skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The lab leak hypothesis is less plausible than the natural leak hypothesis only if you exclude the fact that gain-of-function research on Coronavirus was being done in the Wuhan Lab. When you include that necessary fact, it becomes the most parsimonious.

If this researcher becomes ill with CJD, we'll know it's because, beyond a reasonable doubt, she was mishandling prions in a laboratory setting, and not because she ate some infected meat from a bazaar.
From the post I'm replying to: "not backfeeding grid, but you would be backfeeding your house."
> Why would he become so startled(and obsessed) by a house he never visited for 8 years? To the point that a marriage had to collapse, nevertheless.

I'm not sure, but I think I can understand it. A few years ago my girlfriend had her bike stolen and for at least a few weeks I would look at almost every bike I saw to see if it was hers. More recently I had my bike stolen and even months later, on holiday hundreds of miles from home, I still look at bikes wondering if I'll see my bike.

These things can hurt you. Do you have any experiences that compare?
There are ISPs that prohibit legal bittorrent traffic
Status page [1] not showing anything wrong currently, but I had my own VPS go offline a couple minutes ago, and now the login page for their Cloud UI is also offline with the message:

{"error":"Looks like something went wrong. If this continues, please open a support ticket so we can help you out"}

Edit: And now all my NYC3 VPSes are going offline at 12:01 US Eastern (just got a bunch of outage emails from my monitoring service).

Edit 2: Cloud UI Login page briefly started working at 12:12 US Eastern, but 2FA login step is not completing. One of my servers is reachable, but about 5 others still aren't. Hopefully it's a sign things are coming back...

Edit 3: As of 12:16 US Eastern, all my NYC3 VPSes are back online, but Cloud UI login still failing at 2FA step.

Edit 4: As of 12:24 US Eastern, it seems everything is back up (for me), but they finally updated their status page with "Multiple Products Down".

[1] https://status.digitalocean.com
The U.S. Surgeon General's mandatory warning for alcohol states "women should not drink alcoholic beverages during pregnancy because of the risk of birth defects." It does not use the word "avoid".
Adoption is already slowing down, by half in 2020 vs 2019.

https://blog.apnic.net/2021/02/08/ipv6-in-2020/
Yes, I am done with Toyota as well. They can now join Volkswagen....
Thank you Ted!
As someone else noted, there is a no-code startup that just raised 50M and GIMP struggles to fund two developers.

I have often thought that one of the most effective ways, if I was say a Texan oil billionaire, most effective ways of spreading my world view would be to pay people to code useful free government and non-gov tools - all software is opinionated- as texan billionaire i would want it to have my opinions

Re: Texan Billionaire I just remembered the second Harry Palmer film.
The upside, though, is that having a plug-in hybrid with reasonable range allows us to make do with one car, whereas if we had a BEV we would likely also buy a gas car for long drives because charging on long drives makes the trip a lot longer or even non-feasible where charging is sparse.

We have a GM Volt. 50% of our annual mileage, including all in-town mileage, is electric. That's a 50% reduction in gas use, production of the second car eliminated, and 40+mpg when we do use gas.
Your comment is OT, but here's a comment I made previously to it ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27872908 ) :

Even the term “fossil fuels” is an inappropriate framing of the chemicals involved since it restricts their use to burning. Consider the processes involved in their formations: organic material grew for eons millions of years ago. It then had to be buried in just the right conditions and later embedded into even further beneficial conditions. It took millions of years, high temperatures, and high pressures to go from plant material to these complex molecular forms. Then we dig them up or seep them out with fracking and further refine them. Then we burn them. Huge losses of energy all along the way. Using oil as fossil fuel is a huge waste of the energy it took to create those molecules.
My mother was a lifeguard and was swimming in a medium-sized empty pool surrounded by other lifeguards (her colleagues). Her leg cramped badly and she went under, she said the pain of trying to move was unbearable. She crumpled up at the bottom of the pool and nearly drowned before her one of her fellow lifeguards noticed something was wrong and saved her.

