skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just couldn't take the "research" seriously when I read this:

> They said they found no support for an alternate theory that the coronavirus escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan.

No support? Really? Not just "weak" support, but not a single shred of support whatsoever? So it's just a hoax?

There's a long article going into what would be otherwise some very strange and implausible coincidences [1] surrounding the issue for those curious. Surely unbiased research into the topic would deem these to be worthy of at least some cursory mentions (and ideally, some debunking)?

Moreover, this might be an interesting read:

In January 2018, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing took the unusual step of repeatedly sending U.S. science diplomats to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which had in 2015 become China’s first laboratory to achieve the highest level of international bioresearch safety (known as BSL-4). WIV issued a news release in English about the last of these visits, which occurred on March 27, 2018. The U.S. delegation was led by Jamison Fouss, the consul general in Wuhan, and Rick Switzer, the embassy’s counselor of environment, science, technology and health. Last week, WIV erased that statement from its website, though it remains archived on the Internet. [...] During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory. [2]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27071432

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-dep...
Putin wants an isolated Russia and he appears confident he can mitigate dissent caused by putting the iron curtain back up. This is just playing into his hands and giving him exactly what he wants,

Even if he pulls out of Ukraine tomorrow he will have succeeded in destroying any chance Russia ever had of joining the West, which I’m becoming convinced has always been a key aim of this enterprise.

But he can blame the West for all of it now and roll Russia back to being a complete autocracy where citizens have no rights or freedoms at all because Ukraine.
As I understand it, the Southern Pacific was concerned less with avoiding competition for its Peninsula Commute service than with ensuring that it wouldn’t ever be required to take over BART and bear its operating losses. This was long before Amtrak or the 4R Act, and railroads were still under strict economic regulation by the ICC and CPUC, so the prospect of being ordered to take over a money-losing passenger operation was a real concern.

That’s also the actual reason, or so the story goes, for BART’s non-standard 5′6″ (1676 mm) track gauge: the physical impossibility of interchange with SP’s lines was one more assurance that the SP wouldn’t be entangled with BART or its costs.
It's an article written by a Bay Area person for other Bay Area people, so it's assumed you know what it is. Kinda like how articles about computers don't tell you what RAM is.
An article from yesterday regarding SWIFT explained this. The western govs issued a "commander's intent" to sanction Russia.

That's basically a direction that every financial entity which does transactions with Russia must assume that they too should suspend operations, unless explicitly cleared otherwise.

Russia was declared "untouchable", unless you have explicit permission to touch it (like energy markets).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intent_(military)
Lyon Feuchtwanger, a Jew and anti-fascist who fled Hitler's Germany, lost all his savings in banks in the US, Canada, Britain and France. Because of the sanctions imposed on him as a German citizen. The only bank he still had money in his account in 1945 was ...German.
There is no such thing as a switch that can only work from some arbitrary cause. The switch is either capable of disabling the car or not.

"equipped with advanced drunk and impaired driving prevention technology"

Is indistinguishable from

"equipped with driving prevention technology"
> I’m not pro crypto or pro Russia, but the fact that it’s so easy to lose ones freedom to transact[0]

I am absolutely sure that Transferwise is still available for Russians to use, so the freedom to transact isn't really lost. 'Cryptocurrencies' should not be used at all.
Well, punished twice for listening to lobbyists instead of climate scientists
The framework argument is purely superficial and boils down to two camps: those who can write applications and those who need some (maybe a lot) help.

There is a lot of freedom, performance, and security you sacrifice when you need so much help that you need a third party to simply just do it for you.
BBC News recommends Tor to circumvent Russia block
This isn't remotely the first since WW2. There were near universal sanctions of South Africa in the 60s due to the apartheid there, for example.
Siberia?
But is radiosvoboda even Ukrainian? I thought they were American.

Was the Ghost of Kyiv story made up by the Ukrainians even? How do we know that?

Also, Ukraine is doing well, considering their situation.
>Deal with it by not being female, maybe?

That would imply that women are inherently more socially inept than men.

>there is good data that shows that women encounter both the lion's share of online abuse, and also much worse abuse on every level than men, even on non-gender-related topics.

Is there? Such as? I'm not being glib, I'm honestly asking. I doubt it, but I'm willing to be proven wrong.

>perhaps particularly in science and politics get so much more abuse of so much more vile a nature

I think you're exaggerating and losing perspective of just how terrible the world is.

>we should probably be forgiving of their wish to ultimately just be able to speak without having it shoved in their faces.

If you want to, feel free. When someone shuts off others' ability to respond, what it says to me is either that they're not confident enough in their words to defend them (so why did they bother?), or that I should listen to them, but they are important enough not to have to reciprocate that courtesy. Why should I listen in either case?
Yeah I do a lot of walking and long trips. I had a mid range DSLR and it was horrible carrying it everywhere and juggling lenses and batteries. The iPhone works 90% of the cases perfectly and the last 10% of the cases, I am happy with the compromise.

