skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The 2004 SARS outbreak originated in a lab

This is news to me. The article you referenced opens by saying [0]:

> The World Health Organization has confirmed that breaches of safety procedures on at least two occasions at one of Beijing's top virology laboratories were the probable cause of the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) there last month, which infected nine people, one of whom died.

This seems to be saying they traced the illness in nine people there at the lab back to two leaks at the lab, not that the entire disease outbreak originated in a lab.

There a lot of other studies, referenced in this wikipedia article [1], which explain that the first SARS virus originated in bats:

> Phylogenetic analysis of these viruses indicated a high probability that SARS coronavirus originated in bats and spread to humans either directly or through animals held in Chinese markets.

> In 2004, scientists from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention of the University of Hong Kong and the Guangzhou Center for Disease Control and Prevention established a genetic link between the SARS coronavirus appearing in civets and humans, confirming claims that the virus might have transmitted from the animal species to humans.

In the last 15 years people have fallen ill of the plague, cowpox, meningococcus, h5n1, anthrax, and zika due to lab leaks in the Unites States [2]. These are just the leaks where people got sick and/or died, all lab workers I believe. There were others affecting animals, and others where nobody got sick. None of that means these labs originated these diseases. The origin of a disease is separate from a localized outbreak.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC416634/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS-CoV-1#Origin_and_evolutio...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...
Everyone took software from the office and installed it at home, that's why everyone uses microsoft at home, you got it for free from work.

Worked for microsoft, worked for the people taking it home. Everyone was happy.
As a scent hound owner, if something doesn't smell, it might as well not exist.
He also ignores mirrors. They live in a very different sensory world. I wish I could experience his and he could experience ours.
Most politicians lack this too
It’s so fascinating to me to see someone formulate a hypothesis based on nothing “I think they did[purposely leak a global pandemic-causing virus]”, and then immediately turn around and relish in China’s failure at the thing you claimed they did. Like, do I do this too, and I’m just not aware of it?
> You can hire a ghostwriter to write a biography about yourself and pay a publishing house for a limited edition print run and voila, you can have your own wikipedia page based on an authorized source

It isn’t as easy as you make it sound - to establish notability, they don’t accept self-published / vanity press sources - so you’d need to get your book published by a publisher with an established track record. That’s a lot harder - it is either something that money can’t buy, or at least you’d need a lot lot more money to buy it than self-publishing charges

Furthermore, one high quality reliable source is generally not considered enough for notability, they want multiple sources. If you get your biography published, and then get some journalists in established media outlets to publish articles about it, you’ll meet that hurdle too. But if you manage that, you are probably actually are notable, as opposed to just some random nobody trying to buy their way into Wikipedia
lol, Dmitry Utkin is one of the military founders of the Wagner group and is covered in nazi tattoos. Russians invaded Ukraine to stop the nazis and brought along their own? There are many examples of Nazis fighting for Russia. Come on man, I refuse to believe that you think Russia invaded Ukraine because of Nazis. No way you would fall to that sort of propaganda. Right...?

Again, can you show me the videos of Zelensky saying he wants peace and is willing to accept surrendering Ukrainian soil to get it but the US stopped him and are forcing him to fight. This is your claim, so you should be able to provide the videos. Telling me to "look them up" is not a strong argument in your favor.
Why not the frontpage in phoenix too?
> doing anything remotely 'bookish' in your free time has become almost definitively 'uncool'

teaching kids work-life balance seems like a great idea
While I won't discount the possibility that the outbreak could be a nefarious plot to plant a virus.I feel the US's response to the pandemic and the massive mistakes made make it less likely. The most likely would be just an accident where a researcher unknowingly got infected while conducting research in a BSL2 lab where they were testing wild SARS like viruses and inserting FCS to gauge the viruses potential threat level
Working on bringing it down via the process of "decaffeination". Unfortunately this is Atom's legacy and not our doing.
In reality, it is already in every compiler that matters. For some reason, they don't want to put it in the standard.
I wondered if WSJ must have a style guide that tells their writers to use this construction but there seems to be a mix of both (Energy Department and Department of Energy). Yes, DoE is the correct name, but I see ED used commonly in journalism.
First two sentences of the abstract:

>Given the computational cost and technical expertise required to train machine learning models, users may delegate the task of learning to a service provider. Delegation of learning has clear benefits, and at the same time raises serious concerns of trust.

