skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Note:
Wuhan was closed to interprovincial traffic very early on. The International Airport, however, was left open.

There's a hanful of ways you can look at that:

Wuhan International couldn't be closed without consent from Beijing.

Beijing didn't grant it because

A) Poor information propagation
Or
B) Someone made a weighty geopolitical decision that in order to best serve China's interests, it was time to make this everyone's problem, leaving the International Airport open as a result.
Or
C) some combo of the two.

I don't know your particular balance in regards to the actual Overton Window as extended to humanity as a whole, but I damn well know where it registers on mine.
Even those languages have to contend with win32 utf16 conventions anyways I suppose
What was the motivation for introducing C2SP and CCTV as concepts? Are there immediate plans to introduce more than Age?
The term "transition" as used here is a euphemism that covers interfering with a child's puberty in a way that is likely to sterilize them for life if the treatment persists, and surgical destruction of breasts, and in some cases, genitals.

I think most people, understanding the reality of this in stark terms, would be dead against children transitioning.
Don't get me started on how stupid and racist "wet market" ALWAYS was.

The question would be "why now?" There have been markets like this for, what, thousands of years? Why was this one special (unless, you know, it was near the lab where they made the viruses)

100% percent plays on "lololol look at the backwards bat eaters." So dumb.
No, it's that they don't need them.
From the article: "Some 23% of jobs in Britain require no more than a primary education...".

About half of people in the US with college educations do jobs that don't require them.
For most of the US population, college is not cost-effective.

This is going to be a problem as the US is forced to get back into manufacturing in a big way by world events.
I know that a few pieces of software distributed on floppy showed a warning if it detected it was previously installed (which wrote to some file on the disk, given it wasn't write protected). Which basically amounted to a sternly-written paragraph to say that they're using honor system to make sure you follow the rules.
> it took me 5 years to catch up with the salaries my friends who didn’t take the pause were making

Worth exploring the opportunity cost in a bit more detail.

One possible trajectory is to get a junior permie SWE job on some commercial project, spend a few years learning the ropes, switch to a different org and a different project, get a better salary while learning a bunch new stuff from the new project context, then enter the wonderful world of daily contract rates. It seems very plausible to be making the median SWE daily contract rate (£600) [1] as a contractor after 5 years of relevant commercial experience, one could probably do this even faster if working toward this was a goal, with a little luck.

Suppose you bill 45 weeks per year, 5 days per week as a contractor, with a daily rate of £600 - that's an income of £135k. Money isn't everything, and life isn't a race, but what's the opportunity cost to delay earning good money by pausing a year or so to accrue additional academic credentials?

Another possible trajectory is to start climbing the leadership ladder, towards a technical leadership role, or perhaps sideways to a management role. Doing this likely requires more time spent working in the same organisation, to be internally promoted into one of these roles without having prior experience. For this trajectory, getting some non CS / non-SWE training might be more valuable (MBA?).

[1] https://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/contracts/uk/software%20engine...
There’s an immense benefit to being specific with both what you mean by lab leak (natural virus leaked or modified one did) and by “they” when you’re talking about coverups because it gets weirdly racist and conspiratorial in a hurry otherwise.
I don’t know about the merits of this argument, but it feels like a bit of an old-man ‘back in my day’ argument. A few things I note:

- France has significantly higher productivity per hour than the U.K., but possibly this is due to workers working fewer hours. France has also had (slightly) better productivity growth since the financial crisis

- Is it actually relevant for young people to be able to replace taps or whatever? Cars are more reliable these days so there are fewer forced learning opportunities. If you are young and live in some city apartment, maybe you don’t even drive and maybe you shouldn’t be doing DIY plumbing on a property you don’t own. But these also feel to me like quite arbitrary standards – most young people likely have jobs that don’t require them to know how to change a tap and when you were young, your jobs likely didn’t require you to know how to use the Internet (or whatever – I don’t know how long ago you were starting work).

- If you look at the standardised international measures for things like literacy and numeracy, you’ll likely find that (1) the highest level feels like a pretty low level of ability to you and (2) a percentage of any developed country you pick won’t perform at this level, and you’ll likely find that percentage surprisingly high

- So, maybe there’s also an effect where the older people you interact with have picked up random skills over the years and become more ‘stratified’ such that you are less likely to interact with someone whom you think doesn’t know much but the young people you meet haven’t had so many of these random chances and are a more representative sample of the general population?

