skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The previous administration was broadly right on many important topics regarding the pandemic, that the media was wrong on.

1. Vaccines would be available by the election (they were off by two days, likely because of optics of releasing a vaccine right before).
2. The lab leak theory being worthy of investigation
3. School lockdowns are damaging (now broad agreement)
4. New York did not need 40k ventilators and Andrew Cuomo covered up nursing home deaths (later an aide admitted to it)
5. Shutting down travel was wrong before it was right. If you recall, after trump's state of the union, in which he mentioned covid, Nancy Pelosi went into the streets of china town and insisted people ignore his fear mongering.

Shall I go on?

> A president trying to "wage a trade war" on China

A trade war which he campaigned on, was voted into office for, and for which he has the legal authority. You are complaining that trump doesn't agree with you, not that he did something legally wrong.

> we learned more, we're still learning more

Yes, they learned that they were wrong on many things and trump was right.
Sorry for the expression but "holy shit!".

I worked in Motorola for 10 years from the late 90's. I was based in Europe but travelled to Schaumburg every two months or so (or to Phoenix).

It is really a shock to see this place abandoned - last time I was there (15 years ago) it was very much alive.

It has been a long time since I had such a nostalgic squeeze of heart.
About 19 hours late from my perspective, but Heroku took an outage: https://status.heroku.com/incidents/2311
I somewhat agree with you, but I've seen a lot of smart people struggle with Airtable and no code tools. I can't explain why.
Excellent. The price for distributing software should be very small. My Linux distro gives me free gigabytes of updates every month.
No falsehoods, it is the device, even though it is only a specific part of it. I know you got the point I tried (or rather, the other commenter) to make about the part of someone's body meaning "the whole" of a person. Same philosophical view can be applied to the device.

Anyway, someone in here can accept what the other can't, so let's leave at that and let history tells.
> World Economic Forum: Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better

https://twitter.com/wef/status/849459333486317568
I’m curious what you mean by this. Assuming you are American, do you think that Obama or Trump or Biden wish that the population was more compliant, and had weaker critical thinking? Why would that benefit them?

Most leaders think they are right, and I would think they would want enhanced critical thinking in the population so that the people would better appreciate the leaders rightness.
I appreciate your thoughtful reply to my hasty comment.

I don't think it's about educating other people. It's about educating yourself and being an informed citizen. I think it would be better to engage with your friends on at least some level, instead of smiling along, because even if you're not educating them per se, it helps people feel like their struggle is shared and understood.

The other useful thing that I don't consider educating is pushing back to some extent on things they're reciting if they're wrong or lacking context. That's obviously a huge minefield, but can be helpful with many individuals if you know them.

Maybe we have different definitions of educating, maybe you don't know anyone where what I've said is an option, maybe you're already doing this and I never asked because my initial comment was thoughtless.
Hi. I'm the author. Such nostalgia. With tools like airtable and notion around today, we're actually making substantial progress towards making simple tasks easy.

These days I'm writing at https://scattered-thoughts.net/ and working on https://github.com/jamii/dida and https://github.com/jamii/imp. Same ideals, but backed by many more years of ~~failure~~ experience.

Also still complaining about things https://scattered-thoughts.net/writing/against-sql and breaking things https://scattered-thoughts.net/writing/internal-consistency-...
It makes me wonder if attempts to simplify programming have actually made it harder. I remember Visual Basic: you couldn't ask for simpler than that. Want a button? Drag a button onto your form. Want tabs? Drag tabs. Want a list that contained entries from a database? Drag the list and specify the database.

VB made trivial projects trivially trivial. But whenever you tried to apply it to any real-world scenario, you'd get stuck trying to infer all of the "hidden state" that the too-simple interface was trying to shield you from.

I had the misfortune of working with the original no-code too, Salesforce, for a couple of years - in spite of the name, it's not all that "sales" focused; it's actually more a "VB for web-based enterprise applications" with a sales instantiation implemented in it. It had the same problems as VB, too - it was too simple for any actual problems. Simplicity was obtained by hiding details... that turned out to be crucial for basic business functionality (and don't even think about performance).
I'd like to think we don't put doctors in jail when they raise the alarm on a new virus.
I remember learning that cuneiform isn't an alphabet and doesn't have characters, but rather characters to write syllables so it could be used to spell English or Chinese.
WTF is he talking about? There is no “confusion” they are scanning your phone for data they have decided is bad. Yes today it is allegedly CP, tomorrow it is anything.

“The system could only match "exact fingerprints" of specific known child sexual abuse images, he said.”

