skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The point of the lab-leak hypothesis is not to find the exact historical truth of what actually happened. We probably can never find out for sure, and for political reasons it would be difficult to pin it on one culprit.

The question is only: Could it have happened this way? Is it plausible? If so, then we need to increase our security measures.

I think it is very plausible. There have been SARS lab leaks before, there were local attempts at cover up, and so on. There is no evidence for a lab leak, but it could have happened, and that is enough.

How do we tighten the security measures? One way would be to ban gain of function research. I'm not an expert, so if you say we need this research, we have to find a way to do it more safely. Maybe we can perform the research with 100% transparency. Complete surveillance of the lab, only joint multi-national labs allowed, frequent external audits, intense medical observation of the researchers, .... I'm sure experts can come up with useful precautions. The thing is there are likely precautions that were possible but considered too cumbersome or expensive. But in the light of a global pandemic and the plausibility that it may have been a lab leak, it is time to reevaluate the cost-benefit analysis.

(And of course, the zoonosis hypothesis is also plausible, and we have to do something about it... and think about deforestation, urban growth, wet markets, and so on.)
I've seen instances where improvements and updates are made to existing systems that works just fine. The reason being optimization of resources like time, manpower and money.

But these improvements create new problems in the system that requires another iteration of improvements and updates.

It either that or the intuitive nature of the system is compromised. This creates a very unpleasant experiences that makes no sense.

Another important reason that comes to mind is unrealistic expectations from the IT industry. I've seen customers asking for features that adds no benefit to their business and they want it just because it's out there and they want in. Customers these days want everything. They want an amazing UI, light speed data transmission, quantum level security, and a sophisticated technology stack. They want all this in 1 month. The IT industry is so dense in countries like India that even though these people know this isn't possible, they still promise a product to the customer for fear of losing a valuable business venture.

This inturn results in a half cooked product that seems to have everything the customer requested but whose stability and usability isn't vouched for. More and more updates are promised to solve the issues with the product since "this is an iterative evolving solution".
How do people do this kind of scripting on Android?
Fair guess would be that you leaked that information somewhere along the way - putting the address into google maps, pulling up the dr office phone number on google proper etc.
> Trump should have mandated actual national lockdown

As the other commenter pointed out, the executive branch of government lacks authority to do so. Courts have decided over and over again (like with the eviction moratorium, worker vaccine mandate, etc.) that Congress needs to authorize this.

So it is very much a failure of Congress to act. And since no action was taken, neither before nor after changing majorities in Congress, all parties failed.
I don’t think foreign insurance companies would have any luck making the Chinese state pay for the worldwide cost of Covid, even if there were ironclad proof the pandemic was their fault.
> Nobody is forced to continue using dark-pattern software, nobody was forced to use Apple and tie their credit-card to their "apple cloud account", yet normal users dont see a problem with it at all and just continue even paying for software which is hostile to them and their interests.

While technically true in terms of theoretical modelling of a market economy, I don't think that's a fair diagnosis in practice. Were early-19th century English workers forced to take jobs with 6-day working weeks and >12 hours a day? Technically no. But did they have a choice? And was there an adequate incentive to even provide such a choice?

Of course nobody "is forced" to use dark-pattern software, but as it stands today, normal users have no choice on the matter. I would argue that potential user-friendly-non-dark-pattern competitors are unable to break into the market of the Microsoft-Apple-Google oligopoly not because user hostility and dark-patterns are in of themselves a competitive advantage nor of any economic value as a whole. Instead, I think that the imbalance of power between consumer and industry, network effects, and the disproportionate capital investment needed to disrupt the current market mean that no alternative can take any significant hold.
Great Zimbabwe is very cool and a fascinating structure, but I feel that these gushing descriptions are a bit over the top.

Compare Great Zimbabwe to the 2000 year older Gate of Ishtar, or even the 3500 year older Ziggurat of Ur.

Even backwaters like Scandinavia had more impressive structures a millennium earlier, in the iron age, like Eketorp.
Sometimes there’s no elsewhere. Sometimes elsewhere only has crickets. It feels like you can’t both have a successful product and one that is free of noise. Only some open source software succeeds at this and even then quality often suffers immensely.
Probably being an early adopter and cashing out before it's too late lol
> Downvoted most of times.

Sometimes this can be a signal about the content of your comment, other times it can be a signal about the content of the thread/topic.

