skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unpopular comment on HN I'm sure, but I know a few people who work in various infectious diseases labs - one of which sits in with policy makers and is one of the referred to when those officials talk about their "expert advisors".

None of them believe it was a lab leak. All of them believe it was a spill over or a wet market incident.

Anecdotal, I'm aware. But I'm personally yielding to those people who work in the same building as the world's deadliest diseases, who have all of the information and have all of their (usually multiple) degrees.

Lab leak is juicy. It would give us someone to blame. That's human nature to want it to be true. But nothing I've heard aside from news outlets and conspiracy theorists gives me any reason to believe it's a lab leak.
Ronald Coase won the nobel prize in economics for his "transaction costs" solution to the "why do firms even exist" question. A lot of economics is about asking a question the right way.

He started with "if markets are so great and stuff, why do companies run like soviets & chiefdoms in practice? Why doesn't the product team just contract a UI designer, a testing team and such. Hi solution was "transaction costs." IE, it's too hard to find a designer every time you need a button.

Economics and social science generally is prone to a "defend my model" problem. Once you have a model, there's a tendency to see everything in terms of that model. A Coasian sees everything in transaction costs terms. Coasians ran around

This author seems to see everything in incentive & game theory terms. Management theory often prefers group psychology explanations like Dunbar's number.

IMO, you should probably keep all in mind at once, and remember that none are entirely true. Even if you see the problem as "Prisoners Dilemma," the solution may not be "breaking the prisoner's dilemma."

Human cooperation in groups to achieve aims is basically the secret sauce of human civilization, culture & what makes us different from other animals. If it could be predictably engineered, a lot of problems would have been solved already.

Most, seemingly common sense solutions fail miserably. Trying to break prisoners' dilemmas by nailing all responsibility to someone (a) may be a lot more disruptive and aggressive than you imagined and (b) will often result in elaborate CYA responsibility avoidance. See enterprise consulting for a snapshot of a mature system described this way.

One way or another, this problem has occured to many people over the years. It's not an easy one. Perhaps, it's the hard question of social science.
Gartner Hype Cycle – What is it, how to use it? 2021 Guide
Elements Shoes – Fire, Water, Earth, and Air
I think this is a pretty cool idea here.
I think the article has a persuasive reason why beyond politics: not knowing the origin reason means policies might be written that don't actually prevent another pandemic. There's no reason to more stringently regulate wet markets if the belief was that it came out of a lab, and vice versa.
Quick feedback loops while coding (or, trading some TDD for static types)
If you're looking for no-fringe transactional email sender that are going down the bootstrapped indie route, I can recommend https://ohmysmtp.com

I have no connection to them except being a happy customer.
No. But the person in question here worked on the subject at hand decades ago, not during the development of these vaccines. In the meantime he seems to have developed a political rather than a scientific view of the issue AND had a conflict of interest.
I've thought the same thing.

Looking at reddit, whenever someone complains about degredation of discussion, somebody pops up and says "just use old.reddit.com". However, everyone else is still on new reddit, so even if you increase the quality of your submissions, the overall quality still drops.
I had a manager for the better part of a decade who was non technical (this was a Fortune 500 company). He was awesome. Anything we said we needed, he would get to us. Any technical decisions he 100% left up to us and trusted we knew what we were talking about. He mainly left us alone and spent his time trying to get us more money and running blocking to keep us from being disturbed.

My current manager has a technical background. I now spend the vast majority of my work week in meetings. Not because my job has changed, but because they have so many meetings that we never had under my previous manager. Scrum, backlog, retrospective, one on ones, touch bases, etc. I seriously maybe have 5 hours a week to actually program these days. If we want anything, he is likely to say no and that we can get along with what we already have. He often has opinions on how we should do things based on how he did things years ago instead of modern best practices. Give me a non-technical manager any day.
I have different definitions of a crisis to be honest. And I also think the crisis of misinformation is blown out of proportion and is in the interest of some established forms of media, which make quite a good buck with clickable headlines that sell the apocalypse.

This crisis is used to gain more control about information channels. This is also the main criticism here, nobody argues about the validity of claims some people bring forward as an argument against vaccination.
I haven't been able to play with it yet.