Or like whatever they, the US govt, or any govt where they want to make money (such as China) wants. Is anyone auditing the blacklist? Is it publicly reviewable? (Since it contains CP of course not)
Focus groups tell you about the effectiveness of design changes, not the impact on business metrics.
The Libertyville office is now an "innovation center". I think the manufacturing floor is being used to make EV chargers by a company based in Amsterdam.

https://www.iparkcampus.com/available-space/
That's the problem with these conspiracy theories, though, right? They are unfalsifiable by design. A scientific hypothesis would be testable. For example, "Did the COVID-19 virus come from a lab?" would be falsifiable if the COVID-19 virus didn't share the base genetic sequence of typical viruses tested in a lab. Lo and behold, the COVID-19 virus doesn't have the genetic signature of viruses in labs. Therefore the conspiracy theory is more convoluted to include vastly more participants in a complex web of motives resulting in a theory that is less falsifiable and plays into every possible prejudice a laymen could have about geopolitics, money, race and national governments.

We've seen lab leaks and this is supposedly different because it's not disclosed and numerous other reasons making it hard to prove. We know about lab made viruses which this is supposedly different because it somehow looks like a virus of zoonotic origin. We've seen the Chinese government cover up embarrassing situations but this is different because there was heavy involvement from American researchers and American public educational institutions and they are in on the cover up too for some reason. We've seen the US government dislose previously classified information but this is different because all of the government officials who say they saw classified information about a lab leak (and were in a position to declassify said information) did not accompany their accusations with gathered intelligence. At some point we should recognize that these necessary mental gymnastics put the theory well into crank territory.
Again, there is no identifiable difference between a virus harvested from guano in a cave that later leaks from a lab sample and the same virus if transmitted to a human.

Nobody is saying this virus was engineered in this thread.

It appears to me to be a deliberate psychological trick of lumping people who claim the virus leaked from a lab (by far the most probable cause) with people who say the virus was an engineered bioweapon (insane, nonsensical crazy talk). The entire virology community is dependent on government funding, and they have massive conflicts of interest. I work with academics all day every day, and far too many gradually turn into mealy-mouthed bureaucrats, doing and saying whatever it takes to chase their next juicy grant, abusing and exploiting graduate students all along the way.
They make it sound like what is getting scanned is some sub set of the pictures that people take.

In reality, with the way the new phone setup is, most people are sending every photo automatically to their iCloud.

On top of that this is a feature that had a lot of hands touching it. You know there was an option for an architecture that meant apple had to spend the money doing the hash on the server side. They decided to pass that cost on to the consumer.
This is exactly what's so frustrating about the media treating the gain-of-function research they were doing as the "smoking gun" is so disingenuous. We were doing all of the same types of research, even cooperating with their government on some of it in our own labs IN CHINA, and then all of a sudden we turn around and blame them? Come on, people, you're playing right into what the propaganda says happened. They're not doing anything the U.S. government wouldn't do if the likely point of origin had been somewhere in Atlanta.
Estimates are that Facebook makes $30 per user per year. Personally, I would gladly pay $30 per year for the same service if it kept my data secure.
Yes. But the other thing is debunking rumors is the task they set for themselves. And in these cases, they went for the dopamine hit of writing "FALSE" over the eternally annoying "Unconfirmed".
How can you figure out what a neural net is trained to find? Are they releasing the data set to verify? That would be the bad images we are told it is scanning for and that would be bad.. is there some 3rd party that can do the audit?

Also now that this is a thing how effective will it be at all? Or these sick people that dumb? After all this news? I do hope they are that dumb but who knows.
The thread's entire premise is that lab leakers are only speculating while there is in fact direct evidence of natural origins.

What direct evidence of natural origins is he referring to? Kristian Andersen's argument in his oft-cited paper seems to be that the spike proteins are effective at infecting humans in a novel way, and that if he were engineering an infections coronavirus he would have designed it differently, therefore it's unlikely that it was bioengineered. Beyond that, they tend to point out that "there is no evidence" of a lab leak -- ignoring many pieces of evidence along the way, even if they are circumstantial, including the workers at the WIV contracting a dangerous disease w/ COVID-like symptoms in Fall 2019, the sudden disappearance of the WIV genome sequence database before the first publicly known cases, and the suspicious renaming of the RaTG13 virus sample (the closest known to COVID-19 genetically) in WIV literature. I feel perpetually gaslit but some of these scientists. The argument seems to go as follows: it is most reasonable to suspect a zoonotic transfer, even without direct evidence, because a community of scientists with clear conflicts of interest tell us so -- but we are supposed to dismiss the circumstantial evidence of a lab leak because the only satisfactory evidence would be if a smoking gun were found in the WIV records (and everyone knows that they won't be). The idea that it has natural origins stems from recent experience with SARS and MERS, but of course that doesn't mean much of anything at all -- those experience inform both theories. One should also consider the 1977 flu pandemic which was confirmed to have been related to a live vaccine trial done by the Chinese military -- information which was suppressed at the time by the WHO for fear of losing cooperation with China and Russia.

