skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think in the case of masks, it is highly plausible there was no deliberate attempt to mislead.

While at the time it seemed pretty clear to me that masks had a high probability of being helpful, there was a dearth of research that would support this conclusion - indeed the very limited research conducted on public mask usage did not seem to support it.

On top of this, I believe a major contributing factor was that many medical experts were used to very stringent mask protocols, and did not seem to consider the obvious differences between a hospital setting (where Covid may be rife) and every day life where it is a medium-to-low risk event, and carried over their belief that anything less than their stringent (and unrealistic protocols for the public) would render them useless.

I saw many regular doctors expressing this belief on Twitter at the time, as well as explaining how mask fitting was a laborious process, and that without this the mask would be useless, or that if you touched the mask while taking it on or off it would be worse than useless.

So, I think it is entirely possible that experts were giving leaders and journalists their honest assessment that masks were useless for the public - no doubt more exuberantly than they would have done if masks were plentiful, but not necessarily dishonestly.

I don't disagree that public messaging is highly manipulated in general, but I think it is more plausible that this particular case was fabricated by flaws in the decision process rather than dishonesty.
From what I can tell, the UK and US press pushed the argument that the UK and US should've learned from Italy primarily because journalists there hated the current governments and wanted to portray them as uniquely incompetent, which meant they had to spin them as worse than Italy even though that was a trainwreck. The problem is that the information coming out of Italy was utter garbage.

For example, Italy was reporting zero cases when the US and UK weren't, and exponential growth is really slow at the start - you don'tt just go from zero cases to hospital collapse in an instant. The only way this makes sense is if Italy was failing to test people hospitalized with Covid symptoms even more totally and completely than even the US, which had an official policy of not doing so for patients without travel from China yet still managed to pick up unlinked cases at a much earlier stage. Which means the information on how Italy ended up this way was useless and not applicable to other countries, and all the hospitalisation and death rates were worthless too - and remember, no other country in the world had Covid spread from China result in the kind of outbreak that Italy experienced, their major outbreaks all seem to have come from Italy. So other countries had no way of knowing whether to expect something more like Italy's experiences or their own prior experiences and also no way of knowing what if anything could prevent this.

The information on how to treat Covid patients from Italy also seems to have been hot garbage. Like, their information and treatment policies around stuff like intubation and ventilators which every other country based their policies on likely outright killed a bunch of people. On the other hand, the UK found the first effective treatment for patients with Covid that was actually confirmed to substantially reduce their risk of dying - yet somehow, you don't hear the press arguing that other countries whose outbreaks happened after the UK's should've been able to do better because they had the UK to learn from like they do with Italy. What they have been doing is comparing the total number of deaths with other European countries (rather than per-capita figures) to falsely make it look like Covid was more deadly here than everywhere else.
Introducing - Electron killer! Easily kill electron processes. Just install our 350mb Electron app...
Please let's not pretend to ignore that some species are more "human like" than others.

- Plants are less "human like" than insects
- Insects are less "human like" than sharks
- Sharks are less "human like" than pigs
- Pigs are less "human like" than dogs
- Dogs are less "human like" than primates
- Primates are less "human like" than humans

Pretending that this is is irrelevant doesn't help discourse.

And yes of course this sorting is subjective, some people may find pigs and cows "just as" "human like" as dogs - but most people won't.

Since dogs have been specifically bred to be very close to humans (being companions, living in the home, etc.) whereas pigs and cows have been bred to be eaten, this shouldn't be surprising.
When thinking about the concept of increasing prices, the company that comes to mind for me is Teenage Engineering, the Stockholm based design company most famous for their OP-1 synth/sampler. For example, both OP-1 and OD-11 (wireless speakers) have more or less been doubled in price over the years, and when they release new products such as their computer case Computer-1 and their portable speaker OB-4, there’s an endless outcry on different social media platforms and forums that the prices are ridiculous. That might be true for many people, but in the end, new products often are sold-out pretty much immediately, so there’s obviously enough people willing to pay these prices at the rate they’re able to produce them.

For me, this is a sign of a healthy price setting culture within a company. If there are people who are willing to pay much more than me, I wouldn’t want the products priced at my level. Let these people part with their money first, making me relatively richer than them and enriching the company who can put the money towards creating even better products that I eventually can scoop up on the second hand market for the same price I’ll be able to resell it for. The alternative is to keep the prices down, effectively creating some kind of lottery with regard to who happen to check their e-mail when a new batch is released.

