skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Advances may make it easier to build dangerous biological materials from scratch.

Michael Schulson, Undark Magazine - 12/26/2022, 5:55 AM

In November 2016, virologist David Evans traveled to Geneva for a meeting of a World Health Organization committee on smallpox research. The deadly virus had been declared eradicated 36 years earlier; the only known live samples of smallpox were in the custody of the United States and Russian governments.

Evans, though, had a striking announcement: Months before the meeting, he and a colleague had created a close relative of smallpox virus, effectively from scratch, at their laboratory in Canada. In a subsequent report, the WHO wrote that the team’s method “did not require exceptional biochemical knowledge or skills, significant funds, or significant time.”

Evans disagrees with that characterization: The process “takes a tremendous amount of technical skill,” he told Undark. But certain technologies did make the experiment easier. In particular, Evans and his colleague were able to simply order long stretches of the virus’s DNA in the mail, from GeneArt, a subsidiary of Thermo Fisher Scientific.

If DNA is the code of life, then outfits like GeneArt are printshops—they synthesize custom strands of DNA and ship them to scientists, who can use the DNA to make a yeast cell glow in the dark, or to create a plastic-eating bacterium, or to build a virus from scratch. Today there are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of companies selling genes, offering DNA at increasingly low prices. (If DNA resembles a long piece of text, rates today are often lower than 10 cents per letter; at this rate, the genetic material necessary to begin constructing an influenza virus would cost less than $1,500.) And new benchtop technologies—essentially, portable gene printers—promise to make synthetic DNA even more widely available.

But, since at least the 2000s, the field has been shadowed by fears that someone will use these services to cause harm—in particular, to manufacture a deadly virus and use it to commit an act of bioterrorism.

Meanwhile, the United States imposes few security regulations on synthetic DNA providers. It’s perfectly legal to make a batch of genes from Ebola or smallpox and ship it to a US address, no questions asked—although actually creating the virus from that genetic material may be illegal under laws governing the possession of certain pathogens.

Whether companies will actually get on board remains unclear. In order to maximize security, the system is a bit of a black box. No company so far has committed to turning over its screening process to SecureDNA, Esvelt said, although some companies have agreed to test it.
No, as the article explains they use more of a hub and spoke dispatch pattern, which has less chained dependencies.
I feel like Amazon used to be a good place for discovering new books and that they decided at some point it was more profitable to steer customers toward sponsored (if that's the word for it) items. Nowadays I look at Librarything for suggestions.
In a world where everything is now digital, physical goods have a lot more appeal. That's really what it comes down to, and they leaned into that hard.

It's the same reason why vinyl is continuing to grow. People want something they can actually own. Books are not immune to this and there is something inherently more satisfying about having a bookshelf with the books you've read versus a library of ebooks.
> If this treatment could be turned into a drug that had billions of dollars in revenue, as some arthritis drugs have, then there would be endless studies.

This is a thought-terminating cliche. It's entirely possible nobody has studied it yet.

It's also worth pointing out that drug companies have no incentive to research subtractive diets. They want to find additive treatments that keep symptoms at bay.
Honestly, I am super into old computers and have bought antiquated manuals. There are a ton of people into it. Depending upon what you have, I’d actually take them off your hands… like the Java book. I don’t care about Dreamweaver, but someone would. Post them on eBay. If the buyer pays shipping, anything is better than nothing right?
I find this comment strange and wrongheaded. The world is better off for having this criticism out there, and we should thank Guzey for making the effort. Unlike Walker, he doesn’t get paid to do it.
That isn't what a meta analysis is. I'm not trying to be cruel but people know all sorts of things that aren't true based on insufficient evidence and weak correlation. I did this thing and got that result is extremely powerful for an individual but without controlling for other factors its hard to know if they are assigning credit to an irrelevant factor or one that was more specific to their situation and not generalizable.
Updating the BIOS via fwupd fixed it in my case, running Debian testing on a P14s Gen1 AMD.
I’m confident the market for this is 99% HVAC contractors and repairman rather than consumers. It’s good to know they should be cleaned.
Well, all I'll say is, it is not surprising.

Subversive content in general tends to get that reaction from intelligent people and that book is more rightly considered propaganda than actual history.

If you understand what propaganda is, what its goals are, and can recognize it easily you probably wouldn't have been blindsided.
Capslock + M: copies the title of my next meeting from Fantastical onto the clipboard and adds “ #meeting” to the end. I paste this into an Obsidian note during meetings.
Probably quite a bit more $ though. Anyway, I saw your message and figured it has to be solvable in a cheap and quick way, never mind me :)
Thanks government. Drive prices higher by meddling in the market therefore making people pay more sales tax then tax them some more but do it indirectly by stealing it through energy companies. What a fucking scam!
I put mine in a near by Little Free Library and in a few days they'd all been claimed.
Keep it up. I'm hoping this project is something a novice grower could use to farm a few acres more easily. Would love to see more people turn extra acreage into sustainable farming.
I heard people speculating his parents may not own the house, but I have a hard time believing that would be agreeable to the court (unless perhaps Standford is one of the signatories that remains anonymous, and why would they be?). Has this been confirmed?