Origins aside, it is not disupted that the NIH through the NIAID and EcoHealth alliance were funding research into coronaviruses that was being done at the WIV, and that the data related to that research used to be readily available but now is suppressed by the Chinese government, exactly at the same time that we are experiencing a pandemic that the research was hoping to forestall. Isn't that alone troubling? Are the scientists in this community expressing any trouble with that fact, or are we meant to believe that we are conspiratorial nuts if we bring up China's behavior in any context?
We have hospitalization records of lab staff, which Trump kne about and was later declassified.

We have e-mail evidence of lab employees explicitly asking reporters not to report on the potential.

And we have a novel virus that appeared centered around a biomedical research lab doing gain of function research on closely related viruses.

Simply due to the level of accusation and its implications, the claim deserved investigation from day one not out of hand dismissal.

Imagine if someone is found with a gun right next to a shooting scene, and everyone around you insisted that he certainly could not be the one who did any wrong because... racism or something. And then later on, you find that that guys friends spoke privately with the police and asked them not to conduct an investigation. Shouldn't that arouse suspicion in normal people?
> I highly doubt that the virus becomes incapable of infecting in a fomite in a doorknob, elevator button or keyboard

Covid appears to have low probability of fomite infection - but there is little reason to take unnecessary risks (given how ineffective humanity has been at stopping the infection).

Plus, I know people who just caught the flu. Why not kill two birds with a stone?
> ... a regular dev will do.

Oh, the classic "There is one administrator" falacy.

> kubernatis if you feel fancy

I hear this mindset about kubernetes very often from people who can do some stuff with, but don't get infrastructure at all.

EDIT: thinking that a regular dev can do what an admin does is simply naive.
Does anybody have the inside baseball on what happened to this after YC got involved? It seems like there should be more of a lesson here than just to not back software kickstarters.
If you are doing it right, infra is code. The only distinction in terms of this article is that the "orchestration" is not innately tied to the design of an application. Loosely coupled and composeable software using (sometimes) standard interfaces.

> Pick the right tool for the job

This is such an abused phrase. How about pick the right methodology for the use case? Tooling quickly becomes a cargo cult, be it languages, frameworks, or "infra tools". The deficiencies in said "tools" can often force bad designs or patterns that people apologize for rather than fix. You don't have to pick one tool for the job if you can pick a method that allows an array of tools used in a standard way.

For example, S3 bucket changes. Everyone first thinks "Terraform". But there are certain S3 changes that are either difficult or impossible with Terraform. What if it's easier to allow a developer IAM role to make specific changes to specific objects and leverage said role outside Terraform? You can craft your Terraform to ignore those changes, and use any AWS SDK to make ad-hoc object changes. Maybe later you find that not using Terraform at all for that bucket, and instead just managing roles that can manipulate that bucket, works better for a larger array of use cases.
> This program is ambitious, and protecting children is an important responsibility. These efforts will evolve and expand over time. [1]

[1] https://www.apple.com/child-safety/
> If you want to store your photos on Apple servers, shouldn’t they have the right to exclude CSAM content?

This seems worded to get a Yes answer. So, yes.

It's a big deal because it's unprecedented (to my knowledge) outside of the domain of malware*. Other cloud providers run checks of their own property, on their own property. This runs a check of your property, on your property. That's why people care now. The fact that this occurs because of an intention to upload to their server doesn't really change the problem, not unless you're only looking at this like an architectural diagram. Which I fear many people are.

A techie might look at this and see a simple architectural choice. Client-side code instead of server-side. Ok, neat. A more sophisticated techie might see a master plan to pave the way for E2EE. A net-win for privacy. Cool. But the problem doesn't go away. My phone, in my pocket, is now checking itself for evidence of a heinous crime.

*I hope the comparison isn't too extra. I was thinking, the idea of code running on my device, that I don't want to run, that can gather criminal evidence against me, and report it over the internet... yeah I can't get around it, that really reminds me of malware. Not from society's perspective. From society's perspective maybe it's verygoodware. But from the traditional user's perspective, code that runs on your device, that hurts you, is at least vigilante malware, even if you are terrible.
Because if the content is entirely encrypted(like apple says it is) they aren't legally liable and it's entirely voluntary that they do this.

