skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, it's pretty abhorrent. But it's not surprising - poor people do desparate things to survive.

Talk to a South African if you have the chance - they'll open your eyes a bit. :)
Of course - basking sharks, and greenland sharks, for example. But I did say "most" and "warmish".
A conflict of interest does not depend on whether a person actually gains (or prevents himself from losing) anything, but whether he has some personal interest (such as fame, money, even gifts for a family member, etc.) that coexists with some duty-bound interest to some other party/society (e.g. fiduciary duty, professional ethical duties, etc.), and the person is entrusted with making a decision that implicated either interest depending on the outcome. Conflicts of interest are usually resolved either by disclosure or isolation from the adverse interest.

In this case, Fauci has sort of a small, debatable conflict. His personal stake is not money per se, but his reputation and clear preference for gain-of-function research. If it came out that gain-of-function research caused the pandemic, and Fauci was one of the leading cheerleaders for that since the early aughts AND Fauci may have provided some of the funding for this particular research, then Fauci would stand to lose quite a bit of reputation and standing. That's a real adverse incentive to determine that lab leak of a gain-of-function virus is not possible.

If his job is to share his opinion to the public, then he has a conflict of interest with respect to that decision, since the public doesn't know if Fauci-the-expert is talking or Fauci-the-reputation-seeking-bureaucrat. If he had merely disclosed any of his involvement with restarting funding of gain-of-function research in 2017 or his past advocacy for gain-of-function research, that would significantly resolve the conflict.

In my opinion, Fauci is simply an opportunistic bureaucrat and a liar (I repeat myself), and the conflict of interest claim against him is weak. Peter Daszam has much, much more problematic conflicts of interest. This is a guy who (1) discredited fellow scientists in the Lancet for considering an alternative hypothesis and (2) led a sham WHO investigation into the WIV lab, all while funneling NIH grant money to WIV, not complying with disclosure and review requirements and standing to lose his career if gain-of-function were to be seriously discredited. It would be hard for him to be more conflicted.

Also, for what it's worth, Fauci is the highest paid federal employee. He makes more than the president. Most "public servants" make $150k/year or less. Not to mention, Fauci had also made a book deal as a result of his celebrity.
The strain that was 96.2% similar was a well known strain inside and outside of China.

Experts do not believe that the many, many differences between those two virus look like anything a human would or could engineer. Again, not impossible, but seems unlikely. This research would also have to be done covertly in a lab that was not covert at all which routinely had foreign collaborators.

I also do not think “they” were trying to hide this. Remember that in the US the leadership was anti-WHO and anti-China and you can’t take on face value their value judgements of what the Chinese researchers were doing when they were asked what they were doing and had explanations.

I’m not saying that the WHO and China are unbiased either, they aren’t, but the initial actions of the US’ investigation were also heavily heavily biased and would hardly be described as impartial truth seeking efforts.
> Suppose that Fauci had known for a fact in May 2020 that SARS-COV-2 originated in that lab. How would that have changed the advice he (attempted to) offer regarding public health and safety?

If he had known the virus was being researched and escaped the lab, certainly his recommendation should have included requests for any and all research and records related to the virus research. As such records have been very pertinent to public health guidelines and guidance, if not potentially toward treatments and future vaccines.

Also there is the very real financial and legal component if that were the case. On a much smaller scale it would be on par with destroying video evidence of a slip and fall, denying it ever existed, then when caught claiming it’s immaterial to the medical treatment of the injured…that’s still fraud and at minimum a clear attempt to escape legal and financial liability.
What you did in this thread (posting dozens of copies of the same comment) was vandalism. I've banned the account.

You needn't have wondered why your comment was flagged if you had read the site guidelines before posting it. The users who flagged it were obviously correct to do so. What you did after that was beyond the pale.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
LOL ever notice that pretty much only Rust people promote their projects with “…using Rust?”

Like c++ and python people don’t always make sure to super dooper ultra promote their pet language every time they mention it now that they’ve been let go from Mozilla.
Thanks for the practitioner perspective Keith, this makes me feel a lot better about the approach Stanford is taking (and makes me want to return to the farm!)

Honestly the ethical questions being brought up are some of the most interesting things happening in tech right now. Society & the human API is like the next abstraction layer for tech, and the dust has hardly settled. It's really created a lot of opportunities to ask ourselves what kind of society we want to live in. Your CS181 syllabus looks great!
OpenStreetMap Rasters (GeoTiff)
Are there any good workflows that depend on out of order execution outside the exploration phase?

To use notebooks reproducibly, the whole thing should be cleared and run with some frequency. Global state shouldn't matter.