That story's always stuck in my head.
This year they introduced the RAV4 prime, with 48 miles electric.

The Prius prime is still in it's initial design iteration. Major updates occur typically every 7 years for auto manufacturers, so one would expect a new, improved range Prius prime somewhere in the 2023 range.
Show HN: Forget Phone and Email, Your New Contact Info Is a Link
Third parties suffering a disease is the negative externality.

There's no difference between a steel mill leaking sulphur in the course of producing steel and a biotech company releasing prions in the course of producing medicines. Radiation leaks in the course of producing electricity are likewise externalities.
There'sno source mentioned, but according to this (French TV station's) presentation (see slide 5)[0], Commissaire Fichet from Les Diaboliques was indeed an inspiration.

[0] https://tvbreizh.fr/sites/default/files/dossier_de_presse_50...
I feel less like I'm asking to stop space discovery until we fix Earth, and more like I'm cautioning against the claims of crystal healing and homeopathy. I would have no issue with a well-conducted, good-faith research study into crystal healing -- after all, simply coating a surface in silver dramatically increases its anti-bacterial properties, so clearly some "dark-ages alchemy" level claims are actually true. But with our current priors, given a random claim about crystal healing, what is the probability it's backed by solid research vs. the probability it's quackery?

Similarly with no-code. Should we stop trying to build no-code solutions? No. In fact there are limited used cases where it goes well, such as the Blender material designer. But with our current priors and given a random claim about what some no-code solution will be able to do, the probability it's BS is very, very high.

Maybe that's actually the answer: the place for no-code is not in replacing general-purpose programming languages, but in small, limited-purpose DSLs like shader languages (and even then, only in specific contexts). SQL is an example of such a thing, so if someone came out and said "I have a great no-code solution that's meant to replace annoying repetitive SQL queries in a limit set of circumstances", I would take that person much more seriously.
3 major problems none of the EV evangelists are addressing about with EVs are

1. What happens to all the giant lithium batteries on these vehicles after they reach end of life?

2. How will people be able to evacuate a city or state in an emergency situation when charging/electric supply is not present (which is always likely to happen)?

3. Coal burning infrastructure is still inextricably involved in generating the power to charge these vehicles, that must be considered in terms of overall value of EVs in reducing environmental impacts of fossil fuel elimination.

We need to realize that the motivation to deploy EVs too early is driven by profit rather than by motives in environmental protection and conservation of resources, then the really productive conversations can occur.
"Turbos are a good example. Before, they were very expensive to add to a car, and altered the driving experience such that they weren't very practical for the average driver. Now, essentially every new combustion engine has them because you can lower displacement and actively manage power output to a greater degree, pushing up efficiency."

This is true. In fact, some manufacturers (Volvo ?) have new models that are both super and turbo charged.

But this isn't cost-free - these are tremendously complicated engines running at very close tolerances. These will have higher failure rates and will be more expensive to maintain and fix.

Remember, kids: There's no replacement for displacement.
>(since the parent post was primarily about money)

I don't think so, it was about making money through selling it as proprietary software.
So, at the risk of doing the SV "how can we ML this" thing, this seems like a pretty good opportunity to apply computer vision. I'm sure OpenAI or Deepmind or whoever could build a lot of good will by training such a model and freely distributing it.

I'm sure it will be tricky due to lack of training data, though.

You could maybe even do this without an end-to-end ML system, and just use ML to do the head+arms detection, and then do a rules-based approach to determine the drowning status. This is probably much more tractable and doesn't have the lack of training data.
I agree with you that the feeling of being bombarded or manipulated causes people to close off and deny the opportunity to be persuaded. Another factor might be fear - if people feel that something they value is threatened by the other side's position, they will react to it like a cornered animal. I guess that means people can only be persuaded when something doesn't matter existentially to them?
> all politics is off-topic on HN

