skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> There were tons of articles and threads on [the lab leak theory] everywhere including HN

Until relatively recently lab leak discussion was censored from Twitter and Facebook. I didn't see much of it in the period Feb 2020 - May 2021.

> On the media 'not taking it seriously' - because there was no evidence whatsoever outside of conjecture

There was no brilliant evidence for any source of the coronavirus. Regardless of that, the idea of a lab leak was quickly ruled out and that was unjustified.

I think the problem for the media was that a controversial American president publicly endorsed the lab leak theory, as it supported his broader agenda, and that made people in the media prefer to disbelieve it, even to wrongly suggest that it was not credible. In short: bias.
I agree with you. I am not sure what driving around the WHO delegation in wuhan 1 year after the facts was ever going to achieve.

At the end of the day the only people who most likely know whether it was a lab leak or not are the chinese authorities. So we will likely know in 50 or 60 years if those archives are made public (like for the Katyn massacre). The CIA/NSA can possibly get its hand on incriminating communications, but who is going to trust those guys?

Also I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the chinese authorities got all covid lab samples destroyed without being analysed. The best way to not leak that you may be responsible is to ensure no one, even yourself, can ever know whether you were responsible.
I suspect its because "Amazon" is the most visible there are far worse stories about UK warehouses.

Its a bit like the protestors against Mc Donalds.

And I do wonder if Amazon might have stricter reporting when compared to smaller industrial sites who might hide acidents.
The dark web index 2021, report
The Dark Web Index 2021 report provides the prices for illegal services/products available in the black marketplaces and much more.
Don't be absurd. Every single major social media platform banned even the most gentle suggestion that the lab was involved. And everyone who mentioned it was called "racist".

Now that the scientific consensus is settling and lab leak does indeed seem to be true, they are all in major damage control. And you are trying to change the narrative by introducing some silly victim-blaming charade about "oppression complex", which is dubious and off topic.

It will be less embarrassing for you if you get used to saying "I was wrong" instead of continuing your smug "b.b..but...ACTUALLY, oppression complexes! Therefore, my side is still right." Everyone can see straight through it.

> It just had no credibility due to lack of evidence.

Nonsense. It had an enormous amount of evidence. This paper was publicly available in March 2020: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S15671...
Can’t we tell whether the 4% difference between SARS-Cov2 and RaTG13 is responsible for the Furin Cleavage site?

If so, that would be a huge connection suggesting GoF and the template coronavirus SARS-Cov2 was based on
I think you missed that I'm using Perforce; gitlabCI would be a super hack job.
Megafon halts trans-Arctic cable project Arctic Connect
The UK Has a Plan for a New ‘Pandemic Radar’ System
Thank you for this link. That was incredibly interesting. I won't spoil the twist at the end, suffice to say that I now am hoping for something like that in a scifi movie.
Ask HN: How to hack the erasable marker to become permanent marker
I like the way it is. Sometimes it brings up UI/UX. Sometimes a story on modern assassination techniques. Sometimes something like crystal growth. It's quite hard to classify.
The Power of Python in Programming
Facebook to end special treatment for politicians after Trump ban – report
This is a recent discussion on This Week in Virology: https://youtu.be/IxwrDSYrhjU.

The main reasons why virologists think the idea of a lab leak is nonsense:

* Nothing in the genome of SARS-CoV-2 is particularly surprising. All the elements of the virus (including the furin cleavage site) are commonly found in other coronaviruses.

* Every novel virus in history has been the result of spillover from animals. Just in the last 20 years alone, two novel coronaviruses have spilled over into humans: SARS and MERS. SARS-related coronaviruses are circulating in bat and other animal populations throughout China and Southeast Asia, and millions of people come into regular contact with these animal populations. These millions of people are not trained researchers wearing protective gear and undergoing regular testing for infection. Literally millions of people are constantly exposed at much higher levels than researchers.

* There is not a single shred of evidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had SARS-CoV-2 before the pandemic. None. On the other hand, there's good evidence that they didn't have it. They publish the genomes of viruses they find (such as the now-famous RaTG13, which they published in 2016), and SARS-CoV-2 is not among them.

* The Wuhan Institute of Virology has only ever isolated three SARS-related coronaviruses, and it has published extensively on them. All three of them are only distantly related to SARS-CoV-2. All the gain-of-function conspiracy theories require SARS-CoV-2 to have been secretly isolated in a lab, which is a very difficult and time-consuming task, without anyone being informed, without anything being published, and without any of the many people who would know about this (very likely including foreign scientists) spilling the beans.