There's a fun HN data mining project waiting to be done on voting/flagging trends, including cross-community topic sentiment surveillance within specific time windows.
I mean conceptually the idea is "money without intermediaries" which is quite fascinating. But when you stop and think about it for a sec you realize that we need intermediaries or else the richer will become unstoppable kings with control that cannot be deflated.
I was seriously weirded out by the bottom address bar when I first got it, but I now prefer it. Reaching for the top of the screen is uncomfortable, and I like how the bottom address bar works as a tab switcher too.
The best thing about web3 is that it is a new word, not reused old word, and thus it can be efficiently filtered out from the news in rss readers.
But a) not Ireland b) the amount of carrier pilots is low c) The intake of new pilots in EU no longer involves a military-to-airline kind of pipeline, especially with explosion in low-cost and charter airlines
It would be nice if it didnt have the carbon footprint of Argentina to produce something of no value.
Please stop talking entirely because it offends me.

You game?
Same. In the top-10, I only recognise vmception and dang.
People here in India in panic on some related things. I think this is more of human right issue than a political.
I've thought for a while that this kind of change for the sake of change is fuelled by the number of employees in the companies involved. The ratio of developers you need to build an application vs maintaining one is huge. That creates an incentive for companies to keep building.

Out of the perspective of Agencies (Outsourcing) each working developers generates revenue. Product companies can choose to either keep their employees and keep building, or simply let a huge chunk of them go. Letting a huge number of people go (mass layoffs) is generally seen as a bad thing. So they go the other route. Keep the employees around and have them working - building new stuff.
But you don't get my south american security policies think-tank reports :) that really topped my own list of weird mailings, almost worth learning a better Spanish.
this is not the kind of comment that makes hackernews a good place to have a conversation.
What is the best way to monetize user-friendliness?
Voting with your dollars does cede a lot of power to the wealthy, since they have most of the money and represent a small portion of the population.
> Because the lab leak hypothesis is off topic

Indeed, seeing the lab leak hypothesis mentioned in every comment was very confusing. There is some decent discussion of the paper, but it certainly took some scrolling.

edit: I take it back, there is incredibly little decent relavant discussion here. Should probably just flag the post.
Blacksmith

Black and Tan

Plenty of “black” compound words that are neutral to positive.

It’s not about the words, it’s about power. They want to force you to do what they say.. Even for something trivial like this, if they can force you to do use their language, they make a small win.

A few hundred wins later and they dictate what is acceptable language.
Leaving the company I co-founded
> So, yeah, so far, personal comfort beats the hostility. So far.

I think that's a great acceptable answer to OP's question.
Roku is now publicly traded so its beholden to getting quarterly value for shareholder. Investors have deemed all of this data collecting valuable. Capitalism killing innovation by making it another homogeneous device that doesn't respect you doesn't surprise me.
How to grow green potassium ferrioxalate crystals from iron rust
This is a fascinating article and I really appreciate the authors work here. I really got the feeling that we are making real inroads in brain region representations. Excited to see where this field goes.
> If only I could get NTS to whitelist my domain name

There is a form [0] on the about page that allows people to suggest websites to add :)

> p.s. OP this is amazing! Would love an article explaining any backstory and details on how you made this (or setup / configured it).

Thanks! I think this is gonna be disappointing from an engineering perspective, and certainly not article worthy :) As further explained in my other comments, the website is basically a wrapper around google programmable search [1] where I whitelisted a set of sites I found useful personally, plus some suggestions from other users. It's really easy to set up.

As to why, I will quote some other comments of mine:

"I built this website a couple of months ago because I was annoyed by how hard it was to find useful things on Google."

"to find things more easily while programming or studying (I study biology, cs and ai; and philosophy in my free time, so expect the best results for queries related to those subjects). ... When I'm not doing those things, I just use Google or DDG because they have better results for day-to-day queries."

Let me know if you have other questions!

[0] https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdf8lAoShQz7Wjl9h60...

[1] https://developers.google.com/custom-search/docs/overview
I will probably attract a lot of downvotes for this, but are programmers really as innocent as to be not even mentioned among the possible culprits?

I suspect that there is some sort of short-circuit between the clients (those that ask for features) and the programmers (both the "software architects" and those that actually implement the apps/sites).

Speaking of Government issues (in these times of COVID-19) there are certain categories here in Italy (restaurants, hotels, cinemas and similar places) that have by Law the need to check customers' "green pass" (officially EU Digital COVID Certificate (DCC)).

This can be done exclusively through an app (Apple or Android) written by what is loosely the IT branch of the government.

What the app does is simply scanning the QR code and check the validity of the pass (by some algorithmn and checking also a sort of blacklist).

There is no technical reason on earth why this could have not been made OS/device independent, or at least the Irish (EIRE) one is a "normal" site[1] that works on any recent browser.