This was partly due to my lack of SQL Server projects, but mostly due to the lack of availability of the supposedly Apache-licenced sources and/or binaries (and not wanting to configure AWS for 'just testing').
It is useless in any situation in which absolute rigor is required, but its close relation to human language makes it excellent for developing logical habits of thought in practical situations. Proper mathematical logic fixes its biggest problems, and is incredibly useful in its own way --- I don't mean to dismiss it in any way --- but as a tool for developing non-mathematician non-philosopher people's rational capabilities, I still hold it's unmatched because of its verbal, intuitive character.
Does everyone try to help? And if only one person helps in a crisis, even most of the time, how does that translate to organizational psychology?
Show HN: DocumentSpark – simple project to view docs securely without download
Nice. What's the tech stack?
I love this but alt + H doesn't work on Firefox
Love the JSONB subscripts! It will be so much easier to remember! I may not even have to reference the docs!
> Well, unless you're google and can regularly fire your customers without going bust

This is only true for external products. When I was at Google it always seemed to me that the majority of engineering effort is focused on the inside, and that the same effect exists there.
Your comparing the rate of hospitalization of one group for the entire pandemic then comparing the rate of the second for a few months. That's not going to give you any useful data for comparison.
Good point. On a large screen most of the space is wasted: a blurred column on the left and empty space on the right.

This accounts for 2/3 of the of the space. Please use all of it :)
*posterizing then dithering. Dithering by itself always improves visual quality.
> His claims are so far from anyone's expectations that it should be trivial to disprove, right? There's a bug bounty of $1M dollars available to anyone. Why is no one bothering to claim it?

Because no one who would be interested in disproving it trusts the person offering the bounty to be doing so in good faith.
Global Counterspace Capabilities: An Open Source Assessment [pdf]
We'll never know what happened because the time for properly investigating has long since past. There was plenty of political stonewalling early on. I know I don't trust governments or the media to properly get to the bottom of it, because if something did leak, it would be detrimental to them at this point (government/NGOs want funding without oversite, media towed the line of these entities early on).

The media has a long, long way to go to regain trust.
When I learn about new products randomly, it's almost entirely because other developers told me about them.

But mostly, I learn about new products because I have a problem and am looking for a solution to it. The product comes up in my research.
This will be a bitter battle.

Lying and stealing to ‘own the Nazis’

In most ethical systems the ends don’t justify the means, because you can justify anything this way. Will be interesting to see the backlash (and whether they repeat learning this common saying).

Der Zweck heiligt nicht die Mittel
Mire is a good word to describe what is going through my mind when I see their recent search results.
AI in Augmented Reality
This is something that we talked about during our last podcast where we interviewed our CTO. He believes that a flat hierarchy in an organization is a way to solve for this. There are good and there are bad managers. An organization needs to compensate for this.

If you're interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AflK5qst1qc
Unblock Domains from Security Filters
On Unbeatable Video Games
A Peek into Afro-Urban Fashion
I'm sorry in advance if I'm not understanding again, but is the suggestion that we normally get however many cases of e.g. aphasia, but we just didn't know in 2019 because there was no vaccine push? What then is VAERS for? If there was an alarming situation that VAERS would help us see, what would it look like?

Edit: this has been unjustly flagged.
> ... Gupta says, “It’s a likely probability that this one originated from animals as well. But the possibility also remains that the virus leaked from a lab.”

> By posing these two theories as simply two equally plausible solutions to a mystery ...

How are “probable” and “possible” equal? The author seems to be doing the same thing they’re complaining about.
This doesn’t really make sense - irrespective of where this particular virus came from, we need to re-think regulations for all potential future sources.
from the other perspective, the only ones not calling them roman are 'us' ... so there's that
It goes roughly like: It's the fault of the Chinese and possibly an anti-America bioweapon; therefore it isn't the fault of Trump for ignoring, minimizing and dawdling in the hopes it would preserve his electoral chances (and wipe out Democrat voting demographics in blue states).

The A, therefore not B structure of this isn't particularly valid, but this is excuse making, not sense.
> 'But those are different' is usually the argument here. But why though?

Because we already agree they're different, so they form a Schelling point. We don't have to argue about them, and so there's no slippery slope.

However, I'd say even these examples are not as clear as they seem:

Death threats: I can see the need to punish credible death threats (and any credible threats of violence), but that does not actually imply a need to censor the death threats. Allow them to exist on the platform, but punish the threatener.

Defamation: This seems like a pointless holdover from honor culture. If we didn't have laws against it, people would simply demand evidence more often when hearing someone defame someone else. I don't see why the government needs to certify that my statement about someone else is true. Let my reputation do that.

Pedophilia: Have any children been saved by child pornography laws? It's possible banning and deleting it only encourages them to make more. And again, you can punish the creator of the pornography without also having to censor the content. The two are separate.

Sharing bomb making materials: This is the only example you gave where the actual information itself is dangerous. I support this being banned for sure. (You could say defamation is dangerous, but I'd say it's only harmful when the government is certifying our speech. Take away defamation laws, and defamation itself becomes less harmful, because we won't believe what others say at face value.)
How Does Fake News Spread? Pathways of Disinformation Spread Through APIs
Kind of a low-value article full of Dilbert-style foibles.