Edit: The thing that really killed the DSLR for me was lugging the whole kit up Scafell Pike in the pissing rain and cold in the UK. I got some good photos in the morning but carried a brick for the entire day after the battery dumped because of the cold. I had an iPhone XR back then and that kept me going all day fine. When I got back the whole damn camera despite being weather sealed had condensation in it.
While the lethal dose might be high, mild potato poisoning really sucks. It feels similar to a hangover (headache, nausea, cognitive problems, weird heart rate) and can ruin your whole day. I only learned about potato toxicity after experiencing this several times eating slightly green potatoes for dinner - it was unpleasant enough to ruin my taste for them which is really quite unfortunate
Also it remains to be seen what will happen with online payments to orgs

How one should pay for VPN or VPS, for example
> It’s hard to remember as long ago as last month when peaceful Canadian protestors had their assets seized without due process.

I have never had any expectation that when I am actively committing a crime, I can expect authorities to wait for the courts to decide if I should face any immediate sanctions or controls to stop my behavior.

What would you rather have happen? Rubber bullets and tear gas? Or are you actually suggesting that it is okay to hold the public hostage until you get what you want?
Fair enough. Let's remove personal anecdotes from the equation then, and look at the big picture.

According to the WHO, diarrhoeal diseases are, world-wide, the second biggest cause of death for children under the age of 5, after only respiratory infections. That's approximately 3 deaths per 1000 births. For Somalia specifically, it's over 13 per mille, for Nigeria it's around 10.

By comparison, that number is instead around 0.01 deaths per mille in western Europe and the US. To really put it into perspective, in aggregate across all causes of death, the US has an infant mortality rate of 6.5 per mille. Let that sit with you for a moment: Take all the small children that die in the US in any given year. Now double that number. Now imagine they all died to to a diarrhoeal disease. That is how much diarrhoea can kill.
A middle ground on immigration policy is that a country operates a 1 in 1 out policy.

Ie. If you want citizenship in country X, you have to find someone else who is willing to give up citizenship.

The end result will be a market for citizenships. More desirable countries will be more expensive, just like some cities are more expensive to live in.
You don't seem very open to changing your perspective, but if you care to peruse a subreddit dedicated to reporting defensive gun use in the news, it contains a ton of stories that you've likely never encountered[0]. You may disagree with many of them, but some are absolutely defensible, like an ex-boyfriend breaking into woman's apartment and beating her until she is able to shoot him[1][2] (from the front page of that subreddit).

My point is, become familiar with the frequency that these reports happen before you make the claim that it's rare.

0. https://www.reddit.com/r/dgu
1. https://kfor.com/news/local/oklahoma-woman-shoots-and-kills-ex-boyfriend-during-break-in/
2. https://www.news5cleveland.com/news/local-news/wickliffe-woman-shoots-boyfriend-after-being-struck-multiple-times-boyfriend-later-arrested
I get it - you feel the word “neutrality” should only be used to mean military neutrality - and you’re annoyed that Wikipedia has used a broader definition used by various media outlets.

I think what your arguing here is semantics, as opposed to something that’s “factually incorrect”.

The problem you describe is one Wikipedia suffers from. If the conventional wisdom is wrong then Wikipedia will be wrong. And it will never be the first declare the conventional wisdom was wrong, the majority needs to change their mind before it will.

It’s a downside of requiring citations to support statements. But probably unavoidable.
I am wondering if they were accompanied by US fighter jets while over the US soil?
> Conclusion: Stylometry as a Probabilistic Science

Perfect for AI and web spiders, however you can also use this to spot bots, most bots cant do essays. Something not mentioned is someone's knowledge which can also give away someones identity, Autistics are easy to spot due to their splinter like knowledge and little other interests, but for non Aspies then again range of knowledge and interests can be used to "fingerprint" someone. Its why the security services want good sock puppets for their T.Roll farms.

As for bitcoins Satoshi’s identity, I think you need 5eyes to see the identity.
Wearing a shirt with profanity printed on it is not heroic.
They are necessarily hierarchical, which is to say "yes, technically." I think the way that Twitter deals with this without any kind of expando functionality is one of the more interesting problems in mainstream UIs nowadays. This is not to say that it's working well or is using the best model, but it's a complicated problem.
Yes. Almost all DBMSs has a way to delimit table/column names (for instance when a name contains spaces or special characters.

However, proper DBMSs expose parameters as 1st class concepts through the API. That has several advantages, some of which:

1) It is more secure, as you will not have to do this dangerous escaping before invoking. Parameters are substituted by the DBMS.

