skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a biologist (sorry for the appeal to authority, but it matches the tone of this thread), the evidence against a natural origin appears absolutely staggering.

You have a viral clade that completely descends from a single introduction event inside a major city. The virus does not undergo a period of host adaptation, but instead infects many millions over nearly a year before phenotypic changes are observed. This is simply fantastic. I know of no case where a virus jumped species without a period of adaptation to the new host. The fact that the entire clade has a root in October 2019 (and we can see this even because the first viruses sequenced differed by only one or two mutations from their common ancestor) indicates that there was not slow community spread before the initiation of the pandemic period. There is no weaker progenitor virus.

Considering as well the focus of research labs within the exact city where the pandemic arose makes any argument against the laboratory origin of the virus seem extremely weak. How does a serious and non-conflicted scientist explain all of these ultra-improbable coincidences?
Do You Just Write?
When you want to start writing a blog post, do you just write? don't you sometimes find yourself stuck on how to phrase a sentence? How long does it take you to write a 1 page mini blog?
And it's not as if they are just giving the 400 million dollars away - they earn billions of dollars from Firefox users and they give a percentage of that to Firefox.
Is it new though? Erdős famously took amphetamines all his life. The only drug Tarn Adams (Dwarf Fortress creator) ever tried was meth during his Maths degree. Stims and academia seems like a classic combination to me.
The problem is their own institutions incentivize it. Their world is one where you need to be cited for credibility and therefore funding. You do this by making yourself and your work important. If your area of research is epidemiology and there’s not much to worry about then you need to find something worth investing in from the political class and their appointed admins. So you conduct gain of function research, etc to create enough concern that you get further funding and then somewhere in this process a mistake happens and here we are.

It’s not a conspiracy or anything tin foil hat related. It’s just pure incentives. No one makes a name for themselves or gets the funding they need to continue to exist because they said “there’s not much to worry about”. You need to convince your benefactors that your research is relevant and should be prioritized.
I hear mostly air and tires.
So in other words, it doesn't matter that you can't turn lead into gold as long as the end result is something shiny enough to fool a lot of people?
> So did you send your database logs to a centralized logging system?

Not needed.

> Did you set up roles and keys to access those systems?

Yes.

> Are your roles integrated with the rest of your permissions system?

Not needed. Access to the DB is limited to a very small circle, by design. Postgresql's mechanisms suffice.

> Do you have a perf dashboard where you can see the real-time usage of your DBs?

htop/task manager and Postgresql's internal monitoring have so far been sufficient.

> Have you already rehearsed updating your database version?

Indirectly yes, although AFAIK (happy to learn otherwise) major version update are also not supported by RDS.

This has been working for years now, with actual paying customers (so "in production"). It's always about opportunity-cost and diminishing returns: RDS costs about as 3 developers. The benefit the product gets from 3 more developers far outweighs the benefit of another "9" in the SLA.

Even if all of the savings would have gone to pay for a DBA, we'd still get a better deal: an in-house DBA will focus on addressing our specific needs. RDS also has a serious opportunity cost since it prohibits using extensions that are very useful for us, forcing us to spend time on workarounds.

And frankly, it's not like RDS is even that reliable. We had multiple incidents where the database stopped responding or slowed down to a crawl for several hours, and we had now way to debug this (since we cannot access the server itself). They also don't seem to handle anything about Postgresql tuning.

For the customer, the app slowing down (because RDS has a very limited IO bandwidth) is an outage (and is much more frequent than some system error).

tl;dr: Many people can meet their needs with a Ford, and living on the streets to pay for the extra features of a Ferrari is not a good tradeoff for them.

EDIT: line spacing
> Either those cookies make up for the lost business, these statements only hold for the initial page load or these statements are factually incorrect

It’s likely TrustArc trying to make their widget look muscular to an idiot executive at Starbucks.
DesktopMagic
"it was confirmed by every student I asked"

Makes it sounds like every student confirmed that 30% of students were taking stims, instead of 30% of students he asked was taking stims.
Some infinities are countable.
With ear plugs apparently. But then you have an entirely different control problem.
I can hear the engines very well. Unmistakeable, loud sound.
do you think that live virus research including gain-of-function serves no purpose whatsoever other than for WMD's? It's just "evil and pointless"?
1.5 seconds seem to low for me to be for user annoyance, especially since this comes after the point where the user would change his mind. I'd bet someone had to implement this and needed this to look like it's doing something.
I know about this and New Pipe, but having tons of apps for every little thing I do on the phone is exactly what I avoid. All these apps do is supporting downloading and subscriptions, something I would care about if I submitted to the youtube time sink, which I do not.

Besides, isn't this app a violation of Youtube's policies?
Their complaint is about the snarky way you delivered your message, not the message itself.
The takeaway in any event is it could have come from a lab. That should be enough to trigger some action around biosecurity.

