless prevented by the people governed.
I think it depends on what you mean by remember ... I think they would have an easier time if they need to re-learn it in the future
The lab wasn’t conducting bioweapon research. Gain of function research isn’t to create a bioweapon, nominally. It’s to examine the behavior of viruses under manipulation in order to better understand how we can respond to them given an outbreak. It’s not nefarious by nature, though it does seem like its usefulness hasn’t panned out as was thought.

But again, you really should read the article to understand what gain of function research is instead of insinuating I said COVID was a bioweapon.
Trump officials are the ones who said it wasn’t a lab leak from the start. Did you read the article?
No, the reasonable response is to completely ignore what they say, because otherwise you are still being manipulated by the liar.
It's worth remembering that a good percent of any social media audience are paid Chinese posters (ie the $.50 army).

China has been working _very_ hard to redirect the origin of COVID-19 away from the WIV, and even from China itself (starting rumors that it originated in Italy).

Take any skeptical audience with a huge grain of salt, considering that the zeitgeist might not be organic in the slightest.
It's a data point in favor of not censoring posts based the "consensus" at least.
Firstly, do not get married or have kids. Until after you are rich. Avoid marriage altogether, if you can. As 1/2 or more your wealth will be taken from you. As over 1/2 of marriages end in divorce. And kids and family defocus you from the goal of being rich. Creating financial burdens and limiting your focus and time.

Secondly, find a mentor or mentors who have succeeded in the industry/sector/field you want to get rich in.

Thirdly,
Read the 10 roads to riches, by kenneth fisher. To figure out the road you are suited for.

Good luck. If you live in a first world country. You have so many resources and mentors... to become rich.
IMHO, we were in the middle of the problem. The important part to was to figure out how to get out of it. The investigation at that point would not be helpful as it may make cooperation more difficult. Even if the result is that is natural origin and it escaped from a Wet Market. It was China's responsibility and the whole world must make sure to force China to ban wet markets. But as I said before, it will come a time for that.
Always been this way, look at companies that manipulated silver markets. Or people who never get in trouble at the highest political level.

It's a two tier system.

The sooner you accept this, and go back to work, the better.
Computer History Museum: Oral History of Dave Cutler Part 1
I'm new to getting my designs working well with assistive tools. What do you use for testing and what are the prominent tools that should be targeted?
Van Buren is a victory against overbroad interpretations of the CFAA
Aren’t pciutils dependent on hardware support though? I have a couple of Asus mobos that have weird mouse movement depending on how slightly angled the GPU is in the slot - I tried to use pciutils to diagnose the issue but the “gamer”-grade Core i7 I have in there wasn’t on support-list because Intel only enables PCIe diags on i9/X and Xeon chips.

...and I know a few DCs that loaded up on cheap low-grade i3/i5 chips for “near-line” computing (slow but cheap and cheerful) so they’d be SoL too.
> Like how many of your coworkers from top CS schools remember most of the material in their compilers, cryptography, comp bio courses?

Nobody forgets a compilers course.

A "compilers" course is probably the first CS course where debugging is real--and terrifyingly hard. A compilers course converts a programmer from a "null pointers are bad" person to a "null pointers are evil" zealot.

Compilers courses are probably the closest that a CS person will get to PTSD.
Part 2 is here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVgSLud50ss
http://archive.is/6P11t
Except he was proven right yet again that social media and old media orgs will censor others and lie to the public when it fits their political agenda.
We don’t allow private companies to buy the technology required to protect themselves against a physical army.
That was an example of trump taking the virus seriously. You misunderstood my use of the reference. Also, that's NPR.

It's pretty well known that trump was subsequently labeled racist for attempting that ban.

Where are you getting this idea that the media was deferential? It sounds...very far fetched, to put it nicely.
You write this as though this somehow new behavior by the media, unique to some combination of Trump and/or COVID19.

This is in fact how the media has always behaved. It did this about more or less every major event in US history. Only when the tide has turned sufficiently within the culture as a whole does the media as a whole manage to embrace non-status-quo positions. There are always outliers, visible/audible from the start, who tell contrary stories, just as there have been for COVID19.
That's an interesting perspective (and now that you mention it I can think of someone at work who loves types and also tends to break stuff). I myself love static types because it allows me to avoid certain classes of errors and I try my hardest not to introduce bugs. Static typing also greatly informs my workflow. I tend to practice type driven development to the extent possible so when I go back to dynamic languages I feel like I'm coding with one hand tied behind my back since I can't encode my assumptions in types and rely on the type checker to help me validate them.
Easy Hypervisor Heap Visualization with PyPANDA and HeapInspect
There's no need for a browser extension, you can enable it as a setting in your profile if you're logged in.
With lot of intense activity, the brain also outputs results. So I guess the similarities are there.
Yeah. Can't say I was always right, but I wasn't ever surprised, and I was definitely prepared.
This is a powerful argument for shuffling behaviors you don't want users to come to depend on, every release or every initialization.