This might have been a bit of a rambling, but in the end, I just want to say that I, as a consumer, wish that more companies would try to maximize their profits when it comes to pricing and that they should go against the sentiment that it’s somehow greedy to do so.
By fact checkers you mean what? People at the media orgs?
I loved this book:

https://www.hardiegrant.com/au/publishing/bookfinder/book/ki...

I've only made a couple recipes from it, but it really helped me understand cheese and fermented dairy in general.
One guy writing a book in 1997 that argues France and Germany should be strongly united in a Union, does not imply anything about the decision of British voters in 2016. You're peddling a literal conspiracy theory there.
People get angry and down vote when they don't like what you have to say, rather than making a point why you may be wrong.
AC is not required to live, it is just convenience.
Heating is required (you would freeze to death), but not AC.

Food doesn't need to have so many fertilizers or bug-killers, it makes food poisonous.
Strange, I couldn't play a game with a friend and after we both did this and only this, it worked.
> What makes you think human creativity is anything more than statistical modelling?

Our ability to make the decision between following the rules and breaking the rules, when suitable. A computer could also break the rules, but in most cases it wouldn't make sense or look like good, while a human could make judgement about when to break the rule. Sure, we all learn by copying, but after a while, we start getting a feel for when to break the rule, and that's when unique art appears. Computers seems to not have learned this fact yet (or rather, haven't been taught that yet).

Using the tool that this submission offers, all the results will look similar and can be traced back to the training set you give it. Do something similar with a human (over similar amount of time that the machine got, in terms of human time) and eventually the results will look way different than the training set, as what we see with artists in real life.
I am way out of my depth here, but wouldn’t a machine code to machine code JIT compiler solve the problem of underutilization of itanium? (I remember reading a paper on x86->x86 jit compiler as well that could provide some speed up)

If so complex branch prediction and pipelining can be done in hardware alone, much more clever (and patchable!) optimizations can be done in software, or I would think so. So while mainstream languages may not be able to reuse Itanium’s architecture efficiently at compile time, a separate program could reorder instructions to make use of some instruction level parallelism, couldn’t it?
Why wouldn’t they? Or maybe they are circling close to a nuclear explosion and need protection?
At this current time rescript is still basically ocaml, and accepts ocaml syntax. So it has the Ocaml typechecker.
Its a good rant, even if some of the details are wrong. I think what he's really getting at is just that software is flooded with bad developers. Its only become more true as salaries go up and everyone flocks to the field.

By bad I DON'T mean junior or inexperienced. Bad is someone who really doesn't have any intrinsic motivation or drive to improve their craft, or worse doesn't care how it impacts the world - they're in it exclusively for the money. It really sucks working with people like that. Like this is literally what this entire stupid orange website used to cheer for 10 years ago when recruitment and VCs all talked about hiring for passion, its why github contributions and side projects and an interest in tech were valuable signals before they became another metric to be gamed.

Tech really does seem to be increasingly full of mercenary types now. People who give 0 fucks about ethics or integrity. Don't care what their employer does, don't care about their craft, don't care about working multiple jobs in secret. Just robots you put a coin in and turn the crank to get some code out. Github Copilot has admitted to using all Github code, regardless of license. Mass theft. But some robots built that because they were paid enough.
I didn't know Google Workspace had chat until I read this comment, and we use Google Workspace.
https://github.com/apache/plc4x/tree/develop/plc4c
Even just the first one would seem to make large projects a complete non-starter.
Respectfully, the coverage is good but figuring out what is true from what is essentially (biased, one-sided) eyewitness accounts and blurry satellite images is not easy. I'm not doubting there is something going on, but I'm looking to know what precisely it is (holistically, not from an outrage perspective) and for that this article just doesn't suffice.
No mobile app. It was promised years ago, and they’ve been silent on it since. Their mobile experience right now is nearly unbearable.
when will we see javascript and html rendering built in onto our oses.
Yes, certainly would have been a better angle. I suspect bad/limited data played into that, but it does seem like a fairly obvious direction to go in nonetheless.
It is easy to use statistics bad. For example you can compare all kind of drivers vs Tesla drivers , you don't have teens driving Teslas so stats are not the same.

You can compare all cars vs Tesla and you still have bad stats since Tesla are new and expensive cars, you can't compare with old cheap cars.

You can compare autopilot vs human drivers and is still bad stats because most of autopilot miles are on good conditions on big hihgways so you would need to compare on the exact same roads.

TL:DR you need stats for the similar driver population, similar car prices and age and drive assist, similar roads. The TFA asks for more transparency so we would get more data and maybe we get better stats or more bad statistics, that we need to debug.
> ... I allowed them to stay voluntarily out of kindness and generosity.

> They are really amazing little creatures.

