skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As others have pointed out, its a strawman post, and the arguments being made in favour of what he is against aren't what he is saying they are.

However, I thought the more interesting to address would be

> There is something seriously wrong with the IT industry...

I think you'll find the same case whenever you get close enough to any industry, but don't agree with the general consensus. From afar, most industries, including IT, seem to be well organised and know what they're doing. Its only when you get into the weeds with them you see the chaos surrounding it.

Case in point, music. I've been playing around with synthesizers for the past few years as something a bit different from programming. But as I've got closer, I've come to see that simple problems often have inane solutions, where things that you thought one box could do on its own have to be handled by 10, all plugged into each other with different cables and in a different order.

So yeh, I'd say this is just a natural consequence of being in the industry. Talking to friends in completely different industries, I don't think this is unique to IT at all
I'm really rooting for Julia to improve its ML ecosystem. Julia is a JIT-compiled language that has the potential to become the all-encompassing solution for AI/ML/Data Science. I think their motto was "Walk like Python, Run like C." This could help to implement all their libraries in Julia instead of what is happening in Python (e.g., PyTorch is written in C++). I want to be clear; Python will be the go-to language for AI/ML for the foreseeable future. And It's a great language, but Julia is a breath of fresh air.
> and a full rebuild only takes about 2 hours

The fact that there is an "only" in that sentence, tells me everything that is wrong about C++ compile times, and makes me happy I work with Golang.
That's because humans have also seen a lot of human beings with diverse skin tones. If we had only seen anime our whole life it would be much more difficult for us to conceive of also. With more compute, we will eventually be able to make bigger models with more knowledge of the world that will also be able to overcome this.
I don't know to what extent the China Daily News, apparently a Chinese communist propaganda outlet[0], can be considered a reliable source in 2004, but back in the day the folks in Bejing seemed to be a bit peeved about their lab minions with regards to the first SARS epidemic.

http://web.archive.org/web/20040703130948/https://www.chinad...

And it weren't just the Chinese with a rather sloppy lab security, it seems.

https://www.who.int/csr/resources/publications/CDS_CSR_ARO_2...

Better times back then.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Daily
It's much more reasonable to think most government officials and scientists don't care one way or the other. Some outliers in both groups are malicious, some outliers are benign.
The approach I finally settled on was: check each pixel in the image to build up a list of (RGB) most popular colors and to memoize new colors into LAB values; sort the color data into commonest first; then build up the required palette from commonest downwards, excluding colors that were too close to each other based on a distance measure. Then you can go back to the original image and measure its color against the palette colors, from which you can determine the 3 palette colors closest to it. From that you can give each pixel a propensity range of the likelihood of it taking on one of those 3 colors and run it against a randomly generated value, or a set of preset values for blue noise.
It even correlates with the price.

https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin-obituaries/

If you would remove the dates and the prices, I would not be able to tell the age of most of these headlines.
So for anyone reading this and seeing other comments about gain of function. The first thing you should realize is that the people here commenting about gain of function have no idea what they are talking about. They are completely clueless about micro biology and have never read any of the published papers that were labeled gain of function. For someone naive you would get the impression from the news that the research was a slam dunk obvious case of gain of function. But if you know some biology and actually looked at the papers then you know this really fuzzy and ambiguous and really does depend on how you define "gain of function".
Wow, 1 trillion steps in 1 second, that's amazing.
> It’s a Level 2 facility, not studying bats or coronavirus.

It is indeed a level 2 facility, and it was being used to perform the bat coronavirus research outsourced to the WIV [1]:

The NIH decided the risk was worth it. In a potentially fateful decision, it funded work similar to Baric’s at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which soon used its own reverse-genetics technology to make numerous coronavirus chimeras.

Unnoticed by most, however, was a key difference that significantly shifted the risk calculation. The Chinese work was carried out at biosafety level 2 (BSL-2), a much lower tier than Baric’s BSL-3+.

[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-...
Hmm, this is what I imagined: https://static01.nyt.com/images/2013/07/21/books/review/0721...
Thank you. I'd say that is very convincing, especially with him walking about on 16, 17th and 18th.

When scanning a QR code, is the date visible anywhere on the page? I am trying to guess whether someone just edited a PDF with a different date (might explain why they chose 16.12 - you need to change a single number). Alternative would require someone back dating a test in the system.

In any case, not a good look for Djokovic.
It's not negative, it's true.
I think this view is overly negative. First of all, consider the timing of this all; this was super early days. People, including many experts, had much less facts then, and the topic was sensitive. 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, but to do so requires a healthy debate - in particular, a debate in which people constructively interpret what other's say, and don't take it out of context. The back and forth helps focus attention on all the various factors and indirect or partially trusted evidence.

