skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> 2) My comment added something else that I view as important to this discussion for a tech audience (labeling things as trolling for the purpose of censorship)

An important point, though I will state my concern about how often censorship gets referenced here on HN:

When one worries about censorship, it is easy to see any feedback mechanism as an attack vector.

But since we also value constructive communication*, we must strike a balance. Of course we should not rule out a feedback mechanism only because there is a small probability of misuse.

* Along with every online forum comes an associated ethos; i.e. accepted ways of interacting. To completely refuse to shape discussions out of fear of "censorship" is abdicating responsibility for establishing and maintaining norms. To do nothing, claiming to be completely free of speech restrictions, is equivalent to letting individuals, often the loudest and most self-important, to define the platform, and history shows it gets nasty fast. A reasonable compromise is to lay out your standards and process for enforcement. Your audience hopefully can assess if your forum has what it takes to be worth their time.
Help! Is This Arabic?
Your posts in this thread crossed not only into personal attack but harassment. Not only that, but you've done it before. Not only that, but you've been breaking the site guidelines in all kinds of ways and ignoring our previous requests to stop. I've therefore banned the account.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
It would be weird, but that's not what happened at all!
> People were unhappy on Twitter before Elon, for the reasons I mentioned.

Yet they didn't leave until the Musk acquisition. Huh.
What do you exactly mean that Gain of Function is "easier said than done"? We routinely engineer changes in viruses for all sorts of purposes. Even I can do it [baculovirus expression cassette vectors--takes less than a day from engineering the cassette to getting expression products]. The tools to do this can be ordered from a catalogue, and it's never been easier to manipulate genomes. You design and order the primers you need and get them a couple of days later.

Just take a look through the first few links here: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=lentivirus+expression

That's just one type of technology that can be used with ease. There are many others. Baculovirus and adenovirus systems are in common use. Making a custom system for a different virus isn't hard, it just takes a bit more time and effort. I was taught multiple techniques to do this in the late '90s and they weren't new even then. Genetic modification started in viruses--the M13 bacteriophage. It's only got easier and more sophisticated since then. The Wuhan researchers already have multiple papers published which involved making modified viruses, and were specifically funded to perform Gain of Function research. You seem to be claiming this is out of the question, but this seems counter to what is possible, their existing track record, and the grants they were working under at the time.

Why are you underplaying what went on here, and maybe wilfully misdirecting? A lot of this stuff is already well documented, since it's been going on for many years. You can find their papers with a few searches, and they have already been reported on multiple times over the last couple of years.
Indeed. Some things (GMO free, renewable, partly recycled back cover, repairable) sound good to customers, while being at best of marginal importance compared to other factors.
perhaps this is to pressure China into allowing the WHO investigation, which they have blocked [1], to proceed.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00283-y
Doesn’t the FBI also have a large biological analysis team? For bio terror ?
The media generally doesn’t cover a bunch of no-lifers tweeting mean things at each other. When someone well known gets involved they generally report on that. Kanye and Kyrie were absolutely reported on. I’m sure they have tons of die hard defenders on Twitter that no one cares about though.
And not to forget, is it okay to omit parentheses, does && take precedence over any other symbol in the expression?
This has been flagged, but for anyone still following, Adams' follow-on interview with Hotep Jesus is worth a listen. It's two hours of mostly Adams talking and fielding questions. (Jesus is a black podcaster, and I think it would be fair to call him conservative and occasionally a bit out there.)

One thing that's become obvious to me in recent years is that it's important to go to the source material if you really want to know what's going on. Media summaries (not to mention the Twitterati) are often misleading or incomplete.
The reason why this is a bad idea is that it's hard to remove emoji when they go out of fashion. You can't just pull characters out of the set without breaking the backwards compatibility assumptions made by every programming language that supports Unicode identifiers, and you can't change the meaning of characters without a painful, politically controversial collaboration between every large tech company (see the pistol emoji).