No. HN briefly tried a "no politics at all" policy, and it was one of the bigger shitshows in the history of the site and very quickly reverted.
Why is HN so allergic to different opinions?
I was close to getting one 2 years ago. Did the safety tests improve since then? If I recall the 2019 had issues with the roof / pillars, which were not strong enough to support the car in case you flipped it.
Please be generous with your comments. You don’t have to be crass to ‘ruin a place’. I’ve seen it happen just from sheer numbers. Even if the influx measurably improves the signal to noise ratio, just having more signal can make a place exhausting to participate in. Not wanting to risk any advertisement can be a very prudent thing to do.
I don't think it's that symmetric. Generally it's the faction that holds the power that doesn't want to consider anything other than its own perspective. The lower factions understand the perspectives of the others perfectly well.
You're conflating chronic and acute exposure. Pop epidemiology 101.
Bubble has a showcase section on their site: https://bubble.io/showcase
You can't just take the mass of the lead and then assume it all winds up in humans.

For a given amount of lead output into the atmosphere lead output over an airport is going to get into people's blood a lot less efficiently than lead output in an automotive context.
Ajit Pai is an ultra-douchebag.

He deserves prison for how he mishandled the FCC.

I met him twice back in the day and he was so slimy and douchey each time, it was sickening to talk to him.
Shameless, shameless, shameless, plug here. But have you tried tools like:

Budibase (cofounder) - https://github.com/Budibase/budibase

Saltcorn
That's what they do in Canada. It's awesome but a lot of people hate it because they're being told they should by the usual suspects.
Building a Database from Scratch with LMDB
Many societies have collapsed over the last 500 years.
> I don't think downvotes are the problem.
> I think the problem largely comes from the echo-chamberization of platforms

Echo-chamberization is a result of downvoting. When comments close to the borders of Overton window are downvotes, Overtone windows narrows over time.
Yes really. With DKIM, you blacklist domains, not IPs. Of course, only if you do it properly. Hotmail doesn't...
My lifeguard mother almost drowned from a leg cramp (see my sibling comment), she explained that the pain of movement becomes so unbearable that your body basically goes into the fetal position and sinks to the bottom.
Droplets stopped responding.

Edit: Droplets are back in NYC3
I wish you could have your own IPv4 subnet with your VPC, like at home, with 192.168 etc
They already do in the form of the LIR and resource fee.
This isn't my experience. I occasionally make pretty strong statements about traditionally polarizing technical topics, and I find that people are a lot more likely to respect differing opinions than when talking about, eg, urban planning or politics.
At this point, the best prevention is to avoid eating anyone who lived in Britain 20-30 years ago
I'm facing the same problem.
Ask HN: Is Digital Ocean Down?
Unable to login to Digial Ocean and some of our servers in the NY3 region are not accessible. Status page hasn't been updated yet.
Well, considering all those restrictions and how it's still not secure enough anyway how long before the recommendation will be "Don't use your smartphone. Use the landline phone in your office" ?
How are you going to handle billing, stark law, and anti-kickback?
I know nothing about firearms, but my naive assumption/half-remembered factoid was that the supersonic speed is partly what contributes to what I believed was a common phenomenon of it being difficult to infer where a gun was fired from based on the sound alone. (Not sure if that actually is a common phenomenon or just a trope.)

Maybe any fast, loud noise is difficult to place and the supersonic crack is pretty irrelevant, though? Or maybe sounds tend to just be hard to place in general, similar to how eye witness reports tend to not be very reliable?
Testing Elixir Effective and Robust Testing for Elixir and Its Ecosystem
I think the more appropriate question is:

Was this corruption intended to benefit specific players, or just general sabotage of our government institutions?
Down for me as well. All sites completely offline and showing our CDN provider's Error 522 page on all customer-facing sites.

Same error as yours when I tried to log in and see what's up.
Yup. This is “new leadership 101”. Buy as much political capital as you can - blame everything on the prior person, even if it hadn’t happened yet. Even better if you can claim your first steps are “fixing” the problems the old guy left you - even if you’re actually just instituting a new policy.