* The Wuhan Institute of Virology, just like all other well-run high-security labs, regularly tests its workers for signs of infection. If lab workers had been infected, they would be seropositive. The lab-leak conspiracy theory requires the lab to be lying about its testing results.
If that's what you took from the article, then you got completely the wrong end of the stick. The problem was the removal of the author's attribution and illegal relicensing. He says himself he was glad when Apple later included his tools in macOS with correct attribution and licensing.
As I know the story, claims about wolf were made by just the boy, not by scores of people and subsequently dismissed because the boy was also one who claimed it. I'm starting to question if you argue in good faith.
Outside of cryptocurrency there are none.

This is because it’s better to use a database: simpler, faster, more efficient.

You can do crypto signing in a database or flat files if you really need proof that some actor approved something or other. Each actor can keep such signatures in a local db as evidence if needed.
As an everyday heuristic, sure. But when it comes to matters of national importance we all deserve better.
> Why, do you "assume bad intent" and "make unsubstantiated accusations"?

Yes: https://offices.depaul.edu/diversity/education/presidents-bo...

> Attributes of a successful antiracist
> 1. Stop saying, “I am not racist.”
> 2. Admit racism exists and is ascribed to you.
Shocking? This is all very humdrum to anyone who has been paying attention. Maybe you should pay attention.
Surely this is anti-competitive.
Yes, but, I've seen people try to do that both on here and on rootcause, and the probabilities are anything but objective. It's just people math-washing what they already thought
IIRC in a bunch of scenarios compression makes loading and file access faster, as you're I/O limited and it's quicker to read less data and decompress. You do need to choose simple/quick/not-that-much-compressing compression algorithms for that.
It was quite obvious the way he worded it
> Amazon is building a Wi-Fi network – using your Wi-Fi.

Article is incorrect right from the first sentence. Sidewalk is a LoRA based network, not a Wi-Fi network. "Wireless network" would be more accurate.

I work for Amazon so can't comment too much. However as an Amazon customer, the Sidewalk whitepaper (linked in the article) leaves me not at all concerned to leave this opted in.
> Each part of the system can't know what it needs,

Yeah it can. It needs what it needed before.

If you have a system that is shipping stuff to customers, it doesn't have to care about the new childhoodPetName Field that you've added for a different part of the system.

This is especially relevant if you handle any kind of description of the real world, e.g. in robotics or medicine, and have multiple distributed systems and codebases all communicating with each other.

The inability to gracefully ignore cases that don't fit the expected data model is a weakness most contemporary programming languages and type systems share.
Same in Romania. For a 4 year curriculum:
first 3 semesters (1.5 years): a heavy blend of math, physics, electronics. general programming and numerical methods (matlab) on the side.
4th semester: a programming heavy semester with lots of coding: algorithms, functional programming, network programming, FPGAs. It is this semester that filters the most.
Exactly. That was the problem that he saw.

The problem he should have noticed was that the Sun was selling the code he wrote for hundreds of thousands of dollars and not passing any of that on to him.

Step one shouldn't have been to worry about putting his header comment back in place and getting them the latest version of his code to sell to their customers. It should have been negotiating a redistribution license for his code if they wanted to continue selling it.
A colleague of mine was attending a local tech conference just before Covid hit. I believe it was aimed at newcomers and various companies tried to show off exciting tech that interns/new coders could potentially work on.

She couldn't believe what she saw. A major govt. backed logging company (which does do a lot of dev work themselves) were showing off one of our projects as theirs! We were using depth cameras to estimate the volume of wood loaded on a truck as it drives trough a gate. They even used screenshots that I had made!

Now, they were involved in the project. But they were basically clients of our client. They provided us with a place to test the system as their trucks ran trough. They didn't own the software let alone did any work on it. Why they would present it as something interns could potentially work on is beyond me.

People are weird.
> We usually don’t compress the data on disk; decompression would make loading and file access slower.

Did you actually benchmark this? It probably makes sense in your head, but on any vaguely modern hardware it's very unlikely to actually be true because of how exponential the memory hierarchy is.
Let zend_fiber and amphp have fun
IMHO the problem is the term "free software" :

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html
Not an expert, but it seems the material they're talking about is a Type-2 superconductor[1], which has a more gradual transition in the presence of magnetic fields.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type-II_superconductor
Well obviously you'd give him something for his trouble.

Normally all he'll need to do is to make a phone call and say he's getting his 'friend' to bring the car into the shop.
Show HN: A REPL for Prisma.io
Have you seen the coverage of the interview of Roman Protasevich? The visible injuries on his wrist and his recently adjusted attitude are alarming.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-57353413
> No new evidence for natural origin has come to light. It remains pure speculation, just as it always has been, and you are making an isolated demand for rigor.

This is an absurd equivalence. Viruses spill over from nature all the time. There are millions of people coming into contact every day with animal populations that harbor myriad SARS-related coronaviruses. Every known novel virus that has entered the human population has done so through spillover. This is the default hypothesis, which must be overwhelmingly favored at the outset of any discussion. Everything we know so far is perfectly consistent with this default assumption, and there is precisely zero evidence of a lab leak.