Even ZWJ sequences are forever: we're still stuck with the "eye in speech bubble" emoji despite the fact that it's a logo for a defunct anti-bullying campaign that doesn't even have a working website anymore.
you are legend!

thank you so much for your work!

the socket guide was my home page for like 10 years :)
I'm curious as to why that is. I would think it's LSP support would close the gap on languages (and intellisense) at least.
Presumably, you’re donating 100% of your own efforts to remedy that? (With the occasional and understandable break to comment on HN, of course)
I hate to give specific product recommendations because it is very shill-like but: "ELECOM Relacon Handheld Trackball Mouse." [0]

So table-top trackball mice aren't uncommon, and they often come up in these discussions just like "joystick"/Vertical grip mice. I've used both. The main problem with table-top trackball or vertical mice is that they keep your arm and most of your wrist in a similar position only offering mild mitigation.

Where the Relacon shines is that you can keep your hands by the side of your body, and you can use it while standing using a standing desk. It is a completely different body position than a traditional mouse and because it is so different my body feels like I get actual time to HEAL rather than just delaying symptoms.

Like most trackballs it will take you a couple of days to be fully productive with it, and you might need to adjust the speed. In terms of what buttons it has onboard it is fantastic: Browser Back/Forward, a fully functional scroll wheel (inc. click), media keys, and oversized L/R.

I will add that the battery-compartment cover does indeed suck and the stand isn't anything. But otherwise, it is great, and batteries last for months. I'd buy another if it broke tomorrow.

The only other pro-tip I have is: Learn to use your mouse with your non-dominant hand. Then keep switching back and forward every week. It took a while as a righty to use it with my left hand, but now I can switch whenever I wish. YMMV.

PS - And other Handheld Trackball mice exist, you just have to sacrifice something (e.g. no scroll wheel, no back/forward buttons, etc) or the trackball is in a really unnaturally placed. I don't feel like I'm trading anything to use the Relacon.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08GSCC8RX
55-Inch 8K Display
What is the substantive difference between "Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says" and "Lab Leak Most Likely Caused Pandemic, Energy Dept. Says"? The only difference I see is that one notes the pandemic ("Covid-19") while the other notes the agency ("Energy Dept.").

Or is your comment more broadly that both headlines are bad? If so, then I'd disagree. Both headlines give the most important part of the story: a US agency currently believes that the pandemic was caused by a lab leak.
I would hate to live in a world where, when people randomly guess something correctly, they feel vindicated and emboldened to say other random guesses that are as completely unfounded as the one they happened to get correct.
No one is claiming this was an "engineered virus" (and the evidence for is really thin, FWIW). The finding in the linked article is only that a lab leak is the most probably origin of the pandemic.

That's the problem with this discourse. Everyone has gone full absolutist and views even relatively sane, nuanced positions as evidence for nonsense like "we may be living in a biological war already". The fact that those of us in the "it's probably a natural virus" camp may have been wrong about WIV involvement doesn't validate your favorite conspiracy theory!
And the WSJ piece says the CIA is undecided! I wonder what explains the different assessments.
I don't know what happens if that cell dies. The person may die. Or another neuron may take over (e.g. after coma). But under the new management, the person won't be the same as before. This is not something unheard-of.
There are precedents. There are some neurons that control muscles. If the neuron dies, the brain loses control over this muscle. There's no regeneration, and no other neuron takes over.
What's the point of defining something that only works when you follow the definition?

Are you really asking that?

The problem with most uppercase Agile implementations isn't that they are slightly off from the manifesto, but because they completely ignore what the manifesto is trying to say.
They tend to be very cautious about advertising it as usable vs in testing itself. E.g. GPU acceleration is an opt in to the edge packages of Asahi, which they consider at alpha stage itself. Even with that approach there is still a surprising number of users that join IRC confused it's not further along, largely because there is a huge variance in what one considers usable.
For that to happen, it can't be gravity that keeps a single molecule near long enough for that to happen - dipole forces at a fairly large distance in vacuum over enough time... maybe... at enough distance from the sun. Maybe. Maybe.

Static electrical field from the asteroid, stoked by the sun?
Given the length of Windows serial keys is not that long, why couldn't one extract the check function and run an iteration attack to generate valid keys?