I don’t know anything about the situation in France though. Maybe you’re just plain right.
Why useless? People have to attempt to predict the outcomes of elections, and have to do their best.
Yes, that is also speech. Unfortunately, most free speech advocates are not of the "I disapprove of what you say but will defend it" variety. They are of the similar species "I disapprove of what you say and will apply my principles in an inconsistent manner to ensure that your speech is suppressed while speech I do not disapprove of which nonetheless violates the same principles is permitted" variety.

Talk to any free speech advocate but those who preserve the purity of speech and you will rapidly find that they add epicycles for all sorts of things.
Incorrect. Lab leak is de facto default from now on in the world we live in. Even if you disagree, it will be in 5 years. The tech, the databases, the labs, the money. It's all increasing. Every single year the risk of a lab leak goes up, to the point where we are expecting a covid per decade out of the labs. But hopefully the rest of the world is more ethical than the chinese and their new and novel virus creation strategy and we get relatively harmless versions of the flu etc. Rather than pathogens with zero prior human cohabitation.

Funny how all the datapoints, including new and novel to humans get ignored.......
Yes, but unlike Dart, Go has at least modest mainstream adoption.
So what? Unicode follows language and language is descriptivist not prescriptivist.
I have extremely low confidence that we will ever be satisfied about the pathway that led to the Sars-Cov-2 pandemic.

I feel strongly that it was not tied to malicious intent, but other than that, I don't have strong feelings. Malicious intent would require significant actual evidence to convince me.
It does look like they had to do extra work for the M2 so it wasn’t just a for free feature.
Four U.S. agencies say "market origins" - as does the U.S. National Intelligence Council. Two more agencies -- including the CIA -- are undecided. And then there's the "low confidence" Energy Department opinion, and one from the FBI.

So it ultimately depends on how you weight the 75% of groups that don't think there's evidence that it leaked from a lab.
I’m impressed as a software engineer that it worked as well as it did on my random phone screen.

Also, now I’m thinking about it more because I was annoyed.

I really don’t agree with you. I think it worked. It worked in a way that’s hard to describe; similar to how bad press will sometimes skyrocket a business into success and stardom.
AND america? nah man China should pay reparations or face heavy sanctions and geopolitical isolation.
But that's the point. Employers are already quite limited in how they can disassociate with employees.

You can divorce someone because they didn't want to have sex with you. And you can decide not to be friends with people of a certain race. But employers do not have those rights under US law.

So it would also seem fine if you also couldn't be fired due to political beliefs. We already have a framework for dealing with these issues.
It's a fair complaint against C and JavaScript.
How did they control for non-racial differences in the bots? In the thumbnail the Black bot looks more trustworthy (to me) because the white bot looks like a creepy baby.
Worse than useless. It likely impacts election outcomes.
"Yes if you can solve the halting problem" is better than a "no". It's "no, and there are mathematical proofs why it will never be a 'yes'".

More realistically, you're more likely to hit "yes if there is compelling evidence that $choice is better than $status_quo with respect to $criteria". Sometimes that sort of evidence is expensive-to-impossible to demonstrate such that it's basically a "no", but again, it's a much more specific "no".
I don’t believe releasing an updated version of a book would ever result in a societal loss. Burning books en masse? Sure. A new edition of an existing book? No. You’re getting worked up over nothing. Settle down.
> egalitarian meritocracy

Oxymoron.
> ...for example, chinampas—the lake system’s artificial islands, built from reeds—created small canals where species like the axolotl thrived.

That's an interesting - and potentially misleading - take on Axolotls and their habitat [ref. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axolotl]
It’s almost as if we don’t need this many workers but capitalism provides no other way for people to feed themselves, so we end up making bullshit jobs to keep people alive.

If jobs were a thing that not everyone had to do, and it drew in passionate people who really just want to do that work, not only would we have more efficiency and creativity. We’d also have more job satisfaction and probably even faster absolute progress.

This situation is only going to get worse. Our economic system is very sticky and the expectation of everyone has to work makes people “feel good”.
No we do not have the sequences, the lab has so far refused to share the sequences in their public database taken down down September of 2019. Plus recently people have discovered through BLAST searches an unreported Chimera virus that got accidentally got sequenced via contaminated agricultural rice sequencing dataset. Which means they had viruses that have not been previously reported. And this makes sense researchers do not publish viruses until they themselves can publish them in a journal. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.12.528210v2....
It seems like significant new information on a major ongoing topic.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
The DOE (as a research agency) does a lot of biological and genomic research and is well qualified to do this kind of research, as other comments here have pointed out. It's not uncommon for researchers in different agencies to collaborate with each other, all labs have different areas of expertise and it would be naive to say any one from one agency is more "qualified" than another. The moniker at the top is not so meaningful.