Also, no one(well, most people) has any issue with photos being scanned in the iCloud. Photos in Google Photos have been scanned for years and no one cares. The problem is that apple said that photos are encrypted on your device and in the cloud, but now your phone will scan the pictures and if they fail some magical test that you can't inspect, your pictures will be sent unencrypted for verification without telling you. So you think you're sending pictures to secure storage, but nope, actually their algorithm decided that the picture is dodgy in some way so in fact it's sent for viewing by some unknown person. But hey don't worry, you can trust apple, they will definitely only verify it and do nothing else. Because a big American corporation is totally trustworthy.
Yeah-- I thought SteamOS was mostly dead, sitting on a shelf "just in case". I was wrong, and it now appears that Valve is sending the message "we're ready to do this thing at any time".

Steam has something like 100 million+ active monthly users. Certainly some are casual and wouldn't make the switch, but that's a lot of home desktop market share to lose even if only half made the switch initially, and there'd be a halo effect on it too, along with a much more motivated & active community dedicated to cross platform compatibility.

We'd probably see a lot of "linux first" applications (not just games) as well.
> I don't want unity

And this sentiment is problematic, because other countries have unity and are not afraid to use it.
Lots of people — a majority of Americans, even Republicans, believe it's real but that is far from universal and the percentages still mean millions of people:

https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/politics-...
https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2020/06/23/two-thirds-of...

The key thing to remember is there was a deliberate decision made around 40 years ago to try to delay actions, by the time companies like Exxon realized it was a real threat[1] — and that was far from the time the risk was first posited: here's someone in the 1920s saying it was probable:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn87055779/1918-09-1...

Part of that strategy was to turn it into a partisan issue and there are billion-dollar companies (Fox, Facebook, Google, etc.) helpfully providing communications platforms to ensure that message is constantly available in circles they believe might find a receptive audience. Note that I'm not saying their executives all share that view — only that it doesn't bother any of them enough to turn down the ads and engagement metrics.

Because that was successfully turned into a partisan issue, that means there are many millions of people who are faced with the choice of either admitting both that they were wrong and that this is because people whom they trusted were lying to them or continuing to hope that it won't impact them much and they can just continue to make no changes, which is quite correct given their average age and affluence.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2805576-1982-Exxon-M...
Replika – The AI companion who cares
> […] and why virtually no economists support them.

You mean besides Piketty, Stiglitz (Nobel), and Krugman (Nobel)?

* https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/17/economists-stiglitz-and-pike...

* https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/1088529094478872578

While I'm sure he's good in his specialty, it seems like Cochrane does not understand macroeconomics and how debt-financed government spending works:

* http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/27/a-dark-age-of-ma...

* http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/23/brad-delongs-foo...

Further, I'm curious to know if he did a survey of economists to substantiate his claim of "no economists". Besides the three prominent ones mentioned above, there seems to be ongoing research on the subject and so it is hardly a settled matter:

* https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2019/09/05/estimatin...

* https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/21/us/politics/the-liberal-e...
The point of the analogy was to represent that our actions may be essentially inconsequential if all holes are not sealed, and that larger holes or offenders should take priority. The hole size wasn't really all that important, but yes, a more accurate description would've involved a larger hole, probably.

How do we even get emission data anyway? Especially for other countries like China. For example this source is telling me our per capita emissions are higher than China, which I very much doubt:
https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-pe...
Introduction to VQGAN+CLIP image synthesis from text
They're not misunderstanding it; you're deliberately using an inaccurate description to mislead people while trying to hide behind "technically not lying", and they're calling you out on it.
Yes it was in Swindon. The EMEA headquarters.
What about all the images already in the iCloud?
I'm happy with what Valve is doing now, but as a whole, the fact that Steam OS is a Linux distro doesn't necessarily mean that Steam OS / Steam Deck won't become locked down in the same manner in the future. Android itself is open source and Linux-based.
Electrician. Yeah working in the physical world was another aspect of the decision, I’ve been taking labouring jobs in the mean time and it’s much more social, makes me much more fit and is much more satisfying.

The other comments in this thread involve piling on a second job or getting deep in a hobby, which ate up the rest of my time and never quite worked. This comment by Xenophon summed up programming for me, even though I still enjoy it:

‘Men do indeed speak ill of those occupations which are called handicrafts, and they are rightly held of little repute in communities, because they weaken the bodies of those who make their living at them by compelling them to sit and pass their days indoors. Some indeed work all the time by a fire. But when the body becomes effeminate (thelunomenos) the mind too is debilitated. Besides, these mechanical occupations (banausos) leave a man no leisure to attend to his friends' interests, or the public interest. This class therefore cannot be of much use to his friends or defend his country. Indeed, some states, especially the most warlike, do not allow a citizen to engage in these handicraft occupations.’
You're splitting hairs unnecessarily. Apple is scanning users' photos on their devices. To say that they are not "scanning devices" because they are (currently) only targeting photos and not every single other part of the phone is unhelpful at best, and detracts from the point that this is a massive violation of their users' privacy. The exact wording here really doesn't matter as much as you think it does.