There is no reason to think this won't happen again in our lifetimes. We have this amazing global logistic network that can apparently ferry a virus all over the world in about 3 months. Lab safety has to be beyond question.

I imagine we'll see some monumental changes in Chinese lab safety after this, independent of whether or not they believe it came from a lab.
If you tell them you aren't doing it, they'll fire you and find someone who will. It'll end up existing either way.
> The way that people value software these days is completely insane.

It has been like that since the 2000. It gained wider traction when app stores (looking at you, Apple!) started with a baseline of 0.99 USD in 2009. That's just outright insane. I'd be better off giving away my app for free, because people are lot less demanding when they didn't pay for something.
> we probably should start considering advertising platforms a form of malware as well

Absolutely! They've been used as malware vectors numerous times in the past. One of infinite reasons to block them unconditionally and make no exceptions.
I don’t understand why you are shocked.

Ethics should follow the same standard normal distribution model as everything else. Which means that 50% of the population has less than average ethics.
If you know what a Markov chain is then you must also know that modern language models are nothing like Markov chains. Just as an example, a Markov chain can't do causal reasoning or correctly solve unseen programming puzzles, the way GPT-3 can.

As for self-awareness, your brain is an N x N -matrix in the same sense as an ANN, so surely it must be possible for one to be self-aware? Not claiming that GPT-3 is, of course.
Well maybe vaccine doses per 100 people isn't the best benchmark, especially if they are already giving 3rd doses - it's way more important the share of full vaccination of the total population, because the goal is to get the imune system primed.

The reality is that Israel only has 63% of their population fully vaccinated, even if they keep giving extra doses, a large slice is still not vaccinated (people under 59 apparently).
As I read it this means you get to put a link in your app that says ‘you can also buy your stuff on our website, which is 30% cheaper than through IAP’.

That seems like a major win compared to before.
> We need to hold … scientists accountable

Precisely how do you suggest that the seven thousand odd million people outside the USA hold the USA accountable for what their scientists get to do in Fort Bragg?

The USA, China, and Russia are going to do exactly as they please. You need to make your peace with this.
I don't think using bootstrap is a good idea if you don't know any css at all, some very easy things might work out, but there will be some issues, there always are.
I remember a freelance gig I once had for a saas company, they didn't have a mobile site at all, table designs, html generated server side via some clandestine php "framework"....I had to add
* {border:1px solid redl}
To even see what was happening, even the desktop view had max width 1200px I think. The whole CSS had to be done from scratch, so many server generated pages after submitting a post request had no or hard to trace CSS rules, often in the HTML.
My point is, all this could have been prevented if proper css would have been used from the beginning. In the owners defense, the page was made around the release of the css2 standard.
Just learn the basics, css today is not as bad as it used to be, now that browsers are somewhat compatible and and responsive design is simplified with things like flexbox, it's not that hard , especially for a MVP.
Frameworks are ok, until something apparently unpredictable happens or breaks, just like many things didn't work as intended when people with no JS knowledge jumped right on jQuery.
Though the practice is always deplorable, I don't get why Starbucks would want this kind of thing. Sure they might be able to sell your data for a little extra cash, but why would they make it harder to buy coffee on their site?
I won't repeat myself, but above I assert that there are some critically unusual things about this virus that make it look extremely different from the viruses that "happen all the time." We gain this information not from inside documents or statements that can be dismissed as lies, but from the highly observable viral phylogeny and phenotypic evolution. These are highly unusual in the scope of natural viral spillover events, and any serious attempt to ground the virus in a natural introduction must develop a theory that explains them. What's your plausible story?
I would argue that there is a huge difference regarding the improvements in safety measures, depending on whether there is the suspicion or the proof of a lab leak.

With just the suspicion of a lab leak, there will always be half-measures because of researchers arguing that you are needlessly tying their hands. And there will always be people who believe them, either because they trust those researchers or because they don't want to spend any more money on safety measures.

With proof of a lab leak, nobody would listen to researchers' complaints about those strict safety measures anymore. And having seen the huge cost to society, the evaluation of cost and benefits of that research and its safety will be seen in a totally different light.

Also, having someone to blame would imho rally sceptics and deniers behind a common narrative. There would be a common external threat and a common enemy to fight, meaning that the means of that fight like travel restrictions and vaccinations would be more readily accepted.
SQL struggles with hierarchical data (trees), which are graphs.
For Android apps Mapsforge is a good solution, if you need detailed map of relatively small area, or less detailed map is enough for large areas. You can distribute map with app and have a decent sized app.
there was also no efficient io multiplexing

an ircd with a few thousand clients was cpu bound on poll()/select()

/dev/poll and kqueue/epoll were game changing
Against the chinese?
Anecdotally, I remember classmates in college using Adderall as a performance enhancing drug prior to taking exams. You could randomly drug test a subset of students and check against prescriptions, but that might get onerous.
This sounds like old information. Things have been declassified since then.
That's wrong. The vaccine is moderately effective at preventing the spread of early variants. It's not very effective at preventing the spread of Delta from an infected person, but it's quite effective (but far from perfect) at preventing people from getting infected in the first place, thus overall significantly slowing spread .