There's also the nbconvert --to script jupyter function that can convert a notebook into a script.
I'll also note: one of the recommended ways to avoid bugs where you type out rgg instead of rgb is to use loops and index by component instead of manually naming the components. Perhaps:

Color color;
for (size_t c=0; c<3; ++c) color[c] = (u8)block[c][pixel_index];

However, this becomes impossible in many programming languages if you give every individual component a unique type!
At least after some damage, one then learns something.
That is a good scenario, however you can still use languages like D, Nim, Swift, C#, F#, Go, among others for such scenarios.

For example, you can do codecs in C# on WinRT with .NET Native,

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/audio-video-cam...

In the context of protobuf,

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/aspnet/grpc-performance-impro...

Back to Rust, yes it is a good option, I just wouldn't write the whole application on it, just specialized libraries.

Hence why I am looking forward to Rust/Windows efforts.
The expensive part is "is an undercover officer" not "look up a license plate".
I'm with you. What are the odds it naturally occurred literally right next to the lab studying coronaviruses? I'm not saying it didn't naturally occur, but that can't be the first suspect. This is like ignoring the husband in the investigation into his wife's murder.
Makes sense, it’s only a matter of time before the Intel Management Engine is exploited. Or perhaps it already has been.
Jesus Christ the amount of unprofessional projection in this thread is insane.

No. That could not happen. Bar raisers are hiring to raise the bar for Amazon. Period.
Not if the hackers use monero.
Maybe the Biden administration has concluded that it's possible there may have been a lab leak. It would be damaging to them if they did nothing and ended up unable to conclusively prove there was no lab leak, because Trump has been banging on that drum for a long time now.

So, they don't really have much choice in this. They have to convincingly look like they're pushing to find the truth, or they'd be handing ammunition to the Trumpists.
I wonder why Vietnam doesn't have a dog farm industry, like South Korea. Is it because eating dog is considered low-class or otherwise relegated to grey markets, notwithstanding actual popularity?
Heh, i thought this was about the struggle to find happiness in your life and career.
There's just a lot more noise, now. People like that are still around, they're just harder to find.
Developing effective preventive solutions require that you understand the problem. If the problem is a lab leak, then policies that address insufficient lab safety standards are warranted. Frankly, the Chinese government should feel ashamed and discredited if it was a lab leak under its responsibility. Any US involvement in the lab leak should be investigated and uncovered as well. China would have no qualms pointing fingers at the US if the roles were reversed, and they'd be right to do so. Being sensitive to shame has never been a reasonable excuse for covering up the truth. Coddling China is not only unjust, it damages our ability to prevent this from happening again.
This was the same family who laughed at the opioid crisis they caused and called addicts “pillbillies.”
> "Holy shit I need to hire people" means that the bar is less consistent

Not even. It's not the manager's job to determine the bar. It's the bar raiser's. And they are not under the same pressures.

We can and do veto hires below the bar.
> saying something is impossible

Point out where I said "impossible"? I said skeptical, which is an absolutely perfectly position to take. I'm all perfectly happy to be wrong.
This is a good point.

On the other hand, developer productivity in notebook environments is so high that iterating your way to correct code may be faster than trying to plan it all out in the beginning.

There is also the aspect of exploration. The hardest part of most data programmer projects is understanding the data and optimal wrangling.
Just came out Bill Ackmans SPAC is acquiring 10% of universal music group too.
Yes, at least based on academic articles I researched before turning vegan to make sure I wasn’t harming myself.
This is 110% the kind of content that I love to find on the Internet: https://www.reddit.com/r/BarbaraWalters4Scale/comments/nc00b...

Thanks for sharing that sub-reddit. Subscribed!
This thread shows clear efforts of an organized group, likely state-sponsored, to disrupt it. It was funny to see this happen on 4chan, because at first they could not get it right, and were stuck in their Wikipedia editor mode. They kept getting called out for it, or ignored.

They switched to upvoting and commenting unrelated threads to the front page. When 4chan changed their algorithm to combat this blatant manipulation, they ended with an effective weapon: shitposting.

You fill a thread on Covid or GoF research with an incredible amount of shitposts, and other shitposters attacking those shitposts, downvote walls of text to grey. Derail, derail, derail. You end up with a thread that nobody wants to read, and requires sifting through shit to find what you need. Then easier to just listen to the news about what expert Peter Daszak has to say.

Beating 4chan at its own game. 50 cent army is extremely competent at shitposting.

And interesting posts are now hidden behind a "Read More", while posts defending zoonosis (imagine coming into a zoonosis theory thread to shitpost about lab-leak theory, hahaha) are on 2-3-4'th place.

It is getting harder and harder to find the facts or reason about what the hell is going on. The brain of society is poisoned to schizophrenia.
Lots of reasons!

There is potentially a lot of information I want to share, and it would be weird to have dozens of notes all over the house. Plus it would be fairly natural for the renters to read them and then immediately remove them, and then, weeks later, forget what they said; "Wait, what's the trick to getting the bath temperature right? Wish I hadn't removed that sticky note!"