The "low confidence" has a particular meaning in the world intelligence, and the DOE is also apart of the intelligence community given they run most of the US national research laboratories.
Seems like a lot of people who want to be heard but don't like it when people actually listen
Not the OP but I relocated to Barcelona from New York City a year ago and my dating life has never been healthier or funner. Women here are the most open of anywhere I've been in the world. Now dating a young Russian artist who's very sweet and easygoing and I wish I'd moved here 4 years earlier.
Also a scent hound owner here, can confirm. For her, the sniffer is The Source of Truth™. When I enter the house, she comes up and gives me a thorough sniffdown, as if she weren't confident in me being me until she confirmed that I smell like me.
You know you're right. Remember when Saddam closed his labs to us? The ones that never had WMDs? What was the "confidence" threshold for invading iraq? I also bet its the same exact people now telling us about more "confidence" levels.

Confidence, high, low, whatever, it means nothing. No one trusts the govt. or media anymore and no one should.
One of mine will see a dog on the tv and start growling. My other two only respond to barking on the tv, then look around like they are being punked.
God, I hate these titles. The same science news business site published this before https://www.quantamagazine.org/videos/qa-melanie-mitchell-vi...

I have no problem if they say x thinks y. But to put it as if it is a fact like "To Build Truly Intelligent Machines, Teach Them Cause and Effect" and "The Missing Link in Artificial Intelligence" to get more hits is disgusting.
Crashes don’t mean terminal.

If the dollar (or any other currency)lost 70% of its value in less than a year then we would certainly say it crashed
I prefer DoubleCommander: https://doublecmd.sourceforge.io/

It is a free, cross-platform alternative, also written in Pascal and (IMHO) has surpassed TotalCommander in many ways.
This. Low confidence still significant in that it could have been “low confidence transmission from wet market game”, but that’s not the direction this landed on. It’s likely a lab leak, says the report, but there’s too many gaps to support higher certainty.
>Two wrongs don't make a right.

Absolutely. I am saying you are picking and choosing as per your convenience. People get arrested all the time, just because it was a minister it made headlines. I only wish people rotting in jail (in all countires) with no charges against them had a voice, just like AAP government

> In any functioning democracy, government should not be able to arrest members of their opposition parties or journalists just based on allegations.

I wanted to know from you what country is a good example of a functioning democracy. Not what is your idea of a functioning democracy.

> Exactly! Who says Manish Sisodia did a scam? The BJP government did say, but they are a ruling party who will benefit from keeping their opponents in jail/courts.

CBI did. They are a law enforcing authority in India and they decided that arrest is the correct course of action in this case.
my shorter take: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34518784
I would argue that the average program that got printed in a book was probably quite bad but still of a higher quality than the programs people wrote on their own, simply because the latter were usually written without any education or useful models of working programs.

It’s like an iceberg of bad code: the underwater part nobody saw was astonishingly terrible by modern standards. That code might be running a business, but its author would never get exposed to professional programming. Today Excel often serves a similar purpose. (Excel isn’t spaghetti though since the execution model is completely different.)
> some developers just want to write code and go home

This is the only good point here. The truth is, middle managers exist because technical work is seen lowly anywhere the management is stupid enough to think that technical competency is easy to acquire.

Also, these developers that never participate are usually the ones that get promoted to middle management.
The argument, as I understand it, is that disabling someone's ability to do speech is categorically censorship.
Brazil vibes
the fact that the calculations always seemed to be chasing the experimental result seemed the most damning thing to me

i remember from physics undergrad a million years ago that great value was put on predicting new things -- you can always find a way to fit existing numbers!

an epicycles vs ellipses kind of thing

(but of course w/o actually being expert in the topic, it's hard to really know what to think)
Someone should invent an Oscar Wilde quote generator like they did for Deepak Chopra. I’ve been guilty of using OW’s quotes but does the format have to be so predictable?

“The <$5 word for an emotion> with/of <noun> is not that it <does a banal thing> but that <slightly offbeat insight>”.

1. The surprising thing about rain is not that it falls during your parade but that it never does when you have to attend someone else’s.

2. Some people read books to educate themselves, others to subjugate others.

3. I have nothing to declare but I’m too much of a genius to just “No” when asked.

How did I do?
Stalin's cognitive ability was dismal. His strength was his ability to connect with the infernal side of human nature. This made him an adept manipulator, this gave him the unusual energy spikes after such "connections" and this gave him a depressing aura that bent people's will. The price for such abilities is being a "puppet of the shadowy cabal", using your metaphor.
I need everyone, EVERYONE, who chooses to use this word to be very careful about how you define it, because most of you are NOT DOING THAT.