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02187-1
The same way we stopped nuclear testing.
I can't even take your comment seriously.
what do you have to back your assertions

After reading @fredros's comment here, I no longer feel confident that my statement that the "Qur'an is legal in the PRC" is much of an argument.

The other assertions I made were that 'the Qur'an is sacred to 1/4 of the world' and that 'banning any holy book is PR suicide'. I can't muster enthusiasm to defend those. They seem clear-cut to me.

As I read the original tweet, it sounded like Apple had banned the Qur'an (ie: its contents) from the its store in China. But that is the dev's conjecture. I'm sure Apple banned his/her particular Qur'an app, but there currently are too few details to know why.
I can tell you about my experience with modafinil / armodafinil. For the record, I'm 40. I've never been diagnosed with anything, and I wasn't terrible in school, but I was never really able to concentrate for too long.

I kind of tumbled into IT after school and it worked for me, if I got 2 hours of concentrated work in per day, I'd get by.

A friend of mine had taken modafinil and recommended it to me like three years ago. I tried it and it was extreme, I was able to sit down and just work on stuff and get it done without getting distracted every few minutes. I took it once or twice a week because of all the propaganda surrounding all drugs.

I've switch to armodafinil because I found it to work more reliable for me. About two years ago, I started taking armodafinil each & every day, and it's great. I have no negative side-effects that I attribute to it (well, I've gained weight, but weight has been up & down for me my whole life), I sleep well, and it allows me to get into the flow quickly, remain there for hours, and stay productive. I still have the occasional day where I don't get anything done, but it tends to be because I'm subconsciously avoiding some task, and recognizing that helps me get over it.

These past two years were easily more productive than the previous 8-10. I wish I had known about it earlier. Looking back, it feels like I've wasted a lot of time before.
Yep, I have a JavaFX GUI which is fairly complex, and the jlink image it creates is less than 30MB. Notice that this includes all my code, JavaFX, the JVM runtime and even Swing (even though I don't use Swing, it needs to be included for stuff like splash screen and some platform features, unfortunately).
Maybe it's different for me since I'm on mobile but I was really bothered by the huge left margin that didn't match the size of the right margin
2MW Electric Aircraft Engine
Probably need to stop driving Volkswagons since they are carrying on the Nazi legacy of the German Labour Front then...

Given this long obsession to Nazi history on Wikipedia, maybe she would be also interested in spending months playing the Wolfenstein series...

Although I do fear that would make it worse and she may see Nazis in everything; a strange symptom I somewhat heard a couple of months ago...
I think graph processing has great potential for use cases where the data model is heterogeneous and the structure of a problem really can be modeled as a graph problem. I think the tooling and the technologies are still not nearly as mature as e.g. relational databases and most developers have very little exposure to graph models, so adoption is still quite low, but will probably rise as the cloud providers offer hosted graph databases. In 2015 I was quite excited for TitanDB and the TinkerPop stack but I think the acquisition of the team behind it (Aurelius) by DataStax kind of sucked the air out of the community edition. As far as I understand Amazon is using many ideas and concepts from TitanDB in their Neptune graph database, but unfortunately they don't seem to care to open-source it. I don't think graph databases & graph processing will become mainstream tough, as they're just not a good fit for most problems.
On some operating systems getaddrinfo sorts the DNS response by IPv6 distance! Breaking load balancing

https://access.redhat.com/solutions/22132
> Also, I'm not qualified enough to comment on whether gain-of-function research is necessary and useful. But I would strongly suggest that given the possible consequences, together with the aforementioned woefully inadequate safety measures, it should be reevaluated.

But people have been saying that for at least a decade. There was a moratorium in the USA for a couple of years. The EU produced a lot of guidance. It was viewed as enough and it might have been in a world where international actors are reasonable, transparent and act in good faith. The issue is that COVID have definitely proved that it is not the world we currently live in and some actors are part of the international community in names only.
I like that term: ponzi coins :)
Hey, I translated your whole app to Bengali.

When will I see this reflected in the update?
I don't understand how this would work. If I sell a product on my website for 10$, that works on multiple platforms, would each platform be able to take 30%? At that percent and 4 platforms this would be net negative, so that seems wrong...

Conversely I could say the product costs 10$ for the PC platform (which does't have the commission), and you get a 'free' version for iOS and pay 30% of 0$. That seems wrong...

