skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You don't understand biology. It is possible to date the divergence of genomes using a genetic clock. So they know if those spike proteins had been recombinated.

Serial passage in mice can't be ruled out but is quite out there. Lots of theories can't be completely ruled out, but wild speculation like that is not very productive.

For the lab-leak theory to be true, a "pandemicable" zoonotic virus (a VERY rare thing) has to somehow make it into a lab undetected. Additionally and alternatively scientists have to undergo something like this "serial mice passage". Which is not proven that it could work. And then they would need to somehow let the virus escape through an accident even though they knew it could be dangerous. And it would have to accidentally be able to infect Humans extremely well (which is a tall ask still). It's just... highly improbable.
> My guess is they are showing how easy it is to make an app on the PinePhone.

True, that just isn't specific to Zig, which is why I was confused. It is neat that building the GUI isn't too hard, building a GUI in C/GTK involved a lot of boilerplate and isn't easy to start.

For GTK: I just end up using this: https://gitlab.com/sadiq/my-gtemplate/ As my start point.

> Not sure how useful it is to compile on the phone instead of doing a cross-compile on a “proper” dev box but I guess to just get up and running it works.

That depends. I tend to develop on the phone so I am aware of the screen size limitation, but you can emulate that. I also develop on the phone because the apps I make need access to the Modem (calls/SMS/MMS/VVM) for me test. I have thought about putting an EG-25 into my laptop to develop on my laptop, but that's been a low priority since using the Pinephone is easy enough.

> Makes me want a PinePhone because I have an idea or two and have no idea how to program a simple app for my iPhone. I’d probably just use C though because I gasp like programming in C/simple C++.

You should! The community is very friendly and helpful. All of the programs I developed are in C, so you aren't alone.
I'm not aware of any reason SHA-3 would be less secure than BLAKE3. Quite the opposite: SHA-3 has a very large security margin, so large that the authors cut the number of rounds in half for KangarooTwelve.
Seriously. I can find social media posts of friends in April of 2020 sewing cloth masks to donate to hospitals/medical clinics to help them backfill their mask shortages.
send is nice but my favorite tool by far in this category is magic wormhole

https://magic-wormhole.readthedocs.io/en/latest/welcome.html

it only relies on a third party for a handshake rather than storing files online, so there's no limit to what you can send and it's probably less likely to go away.
> intentional or reckless.

Yes, that would cover all lab leak possibilities, wouldn't it? If we assume the premise of a lab leak, then logically they either they did it on purpose or it was an accident. The union of intentional and reckless gives 100% coverage. You might as well say "the grain silo blew up intentionally or due to recklessness." No shit.

> The research into bat viruses however is vital.

Grain silos are vital to society, but if one blows up accidentally then wouldn't you say it's important to recognize the accident and enact measures to make similar accidents less likely in the future? The importance of grain silos to society is not an argument against investigating the role of negligence in grain silo accidents. If this research killed millions of people by accident, then figuring that out matters so new security measures can be enacted.
Have you tried gathering sample queries from real people? I previously worked at a company that tried this briefly. They gave up after getting the first sample of queries real users typed in.
> I don’t know why you keep bringing up religion, I have not mentioned it at all.

The only objection anyone has to abortion is based on religious beliefs. So, you didn't need to mention it. It's the foundation of the entire issue -- that religious beliefs can be imposed on a population as law. Saying that it's irrelevant to the discussion betrays an ignorance of the subject at hand.

> None of these rights apply to abortion. If anything, there should be an enumerated right to bodily autonomy.

The enumeration does not need to specifically reference the word to be applicable. For a different example, the 4th amendment doesn't contain any verbiage about police officers opening a trunk during a traffic stop, but the declaration that they must have probable cause still applies. In the exact same way, to assert religious beliefs that affect someone else's medical care violates all of the rights I listed.
Honestly, pretty disappointed by the mass derogatory comments and trolling. We should be very happy about the transparency and RFC on a crypto bill, even if the first draft is not good.

Kinda afraid they just won't bother next time.
Both of your points are directly and conclusively addressed in the post..

> First, because viruses travel easily – so even if 100% of early cases were around the market, it could have reached the market via a lab worker

There were two distinct lineages at the market with a cluster of positive environmental samples in the wild animal section. I would love to hear a plausible theory on how two unrelated lineages came to be present there after human-human transmission.

> And second, early overemphasis on the market cluster caused authorities to search for every case there, and ignore cases elsewhere – just as in the US, authorities missed early community spread because they didn't even consider/test people who hadn't recently returned from China.

Not remotely true. I'd encourage you to read this paper: https://zenodo.org/record/6299600#.YjSWqDUxmUk
> I hope to god that regulation of interstate trade gets shot down, so California and New York can tax goods from red states into oblivion.