And in the process, you end up fueling right-wing idiocy. Because there are presently two working definitions of "woke."

Reasonable people have defined it as "a modern extreme naive liberalism" and that's fine.

But the right basically uses it as "whatever we disagree with," and often pretty much feels like the n-word.

And conflating these two is causing LOTS of problems.
I work on cars and motorcycles and for fun I like to ask ChatGPT how to do certain repair tasks. It usually perfectly outlines the steps to complete the repair, then glosses over all the details a real world human would want to know. Like step 6 to rebuild a brake caliper will be something like “next rebuild the caliper”. I suspect this information is just not in its training data. It would be interesting if it could learn from youtube videos somehow.
They improved the ability to share info (fusion centers and whatnot), but the desire to do so remains under the auspices of humans.
FWIW, Go's channels were largely inspired by similar facilities in Occam.
Freedom of speech is also the freedom to hear and read any viewpoint you'd like to hear or read.

The problem currently is that there is broad censorship for many views and even if you actively want to research an issue, you'll only be presented with one half of the story because large tech and media corporations work in concert to block certain points of view.
> Almost all middle-earning but high-productivity jobs will have a legion of support staff earning almost exactly the same wage but doing nothing that is productive in itself.

Gotta be somewhat careful about these kinds of characterizations, though. A lot of support staff may not be doing things that are directly producing profitable output for the company, but they still provide necessary services (and, well, support) that enable the people who are "line workers" to be more, and more consistently, productive.

A great example is IT, especially in a non-tech-oriented company. Without a competent IT department, your workers will struggle every time there's a bug, or the power goes out, or they forget their passwords. And yet, as has been seen all too often, IT is a "cost center". And, indeed, it's not at all uncommon for there to be many incompetent IT people in a given large company, who are exactly the kind of unproductive drag on the business that you describe.

My point, ultimately, is that any attempt to divide employees into "produces value, good for the company" and "unproductive, bad for the company" cannot be done by simple categorization; it requires actually evaluating the individuals' contributions. Which, exactly as you say, far too few managers are actually capable of doing.
The anonymity of it all, and how they got away with it, is what makes it stand out for me. There aren’t many crimes this atrocious that are seen publicly without due repercussions for the criminals. I’m sure some homicide detectives see some real messed-up stuff, but I’m just a rando who didn’t sign up to be exposed to this kind of society underbelly.
> by what standards do you find it inappropriate?

It's the specific wording choice.

You did it fairly politely and even said please, but as a general outlook on life, I don't like being told what to do.

Telling me where to post = bad

Suggesting where to post for x logical reason = good
A boy or girl dinosaur is the question.
Since this post will inevitably bring out the usual comments that prompt engineering is dumb and a waste of time, here's my rebuttal to that: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Feb/21/in-defense-of-prompt-e...
Someone linked me this website last year https://peterdaszak.com/ . I thought it must have been run by a crazy person at first, but it's turning out to be more and more correct. I'm not sure of the whole Nazi angle, however.
It still makes sense for things like anthrax that aren't easily communicable. Or botulinum toxin.
Almost two thirds of London businesses are choosing not to fill vacancies because doing so means paying the market rate for the skills needed...
Terrorists motivated by religion or ideology sometimes use tactics and weapons that make no sense to rational people. The Aum Shinrikyo cult was developing biological weapons.
Oh don’t get me wrong both crypto and LLMs are interesting. I am just a little dubious how much money and attention suddenly flowed into one and then later out (followed by bankruptcies and lawsuits), then into another.

We will see.
The fucking article says the DoE has low confidence in the report.
Did I miss in the article that the original version of the Bond books are somehow contraband? I’ve got an entire set of yellowing paperbacks somewhere. I hope they don’t come for me!
Propaganda.

That is the first thing I can think of where it doesn't need to be particularly connected to reality.

Even fiction needs to have long-term coherence; propaganda can be "arguments as soldiers".
Fair enough, I meant viral biowarfare.
Yes, history has shown that it can go that way. We all have to stay alert and raise an alarm when a democratically elected government starts trying to manipulate four pillars of Democracy: Legislature, Executive, Judiciary and Press.
Flight Simulator Gave Birth to 3D Video-Game Graphics
Fully agree with this article. Our definition for intelligence: "Intelligence is conceptual awareness capable of real-time causal understanding and prediction about space-time."[1]

[1] https://graphmetrix.com/trinpod
I would guess that the vast majority of the population do not take meaningful actions based on election prediction (other than "I might [not] need to actually vote").

There are good reasons to have polls and predictions but they are far from necessary.
Just write it to these fine people:

https://fiscal.treasury.gov/general-fund/