I've observed managers who had very little knowledge of the tech, but were excellent at critical thinking, sensing BS, and "managing up".
The biggest component of the answer is simple: risk aversion. The status quo has been working so far, and making changings introduces risk that things might no longer work. An organization will probably exhibit risk aversion comparable to the most risk averse decision maker in the a particular decision chain. This imparts the status quo a type of inertia.
Looking over the comments here I feel there's a lack of common definition and thus expectation. I've always personally found it useful to make a distinction between team lead and manager.

The way I define them is team lead is the or among the most senior and experienced team members. They still do some hands on work, the high value stuff, and they support, coach train the team on technical stuff, do high level design and ensure it all adds up to coherent working quality something.

Manager understands people, client, goals, process, company - how to support their team, how to protect the team, and how to get shit done - and crucially, how to get the right shit done based on company's and user's priorities.

I find its crucial to distinguish the roles and expectations.
One of the best managers I ever had I did not respect at the time - I judged them as a team lead and their tech knowledge was limited...but when they left - team fell apart, and shit I didn't know existed started hitting us and we got torn seven different ways.
Facebook’s internal research on the mental health effects of Instagram
shameless plug

I am a maintainer of subspace (https://github.com/subspacecommunity/subspace). My contributions were updating the SAML library (crewjam/saml), implementing prometheus support (which is still being reviewed) and some minor features.

My vision for the project is to evolve into a fully featured userspace VPN service that still relies on WireGuard for the network layer, but implementing useful features like key rotation, built-in horizontal scaling support, server-client configuration sync, automatic user de-provisioning based on the upstream Active Directory users manifest and an api/sdk for extended automation.

But before I can even get to the cool stuff, I need more peers just to review current pull requests and deal with the current issues, because as it is, I don't have quorum to do such (I mean without abusing administrator privileges). Without such, my option would be to fork or reimplement the service.

I think Firezone is an excellent effort, we need competition wherever possible and I think we can contribute with ideas, but with SAML/SSO already implemented, maybe subspace is already more suited to corporate environments.
It really does not. Conservative sketch: assume 10k ppl, avg cost $50k/y, process/procedure/policy overhead 30%, is 150M/y. For that to make sense you'd need 15x $10M fraudulent or single point stupidity errors per year. And that is assuming that the bullshit actually catches most errors.

In my experience the 30% is conservative, from my measurements of large orgs. High overhead does not reduce errors, instead it increases both frequency and severity. It also kills innovation, thinking, adaptability, etc.
The author uses "we" a lot but who are this "We"? For sure there is a large number of Linux users that are not part of his "we". I consider myself someone that is into the technical stuff but at the same time I care about the philosophy and meaning of "Free Software".
What's the hardest part of mobile app development?
Hey,

We develop a mobile app tool and doing research about mobile design&dev process.

What is the hardest part of mobile app development?

Share your experiences about the biggest challenges no matter what stage it was: from discovery, UX, visual conception, etc to coding, testing.
When would this be more useful/readable/simple than just

mylist = [show (OffensivePlayer …), show (DefensivePlayer …)]

?
This is true and obvious, but before I became an EM I had great managers who were either technology or people-focused. Both can be good IF they recognize their skills & gaps, and mitigate accordingly.
Hand wave away the "coincidence" that the virus most likely originated nearby the Wuhan Institute of Virology, because a CNN report was "presented with portentous music on the soundtrack, suggesting subliminally that something sinister is going on there".

China is "shopping" articles that absolve the lab and are actively interfering with investigation- Occam's razor starts to come into play here.
Can confirm, plays well with darkreader.
Lab leak, if true, would be damaging to the flexibility of their work and bring further scrutiny toward future funding of said work.

They have incentive for it to not be true.
I already have someone to blame and it was a President too stupid to wear a mask that sent thousands to their deaths. A president that instigated an era of not believing the news or experts and introduced a culture of “alternate facts”, otherwise known as lies, that have caused the current anti-vaccine idiocy.

695,000 Americans dead so far.
Your app looks great! I'm hacking on something related, so always fun to see new takes in this space. Did you try Instapaper as an alternative to Pocket? No intrusive features, great reading experience. I'm a happy paying customer and user for over a decade now.
Technical experience is naturally not going to turn a bad manager into a good one, but a good manager will always be better if they have technical experience as well
maybe check out this and other forums do get an idea of what people are looking for if there's a market etc.

https://www.reddit.com/r/nocode/

just in my quick look there seems to be a market for business lead projects in the enterprise, but the suggestion was use Gardener's top right quadrant.
How does everyone do postgresql upgrades with the least amount of downtime?
I've also had a bad experience with a programmer turned manager. He micromanaged to a frustrating degree, almost checking things in as much detail himself as if he was the actual engineer working on the task. Additionally, he had a very hard time adapting his working and communication styles, and instead asked for a lot of things to be done his way or recommended his way instead of understanding and trying to help me with the things I was struggling with, which I always found backwards.