Questions are:

1) was it the government asking for a dual (iOS/Android) app (and no site)?

2) or was the SOGEI (the government connected IT firm that wrote the apps[2]) to decide to NOT make such a site?

[1] https://app.digitalcovidcertchecker.gov.ie/

[2] BTW the actual Android app at least - cannot say the iOS one - needs a relatively recent Android version, cannot remember exactly, probably 8, so that using your old phone wouldn't do.
No, because more infectious but less severe virus is actually going to kill more people and cause more disruption economically even without deaths.

For the former, essentially you're dealing with multiplying lower chance of death with much higher infection rate, resulting in bigger count of deaths (and other events like hospitalisations, isolation, etc., which increase economic disruption).
FWIW, Dollar Bank had one of the earlier web banking sites and it was perfectly serviceable. I often wondered why larger banks couldn't do it as well. ING Direct (before it became CapitalOne 360) was pretty handy too, and while the CapitalOne site is slower and more SPA-like, it mostly does what I expect.

American Express, on the other hand, is the real WTF.
Am I understanding correctly that you think that, for example, ‘sign up for our newsletter!’ modals exist to allow the US government to get more data on people?
I know it’s not the point of your comment, but the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is about how your language itself structures your thinking, not word or grammar choice in individual utterances or writings made by an individual.
I would love to use this. Android please :(
> A point in the sense you mean is a collection of real numbers equal to the number of dimensions of the space it’s in.

Not necessarily. In 3D graphics, it is common to represent points with homogeneous coordinates, where points in N-dimensional space are represented by N+1 real numbers. Using 4x4 matrices [0] to describe affine transformations of 3D points is very convenient.

(Agreed with your overall point though. Just goes to show how different some fundamental perceptions/definitions can be.)

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affine_transformation
Now that is interesting... at what point would follower bots be as good as the real thing? Dogs are pretty good at paying attention to humans in a way most of us like after all, and a household robot can lead to a similar bonding experience. I wonder what the minimum is...
We used to present our designer with a particular webshop, when he asked what sites we frequently used and enjoyed. That site had made one change to their layout in 12 years, they added round corners. That site was easy to navigate, everything was a simple as you can imaging, no weird icons, just text that said: "In stock/out of stock". The thing is, the site looked old, and dated, so everything good was dismissed along with the styling.
I have tried this many times in the past. The problem I have had with internet addiction is that the phone itself is the cue, craving, response, & reward. I had to resort to locking my phone in one of those timed kitchen containers to make any progress.

It's sad to admit I do this, but the only way I've found myself to make a clear barrier is by having a physical barrier. I've tried shortcuts, VPNs, mindfulness apps, etc. Nothing really sticks if it's on the phone itself.

On-top of that, having to give each device a job has worked wonders as well. My phone is my personal/entertainment device. I don't need it majority of the time if at all. My computer on the other hand is my work device where I do the things I should be doing instead of endlessly scrolling (coding, writing, etc).

Screentime on macOS can show you how many times you pick up your phone and it makes me quite sad to see the numbers before doing any of this. There are other apps that count how many times you open a specific app like https://apps.apple.com/us/app/one-sec-take-a-deep-breath/id1... which reveals the same thing on an app basis.
No, SSRI work well in a number of BP2 cases.

Apparently yours do not quite work well enough, since you seem to be describing aboulia, which is a depression symptom.
I'd argue that knowing fairly well and theoretical guarantees are significantly different.

As an example, you can run a million simulations on a satellite with different initial conditions to test your new control algorithm. However, you have infinitely many possible initial conditions, and you can't simulate all of them. If you however show that the closed loop system in stable sine sense, it's a more rigorous guarantee.
How you can be a web developer today and not knowing how to add two headers to all responses a API does, boggles my mind. Literally took me about 30 minutes to understand how CORS works when it first started being shipped with browsers.
> No coincidence need be invoked.

It is not just a coincidence, but a plausible hypothesis, just like the hypothesis that it is a zoonosis from an exotic animal market.

I think we have to take all possible causes seriously. Act as if it was a zoonosis and act as if it was a lab leak, in order to prevent another pandemic.

(Actually, I think the lab leak is both the more scary and the easier to prevent cause, so no matter what actually happened we should try to shut down this possibility as much as possible in the future.)
Just because you call it "scientific racism" and "eugenics", doesn't mean it's wrong or untrue, just that you don't like it.
Firstly - software is too cheap to ship, and has removed the economic incentive for quality.

Floppy discs or CD-ROMs or game cartridges used to cost real money. Broken software would be publicly embarrassing and long-lived. Some users might never update and just think your software sucked. So we had to try harder to get software right up front, to test in advance and write code that would make it function in difficult situations.