You think these people end up running major US govt orgs and aren’t ruthless cunts? You can’t survive in DC without knowing how to throw people under the bus.
To me there’s way more nuance than simply the question “is big tech a common carrier?”

I don't really care if Google discriminates in its search results to provide a better user experience. If I don’t like that UX I can use another search engine.

But what about Twitter? Twitter is not just discriminating in tweet search results, they deplatform Tweet authors and organizations (e.g. Unity 2020) on a whim and with no recourse. The analog would be if Google just deleted your website if your page rank fell too low.

IMO Google looks like an information broker and Twitter/Facebook look like common carriers of tweets/posts.

If your argument is that we can’t call them either then it seems like it’s on you to suggest a framework that does correctly classify content platforms.
We need, but making a default SMS app straight sending your texts to Google.com by default, and making it very hard to disable for a technically illiterate user is beyond unethical.
PCR testing during the covid epidemic, which he was not alive for, has clearly been working well

There is no correlation between COVID health outcomes and levels of testing.
Gaming GPU allows faster, more precise control of fusion energy experiments
I'm genuinely astonished at how powerful that tide is. It's also quite a disconnect watching how the water flows past the machine, as if it's moving forward when it's stationary. If I was a technician going to work on that for the first time I think it'd be quite off putting for the first hour or so.
Please don't pollute the world with toxic brain-damaging chemicals out of stubborn inertia.
I'm experiencing the same thing. Can't reach my droplets, and can't sign in to see what's going on.

Edit [12:16pm EST]: my Droplets are reachable now, and my web apps are back, but I still can't access the control panel, and the status page hasn't been updated to show any problems.
yes, that's the third-order thinking. How to "lie" in a way that you don't get caught, but still achieve your ethical goal.
1. They will be recycled.

2. Never heard this one, what kind of apocalypse are you foreseeing ?

3. Centralised generation is easier to mitigate, and later replace with clean generation.
People do not just buy cars for daily commutes, it doesn't make sense to solely design around that.
Meanwhile I can't have them delegate more than one IPv6 address to a server. I wouldn't need all the IPv4 space if I could just do that
South African payments startup Yoco raises $83M Series C backed by Dragoneer
Your esoteric definition of efficiency isn't very useful.

If you have solar power, the comparison between storing it in hydrogen using electrolysis or a battery is pretty direct and useful and has fuck all to do with hydrocarbons.
According to the American Heart Association [0], CPR can double or triple the chances of survival:

"Each year nationwide, more than 350,000 people suffer a cardiac arrest outside of a hospital; only about 10 percent survive.

When the heart stops beating, a lack of oxygenated blood can cause death within minutes. If CPR is performed immediately, it can keep blood flowing to the brain and other vital organs, doubling or tripling a person’s chance of survival."

[0] https://www.heart.org/en/news/2018/08/22/cpr-training-at-sch...
It's been a long time coming - manufacturer's been working on this for at least about a decade.

What's important about this fuel is that it should work in _any_ application that requires leaded gas. The most demanding applications are a small % of the engines overall, but get the most hours and burn the most fuel. So we've been waiting for a drop-in replacement that can supplant leaded gas entirely (market is too small for multiple aviation gasolines to be effectively distributed).

Of course, this is going to continue to take way longer to roll out than it should, but this first approval is a very big deal.
That's true. In person you also have to worry about COVID and other communicable diseases. Can't beat that!

But no in all seriousness, some of the most in-depth conversations I've had in my life have been in video call 1:1s. The intentionality of sitting in a call with someone for 30 mins is enormous. It's equivalent to going to someone's office and sitting right in front of them and talking for 30 mins. That almost never happens in office environments -- instead you have lots of fleeting encounters, passing people in hallways, etc. With remote you get this extremely intentional person to person experience every time.
That idea would be to cure it, prions are terrifying.
We have lockers to secure phones when you can't take them with you.
People are slapping down $200 a month for tesla features, how long until tractors have a $2000/month fee.
What about GDPR, did it change anything?
The new starship platform should be able to launch 400 satellites per launch. They would only need 30 launches a year to support the constellation.
Personally, I agree both parties are severely problematic, don't feel they're equally problematic.