The only "news" source I found discussing this was also speculating, and was a right-wing political blog. Not a source I'm comfortable relying on (even if it had been a left-wing or centrist political blog). But I didn't look very hard; open to being corrected if someone has a good source on this.
AI is a multiplicative feature. If you have an empty Notion workspace and only want to do AI things, there's not much reason to use Notion instead of ChatGPT. But if you're using Notion as a collaborative wiki & project management workspace, there's a lot of opportunity for AI to augment the stuff you're already doing there, and our AI features will have much more context on your knowledge than you'd get by copy-pasting documents into ChatGPT one by one.

From the market perspective, APIs like OpenAI have made AI features ~trivial to implement compared to 3 years ago. Every content-oriented app under the sun is rushing to adopt these APIs; no one wants to be the last competitor with AI features - especially given the rate at which AI APIs are getting smarter.

In this context, competitive differentiation comes down to how well the feature works, how fast it improves, and how much the integration of AI features multiplies existing value of the product.
Creating in the Era of Creative Confidence
In this scenario I think the biggest issue with losing an account is the ability to aquire future purchases. But like I said, it's more a matter of principle for some. You own a book, you don't own a digital copy of a book.
Atmospheric microplastics: A review on current status and perspectives (2020)
They must be, because ID is not required for scheduled medications in Oregon.
"Why" is shorthand for the minutae of actual selection pressures that take much longer to type out than "why".
Anytype. FOSS Notion Alternative
While Mickey is a worldwide issue for Disney to deal with, the article is written from a U.S. perspective.

I'd be curious to know how other countries' laws justify copyright.
> In five years, this guy founded a hedge fund that made millions of dollars, a crypto exchange that handles billions of dollars in trades, and became a mega-billionaire...and it came crashing down because he was secretly stealing user funds.

That is not what happened. Alameda was a scam tied to the tether fraud from the very start. The entire thing was a con. Alameda was pump and dumping shitcoins before FTX was even created.

> In five years, this guy founded a hedge fund that made millions of dollars

remains to be seen. May not even be true. Some say his "kimchi trade" story is bullshit.

The leaflet where he "sold" Alameda to investors is more than extremely fishy: it looked like a scam planned from the beginning.

> a crypto exchange that handles billions of dollars in trades

remains to be shown too. A lot was certainly fake volume. For all we know most trades that happened where actually dumping shitcoins they pumped on their users. It's not known where all the supposed users are nor how much was really trader there.

It is very likely the volume was in part fake, to sucker investors in.

> and became a mega-billionaire

he never was that. That was a lie too. If at any time he had billions, that was stolen money and valuation based on lies and tokens he created out of his (now sorry) arse.

> and it came crashing down because he was secretly stealing user funds.

It came crashing down when it shouldn't have because the dude was bribing officials (it's now proven) to try to regulatory capture a big part of the crypto exchange market by having a legislation passed that would have killed Binance.

And CZ from Binance exposed the ponzi SBF was running since day one.

The indictment clearly specify that there was a conspiracy to defraud both investors and customers.

I don't buy for a second that he was running a legit scheme, that he was legally worth billions (it was all fake valuation) and that someone a few trades went wrong.

That's not at all what happened.
Oh, I totally missed that one.

Yeah, sounds like "conn a ship" and "plan an invasion" are actually him just being weirdly militaristic. I guess he thinks everyone should have some career in the military for a while

No matter. My complain was that for some reason you were making the other ones sound like they take a long time to learn, which is obviously absurd.
...in your state. This is not a federal requirement.
My linux user agent would've told you chrome on mac, and I use neither.
You will not lose any features by self-hosting. Quite the opposite, some enterprise features like SSO are only possible for self-hosted instances. Source: I work for Baserow.
the value of solana was that there were bigger fools out there who would buy your coin from you. We have a word for it, I can't remember...ugh.. something related to pharoah...egypt...scheme..
A jury isn't particularly going to understand what those likelihoods are. People are really bad with probability
Yep. The only big takeaway I've had about Guezy, from various things posted on here, is that the person feels he doesn't need to sleep as much as Walker claims and sets out to prove every little tidbit wrong that Walker ever said. And perform experiments on himself (there was one where he intentionally sleep-deprived himself then tested his reaction time on a video game, if I recall correctly) to say "Look, we don't need to sleep that much!" Honestly, it seems he more has an issue with sleep and is looking to optimise for time awake, thus he basically hates Walker telling us we probably need more sleep.