Punishing the poor and economically disadvantaged in red and blue states as political reprisal is the stupidest idea I've read all day.

What are you accomplishing besides making yourself feel good at the literal expense of the most vulnerable?
How can you go from

"Asking whether IVF is under threat is a silly question"

to

"Of course IVF is bad"

in the span of one comment?
Spacechem is one of my favorite game ever, and I have purchased nearly every Zachtronics game since. Thanks Zach & team, looking forward to wherever you have next for us!
In the wake of the Dodd decision, the West only needs the Bible as toilet paper.
> during 2014-2019 NIH actually paid $3.6M to EcoHealth Alliance under the grants clearly specifying the coronavirus GoF experiments in Wuhan with the "Human subjects included" checked.

Is this is the grant you're referring to?
https://reporter.nih.gov/search/me9X23pZWEigATS-4XTBfA/proje...

From your comment it was unclear to me what the human subjects component was. It appears to have been population surveillance using PCR and antibody testing, with the intent to detect prior infection by previously unrecognized coronaviruses. Which is low-risk.

From the public project details, it is not clear that the scope of the work as described to the NIH included gain of function experiments. Perhaps you were referring to a different project description? And of course EcoHealth Alliance may have done gain of function experiments that were not described in their proposal.
Me too, please :) email in the profile!
> but lets hold all these multi-billion dollar business accountable too.

Oh, for sure. Microsoft is far-and-away one of the worst handlers of data, Yahoo and Google aren't much better either. This is a strawman though, and while it provides a nice bit of context around the rest of the status-quo for privacy, it doesn't absolve Apple of the fact that their security is half-theater, and the other half has convenient backdoors and workarounds for the involved parties. Given that the topic of this article is "Hardening MacOS" and not "Reviewing The Standards of Security in Big Tech", I chose to focus on Apple's particular issues, especially since the issues with those other companies are so well-documented on HN.

> It's not private for local users, and that is bad.

This is what I used that point to illustrate. Apple claims that privacy is a human right, yet apparently not all humans are created equal? It's a strange bit of hypocrisy, one they could easily avoid by refusing to negotiate with countries that take advantage of them.
They have laid off so many people recently to make the books and company look more profitable than it is. All of that knowledge just shown the door.
This fallacy gets repeated over and over again and it doesn't make it any less false.

Languages are tools and some tools are actually better-built than others. If we can claim that a language like Brainfuck makes writing clear code extremely difficult, and Python or Rust make writing clear code easier, we've already established that there's a spectrum for language in expressiveness and clarity.

Eliminating entire classes of bugs makes for better understanding.
Checkout: https://github.com/coteditor/CotEditor
A surprising experience to me was seeing Saturn through a telescope. Despite working on PhD in physics at the time and being a lab demonstrator for an undergraduate astronomy course, I looked at it and thought "shit, it's real!"

Though it was a nice enthusiast-level telescope, I think it was just seeing the rings that did it. So I reckon a cheaper one would have had the same effect.
If you are condoning this, what is your name? It's literally a violation of Law.

https://www.senate.ca.gov/content/protected-classes
> Rights are not supposed to be subject to the whims of political majorities.

They kind of are, when they're controversial and as weakly justified as Roe was.

The Democrats really botched this, when they put all their efforts into puffing up Roe than creating other supports.
That's part of the logic (basically overriding the definition of statutory rape to be "not rape" if the underage child enjoyed it)

But there are a bunch of similar decisions here: https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...

And the common theme is just because the parent is raped, doesn't override the rights of the child.

It's easy to see how that logic would be extended from child support to abortion.
Claims about disproportional representation are almost always based on presidential election results, ignoring the midterm elections, even though the midterms are equally important for the Senate.

The 2014 election shouldn't be ignored, because it explains why Garland wasn't confirmed and Trump's appointments were. That year, Republicans won the popular vote by a margin of almost 6%, and won 9 seats in the Senate.

That election gave them control of the Senate until 2020, and that outcome was representative of the popular vote.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_United_States_elections
Connectomic comparison of mouse and human cortex
>Trying to map english to formal logic is a fools errand.

Perfect description of a developer's job.

"WANTED: One Fool to serve the court at the pleasure of the CEO. Compensation is one crust of bread and a flagon of ale per day."
Unlike a virus, you can't just grab a tornado and move it somewhere else to study it. If you want to study tornadoes, you have to be where tornadoes occur.
At the Bored Ape restaurant, your ApeCoin is no good now
I've served on two nonprofit boards with a combined time of about 22 years or so on them. Both were/are much more engaged than the boards described in this piece, but I think they are an exception.