Also, I can spend the next week+ building up the "library" of notes as I go through the house, vs. having to do it as a "last chore" before we leave the house, putting sticky notes all over the darn place and trying to prevent my 3 and 5 year old children from grabbing them.

And we could re-use the virtual notes with zero effort the next time we rent the house.
> totally unrelated to what iteration order you get when you iterate elements in the hash

That is a bit too strong am assertion: you can decorrelate the two when you build the collection, but the naive set up is very much that hash randomisation will randomise iteration order.
There was an investigation! International teams went over data and samples! Researchers were questioned! All of this is public and in reports. The problem with saying it is a cover up is that no matter what is provided you can just say nothing is enough.

Can we get more details about how we know for sure that 2-3 researchers were actually hospitalized? Oh, it’s classified, eh? Well I can’t imagine the US ever falsifying intelligence.

I’m not suggesting that the US is lying and CCP isn’t. But I think if you rationally look at the data and the reports and listen to the people that did the investigation they do not believe in the conspiracy. And yes, they are biased, but at least they have arguments and actual data to defend their position.
Recursion. The second best kind of cursing.
I don't understand. How is blast dismissing something similar to airbags? blast says

>We need many angles of defense against these criminals.

Whatever you're comparing airbags to would be one of the defenses that blast is saying we need.
Get the content you like and want to explore We sneaks the content from the web
"DON'T TOUCH THIS HANDLE - IT LEAKS!" -- it's sort of hard to explain exactly what handle I'm talking about in a bedside note, but trivial with virtual (or real) sticky notes.
Well then, the number line is the conceptual descendant of that tally bone ? ;)
Note that those chips are application-specific, so it's not quite the same as Apple's or Amazon's migration to ARM.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27388952.
> Basically bombarding this small, small, small area with tons and tons of energy based on all these needle points ... this ends up creating an anti-gravity field of sorts

Thanks for posting that link, but after watching that explanation I am even more sure that there is no anti-gravity device.
For Jupyter sure, it's true, but not for Observable.
Summary: "Why bother with R and Python?"
Note to the author of this article: whatever your site is doing to make my browser's title bar keep switching its text every second, please make it stop. I stopped reading and closed the tab because it was so annoying.
See this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23202850
Would it be possible to have a non-profit organization that exists only for patenting obvious things and "open sources" all of these patents?
> a PM will pull out traffic statistics and say ‘see, x% is still on IE, we can’t not support them’

Sure, which can be countered with: "no problem, it will add 30% to the estimate".

Unless the % is significant (over 10%), it's not worth the effort.
JOVIAL Programming Language
Crossing into personal attack is not allowed and will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. We've had to warn you about this kind of thing before. I don't want to ban you, so please fix this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You joke, but bans on cash have been proposed for decades. Naturally with CBDC, the government could better control who could transact and for what purposes.

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/021816/why-g...

https://schiffgold.com/key-gold-news/the-war-on-cash-us-expl...

https://internationalman.com/articles/the-war-on-cash-transp...
> Most BRs aren’t you. Most BRs are wet noodles and will just go along with whatever the HM wants to do.

Citation needed.

> 2) hire someone mediocre that’s just good enough to pass the loop, don’t spend any time onboarding them, fire them, and keep your tenured team members

You are clearly not a manager at Amazon and have no clue.

We throw people in the deep end. That, if anything, is our flaw.

Once again, if you are hiring its because you have head count. If you have head count it's for a goal. If you don't meet your goals, it's you who winds up as URA.

The best thing you can do for your team is ship your shit and get your top people promoted.

The way to do that is not waste a viable engineer on your team with a revolving door of mercy kills while you waste literally hours every week recruiting and interviewing folks you don't intend to keep.

The whole premise is so ridiculous, I can only shake my head.

Amazon has plenty of problems.

This isn't one of them.
Honestly, reading comments like these and articles like the OP has convinced me that we, as humans, will not at all be prepared for the next pandemic. And the one after that.

These viruses and their potential recombinations are out there, we don't need some virologist to go out and maybe catch it. People will catch them, we'll just know even less about them when the next pandemic starts.
Please read and follow the site guidelines. They include:

"Don't be snarky."

"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

They apply regardless of how wrong anyone else is or you feel they are.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
...in 2016
The Wuhan wet market episode, in retrospect, was almost certainly a superspreading event rather than a patient zero situation. The virus's effects are so variable from person to person (lots of asymptomatic carriers, people who just get a little cold, symptoms undistinguishable from the flu) that it was almost certainly already circulating in Wuhan unnoticed, until it became big enough to be hard not to notice.

Consider for example what happened in the US, in Washington state at the beginning of the pandemic. The first local community transmissions were detected weeks after they had already started happening, even though there was already a relatively high degree of alertness. Without testing, it wouldn't have been detected at all until a similar superspreading event finally took place.