To each their own, if it's not a pet peeve then it's a pet
Look - super impressive but it's not hard to find downsides. This thing took 20 years and near a billion dollars; at some point you should be asking, "Why couldn't we have had it sooner or cheaper or some combination of the two?"

Say it wildly over performs reliability.. it lasts not 20 years but 1,000 years - is that more of success? I'd argue against that - it's more of a failure because we don't need it to last that long.

What if - hypothetically - we had JWST 10 years ago for half the cost but it were just winking out right now? Would that be a failure? I think that's at least an arguable point.
Support doesn't need to be perfect. An out-of-date browser should be security-OK for things that don't involve money. Maybe JS needs to get switched off. So sites should work without JS.
That's right, though that feature is very high on the priority list, so it's probably going to be supported fairly soon.
No one writes software for you as a user, that’s the thing. Software is written for users as a group. That group will require different features so the only software you as a user can afford is the one that has enough users. The software that has enough users is the one with enough features to attract or keep those users.
Have you tried youtube music (via youtube premium)? I'm not sure about the high quality audio part because I only listen via bluetooth. The recommendations, general app UX and the fact that I can listen via website on desktop have made me cancel spotify.
It seems like something that should be backed by an industry consortium; member companies pay money to the foundation and that employs the author and other folks to work on the code etc.
> I think it's perfectly reasonable and even necessary that ill-founded but hard-to-disprove theories such as the lab leak theory at the time are examined critically,

There's nothing ill-founded, it was then and is now the most reasonable and plausible explanation for the outbreak. You can do the same back of the envelope calculation today that I did 2 years ago, and nothing has made it less valid:

1. There's 100 cities in PRC with >1 million inhabitants.

2. There's one (1) lab in PRC doing work on bat viruses.

The probability that the outbreak happened in the same city as the one with the lab by pure coincidnce is therefore about 1%.

That's not a proof, that's not a definite argument, that's just evaluating how plausible the hypothesis is. You can tweak the values to be more charitable if you want, say note that Wuhan is a large city and we shouldn't count smaller ones, or point out that there might be a few mor labs doing the same kind of work but with less prominence. That merely lowers the lab leak's plausibility to 50%. I.e very plausible.
You just said it:
Sentimentality is different than 'caring for others'.

if you use a different adjective to describe an adjective, maybe the first adjective is the correct one.

The pop science study that these labels are from is pseudoscientific anyway so this conversation is pointless.
> It's easy to just strip the TS metadata and you're left with working JS.

Compared to what? JSDoc made it even easier, you didn't even need to strip anything, as the "types" were just comments. This comes with its own problems, who want to program with comments? But it didn't require any changes to use for us who want nothing to do with TS.
Thank you for letting us know!
We set our front-end guy on it and it should be a lot better now.
In a sense, the US government does the same thing. In the US tax code, you can can deduct business expenses to reduce taxes — ie, subtract expenses for a corporation you control from your personal income. This has been known be abused, as folks deduct their personal car, house, travel… as a result, if you have a business that goes long enough without a profit, the IRS will look really hard at it to make sure it’s not really leisure.

https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-utl/irc183activitiesnotengagedin...
Prevent Let's Encrypt failed authorizations with Ansible
Keeping with the theme of insider experience, you might want to reach out for companies doing auditing, fraud detection etc. A domain expert who knows ML is a hot find
Hey there,
We don’t have block referencing in the same way Roam does it… yet. We allow you to copy a block link and paste it which will create a link to the block with text preview. We hope to add improved support for this soon.

A 75k page import is quite the load. We have bulk markdown import but that may test its limits. How would you ideally perform that and where are you importing from?
> the real killer and root cause is that Chromium is well suited to being embedded, and Gecko is not.

When Firefox was new, it was trivial to embed Gecko. There was an ActiveX-Widget that you could just drag to your VB or C# form and get a browser. There were also a bunch of browsers which were just wrappers around Gecko (K-Meleon or Galeon). It was also possible in other environments, though maybe not so easy - StarOffice/OpenOffice included Gecko, too. One reason this was possible is that from the beginning, Gecko was built with components in mind. XPCOM was very much like COM and allowed you to have a stable C++ ABI. Your classes are basically structs with a known memory layout and function pointers, and you use interfaces to access them.

Unfortunately it was a bit overengineered, and component technologies fell out of favor and were removed from many projects (XPCOM, COM, BONOBO, UNO...). I think it was a overreaction to the excesses of object orientation in the 90s- Microsoft is moving back to the opposite direction with WinRT. Anyway, the modularity was removed from Firefox/Gecko on purpose in order to simplify the code.