But that means people must be able to propose ill-founded hypotheses. They'll be proposing tons of them as they try to separate fact from fiction!

In an idealized world you might do this in the open. Unfortunately, media outlets and social media including hacker news will take things out of context, as both the telegraph and this very discussion is doing right now. That's simply not a valid interpretation of the participants opinions and their confidence in them. Selectively quoting "experts" while they're still forming their interpretation of the data is misleading, because it removed the whole point of expertise; the reason you trust such expert opinion is because it is informed, and the social contract here is that experts should refrain from misusing their authority when they're not sure of their conclusions. And most generally do that to maintain their reputation.

So what to make of this? I think this could simply be part of a normal healthy debate; one that never saw the light of day simply because (a) evidence was lacking, and alternative explanations (e.g. of that furin cleavage site) emerged, and (b) given the lack of evidence and the unfortunate impossibility to express a nuanced opinion and have it be interpreted by the public correctly due to the charged atmosphere at the time, many chose simply not to speak.

That's not to say there aren't a few people that probably acted in bad faith, but the vast majority looks perfectly reasonable to me. And if we want to avoid this in the future, we need to have an atmosphere where nuance is expressible; otherwise you simply can't expect people to open up about potentially explosive hypotheses that they themselves don't even really support but cannot rule out; the damage to their reputation and to society would be too large.
Can you explain why you think this telegraph article is part of a conspiracy theory?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29850987
237+ points

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29861752
371+ points
and thats exactly his problem. Its about dumbifying the development cycle, with often terrible results for the end-user. Its a race to the bottom about 'how low can we go' and 'what will our users tolerate'.

Not all Electron apps are bad, but thats because they are still doing a ton of work to actually make it a little bit smoother. But this is in spite of Electron, not thanks to Electron.

Its a race to mediocrity on every platform
I wish I had the stones to call my company Waifu Labs
Didn’t work out well for him.
Oh, I have been dreaming about LiFi for some time, if what you're saying it's true, that's... disappointing. Do you have any sources about the current state of (real-world) LiFi ?
Yeah, holding strong to the logic that's like a mom concluding of her kindergartner "You're being evasive, this means definitely that you're hiding something" is ridiculous.

If the outbreak started in Colorado, and Russia wanted access to the CDC lab there, Americans (officials and public) would also be crying and screaming...
It’s hard to believe how bad this is. Not the lab leak theory itself, but the fact that scientists found it plausible that a scientific mistake released an epidemic which killed 20m people – and decided they should cover this up because “talking about it might harm science“. This is truly scandalous, and I don’t see how those people can remain in their post.
Madness will only end when developers stop being bitches and start asserting your points to customers who want their web pages to look like triple-a game demos.
Plus Belarus is a massive producer of said fertilizer, and Russia and Belarus have good trade relations. We'll see what happens ...
> What really raises the most suspicion of the lab leak theory in my mind was how the Chinese government acted towards the rest of the scientific community.

That is nothing special for the Chinese government, they would have acted that way regardless. They are extremely adept at creating Streisand effects.
Concealing all kinds of information to "protect" the sheep-like citizens is counterproductive and dishonest. An honest discussion is the best way to avoid spreading of false information which will always exist to some degree.

However politicians more and more try to avoid all discussion with the voters and just convince them of the rightfulness of their doing. If you don't accept their way you must be wrong, maybe even protected from false information, shielded for your own good..
Zeynep has been wrong so many times during the pandemic that it hurts. She will not admit to it, though. She claimed that the Delta variant would end the pandemic, in the same way it is claimed for Omicron now. She's very naive about how the immune system works.
Her writing is generally more propaganda than science.
I hate to break it to you but a tax like this is a brand.. a scarlet letter. It only gets worse after.

You can unironically move to Texas if you want a real break. Relatively few people care about Covid down here. It is all over the MSM still but most people are just done.
unfortunately you only have the willingness to pay before the product or feature is delivered.
It's a really old observation, Joel on Software did it too: "you could spend 6 months carefully optimizing your application, or you could spend this time playing in an amateur rock band, the end result would be the same: 6 months later, your application will run significantly faster".
I know that one. It’s kind of what I’m experiencing - “Something has to give”.
Anthony Fauci has explicitly admitted on camera that the reason "masks don't work" was promoted to the public initially was to conserve PPE for the highest-risk health workers [0]. It was NOT a case of the science changing:

> So, why weren't we told to wear masks in the beginning?