2) The DBMS can better understand the "dynamic" part of a query and cache query plans.
Google's Updated Work-from-Home Policy Is a Major Win for Startups
Yes. Some more quotes might clarify:

> These papers fill in some interesting details about the early outbreak at the market in Wuhan where the epidemic was first identified, but they don’t identify an intermediate host species that caught the virus from bats and then spread it to humans. Nor do they identify a precursor virus in a population of wild bats that lives near Wuhan or near farms supplying the Wuhan market. They show that the virus was introduced to the market at some point, but that could have been by humans who got the bug at a lab.

> And so we’re left with the exact same dueling origin theories: it would be an odd coincidence for a lab-leaked virus to have its first big super-spreading event at a live animal market, but it would also be an odd coincidence for a devastating zoonotic coronavirus plague to occur in a city that happened to host a lab doing research on coronaviruses. It’s a genuinely weird situation.

> And that is the Covid-19 origin puzzle in a nutshell: how did a bat virus from a cave in Yunnan end up hundreds of miles away in Wuhan?

...

> It’s thanks to the hard work and diligent efforts of those WIV researchers that we know about Bat RaTG13. But this work also offers an explanation for how a bat virus could have traveled 700 miles from rural Yunnan to Wuhan: it was transported years ago by virus researchers.

> So did the virus travel from Yunnan to Hubei a second time in an unrelated voyage, this time bound for the seafood market rather than the virus lab? Or did it travel from the lab to the market?

> [...] the evidence is all consistent with the theory that a human got the virus at the lab, brought it to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, and triggered a super-spreading event at the market (potentially infecting raccoon dogs along with humans).
I'm looking forward to banner ads on the front of my oven nagging me to buy more frozen pizza.
Marcus Yallow in shambles.
As a response, I refer to the opinion written by

Yuval Noah Harari:
Why Vladimir Putin has already lost this war

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/28/vladim...
1password was an amazing app and now it's an electron app that frequently doesn't work for me, if you want another example.
On a related note, Druid is hardly a good example of API and good deployment and docs story.
Energy crisis started long before the invasion. How much of the war is already priced in there? Europe might have to delay its green plans and even go back to coal.

I think it's remarkable how little the markets reacted to this momentous event. Maybe it's not going to be as bad as rumored?
How much caching are you doing and what are the CPU / memory / disk specs of you server if you don't mind me asking?

I ping 15ms to your server but page load times are 500-600ms on most threads (10 or 3,000 replies doesn't make a difference). This is checking out the Rails app server response in dev tools.
Do they actually? Has this been proven? I know that I'm just supposed to take any anecdotes about race and gender as unquestionable truth, but I just don't.
I genuinely thought Matt Yglesias was a satirist until recently. It's entirely possible that I'm not the first one to infer that from his "professional take haver" persona (which I thought was a caricature.)

I don't have a strong opinion about him as a journalist in general because I'm not intimately familiar with most of his work, but I found this particular article kind of underwhelming. It reads as a direct extension of the title, Breaking News: Local Man Feels Unconvinced About COVID Origins... like, okay? It comes across a bit navel-gazing to frame a "News" piece as an update on one's personal opinion, especially considering doing so provides the author cover to say "Well I was just riffing!" later if he happens to be conclusively disproved.
How do you manage the lifecycle of objects with the observer pattern? I saw an example of the pattern below that is crucially missing a 'remove' function to unsubscribe from the subject. Like when using events at the app/controller level, I have found a layer/glue starts to form associated with the adding and removing of subscription handlers, and it is this subscription management layer where the majority of complexity and bugs lie. Being inspired by immediate mode renderers, this is what makes React so great - it basically eliminates this entire layer. I might have PTSD working with observers and events from my AS3 days, but if I were building a single page app I wouldn't use the observer pattern over React unless there was a robust way to manage the subscriptions. Perhaps I am overcomplicating something that is actually pretty simple, but I imagine using the observer pattern by itself doesn't really scale beyond the component level?
First of all I was referring to the American war of independence era. Second, as I understand it English or British ancestry is very under-reported in the US due to it being the default and people focus on more exotic, original origins.
It is not sanctions directly, It is change of perception on Russia. In one week, Russia become toxic economy and no longer viable to invest. This is much worse than sanctions.

This might not topple Putin, but it would bankrupt Russia in the next 3 months.
Unrelated, but that accessibility button is anything but, at least on mobile. It obstructs the text. I don't understand how a team could add these "accessibility" widgets and then think to themselves "a job well done" after.
Media is and has always been propaganda. All of it. You have to start from there to make sense of the world.

We ran into trouble at some point with critical thinking. I believe prosperity and comfort for three generations in the West may have led to this type of thing by default, unfortunately. To flip it around...you can also make an argument that PR and propaganda itself has led to prosperity and comfort. Or at least it was something to do that filled time and created some cool apps and fashions. Which is awesome until you realize you're not safe from war.
I think it's an interesting idea to expose webboards with NNTP as an additional method to, say, RSS.
Do you mean https://xkcd.com/932/ ?
Some confused logic here.