Webkit comes from a similar heritage (Kparts). I think the reason why there are embeddable Webkit widgets is just because people did the work to create them - QtWebKit, WebView2, ..., not because Webkit is inherently more embeddable. In fact, the multi-process nature causes a bunch of problems. You can't just reach into the DOM from your native code, but you have to inject JS to manipulate it, and so on.
Note that the first link is published by a Commonwealth Government entity and the second is not the government. His exemption was granted by Tennis Australia, not the Commonwealth.
In anime specifically dark skin can be more associated with demons, monster girls and dark elves than humans though :)
I'd argue that Steam isn't 'now' an electron app but was the OG 'electron' app. The store and community interface have always been web UI from day one.

Originally it wrapped the IE/trident engine and then transitioned to chromium.
A directionless link or relation does not require exactly 2 rows here, that’s overconstraining the definition.

A simple example would be to link 3 brothers with the same relation: the worse solution would be dividing it in 3 different binary relations; the reality is that each brother is part of the “brother relation” set by way of sharing parents.
Corporate censorship and state censorship are completely different beasts, and this false equivalence you're trying to paint is obvious FUD.
Can you email me? Check my profile and add an "a" between the dots in my email. I don't have a big gig right now but can tell you more and present myself.
> Given that furin cleavage signals are present in other coronaviruses at exactly that point in the S1/S2 boundary region, it only LOOKS unusual, especially against the backdrop of SARS. The preponderance of evidence, coupled with Ockham’s razor (that the simplest explanation is preferred) dictates that the PRRA sequence has been conserved in nCoV2019 from a long ago ancestor virus. It is not of suspicious origin. The closest bat virus sequence is really not close at all.

https://virological.org/t/tackling-rumors-of-a-suspicious-or...
I have observed two common reactions in companies not willing to sponsor open-source:

1. "Do you mean we will pay money to develop software for our competitors? Murder!"

2. The OSS donations are not seen as business expense but as charity. "We don't do charity."

What we found effective so far is an OSS project, a consulting company and a consulting arrangement where any modifications to the core project will be upstreamed. This way, the company pays money to solve their problem (and not competitors') and it's not seen as charity (it's consulting), while an OSS project goes on. Moreover, the OSS project is itself used as a selling point for the consulting services, as a proof that we will not lock the customer in with some proprietary framework.
You're not understanding what I mean by locality in this context. I mean that the on-disk structure should approximate an array of indexes, e.g.:

const unsigned *edge_indexes = (const unsigned *) mmaped_structure_on_disk[disk_offsets[index]];

That's not the same as just being able to access those via an API; locality in this case means that you shouldn't need extra seeks for every single value, nor have to make a bunch of round trips through SQL.

That is the primary difference between traditional relational databases and column-oriented databases. Normal relational databases have row-based locality; column-oriented databases have column-based locality.
The earth doesn’t “regulate” CO2. CO2 levels have been much higher in the past. There are natural process which just happen to capture or release CO2, but there is no “right” level of CO2.
US intelligence has many interesting discoveries about this lab. There were big sudden spikes in acquisitions of PCR testing equipment a few months before the virus was formally discovered, and I think cell tower data also showed weird activity there. The inference being that the lab was shut down or locked down.

But you don't really need to take US intel's word for any of it. The grant application where the scientists literally propose modifying spike proteins of bat coronaviruses in the Wuhan Lab leaked from the DoD and you can read it for yourself:

https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-gra...

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21066966-defuse-prop...

https://assets.ctfassets.net/syq3snmxclc9/oVt6gT0yBx4eQXSeuN...

"A GRANT PROPOSAL written by the U.S.-based nonprofit the EcoHealth Alliance and submitted in 2018 to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, provides evidence that the group was working — or at least planning to work — on several risky areas of research. Among the scientific tasks the group described in its proposal, which was rejected by DARPA, was the creation of full-length infectious clones of bat SARS-related coronaviruses and the insertion of a tiny part of the virus known as a “proteolytic cleavage site” into bat coronaviruses. Of particular interest was a type of cleavage site able to interact with furin, an enzyme expressed in human cells."

Note that the names on this grant proposal were the same scientists that were executing this coverup and the ones responsible for the obvious lie that it couldn't have come from the lab.

The idea that it wasn't created by scientists requires either a lack of information or tremendous naivety to continue holding onto. You can literally read their proposals to deliberately engineer viruses to be more infectious to humans and - even crazier - to deliberately release these viruses into bat caves and then spray airborne vaccines over self-same bats.
> This article contributes zero actual evidence

What evidence has China given to show that the virus jumped from animals?