This advice has been seen successfully implemented for hash functions, where the users whose expectations were to be dashed were hackers hoping to exploit the results.
> Sellable desktop software became obsolete due to piracy.

This is almost certainly not true. If anything hurt selling desktop apps, it was Apples policies encouraging dirt cheap apps on the App Store that then led to customer expectations of the cost of apps dropping dramatically.

There were recent stories about how software shops like Panic are going back to selling only desktop apps and ending their iOS apps.

If anything, the technology to prevent piracy had only gotten significantly better by the time ios came out, and companies were doing just fine even before.
"Camera calibration is generally understood to be the process of estimating the characteristics of a camera that affect the formation of images of real 3D scenes."

Not really. From the title, you'd think it was about color calibration in Scratch.
It's still not clear to me what the conflict of interest is. The amount of money is kind of important, because it gives you an idea of the level of involvement. As I said, $600K over 5 years is very little money, it basically makes sure you get the results of whatever research is already being done.

> His measly public servant salary only paid him $417K.

The top scientist in the country, with several Ph.Ds, 50 years of experience in a both public leadership and an incredibly complicated branch of biology, is making roughly what a staff engineer at a FAANG company makes...and you are complaining? That's the bargain of the century. He's a sick fuck for actually sticking it out - he could have bailed and consulted on "return to the office" for all the big tech and entertainment companies. He is 80 years old, working insane hours, and probably would have made more money in 6 months than he has in his whole public career from a really nice beach. You will never convince me that THIS is the smoking gun that proves Dr. Fauci corrupt, finally, after 50 years in public service. It's too stupid.
Moonsense Recorder – Build live prototypes using mobile device sensor data
>if you miss table layouts, you can use them with `display` on basically anything

except not really because there's no CSS equivalent for rowspan/colspan. wish they would add this, it'd also be useful for making tables responsive.

Thanks for the attr tip though, somehow that one had completely slipped by me!
Several thoughts:

1) If covid _did_ come out of lab - I'm emphatically not saying that I believe that it did - I have pretty high confidence in the ability of the any government to cover it up.

2) There is some class of people who will accept whatever 'evidence' of a lab leak as completely convincing for a variety of reasons (conspiracy minded thinking, anti-chinese sentiments, etc)

3) It seems impossible to strongly prove that the virus emerged naturally (we can't observe the case zero event again), _especially_ to the crowd mentioned in 2).

Given these 3 statements, it's really hard for me to see _any_ value in investigating this any further. It just seems like it'd just feed fuel to group 2), which is not something that I think would be particularly good for anyone in the long run.
by guess, do you mean estimate, or just a real guess? Is there somewhere I can read more about the teams that have looked for the ebola origin and how they're funded?
Offering remote work is a competitive advantage. You get access to a larger pool of talent. The smart companies realise this. If you are a manager and you can’t figure out how to manage people remotely, then you are an incompetent manager.
That's not what the person you are responding to said at all. Please stop dishonestly conflating the two theories. You can believe that a coronavirus accidentally leaked from a lab that was studying coronaviruses without believing that it was intentional, or that the disease was a bioweapon.

Honestly, this is not a difficult distinction to understand. You have to wonder why people are so eager to conflate the two.
Interesting. After reading this quote - "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it. — Brian W. Kernighan and P. J. Plauger in The Elements of Programming Style." - instead of trying to get to the flow it seems better to avoid the necessity to get to the flow, write so simple that the flow is unnecessary. Wonder what's harder to achieve.
This is true! It's also a checklist item that often involves shuffling a lot of bits around, storing them for 60, 90, or 366 days, and then deleting them, and without anyone or anything having read them.
Robotics – Pliant Energy Systems
It wasn't just the media.

> "After the interview aired, death threats flooded his inbox. The vitriol came not just from strangers who thought he was being racially insensitive but also from prominent scientists, some of whom used to be his friends. One said he should just “wither and die.”"
China could - rightfully - point out that they in fact did get the situation more or less under control and that in spite of being fully aware of the seriousness of the situation the bulk of the governments in the West (those who presumably would be first in line to demand reparation) messed it up all by themselves.
according to caniuse it's less than a percent now. of course mileage may vary.
What would the benefits of a language native implementation be, over something like decimal.js?

Is it just a matter of there being a "blessed" implementation for folks to standardize around?
OK but it's also extremely useful and the backbone of almost all incident response on Linux servers... The fact that it's a checklist really isn't relevant - no one is checklisting that specific system calls are instrumented, and that's not even how compliance works.
How many of these courses have video lectures? It's always a delight when you find the vids.
if I may recommend my own library:

https://htmx.org

it extends the expressive power of HTML as a hypertext and allows you to do quite a bit more within the hypertext paradigm.