I vote for third party candidates with policy I actually agree with when it isn't going to negatively affect me or others when they inevitably lose.

The sad reality is that FPTP makes strategic voting necessary if you want to have any kind of power. In addition to the issues you mentioned we need score or ranked choice voting so we can begin a transition towards actual accountibility, and hopefully eventually a more diverse set of parties.

Voting for a third party candidate is effectively throwing your vote away in a protest no one will ever hear in a FPTP system.
Just noticed the same. I'm still connected to my VPS over SSH, but HTTP traffic is timing out. Think it's US East only (my European sites are still OK).
... so we're just going to slowly build up base-level contamination in the soil, water, and ecosystem? Let's not?
I used to be a lifeguard. I am glad I never had to deal with a pool like that with so many people and inner tubes in it. Makes line of sight so much more difficult.
Looks like a widespread outage. We have servers in multiple regions that are all down and we can't even get into the DO dashboard.
You can buy an e-GPU, if your device has thunderbolt and isn't an M1. Compatibility isn't great and it is obviously more expensive, but it is more or less what you suggest, with the limit that you can only use it with one computer at a time.
> This is, I think, the better comparison that should be drawn

This is a good callout. I threw the other examples in mostly because I found them interesting to think about, but I think you're absolutely right that only one of the three can be directly compared.

Thanks for bringing this up.
For #2, I'm not so sure the situation is strictly worse than with gas. I lived in NYC during Hurricane Sandy, and it took many days for gasoline to become available (a few weeks, IIRC). Electricity was plentiful, though.
That would be a fun project to create for public domain works. And not especially difficult.
The groupthink here isn't straight party-line, but it does have a lean.
I literally bought a new Chevy Bolt in April for $22k total ($20k financed).
Just get used to the fact that the vast majority of Trump appointees will suffer no professional or personal consequences and move on.
it's nuanced. prusiner himself was a bully who ran a toxic lab. my group collaborated with him and we got an eyeful.
No-code environments are “Duck Programming:”

https://raganwald.com/2012/01/08/duck-programming.html

I’m much more interested in how they manage all the software engineering _around_ the low code than I am in the low code itself, e.g.

- version control
- testing
- developing at scale

Which is not to say that the low-code tooling for single developers or extremely small groups is not interesting and valuable in its own right. It’s just that this other stuff is even more interesting if a tool is to escape a small (but still incredibly valuable*) niche of making prototypes quickly.

———

* Way back when, some of us used Hypercard to do low-code prototypes and mockups of apps. It was absolutely a good tool for iterating quickly on working prototypes, and Bubble could be that with high-fidelity today.
Yes, it is down for me too, as well as others: https://twitter.com/search?q=digitalocean&src=typed_query&f=...

I am also in NYC3. I am not sure if other regions are impacted

EDIT 12:15 EST: everything is back for me. it looks like my server didn't shut off but briefly lost network connection including internal
Yes, I got noticed from uptime monitoring service, my SaaS are running solely on DigitalOcean ughhhh
That's to be expected. All it does is ensure the accuracy of the email sender. Which finally lets you attach reputation to domains instead of addresses.
Appears ny 3 is down same issue.
(2010)! (it's a republish)

Some previous discussions of this old piece resubmitted often by usual suspects:

11 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1492835

6 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9947237

5 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11667755

3 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17170593
Hopefully that's something we can all agree upon!
> "This protein, in its healthy, properly-folded state, is, if not trivial, relatively unimportant. Its complete loss is certainly not catastrophic."

If I at my age know anything about how real world works, absence of evidence is not an evidence of absence, and I can bet that this will turn out to be complete bullshit, and it will get known in the future that this protein is important.
Not sure if your tone is sarcastic. Does the existence of a bootcamp for Bubble negate its value?

Adobe Illustrator has a learning curve too; that doesn't mean that I should go back to coding SVGs by hand.