I've also found a lot of these points to be quite finnicky too, as [1] discusses

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34166889
You clean the outside condenser coil with a similar process (except you can/should flush it out with a garden hose as some of the coil cleaners are somewhat aggressive and should be rinsed thoroughly off the aluminum).

Change any filters. Leave the ducts alone.
I buy everything up to the point where they present a second prototype with the motors opposite to each other, i.e. right in the gimbal lock position you'd usually be careful to avoid. (3:55 in the video)

How does that even work?
I just upvoted you. From my M1 Air.
BS.
Too many people write too many books.
See the Brandolini's law.
Ya but there are leftists articles about everything it turns out when you put 7 billion people on the internet and give them the ability to say things you can find lots of stupid things.
>Prior infection provides less protection than vaccination

Citation needed.
Grin? Haven’t heard about grin in ages. I used to run a node, thinking about bringing it back online.
Canadian and can confirm. It is insane, Insanity.
Recent discussion with friends on petrichor, many didn't like it, but most are also city dwellers that mistakenly associates it with wet concrete/building materials. Opinions flipped when explained it was wet nature/soil.
It sounds like this particular individual was not just an outsider, but also did their best to remain completely ignorant. That’s not promising.
Modeling programs as circuits also makes them significantly easier to formally verify too! These sorts of synthesis tools are really cool, though writing traditional software in them is extremely painful.
I saw this at uni (2002), a lot of people studying there said it was for the job/salary and they didn't know much about it before starting.
I asked a clerk at the Pleasant Hill store about that closure; it was due to rent increases. Figures, considering the location in downtown Walnut Creek. Sure was a lovely store, though. Fairfield and Reno still have big stores if you're ever in the area.
Creating tile-albe textures using Stable Diffusion
A lot of "professional fitters" are just salespeople who were made to watch a 15-minute training video from corporate - and the resulting measurements are about as good as one would expect. They still try to do a decent job and will try to get the customer into something which isn't terrible, but often the stores carry a very restricted size range so the product the customer needs is not something the store has. A commonly seen trick is to just randomly add 3-4 inches to the band size, which moves a lot of women into the 32/34/36 band range.

If you want to get a good fitting you have to go to small boutique shops - easily identified by them carrying brands like Curvy Kate, Ewa Michalak, Freya, and Cleo.
Going to a store like Victoria's Secret and asking for a 28J is just going to make the poor salesperson's head explode.

As to 3D scanning: Hell No. There's no way you are getting women to voluntarily have detailed images of their breasts taken by random store people, no matter how much you promise that it is "totally safe and privacy-conscious".
Stuff that is specific to old versions of applications is probably best used for kindling or to show off how awesome your 50 cal is. Stuff that is more theory based will be appreciated by somebody.

My father had shelves of computer science books from the 50s and 60s - the first half of the books would always be dedicated to how to decipher a particular professor’s writing and flow charting style, and then it would get into the actual computer science. Nobody writes books like that anymore. He also had a complete set of IBM System/360 manuals at one point. Then he threw everything away and it just killed me. He had boxes of both used and unused IBM punch cards that suffered the same fate. I would have hsuled it all off just for nostalgia value if I had known.
> If presented with one on my route I always take a right and then do a u-turn.

Sometimes called a "Michigan left." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michigan_left
ZFS is ridiculously good too. So is Factorio, in fact!
Maybe if you want the latest release of a popular author. In my experience, book inventories held by bookstores have decreased dramatically, which fits with the “carrying a curated selection” narrative. If I want anything released more than two years ago, the book store rarely has it, unless it’s a staple like 1984.
I haven't read the book, so I can't comment on that... but this comment resonates with me.

I think its similar to how people will completely write off a book/movie/person for _one_ thing. I get some things have more weight than others and its hard to trust a book if you find one error... but I've seen people say entire books (technical ones) are "trash" because they disagreed with one or two issues.

Seems like a modern phenomenon. Or maybe just rose tinted glasses... but it seemed people could disagree or even point out flaws while still being on the same "team."
Think of it as a brown M&M. A company that mandates a single environment is going to have other issues.
Man do I want to believe the lessons here. I just wonder if B&N success is also maybe due to the pandemic murdering poorly capitalized independent bookstores and they see an opportunity.
I'll look into it, thanks for the suggestion. I don't know anything about Go, part of why I was looking into Jekyll is since I know a little bit of Ruby at least.

>a free service like Heroku

I mean, if the pages are static I can probably handle subscribing to a list for say, Apache, I just want to keep things simple since apparently Wordpress with all the JS etc has quite a big attack surface.

Anyways, I'll grab a book on it and see if it looks promising, but part of this is speed -- I'd hoped to stand something up by 1/1/23 but I may have to push that to Valentine's apparently...
This article is a good answer to "how can CEOs be worth all that money they get paid?"
It’s a strength that I don’t know?