The very fact that miners got sick a few years ago makes it also sound likely, based on Wuhan's history and based on the virus's characteristics, that bat-to-human transmission took place in similar circumstances as the miners' a few weeks or months before the Wuhan wet market event, had some low-key human-to-human transmission simmering in the community which people wrote off as the flu (at worse), until that one superspreading event.
That wasn't meant to be an example of a more on-point variant. It was meant as an example of a different set of potentially arbitrary details to focus on that changes the perceptions and associations. It works to associate hoodies, scars, and left cheeks with murderers.
You have a lot of replies but as far as I can see no one made this point, so let me add yet another reply.

Victim blaming is a framing that makes it sound like it's about moral and ethics. But it's about practicality. There is a causal chain leading to a bad outcome and we simply break the weakest link. Sometimes it's easier to lock up the treasure and sometimes it's easier to lock up all the thieves.

Consider the case of computer security. Locking up all the thieves is super duper hard, because they are located in places like Russia and China that wont cooperate with law enforcement.
See also: https://jovial.com/JOVIAL/index.html

At BitSavers: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/sdc/jovial/
200Hz seems a low enough frequency (1.7m wavelength) that they could do active noise cancellation with a small onboard speaker designed to generate a similar sound 180 deg out of phase such that it cancels in far field. Would probably need some DSP to generate anti harmonics as well assuming there are some nonlinearities.
Absolutely - till this year I was rocking an iPhone 7+ as my daily driver. If the screen didn’t crack I’d have kept it for another year.

I put on a screen protector, gave it away to a friends kid, and I hear he still uses it.
article doesnt mention ME
In beginning and middle of pandemic energy is better spent on solving the crisis first. Truth is for mortals like a set of possibilities. Here media presented both possibilities and reported usual facts and opinions.

As we all know, media often gets thing wrong, as nobody are arbiters of Truth. So one reads it like that.

When president turned traitor, that was more damaging than this virus itself.
> The users who flagged it were obviously correct

CCP master! You are being naive and your site is abused. But I'll stop. Do check how fast the flags were. This was scripted. Also check the IPs for VPN usage and entropy between the downvotes.

Taiwan is a country. Dare say it?
The government should regulate software the same as car seats. If you produce a faulty product you should be subject to common neglance(USA) laws.
Not sure how that contradicts what I've said. I, as a regular person, understand the thrill of walking around a place I own. I enjoy playing SimCity-style games and seeing everything running in the city I built, but I don't get the same result looking at the stats screen. If I were in such a position of power, this would be a perk of return-to-office that would apply to me more than to my subordinates.
> Potentially in a couple years, GB/s to v8/browser, mostly waiting for some basic issues Chrome devs don't prioritize, not fundamental ones. This gets hard when we want to interactively visually analyze say 10 GB of click trails: that can quickly get into 100 GB of in-memory representation needing streaming / out-of-core tricks, and download speed issues.

what issues aren't being prioritized?

> Likewise, WebGPU is cool, but it's still not even what CUDA / OpenCL were exposing 10 years ago, again, mostly b/c Google WebGL people prioritize other stuff.

what's missing vs say opencl?

a lot of shade cast with very few contestable claims. I want to listen to your points but right now the article seems far more right to me than your ill described counterclaims. I don't see the limits you claim with webgpu sand I don't see what the browser folk need to be attending to.
The ‘Unix Way’ Has a Right Way That’s Almost a Lost Way
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27389001.
Nobody ever, ever does.
It's not the name.

It's the WAY Trump et al said it + their political motivations & bias. Context is very important.

"ChiNe A", almost the verbal version of slanting your eyes with your fingers.

And the more obvious 'kung flu.'

For what it's worth I've read that there has been attempts to reframe virus names from using state names as to not cast blame (though 'blame' is muddled in this case if it was leaked or worse GOF->leak).

"Spanish Flu" for instance likely didn't even originate in Spain

Fair point on the media, since variants do have actual scientific names. But I don't think the context there is the same. But they should be using consistent scientific names imho we knew H1N1 we can do that again.
You've broken the site guidelines badly and repeatedly in this thread. Crossing into personal attack is seriously not cool, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. And you broke other guidelines too.

I'm not going to ban you because it doesn't seem like this happened before, but we ban accounts that do this kind of thing, so please don't do it again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I can confirm the videos existed. Saw them when they were posted, back in Jan 2020. They were never on youtube, though, that I'm aware of.
A <comments> tag would be a nice addition to HTML. I would happily block them all, except from sites like this where comments are the main point.
Response to terrorist attack from Afghanistan: Invade Afghanistan.

Response to terrorist-equivalent cyberattack from Russia: Invade Russia?

I hope not. I don't want World War 3 to be in my lifetime.