> "Well, the reason for that is that we were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply. And we wanted to make sure that the people namely, the health care workers, who were brave enough to put themselves in a harm way, to take care of people who you know were infected with the coronavirus and the danger of them getting infected."

[0] https://www.thestreet.com/video/dr-fauci-masks-changing-dire...
yeah but the problem is: which budget are you optimizing? That of the company of course. You offload a lot of bullcrap onto the end user. Like the author said, wasting electricity and battery life and thousands of devices just because you cant be bothered to generate html on the server to serve simple text is a common thing for news sites.

This is wasting the time as well of the end user, because its slower to load, and lower performant on the device itself
Disagree. It is a good faith answer which states standard practice for safety standards.

Burden of proof is on Tesla to show that FSD is safe, not on the DMV to prove that it isn't.

You are welcome to argue that this principle is in need of reform. People may or may not agree with you. The discussion might be interesting.

But like it or not, the underlying principle for an exception to an established safety principle is that the burden of proof is on Tesla.
If Russia wanted access to a CDC lab, the Americans would be crying and screaming regardless of whether something happened there or not.
It's not FUD. There's nothing hypothetical about the danger.
Generally speaking rights protect human's interests, weak AI has no interests yet, so rights are not applicable to it, and do nothing even if applied. And an AI with interests will be quite a bit new kind of creature.
Worse yet, US vehicles are left-hand drive
Good open communication with the spouse is such a powerful tool, completely agreed.
> literal concentration camps

I've seen this repeated hundreds of times, approximately 0 times with proof. Can I find these camps somewhere? Are there photos? As it stands, a casual reader must conclude this is part of a propaganda campaign vilifying China.
Wholeheartedly agree. I don't give much weight to the negativity on HN anymore. VR bad, crypto bad, Tesla bad, autonomous vehicles bad, billionaires in space bad.

To me it's pretty clear that Tesla's audatiousness in pushing FSD could move up the advent of L4 by years, possibly saving hundreds of thousands of lives, for very little downside. In fact, I believe human+FSD is already safer on average, just due to the fact that FSD requires the driver to watch the road.
Not trying to belittle you or anything, but I have a hard time understand why someone would use Go without Goroutine and Channel.
Don't trust the people that report the science though.

The gutter press has to sensationalise stories to sell the newspapers and get viewers. It's a race to the bottom. A quarter not vaccinated!!! vs 75% vaccinated so far. Guess which one they run with? Let's not forget cherry-picking the science too, and that the media is a massive echo chamber.

There's no problem with science, but like any other industry, it has its own language, which isn't accessible to the average person, so someone has to simplify it. Journalists should not be that 'someone'.
I don't need more than a few hundred megabits on the go, thank you very much. If I want to go faster, and Ethernet cable is always a faster solution with less moving parts.
I think the criticism hurled at PHP is misplaced. It serves the niche it was designed for very well. As long as you have namespaces, the include files should not be a problem for you. You can design a class loader and use that. The only thing you need to tell php.ini is an include path and then rest of the configuration is app dependent, like it is for any platform. Where do you find VM config for modules?

Also, any language that is used in real life is built on a foundation of sh*t only. The component loading with python is so bad that I have programs keeping their own version of python and IDE suggesting I create VM for my project. The situation with C is so bad that no one can solve my linker problems unless I switch the toolchain version. For a long time Javascript was a (purpose built) toy language to sprinkle pixie dust on web pages. Any sufficiently complex problem requires either deep knowledge or following convention (tribal knowledge specific to the context)
But they explicitly told us that at the time: “don’t rush out and buy masks, we don’t have enough for healthcare workers as it is, you don’t need them more than they do.”

The right just took some sound bites and excerpted the rest of the discussion to “prove” that Fauci was lying, while everyone else was rolling their eyes, and still are.

People hear the things that support the story they want to believe, and then ignore everything else that doesn’t support their preferred narrative. You don’t need a PhD in psych to realize that.
This might be beneficial. If people get used to a mini-repeater in each room, dead spots of signal in houses and flats will go the way of the dodo.
Nah, the future of software is hardware.
When I was writing my thesis we were not allowed to have a thank you note at the beginning so I've put a thank you note in one of the screenshots.
If you are part of a marginalized group, it is both nice to the individual and productive for societal-level integration if you find yourself represented in media, especially if it's a generator with a promise of "generate anyone".