My previous manager never even coded, while the manager before that was also still actively developing, and both had a much more personable yet effective style. Everybody has their pros and cons, but I just wanted to agree that being a programmer manager isn't necessarily good or bad.
"We'll really miss his excellent work. He lived up to the team's high standards."
It's not just cynical (and jaded). It's condescending.

I mean, in one sentence the author writes:

> Well, that and Kevin needs to learn how to code, so he can then learn just how ignorant “Stop putting bugs in the code” really sounds to a development team.

And in another it's:

> Detailed tellers are so happy that they finally have the power to get everyone to write code “the correct” way. Tellers are especially bad if they have lots of energy and vigor as you can’t just wait for them to go away. This manager type is probably single-handedly responsible for causing software engineers to be reticent about working for a manager with technical chops.

So the manager is clueless if he or she can't code, but also clueless if he or she can and crosses the author's undefined boundary for too much direction and detail.

The message: the author (and her prototypical developer) know it all. Everyone else probably sucks, probably beyond repair.

Yes, bad managers do exist. Exceptional ones are not super common. But the same could be said of developers and I'd say that based on the following, the author exhibits a toxic attitude that every team should look to avoid.

> So, as a developer, what can you do?

> Not much, unless you have a good shot at getting the manager removed without hurting your career. You might be tempted to somehow educate your manager, and if the skill gaps are pretty small, and the trust level is high, the managing-up school of management can be effective. However, most development manager skills gaps are on the scale of the Grand Canyon.
You express strong views about mathematical logic (i.e. first-order logic) as part of mathematics, but do you disregard the contributions of first-order logic to the theory of computation, or do you consider the theory of computation to be part of philosophy rather than mathematics?
As opposed to generalizing from self doing as it does?

You didn't see it so it must not exist?
Comprehensive Survey and Performance Analysis of Activation Functions in DL
> I use org-super-agenda and a central TODO file to manage my stuff

Hadn't heard of org-super-agenda, but looks great. Thanks!

https://github.com/alphapapa/org-super-agenda

> I've also started using org-roam and I'm loving it for capturing my thoughts.

I've tried with Org-Roam but I find the idea of breaking thoughts into little bits very awkward when I mostly work with philosophical books, where the priority is the relation of a concept to the others in the same book, then to the author, then maybe school, then to other authors. I haven't figured out how to model that in org-roam, but maybe there is a way? I also like to divide my notes into folders based on their author (awkward for multiple authors, I admit), but org-roam seems built to keep everything in one massive folder. I just use plain org files and grep around for relevant other stuff.

> the customizability lets me never be satisfied and spend more time screwing with stuff than actually working.

Yeah, I hear that. The one above is the most stable workflow I've come up with after numerous iterations. Keeping it as simple as possible, basically a super powered todo list or bullet journal, has helped, i think.
Intuit QuickBooks DT Premier Plus with Enhanced Payroll 2022 Accounting Software
Could be innocent laziness.

But since it’s a critical subject, the coordinated messaging feels like a propaganda piece.

This is coming from someone who is vaccinated.
I have an option for iOS in beta https://xenodium.com/plain-org-for-ios-a-month-later/

More updates at https://www.reddit.com/r/plainorg
This is everything I wish the web would move towards: quick, minimalistic design that doesn't hinder the user. I think Reddit is the worst offender in this regard with its slow, bloated redesign that stops my viewing experience.

There is also something to be said of the inherent, tactile satisfaction derived from a button-press, as opposed to a mouse-click.
Having worked with a lot of managers, it can cut both ways. Perhaps it's the lessons these managers learned (or chose to learn) when they were more directly involved in the development process that really matters. The people who came away from the experience with something like "the pace of change is rapid, keeping up is difficult, and some core problems may never be solved" seems to be much easier to work with than someone how chose to learn random facts like "caches are bad" or "caches are good" or "Oracle is the only real database server" or "Java is the only proper language."
It's a valid and interesting question though why the same task implemented in a 'professional environment' today sometimes (often?) takes many times longer with worse results than 20 or 30 years ago in a small team and with development tools that were much more primitive than what we have today.

Why can't it be the same now, indeed?

Everything should be faster and easier in modern programming languages, frameworks and tools, but very often it isn't. Why?
> you pay only $79/mo to us for a very good website

Why would you pay monthly for a one-time job?

Also, what if the customers stop paying after the site is ready?