My understanding was that the threat model for data poisoning is when the attacker controls part or all of your dataset, not the learning algorithm. Am I getting this wrong?
Yeah. In 2016 when people were like "hurr durr experts suck, they predicted Hillary would win and she lost", it was exasperating. If a model predicted an outcome with 60-70% certainty, and the less likely scenario happens, model wasn't necessarily bad. That'd be true even if it was a 90/10 split.
I don't think it's against US interests for China to sell weapons to Russia.

Post-WW2, the traditional way in which powerful nation states test their conventional (non-nuclear) capabilities has been through proxy warfare. The US would probably love it if China sold some of their weapons to Russia, so that US/NATO equipment can be tested against it. Conversely, the Chinese would probably not mind testing their "on paper" capabilities "in the field". The caveat here being that the US can probably upgrade/adapt to whatever is learned about Chinese equipment.

In other words, there is no substitute for actual operational experience, and both sides benefit from selling weapons to the various parties in Ukraine, in order to get said experience.
When it comes to the Iraq War, according to the Wikipedia, and let me quote it

> "An estimated 151,000 to 1,033,000 Iraqis died in the first three to five years of conflict."

Then that famous video of "Madeleine Albright Saying Iraqi Kids' Deaths 'Worth It'" talked about half million children.

https://www.newsweek.com/watch-madeleine-albright-saying-ira...
As far as I understand, these dreams are because your body is catching up for all the missing REM sleep your didn't have before.

So you have a lot more REM sleep for a while because you need it, and REM sleep normally goes along with vivid dreams.
Yeah. The question is do we change FERPA (add notification requirements and penalties) OR do we remove the exemption that places education-related medical records under FERPA (and let that info fall under HIPAA, where it should have been all along)? I think the latter makes sense - the school is acting as a medical provider, so HIPAA should apply. No get-out-of-jail card because they’re a school.

Of course, the problem with any meaningful penalties is what does that really accomplish? Crippling a school district (by yanking funding) doesn’t help anybody in the long run - it just makes education in that area worse.
Hmm, there is a different 'accidental hard drive dialing' story in his autobiography (Just for Fun) - where that happened in Minix and as a result Linus chose to move to Linux full-time:

> But in December, I mistakenly auto-dialed my hard disk instead of my modem. I was trying to auto-dial /dev/tty1, which is the serial line. But by mistake I
auto-dialed /dev/hda1, which is the hard disk device. The end result was that I inadvertently overwrote some of the most critical parts of the of the partition where I had Minix. Yes, that meant I couldn’t boot Minix anymore.
>
> That was the point where I had a decision to make: I could reinstall Minix, or I could bite the bullet and acknowledge that Linux was good enough that I didn’t need Minix. I would write the programs to compile Linux, under itself, and whenever I felt I needed Minix I would just add the desired feature to Linux. It’s a big conceptual step when you drop the original hosting environment and truly make a program self-hosting, so big that I released the new version as 0.10 in late November.

Of course, maybe he did do the same mistake twice :)
I’m 35 and I keep waking up throughout the night. I joke that we’re designed to be awake at the age we get kids.
How about murdering? See Charlie Hebdo, Samuel Paty etc.
Go to Andhra Pradesh, cronies of politicians are filing private cases against CBI officers with the aid of the AP police. This is with respect to the investigation of the murder of YS Vivekananda Reddy, brother of ex-CM YSR, and an uncle of the current CM of AP. It tells us how weak is CBI is. Every one knows that the current CM of AP is involved in killing his uncle.
I was reinstalling Win95 and Win98 so much in my youth that, to this day, I still have my Windows 95 OEM number and Windows 98SE CDKEY memorised and can recall them with no effort. 20 and 25 alphanumerics respectively.

I didn't know about the much smaller 10-digit Win95 keys.
by selling ADS.

TV commercials are paid regardless of how many people are watching them, you pay for the potential audience, not for the actual number of viewers (which is always presumed).

Putting pressure on the viewers (us) to undergo the torture of constantly being nagged by glovo and audible ads every 15 seconds, it's frankly the best way to not get any more viewer and scare the old ones away, for the content creators.

You want to advertise on YT?

You pay for it and hope people will watch your ads, if they skip them, they are probably sh*t and you need to make better ads, not force people to lower their standards.
And how do you get this LLM to output a good prompt?
> I think they did thinking the West wouldn’t have developed a vaccine so fast.