For a lot of reasons I like Toyota and I’m super happy I don’t really know the CEOs name. If they do something silly I won’t have to feel like I can’t continue driving Toyota

When I buy a Toyota
Nominal dollars when the book was published. Real values will be dealt with real returns over time.
Wastewater data is much more reliable, since it doesn’t depend on people getting tested in a way that is reported, and indeed shows a major uptick since thanksgiving

https://biobot.io/data/
>I really wish I could have an e-reader, but again, I don't want to spend money on things that will lock me into a single vendor indefinitely and might just arbitrarily go away.

https://github.com/joeycastillo/The-Open-Book

This may be up your alley.
Are you really going to read your books more than once?

My wife and I are ruthless about not collecting stuff
> Houston TX in 1986 with 1.3 million people respectively

The intro to the concert footage has cuts from TV news and interviews, shows the scale of things: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYio7l7B940

Was extra special as one songs was composed for and was intended to be performed live from the space station by one of the Challenger astronauts[1] who died a few months earlier.

I was a young kid here in Norway at the time, but I recall very well the concert being covered by news here. His music was on the radio as well, so he was definitely well known outside of France I'd say.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_McNair#Music_in_space
It is serious this time?

It was going to be early Summer 2022.
I agree, but only in a consumer environment, such as games and other trivial consumer apps with a lot of free sign-ups, when storing none or very little PII, where SSO/etc aren't ever going to be required. These SaaS products are far too expensive for free consumer apps.

Otherwise, if you are going to be selling into the enterprise and the majority of your users are paid, this is an area where using a SaaS tool is a no-brainer. Your sales team is going to run into customers that need XYZ-compliant auth and it's solved out of the box with the SaaS and cost isn't an issue since it'll just be baked into the per-user pricing.
>I think it has made me a better/significantly more defensive driver

I am highly, highly suspect of such an assertion. Watching videos of edge cases is at best a really inefficient way to get good at detecting the preceding conditions.
Look up and use the Media Mail rates. They’re subsidized to help move books and media around.
Oh, wow I didn't recognize it by your username at first, but I use your repository/substack a lot for research. Thanks for the work.
Why did we ever just accept colds and flus being so common? Many places have a general social expectation of masking if you have any symptoms of anything.

Do we know what the long term cumulative effects of normal seasonal illness is? What would happen if we were able to get rid of them?
That'll be the same thing though?

The ai creates a video animating the way it thinks you did it, which adds a couple extra legs and an extra eye, but the jury is already biased to think the defendant is likely to have extra eyes and legs, so they accept the ais description
SW is hardly even the cheapest. If not booking months in advance, SW is almost always twice the price of United or American, at least in my parts.
Seems like perfect freedom to me, freedom for the author to control how their intellectual property is used, and freedom for everyone else to use it or not.

Hard to see any harm at all, certainly not "banning capitalism".
If you’re looking for wacky ideas, here are some:

- get some resin and make micarta with them, then sell the micarta or use it in some creative projects

- use them for all your future gift wrapping, especially when giving to fellow nerds

- wallpaper a closet or two

- make a collage on plywood and hang it up as art

- make origami paper cranes

Have fun!
Yeah, Bones is absolutely one of the worst magic-CSI-solves-crimes shows. More or less every episode uses that kind of thing as a premise.
I've been wanting this for years. And just left feedback for Apple Maps for exactly this feature: https://www.apple.com/feedback/maps-ios-ipados.html
But the Southwest system is not "phone-based" by design, I presume? They are going via phone because the decision support system for ops/crew control are down/unusable?

If they've resorted to doing all their scheduling manually with pen and paper, any data pushed to the edge (air crews, ground staff etc) will need to be transmitted in a similarly manual fashion.

The gate/ground/air crews are not making autonomous decisions about who is flying what, when and where. That is decided by some ops/crew control structure in the airline.
As per another reply: all the unneeded crayon colours that are displayed when all I want to do is edit a couple of lines in a plain text file.
https://www.elliottmgmt.com/who-we-are/

There's one MBA on their management committee. Heavily outnumbered by JDs.
Small nitpick: 'WGPU' is somewhat ambiguous because it could refer to either WebGPU itself, or wgpu[1] which is a library implementing a derivative of the WebGPU API that can be used by native code.

[1]: https://docs.rs/wgpu
Reading Nadella's book is something I think everybody in this industry should do. You understand the impact his son Zain had on him and consequentially the reason why Microsoft is pushing in some of the areas it has been since he took over - accessibility being first and foremost.
If you're willing to throw out security and use one of the many EVM clones, then you're just better off using a database. You're giving away the main value add and are just left with inefficiencies.
One argument I rarely see being brought up in the whole IDE/terminal editor wars is why use a terminal editor at all?

For me, the pain of switching between multiple terminals and then to a different gui program like a browser can be a real tiring chore, especially when debugging.