The other thing I'd add as a nonprofit board responsibility is to be the final owner of the organization's mission and values, and to make sure the organization sticks with them. To a large degree, this is deeply entwined with evaluating the CEO, since one way a CEO can fail is to let the org drift off mission or fail to live up to its core values.

Another thing I'd add, at least for smaller orgs with few employees, is that the board can be part of regular long-term strategic planning (1+ year plans) and budgeting discussions. But of course this requires a more-than-normally engaged board to be useful.
Wow. They really weren't trying to hide the fact that (1) They were actively building a CMS in-house at the time, and (2) They thought they did such a good job building said CMS, that they'd check your work vs their own no doubt stunning/transformative in-house work. XD
>There is no way this can be upheld, right? How on earth can citizens of state 1 go after citizens of state 2 for something that's legal in state 2?

I'm pretty sure it will be seen as a violation of the constitution's interstate commerce clause, which gives that authority exclusively to the federal government. However, it is possible that a pro-life administration would institute an order that does make it illegal to cross state lines for an abortion, similar to how sex tourism is illegal.
That's not as far fetched as you would hope. Of course by the time we see that come to pass it'll be too late.
100% this. I'm not deaf, but when working in foreign countries functionally I am. Repeating stuff back to me as "it's nothing" is extremely frustrating. I'd rather be the judge of "it's nothing".
Oh boy, can I relate to this! I have spent about a decade working for nonprofits and I think they are extremely weird organizations with no good accountability or feedback loops built in unless the CEO and Board choose to implement them. The quality of the organization almost completely flows from a few highly engaged board members, one or two donors that may give the majority of funding, and the CEO. If they are spectacular, you get a spectacular org, if they suck, you get a sucky org (and maybe some crimes as well).

Because the thing is, the customers of the nonprofit are the donors which purchase the marketing story of nonprofit and nothing else. It is sort of like bitcoin, there are no fundamentals, just the hype and hope and that is the only fuel needed. The actual programmatic activities of the nonprofit do not need to bear any resemblance to the marketing story the donors purchase. If you are very good at telling that story, you do not need to answer to the donors at all on the real performance metrics of your org. A very large donor may demand to see these fundamentals, but you don’t need them if you have smaller donors. Grant making foundations also often demand fundamentals and measures of effective philanthropy, but you can avoid taking any grants that expose you to too much governance.

And finally the board tends to be the society of friends of the CEO, so they very rarely do anything but use their connections to boost the money and influence of the org.

In the end; the CEO does not need to answer to the board, the donors, the beneficiaries, the shareholders, the IRS, the Gates foundation or the employees. They answer to their own conscience.
> It doesn't help solve the crisis.

It doesn't help solve the crisis and it doesn't change attitudes toward gain-of-function research. The pandemic itself, regardless of origin, highlighted the possible consequences. Even without a connection to research - and even more so with the mere possibility - it heightened concern about lab safety, and made the risk/reward calculations around GoF research even less favorable than they already had been. The community of people capable of performing or funding such research was already on top of it - again, regardless of origin. Public finger-pointing is only likely to rile up nationalist sentiments which would interfere with establishing better procedures and protocols governing virological research.

The lawyers and diplomats have some work to do, but (especially in light of today's news) I suggest that the rest of us including the media have some higher priorities for how to spend our time/energy.
Your comment is quite mild given that from the outside the last years it really looks like the US is sliding slowly towards autocracy. The tendencies are there. I've asked myself if it's not the case that the largest threat to peace and progress & good quality of life for the western world long term does not lie in the balance of how it goes in the US and what I can do about this - just to ensure the best for my life and those I care for.
What does "date divergence of genomes using a genetic clock"? I am curious to learn about such a tecnology. If you mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_clock that is highly non-quantitative.
I have a child, and will likely be having another. I love them dearly. But to pretend that the birth process was "wondrous and miraculous" is papering over reality. It was bloody and gruesome. My wife was given an epidural to help control the very significant amounts of pain. During the birth, there was blood everywhere. While the newborn was being attended to by nurses, my wife had her vagina stitched back together. And to this day she deals with prolapse, which is where her organs drop out of her vagina. Among my friend groups, this was one of the easier/more routine pregnancies.
If the state decides to take all your money, it can deploy such force that you will surrender it, regardless of where and how you decide to hide it.
Please read the fricking context.

My comment was about preferring other new, low-level languages over Rust when they don’t give the same safety guarantees. If you can deal with a GC then fine—my comment has got nothing to do with that.

So it was much, much more narrow than making a case for Rust in general.

Rust and GC both eliminate certain defects. And if you can use a GC then you don’t need Rust (w.r.t. memory safety).