Edit: @ale42: makes sense, thanks for putting this one to rest. 36^25 is approximately 8 x 10^38 which is a really, really big number.
Bigquery is so deeply integrated with Sheets these days that you can establish live links from specified tabs to BQ (applying a SQL schema in transit), and vice versa, such that you can build a SQL layer into your spreadsheet “backend”. Bigquery is so cheap on data of that size that you’ll never realize significant cost, and provides a great query builder GUI on top.
As a corollary, why does there need to be an excuse for this? Maybe it is right, maybe it’s wrong but I’m surprised you’d jump to it must be broken
I don't think anyone has seriously tried to teach schoolkids to code in Rust just yet. But the way you'd do it would be to treat it as something close to a pure functional language. .clone() all the things and use Cell<> for the hopefully rare case where you really need shared mutability somewhere. (Even RefCell<> is arguably a step-up in complexity over Cell<>.)
It's Python's serialisation format: https://docs.python.org/3/library/pickle.html

There are tools to check the format for suspicious behaviour: https://github.com/mmaitre314/picklescan seems to be the most developed one.

You can also check the format manually (being careful not to call into it), like demonstrated by this more rudimentary scanner: https://github.com/zxix/stable-diffusion-pickle-scanner

It you do check for security issues yourself, you'll need to read up on what magical methods/variables may cause code execution. Simple demonstrations of dangerous code can be found all over the web (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47705202/pickle-exploiti...) but I'm sure there are obfuscation tricks that simple scans won't catch.
> However, this is exactly the sort of virus that they study at the BSL4 lab in Wuhan, quite legitimately

Bat coronavirus work including chimera creation was done at WIV at BSL-2, not BSL-4.
You just need an LLM to generate random prompts and a sweatshop in Manila that filters out the bad ones.
I can't answer the why, but I can confirm that it's not a typo, the file key is indeed 128-bit as-implemented.

However, the "payload key" is 256-bit, derived from the 128-bit file key via HKDF-SHA256. It's the "payload key" that keys the ChaCha20Poly1305 cipher, which encrypts the file payload itself.
What makes a writing system such, and why emoji are not a writing system?
>Notably, chain of thought (CoT) prompting, a recent technique for eliciting complex multi-step reasoning through step-by-step answer examples, achieved the state-of-the-art performances in arithmetics and symbolic reasoning, difficult system-2 tasks that do not follow the standard scaling laws for LLMs https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.11916

>https://sites.google.com/view/automatic-prompt-engineer

Not exactly a "toaster go brrrr" job, but it could be obsolete one day

WaPo does need to chill though. There’s barely any Prompt Engineer jobs

Edit: If anyone's curious, I've been following this for prompt stuff: https://github.com/dair-ai/Prompt-Engineering-Guide
Thanks for that, it brought me back to my teens.

In the Renegade BBS system, for like one minor version or so, you could authenticate to any account, including SysOp, by hitting Enter instead of providing a password. Of course, in Renegade and many BBSes, you could login with either your account name or ID, which was an auto-incrementing (the manual way) integer starting at "0", the Sysop. And I'm fairly certain that the problem wasn't triggered unless you logged in by ID, which few ever did.

On one Saturday nearly every BBS in my area code running that software was restoring from backup.

I stumbled upon it because I was "1" on another BBS[0] and accidentally popped "Enter" aiming for Shift when typing my password. After picking my jaw up from the table I called my buddy and told him to unplug the phone line. :)

[0] Actually, I had hacked up and substantially re-written from the leaked Telegard 2.5 source (whichever was the origin of Renegade's code) and the password validation code was insanity -- I was young enough to see hacking as mystical and suspected I'd found a cleverly hidden back-door so I rewrote the entire thing to be as "dumb as the rest of the password handling logic was"; I had heard, later, that there was something funny going on but I stopped playing with that code by then and the Internet quickly ended that world. In all likelihood, the original developers were doing something novel that I was totally unfamiliar with and I made it worse, but I like to think I "locked that up". :)
So the sort of stuff I've been using this in is encryption/decryption, where there's a whole boatload of things you have to set up, read/create OIDs, configure identities, fetch certificates, match algorithms, etc. etc.

All of that has to be ok before you finally get to the bit that does the work, and since I'm using ObjC with its ARC feature, I don't need to deallocate anything, they'll be deallocated as they go out of scope. I tend to release critical RAII stuff in my -dealloc method anyway if there's anything there to be done.