No one here is mandating shit, GP asked a friendly question in a most respectful manner, which prompted an informative answer from OP even. If such interaction generates such an allergic reaction in you, the problem is not with the grandparent comment.
That's not true. If it were that easy the builds would be quicker. My last project was 2 hours clean build on CI. I spent a week optimising it and got it down to 90 minutes, and within 2 months it was back up to to 2 hours again. Entropy is real!
No, that's not how you make reasonable policy. That's just listening to your gut reaction to such a video. Gut reactions do not work at this scale because this "single prolific driver" drives far more than a human in their lifetime. Therefore even rare events become common. Put a different way, as driven distances goes up the probability of having some scary event approaches 1. What we want to know at which rate it approaches 1. Twitter videos don't tell us that.
> Barring moonshot tech breakthrough or militant scaling-down of consumption worldwide, how can we survive?

Just bare with it? The frequent storms, and severe weather frequenting USA in recent years are nothing special in East Asia.

1m Downpour rainfall is an annual event in much of India.

Snowstorms where you see no more than a few meters are also very survivable, and people can adapt to live with them.

Kilometers long storm surges, and multi-decade coastal errosion are also something people learned to live with.
There are far less invasive ways to do so. Like, for example, an IR sensor.
I agree Electron is a great way to serve tons of end users. But lets not exaggerate, there are 4 main systems to target: iOS, Android, Windows and Mac. Its not that insane to have 4 well optimized applications, instead of 1 mediocre-fits-all approach.

The problem is more recruitment and internal mobility I guess. If you have 4 teams, experts in their domains, you will have 4 teams 'fighting' each other over the UI, working in their silo's, harder to maintain feature parity... But thats organisational.
Not me. I’d think capturing sublingual speech would be much easier than dealing with noisy brainwaves.
Saving lives isn't good enough for you?
It isn't unusual at all.

Many coronaviruses including MERS have a furin cleavage site and they're common and likely evolved independently multiple times, showing that this acquisition of an FCS is common:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187350612...

The FCS in SARS-CoV-2 is NSPRRAR, we now know of sarbecoviruses like like the BANAL viruses in Laos which have NSPAAR, some other viruses like RmYN02 have NSPAAR or NSPVAR. If you insert an R into the BANAL spike protein you get the SARS-CoV-2 FCS.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02596-2

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.26.428212v1

Finding bat sarbecoviruses which are one insertion away from having the original FCS really blows a gaping hole in this whole idea that the FCS is some kind of smoking gun.

Delta has P681R and Omicron has P681H mutations in the FCS region which may be behind why they're more infectious/transmissible. So the FCS is also still evolving and adapting to humans.
New Yorkers fund 4 GW of solar for less than a cup of coffee per month
but but.. what about the other services I wanna put on the Internet?
Honestly, good. I’m glad you (and others) realized this. With an open mind read about the history of the US during the age of 3 letter agencies (https://www.npr.org/2019/09/09/758989641/the-cias-secret-que...) (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jakarta_Method) I could go on and on with historical accounting books that are just accepted as fact… and try to square the circle that those kinds of things have stopped and the people in charge have your best interest at heart, and act in good faith.
It’s not about the long hours or hard work. Those are the quantifiers for when you have nothing else to quantify, so completely remove that from any kind of evaluation. Worse, I would argue that hard work is counter productive. If employee A works twice as hard to deliver the same as employee B they are half as valuable.

To be fair to your employees, such that bias and impartiality don’t rule the day, you have to quantify something. There are the minimum things like story completion and number of resolved defects and then there are the advanced things like original solution delivery that was not asked for. Original solution delivery should do one of two things: reduce expenses or suggest a new line of business.
What a careless decision, naturally the German twitter is now full of requests to uninstall Luca.
I wish this worked but I'm too jaded to believe. I'm losing arm function so I have to type by voice and use an eye tracker. voice is great, mostly, except everyone knows what I'm doing. I lose so much privacy because I'm announcing everything I type. also talking for hours straight is hard on the vocal cords, and I'll never be able to work in an office if the pandemic ever ends.

it looks like this thing works by EMG of the muscles used for articulating speech, btw. it's a "neural interface" in the sense that it's measuring neurons, but it's not, like, reading your mind. I'm skeptical they can capture all phonemes without drilling holes. paper here: https://dam-prod.media.mit.edu/x/2018/03/23/p43-kapur_BRjFwE...
Really? Let's take the case of Switzerland, everyone wants to go there, they are literally spending money to supress the increasing exchange rate to avoid a collaps of exports... what would happen if they took a years break.. I mean maybe it would be better, letting the CHF, go higher , allowing the swiss to leave to greener pastures, allowing others to visit such a beautiful country (and use the empty living space from departed swiss , foreigners)...

Maybe what we need is radical capitalism, but all we have the balls for is corporate nepotism?
For anyone interested in US nuclear strategy, Daniel Ellsberg's "The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner" is an excellent (terrifying) read.