Admittedly maybe I could have made it more clear that my comment does not make an argument against new low-level capable languages when used with some kind of automatic memory management scheme, like I guess Nim.
curl -X POST https://login.wordpress.org/register --data 'user_login=binancecms&user_email=contact@binance.com&terms_of_services=1618205211&user_mailinglist=false'

thank you come again
HN is about technical, objective things and those other points you mentioned are mostly emotional subjective topics. It would be strange to see them discussed here at any significant length.
I didn't say it has something to do with that. It's a tangential question.
As I wrote elsewhere, states rights has long been the motte of all kinds of minority social opinions in the Bailey. The broad consensus is being held hostage by a minority in some state legislatures, and in the senate, and has now trickled into a 6-3 Supreme Court with lifetime appointments of comparatively young justices.
Somewhere there is a gag UI mockup I made at the peak of the Scott Forstall rich-Corinthian-leather period of what I imagined a future Safari UI might look like, in which the app's name was taken literally and given a Jeep-like makeover.

That may have been a joke, but there is a certain playfulness that I think the industry is still trying to find again in the modernist period that came as a reaction to past excesses.

Edit: Found the mockup: https://imgur.com/twSdV
I would add that the probability of a task getting done, is inversely proportional to the distance between the people deciding about the task and the people who will actually do it.

Since the board members are almost never the people implementing the decisions, the plan is much less likely to get executed. The decision needs buy-in from the CEO and then the employees. Since the board members don't spend much time with the CEO and employees and they have a very different view of things, that buy-in is likely to be weak, so the plan gets watered down every step of the way.

Really makes you realize why things are so inefficient in public organizations and politics.

In a two person startup, if the founders decide to do something and they are the people executing on that decision, the task is very likely to get done fast and in full. If a non-profit board decides to do something, not so much.
I've already blown my nose and moved on. Brave is a nothingburger, and if you disagree then you're welcome to spend the next 20 years of your life explaining to people what a Brave Browser is and why they need/don't need to enable advertisements so they can get paid fake monopoly money that they can turn into real money if they find someone else to buy it at a reasonable price.

Oh, and then Firefox works just fine, too. Worst it has is... a builtin bookmark service? Oh, the humanity!
This goes in line with the same rule that 90% of these startups like this one will fail. As for crypto projects, the same is true, that 90% of them will also fail and like the survivors of the dotcom crash, only a few of them will also survive.

So the anti-crypto and pro-crypto maximalists are going to be both disappointed.
> The lesson here is not “we need to prove it was a lab leak,” the lesson is “we need better visibility inside China.” Which is also true for viruses that arise naturally inside China.

The WIV was conducting research with US financial and technical support. The lab in question regarding a potential leak was funded in part to look for early signs of outbreaks.

If there was a lab leak and it was inadvertently caused by this lab, would you suggest that we continue to fund and provide support with no changes?

> One of my frustrations with the “lab leak theory” is that it seems to cause fuzzy thinking about future preparedness.

I can't speak to what you've seen elsewhere, but future preparedness should involve more transparency, safeguards that samples are being tested with the right safety levels and actual independent oversight.

It seems crazy to continue funding a bad faith actor without those conditions.
https://element.io/blog/introducing-threads-in-beta (not as good as zulip’s threads yet tho)
> "pandemicable" zoonotic virus (a VERY rare thing) has to somehow make it into a lab undetected.

This is the opposite of what I understood the lab-leak theory to be: that an initially-zoonotic virus was identified and bred in a lab until someone working at that lab with lax security standards accidentally brought it out of the quarantine. This is plausible at face value.

I think a lot of the really extreme vitriolic reactions to lab-leak theory are conflating it with the accusations that a secret cabal purposefully engineered and released this virus to sow harm and discord. But that's not at all the connotation of "leak" IMO -- leak implies a lack of intention.
My parents are not scientists, and my mother is probably even science skeptical, but two of my strongest, earliest memories were going to the beach to watch a meteor shower. It was magical - I give no qualifications.

I am thankful for this experience often, especially when I see these sorts of discussions. Way to be.
I often hear about "my body - my choice".

But after spending nine months in woman's body the child becomes the part of her life for twenty next years. Should it rather be "my life - my choice"?
I find it extremely unlikely given what I know about biology and how viruses and epidemiology works.

Lack of transparency in China is no proof, it's standard operating procedure. They'll try to CYA even if they didn't do anything wrong, maybe especially then.

The simplest and most probable way the pandemic started really is the way pandemics usually start: by a pathogen jumping from an animal species to Humans, without passing through a lab whatsoever.
Where does it say how the actual phishing message itself is easy to send? I see no explanation there. How does one send a message with a different SenderID?
Have you considered applying for a phd and pursuing your research-related career somewhere abroad?