Or maybe I would have have to track users installs and use time? That seems wrong...
> Kernighan's "Why Pascal Is Not My Favorite Programming Language"

https://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html

There is a TL;DR at the end.
> Nothing they sell is critical

Does that mean the law doesn't apply to them? You do business in Europe, you follow European laws + the laws of the specific country you're doing business with, doesn't matter what the type of business is.
jar signing has been around at least since Java 6 if I recall correctly: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/deployment/jar/signi...
One thing I did not understand is why looking for class name collisions depends on modules. If I have two classes named com.foo.Bar in two different JARs, and I use both JARs (without any class loader trickery), then what part of the module system is needed to recognize this fact and throw an exception in my face?

This seems interesting to me because most of the time, dependency management happens to include two versions of the same library by accident and a simple exclusion rule fixes the problem, but obviously only if you know about it in the first place.
That doesn’t really make sense though. Someone that’s had Netflix for years but now downloads the mobile app is not suddenly giving 30% of their subscription fee to Apple.
Find a startup (<30 people) that is building something you like and who's checks clear.

Pro tip: whenever you hear two people talking about something being fucked up or broken and no one knows why, offer to try and look into it. Solve 1/5 of those and people will be extremely impressed.
It is as you say, however, a and b had already been declared, which is the error.
No the tourists have to put up with YOUR shit.

You are immune for fucks sake, how hard is it to actually be welcoming and say: It's ok for unvaccinated to enter a restaurant. We can live without implicitly checking everyone. We don't need to be like that and can act like normal decent humans again! Is that so hard?
that's nice. how big is the billboard? doesn't the local govt snatch some money in the name of license / fee / permit / tax ?
If you're an h1b worker you literally don't have a choice.

You obey or get yourself and your family kicked out of the country.
It lasts too long for me. I would take it early in the morning, and I'd still be wired at 2am the following night, unable to sleep. Made it unusable.
I originally watched this on Amazon Prime, but didn’t realize it was now for free on YouTube, which is why I submitted. I suppose I could have put “AlphaGo Documentary on YouTube” or some such ...

(original poster)
Thanks, seems they renamed it recently.
This is just wrong. The surgace of the sun is around 5700K and rhe emitted light follows the back body spectrum for that temperature. And that has a massive yellow peak. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EffectiveTemperature_30... for the data. This is measured outside the Earth's atmosphere. Rayleigh scattering does come into play, but it is way less important.

As I said, human vision has a kind of adaptive white balance that cancels out peaks like this to some extent. It also does that for artificial light sources with uneven spectra (neon light, blueish white LED lights...). [Side note: this is also the reason why cameras have adjustable white balance. A picture taken by a neutral sensor under some artificial lights is perfectly correct, but looks color tinted and wrong to the human eye afterwards, because the eye under the same conditions has a shifted white point.]

Why is this important? If you set up a light source in a renderer, you often get a pretty naive equal energy white as a default, which is simply not what you need for sunlight, even at noon under a clear sky.
Thing is I'm not just talking about America, all these talking points are now transnational and come just as bundled.
“If and only if” also has a shorthand in “iff”.
Thoughts in the Presence of Fear (September 2001)
I gave up on Usenet newsgroups when the noise in groups of interest (mainly rec.music., comp.lang. and comp.sys.*) led to me spending too much time managing my killfile in relation to actually reading and replying to news.

It really was too much to self-moderate your way through. The volume was just too much. As well, you couldn't sort through the trash to find the pearls.

The volume was a trickle compared to volume today. I don't have a source for this assertion, but I think it is reasonable.
Not everything follows a standard distribution model. In fact, since some psychological tests are designed to return a standard distribution result, if the traits do not occur in the population along a standard distribution, the psychological tests are designed in a way which will give inaccurate results.
> "Under all models, Apple would be entitled to a commission or licensing fee, even if IAP was optional." (page 67)

It seems you still can’t make it 30% cheaper. Sure, making a different offer and skirting around the rules might be possible, but the judgment gives Apple the right to go after what it feels is cheating.
I tried Adderall once, in college, for a final exam I had ill prepared for. It increased my working memory by a factor of 2 or 3; the most concrete thing I remember being able to do was hold 8 (sparse) 3x3 matrices in my head (Gell-Mann matrices, [0]) and effortlessly manipulate them, all without ever writing anything down.

However, the crash afterwards was so brutal that despite the extraordinary effect on my short-term memory abilities, I never wanted to try it again.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_matrices
>Modafinil isn't an amphetamine.

The last time I went on a modafinil bender I didn't sleep for a week and ended that with a 12 hour masturbation session involving a lot of blood.

That's not really that much different to what happened the one time I did meth, apart from there being a lot less violence.

Modafinil should be way more regulated than it is.