But with no marginal cost to shipping, businesses experiment with the question "how shoddy can our engineering be while still turning a profit?" and "what features can we add for our profit, even if it obstructs or hurts users?". They run those experiments daily now.

I believe this has successfully brought down quality norms in almost all categories of software: UIs respond in 100s or 1000s of ms as standard, not 10s. You lose your train of thought often with bad UIs, and they're all differently bad.

Secondly - a user in 2021 is less likely to be the person directly supporting the author of that software.

So the users' decision to use (or bin) the software for the long run doesn't need to be core of any software business' success. They can be compelled into using bad software by network effects (I know, pioneered by 90s Microsoft but the internet turbo-charged this). That's not just about evil business models; bad government or banking software has forced lots of people to bad software who never wanted a computer in the first place.

Thirdly - the other surprising evil from the network is the end of data ownership. After all the fuss 20 years ago about the politics of the MS Word file format, many users can't reliably separate data from the application that processes it any more. File format interoperability (whether reverse-engineered or open) used to be a smart way in for new competitors - do more things with your old data. Now that's impossible without continued cooperation of the companies producing the data. APIs to online data are treacherous and only kept around while they serve the business, not its users. So many "experience" apps aren't even clear what data they keep for you, and the law is still catching up.

Don't get me wrong, it's (maybe) a good thing that there are more people in 2022 doing things with software than there were in 2002. It's very often enabling. But the ideal of a computer being a tool or a "bicycle for the mind" is something you have to choose & fight for now.

(OS security & power management "innovation" is the other end of this rant, but for another day :) )
Thanks so much for acquainting me with "Hexing the technical interview" and "The Night Watch". I don't think I've ever before read great writing by great programmers. Now I have.
Ask HN: How do I manage the profit of a successful website?
Some time ago, I started a subscription-based website that has slowly gained momentum and revenue. Currently, my monthly recurring revenue from this site is about $45k USD per month. I’m taking ~$14k/mo salary (which is far more than enough for my needs) and I’m paying one other dev part time about ~$6k/mo. My other expenses to keep it up and running are only ~$2k/mo. That leaves quite a bit leftover and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with it. I have no desire to expand the operation for many reasons. I’m perfectly happy working on it full time myself and don’t want to change anything. My question is what am I supposed to do with that profit? Claim it all myself as income? Let it accumulate in the business account? The company is formed as an LLC and I am based in the US, for reference.
Mechanical computing systems using only links and rotary joints
I also found this by just blocking things like HN in my /etc/hosts file. It's amazing how often I found my myself staring at an error page and then wondering why if I didn't make a conscious decision to go there. Habits can be unsettling like that.

I only access HN from my mobile now, which I put out of reach when working.
How do you "act" if you detected your logic is faulty? In many situations aborting is the best choice.

If input data is faulty and the reason for that is not seen as part of your logic, then sure, log an error and skip.

I used to define my own assert macro to "ensure" my asserts aren't disabled, but I don't bother anymore. There's nothing wrong with assert, and you needn't define NDEBUG. It's important to be aware that there are different situations, and not all warrant aborting, as described above. Another differentation is that there can be asserts that must be disabled in release builds for performance reasons, and others that won't affect performance and can stay enabled.
metafilter is anything but apolitical, they literally ban differences of opinion.
I vaguely recall reading that Google uses time spent on a page/domain as an indicator of the relevance or quality of the search result/content, but I just googled to try to find that source and only found articles stating the opposite [^1],[^2]. Does anyone know if it is indeed used, and if so, why does it not work to demote low-quality SEO-abusing sites?
[^1]: https://www.nichepursuits.com/how-important-is-time-on-site-...
[^2]: https://ahrefs.com/blog/dwell-time/
> users will grumble but put up with abysmal performance and graphics quality

The reason to choose Nintendo has never been to get top-notch performance or graphics quality (not even in SNES days). Nintendo focuses on delivering a fun experience, often for the whole family. There's more to games than graphical realism and framerate.
There is none to my knowledge. That is why I tried it. Google returns at least links from tomshardware, wired and Android Authority after a few scrolls.
The odd thing about support for the lab-leak hypothesis is that it defines itself by wilfull disregard for any evidence that doesn't match (including plausible identification of previous infections stretching across rural China, finally reaching a market that was too far from the lab for lab-leak hypothesis)
I have an Android phone, so I wasn't surprised that Googles spyware managed to get that information, I was surprised that they are allowed to collect and use medical information about me without ending on the wrong end of various related data protection laws.