You can't have a war without two opposing armies. So places where war breaks out are limited to only locations with two opposing armies in position. You might have, say, 5 such places in the world, but a war starts in only one of them. The probability of war is O(0.2) across that set of locations. The probability is O(0) in all other locations. If war breaks out you wouldn't marvel at the coincidence because having two armies was a prerequisite.

Now, you can have a virus pandemic originate anywhere there are large numbers of humans (too sparse a population and it doesn't spread far). You don't need a virus lab in order to begin a pandemic. There is a theory that you could start a pandemic with a virus lab. In order to have a lab-originated pandemic you do need a lab at your location or origin.

Therefore it's a coincidence that a non-lab-originated pandemic began in a city with a lab. It's not a coincidence that a lab-originated pandemic began in a city with a lab.

So if you had a lab-originated pandemic you would not be surprised that there is a lab at the location of origin.

You can not however conclude that if a pandemic originated in a city that has a lab then it must have been a lab-originated pandemic. There's no probabilistic link between those two known facts. Causation only goes one way.
I haven't used VS Code, but on the other hand, Teams is also Electron and is one of the worst pieces of software I've ever used both in terms of UI and resource consumption.
I don’t understand why we are taking actions that by and large will hurt little people the most.
I've yet to see a good web/electron app.
Is that the complete article? Or does it continue (for subscribers) after this paragraph?

> But you could also draw a map focused on the human cases that would have shown a cluster in the other corner. And certainly the evidence is all consistent with the theory that a human got the virus at the lab, brought it to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, and triggered a super-spreading event at the market (potentially infecting raccoon dogs along with humans).
No but earlier many overshot what they needed because smartphones were so obviously inferior even for social media. FF and even APS-C are still clearly better but what matters here is that modern smartphones are reaching the “good enough” bar to no longer look bad.
This 110%.

Electron as a UI layer is hands-down excellent.

But that doesn't mean I want to be running performance critical code in JS. Electron supports native addons just fine (and can call out to c/c++ fairly easily), but most companies don't take advantage of it.

Hell - Slack goes from like 40% of my CPU to less than 1% if I just disable emoticon images (seriously - preferring the plain text over the rendered GIF make an INSANE difference in how crappy it is).
Heating Airstream Trailer with Bitcoin Miner
Well, there was freezing the bank accounts in Canada. That was just a couple of weeks ago.
> Using crypto is actually productive use of it. It s speculation that is bothering you; that is not going to happen here.

Crypto is always used for speculation and nothing else and it cannot be used as a 'currency'. The slow speeds, the high gas fees, scams and rampant rugpulls and hacks make this an unregulated wild west that even the crypto exchanges have blocked Russian users (so much for no censorship) [0] so it is all broken to begin with.

'Cryptocurrenies' are not currencies and they should be called for what they really are: monopoly money tokens.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/crypto-exchange-bin...
I'm well aware. One chooses how to present oneself. Do you know if I'm a woman? Do you think you don't know by accident? If I want my ideas to be heard they should be the focus of my communication, not any part of my identity.
I get the feeling you have that problem in reverse. All defensive gun use is very rare. Certainly, rarer than the opposite (offensive gun use). Combined with suicide risk and accidental deaths or injuries, it is rarely justifiable. Study on this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2848468/
But my point is why start with broad sanctions applied to every Russian citizen instead of putting an immediate end to us directly subsidizing Putin’s was machine?

Clearly the latter is more focused on the Russian government, ends a direct subsidy of our money paying for this war, and has much less direct impact on poor and struggling everyday Russians?
According to the nytimes cards might still work in the country.

"The suspensions announced on Saturday evening will prevent Mastercards and Visa cards issued by Russian banks from working in other countries and block people with cards issued elsewhere from purchasing goods and services from companies in Russia.

But other transactions may still go through. Cards branded with the Mastercard or Visa logo that were issued by Russian banks may still work inside the country, because the transactions are handled by a local processor, officials at both companies said."

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/03/05/world/russia-ukraine...
I am sure that if my life savings lost 50% of their value in a few days, I was unable to transact with it or move it and faced the possibility of it being seized I would definitely take the advice of some silicon valley armchair experts with 6 figure salaries because they totally relate to my problem.
NATO will not get involved in Ukraine militarily ever. Period. This isn’t a stage, this is all there is. Accept it already.
Yes, in a few days Putin created a cartoonish evil villain image for himself like in B-category movies: invading a country, threatening the world with nuclear war, shooting at nuclear power plants, threatening prison for anyone of his subjects who dares criticize his actions.