So it's really a whole long list of

id result = nil;
do {
if (setup-X-fails)
break

if (setup-Y-fails)
break

...

result = call_method(X,Y,Z,A,...F)
} while (0);

... which works out pretty well, and is very readable. The setup-xxx stuff can be several pages of code for each method - and useful in their own right, so integrating it into the loop doesn't seem preferable.
I always put a goto in all of my code just to mess with the "goto considered harmful" people. Most people don't notice but every once in a while I find someone who can't make it past the goto and it puts a smile on my face. =)
Yeah, an opinion I share, and if enough people share that opinion, HN is designed to react.

I'm not going to stop flagging this kind of content, and dang is here to overrule me/others when he feels the need to, which is also how HN is designed.

The post is up, the system is working as intended. We all have roles to play here, no need to worry!
What about the request to use gain of function research to add furin sites to coronaviruses? That seems to me the smoking gun, since this lab asked for funding to do exactly that.

It’s a bit like Jaime Meitzl (sp?) said - for the first time in history you find a unicorn (furin binding site in a coronavirus) next to a lab that asked for funding to make regular horses into unicorns. But the lab says it’s “natural origin”.
> I told people to at least try to learn x, because their job would become much easier and they'd get more money. Nope, not interested

How much more money? I'm frankly not sure there is any skill you can learn on your own (without full-time commitment and/or paid formal education) in a reasonable time that would make financial sense for a typical 50k/year office clerk to learn, at least not in the UK.

The closest to this would be software engineering, but even then, it would take you ~10 years of experience to reach the level of a proper senior software engineer, and even that only gets you 80k on average in the UK - a sizeable chunk of which will get stolen by the taxman.

10 years of effort starting from scratch to not even be able to double your salary (and again, the net salary is even smaller, as taxes increase) is not a winning strategy. You're better off bullshitting and playing office politics to move up in the pecking order at your current company and increase your salary that way.
EDIT: I found some of the pages with links that include UTM tracking params. Let me know if you want me to send you the pages with those links, can send them through email (my email is on the contact page of the site).
A talking to from who? Tell them to reduce the sprint items to match the new schedule leadership requires. Next sprint add in 5 hours buffer to avoid unnecessary surprises. Use the missed deadline as reason. Start taking more control of the sprint goals. Reference this moment as justification.
Where is the link to the DOE's publication? You'd think the goddamn newspapers would list their references.
The argument "they would have used a published backbone and reverse genetics system" is wishful thinking.

You might interested in this paper: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.12.528210v2

"Discovery of a novel merbecovirus DNA clone contaminating agricultural rice sequencing datasets from Wuhan, China"

MERS is really nasty, this is clearly evidence of engineering, and guess what the system is unpublished.

Personally I suspect this paper (which came out a while ago but got "boosted" recently) could be the reason for DOE "confidence update".

Media have not reported on this and "the usual" zoonosis advocates have been remarkably silent about it.
> Talk to your friends and colleagues who switched jobs and then get back to me.

They increased their salary!

Did you know that lots of other people didn't change jobs during the pandemic? In fact, some people even lost their jobs! And lots of others kept the same job at the same salary (while inflation increased).

From 14 March to 3 October 2020, for example, the ABS reported that wages were down -3.3% (and would be much lower if you excluded JobKeeper payments)[1].

We're on a tech website, so if you had scoped your comment to "tech workers salaries rose on average", I would probably agree. Do remember that the world doesn't consist entirely of tech workers.

> There is lot of propaganda.

This is certainly true. But given you didn't provide any of your own sources to back up anything you're saying, some might think you're using accusations of "propaganda" as a simple means to disagree with something you don't like.

[1] https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Depart...
Earlier in the pandemic I read a report talking about the possibility of the virus being something they sampled, and that it leaked when they accessed the sample presumably to start sequencing/analyzing it.

The theory was that it was a virus they'd have sampled from immunocompromised miners working in the same caves that the bats with the most closely related viruses inhabit. They had some references to a report with something like that happening some time prior.

It's so far the only theory I've read that seems to match the evidence.

The evidence doesn't seem to indicate that it was engineered, or that it was a product of gain of function research on animals. I think there would have been more solid evidence pointing in that direction by now, if that was the case. They would have published something related to it, or non-Chinese researchers connected to the lab would have known something.

Yet there's no evidence of any related animal resorvoir, and the virus was very well adapted to humans from the very start. And everything points to the virus passing through the lab somehow. Those things put together seems to point at them having sampled a virus that already made the jump to humans, and that somehow during the sampling, or retrieving the sample from storage, the virus escaped.