> If you read the Nicholas Wade article

I've read it, and it is appalling that an article by someone who does not understand the subject they are writing about is getting so much circulation.

> there is solid evidence of a cover-up

There is no evidence at all of a cover-up of a lab leak. Everything we know so far points to the lab not even having had SARS-CoV-2 before the pandemic. It appears to be a completely novel virus, not closely related to anything else known before, which is precisely what you'd expect for a novel virus that spilled over from an unknown animal population. If there were a major outbreak of a virus that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had (such as WIV-1), that would be a different matter, but there isn't.
You might enjoy this paper, which is included with a cycle-accurate 6809 FPGA implementation:

https://github.com/cavnex/mc6809/blob/master/documentation/s...

I particularly liked how it covered his thoughts on why he'd avoid implementing a Hitachi 6309 instead. There's a bit more on the main README, as well.
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> If the goal was to disable the pipeline the attacker could just apply thermite somewhere along one of it's many unguarded miles. The reason that doesn't happen is because retribution for such an act would be striking to say the least.

For what it's worth, a couple weeks ago someone (according to a manifesto, an anarchist group) did exactly that in Munich - they set about 50 10 kV electricity cables that were laid bare due to construction works ablaze to strike against a military supplier and cut off about 20.000 households for over 36 hours until the utility managed to restore service: https://www.br.de/nachrichten/bayern/stromausfall-in-muenche...

Sabotage or plain old theft against utilities is pretty common, but it's hard to do something physical that truly disrupts service for longer than a day or two - the networks are designed with reliability against all kinds of issues in mind. An IT-based attack leaves no traces if done well and can have a week to month long impact, simply because back when these networks were designed, IT threats were not existing.
Right. You believe in magnetic water and each time you see someone drinking coke you start pushing around the flyers.
For cleaning windows you can also employ a Robot to do the job. Though i think a safety cable is a really good idea, not sure how that is done for a Robot working on the ceiling.

https://azbigmedia.com/lifestyle/how-a-window-cleaning-robot...
Are EQ and Emotional Intelligence the Best Predictors of Success?
I think what would be more use-full would be a new "shell"
which is base on a modern context, incorporating lessens learned from years of cmd-line UX design (ok let's be honest many programs didn't learn anything wrt. UX).

But adding jet another POSIX shell which maybe does some parts better but in the end has still not a grate UX because it's a POSIX shell seems kinda pointless IMHO.
Facebook. What does it do? Chat (for adults and kids), dating, blogging, marketplace, groups, stories, AR, image recognition, live feeds, YouTube-style videos, shopping, property rentals, Q&A, clubhouse-style rooms, COVID-19 info center, multiplayer gaming community, events, job listings, mental health, weather, fundraising.

I avoid the app because I think it's data harvesting, but the mobile site is such a pain. Sometimes it's the little things like writing "the..." in the text box, and accidentally tagging "Theodore" because of a generic word. I have to type all my Facebook comments in a separate text editor.
Exploitation of a JavaScriptCore WebAssembly Vulnerability (CVE-2021-30734)
> It was livestreamed

According to what I've read it was not livestreamed to an audience, with the exception of some brief experiment with 24/7 internet livestreaming. So pretty easy to fake.
Superconductivity is not really a "yes or no" property. It can be destroyed by a too-strong external magnetic field, or, equivalently, a too-strong current. The quantitative side of this thing (i.e. what allows us to say "superconductivity is weakened") is "how strong is too-strong". We can also talk about the "order parameter", which is related to the fraction of conductivity electrons participating in Cooper pairs, and to the depth (usually ~100 nm) to which the external magnetic field does penetrate the superconductor.

The arXiv link to the original research is https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.09901v2, and from Fig. 1, it follows that they are talking about a Type II superconductor, which does allow some magnetic field to pass through the bulk of it, in the form of vortices. Obviously, the volume occupied by the vortices is not superconductive, but they are shunted by the remaining bulk of the material, and therefore the resistance of the whole specimen is still zero.
I think the "gathering supplies via sweepstakes" is what they're questioning.

I was dubious about that part at first, and then they said he did it in Korea in a language he didn't speak, and now I'm pretty sure it had a lot of tomfoolery to make it work.

It's still interesting, and I'd watch it... But I don't believe it was fully legit.
At least with Firefox, doing tasks in the background was sometimes quite painful, especially during development. For example, I do some CPU-intensive stuff in the background, close the tab because I noticed a mistake in my code -> background task still runs for several seconds eating CPU and memory until it is killed or finished (I didn't check to be honest) by the browser.

Edit: As with everything related to complex web applications (and I had two or three in my career), it is obvious that the whole environment (client, protocols, languages,...) was never designed for this.
>Here’s how these attacks work. A hacker penetrates a company’s systems—an often easy task, given many firms’ shoddy cybersecurity practices.

This seems like the real problem. "Banning cryptocurrencies", whatever that means, doesn't solve the security problem. If these critical systems are so vulnerable, shouldn't we be even more concerned about hackers who have more nefarious intentions than making some quick money?
Labs may be built in areas relevant to their research.
I keep wondering how long until Google page ranks are "adjusted" when using GA (because GA is slow, so GA pages are penalised at the moment, and clearly Google wants people to use GA so they need to fix that).
From my point of view, the lab-leak hypothesis is presented in a political way and not a scientific way, so it's hard to challenge scientifically.

This is my genuine scientific take, having worked in a genome lab:

If the virus was artificially engineered, then you might expect to see points of artificial cleavage in the genome (which I assume you don't, because that would have been identified by now and would be presented as strong scientific evidence for lab origin).

If the virus were stored and allowed to mutate naturally but in a lab, then it might look very much like any naturally-occurring virus, but in lab conditions it seems likely (probabilistically 'almost certain') to evolve in the direction of reduced infectiousness. So, this also seems unlikely.

Deliberately engineering a human-infectious virus to appear natural is theoretically possible, but it seems to me that it would have to be deliberate - and is far beyond our current public understanding of science. So, I'd expect the cost to be astronomical. One lab or one group of scientists privately working on this doesn't seem to be enough.

The fact that this coronavirus transfers so easily to and between other species (and mink in particular) suggests that it has cross-species potential, and therefore cross-species origin. It suggests that this virus doesn't have any particular connection to humans.

Like any scientist, I'm prepared to accept that it's not impossible. Indeed, I have laid out three routes in this comment. But, the arguments for a lab-leak it are not scientifically convincing, to me, and it seems vanishingly unlikely. I haven't seen any hint of evidence that would make me sit up and pay attention.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...
Why is disclosure of potential conflict of interest made out to be such a high bar? And why do you put arguments forth that did not exist in what you replied to?

> Does it make any sense to say he can't comment on the work of an organisation he runs because he runs it?

Is a straw man argument, because what was said was that the conflict of interest should have been disclosed. And, not that he cannot make a comment.
When everyone is responsible, no one is responsible. The buck has to stop somewhere.
>>I've relived it a number of times over the past year particularly.

Perhaps you should consider checking in to a psychiatric care facility, that's definitely not normal.
There are other things aside from array broadcasting that languages stand to learn from APL. I think that the biggest one is looking carefully at the clever choice of primitives.

To my knowledge other languages like Julia and numpy don't offer the same range of index-based primitives, like grades, or classifications, which are used pervasively in APLs.

APLs better support a pattern of computing some permutation of a set of arrays, and then viewing other arrays through that permutation, than other languages. You can do it, of course, in numpy, but it's not nearly as pleasant.
> They look deceptively simple, but those that are kprobes-based are really kernel-specific and brittle, and need ongoing maintenance to match the latest changes in the kernel

It seems like there is a missing formal interface here if this is so brittle, no? If it’s hitting a bunch of internal kernel stuff shouldn’t this stuff just live with the kernel itself?
Recently I tried to set up some pretty basic Office 365 stuff, and in the end I had to pay someone from Upwork to run a bunch of PowerShell commands because the admin UI simply ignore or timed out when I tried to set stuff. Between that, the absolutely dreadfully confusing product URLs and so on, the chances of me ever trusting MS enough to run servers for me is slim.
I'm starting a startup with Scala and Akka. I'm doing this because I tried doing the same thing with Node and before then Java, but both the language and ecosystem could not help me (solo founder) move fast enough or give me confidence that my architecture was going to last a couple years down the road.

I also didn't want to make things "just work" and refactor later, because I think that's just overall terrible advice. The cost of going back and rewriting your architecture is enormous. Might as well use tools you feel confident can scale with your startup than hack something together and have a complete mess on your hands.
I’ve been very impressed with fastText and React
Locked out from an ad platform for simply using another competitor, not even related to ads?
Yes to all of that.

* Admin-controlled certs and mutual TLS for the webface.

* send a webhook for each snapshot, maybe sign and ship the image somewhere durable

You could likely work out a recurring charge per unit for these features. I.e. enterprise buys the units at normal price and then pays $100/unit/year for enterprise features. Remember that you're competing here against the hardware vendor's on-board management. That's not usually free or as flexible as you can be.

Also I want to emphasize something that the parent poster said. Medium and large companies have to fulfill legal and certification obligations (SOX, SOC1/2) that require them to defend against audit challenges. If you can tie into that story and satisfy their compliance controls with just a little configuration these companies will buy.