I’m curious. What motivation for purposefully leaking such a virus would ‘they’ have?
I'm wary of engaging, but this just makes no sense to me. Perhaps you can explain and actually make explicit some of the implied connections.

Previously the 'big lie' was that it was not from a lab. Now that it's assessed to be likely from a lab the new lie is the contention that it was done deliberately? Whose propaganda machine is at work here anyway? The Chinese govt or the US one? Or are they in cahoots now?
" I have no idea why you think that has anything to do with the FDA, just buy the supplements if you think the circumstantial evidence is good enough."

Can the FDA turn the circumstantial evidence into real evidence? I think they can.
There is the Minimap community package which is one of the most installed ones.
https://web.pulsar-edit.dev/packages/minimap
Agreed. What we really need is a new payroll system with an API that uses GraphQL instead of Rest.

But seriously: niche products always look uninteresting and stupid to someone, and niche products trace all the way to folk crafts. cottage industries, and open air markets. Making video games for dogs is neither embarrassing nor a “product of startup culture”. It’s just something somebody thought was cool and put some time and money into. It’s great.
The model wasn't bad, just useless.
I disagree with this idea, that we are talking about Free Speech Rights. When I see people say Free Speech, it is in the lens of the inalienable right that we all have. The US constitution does protect some specific scope of Free Speech, but any limitations legally are still infringements upon the Natural Right of Free Speech. Rights do not come from the Government, they are innate and natural. The government can merely infringe or protect those rights. A company or government infringing on those rights is unethical, because infringing upon any other's rights is unethical, regardless of what the US government says.
Someone decided to put sensitive records unencrypted on a computer connected to the internet. In the past they'd be on paper in a filing cabinet, only available to Watergate style attackers.
They've had the same time we've had to build a system to deliver clean water to themselves - if they haven't it's their fault and they deserve what they have (or don't have).
Can I ask what the KMS is, for my informal plugin prioritization/planning? If you prefer to email it, it's hi at my domain, filippo.io.
If you want to be part of it do not let me stop you.
> But as I said, things are changing. So far we're moving the "backend" stuff to .Net/C#.

Delphi and C# share a chief architect, Anders Hejlsberg, who left Borland for Microsoft in 1996[0].

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg
I don't think this distinction makes any sense nowadays. A "smartphone without cellular connectivity" is a lot more than a "Personal Digital Assistant". Could a Palm Pilot stream music? Did it have an app store? GPS? Microphone? Could it make VoIP calls? Could it connect with an external modem so that it could work as a softphone?
After you sue, if you shred then you are in trouble. How do you anticipate what documents you need and when a legal suit is going to be filed by an unrelated party
> I know suspicion isn't fact, but that should have always been the leading theory to be disproved

The leading theory should be the thing that has never happened before (lab leak causes epidemic or pandemic) instead of the thing that has happened dozens of times before (animal virus jumps to humans and causes epidemic or pandemic)?
I'm born in the United States and had a Russian girlfriend for a year+ in grad school: same thing, went to modern supermarket and she was freaked out with choices overload. I understood when she described it, but it was something i had tuned out unknowingly since being a little kid.
Can you share why you think violence from kids raised by single moms is more prevalent than from kids raised by single dads?
> However, we have freedom of association, and a business may not want to associate with someone who has opinions counter to their own.

I think this part is why there’s so much angst about this these days: businesses have captured a huge part of our commons and our support systems, pieces that might have been (or could be) the purview of government at other times. If we’re all paying dues to BigCorp in order to live, is it fair to say “businesses can choose to not associate with whomever they want”?
I work in finance and I hate pandas! Also worth pointing out that almost all big banks have their own functional languages baked into excel that allow not only relational operations and extend excel functions but also tapping into their inhouse analytics libraries written in C++.
Lockdowns serve many purposes, not simply the stated one. They also have many side effects.
This is very accurate in my experience. People complain about a lack of training but when you provide an avenue for it hardly anyone takes you up on it.
It isn’t always a lack of will. Sometimes it is lacking a worldview that continually perceives through the lenses of statistical probabilities because most of the time, heuristics are Good Enough. Constantly evaluating upon an ever-shifting, -updating net of probabilities is relatively more cognitively demanding.

Those who do reflexively apply probability assessments however, would do well to also perceive when to accept heuristic Good Enough solutions.
No it's not. Not at all. Everything risk is increasing exponentially. BSL-4 labs are expanding 1 per year, or around 2% extra risk. CRISPr and CRISPr cas9 are only 10 and 20 years old. How much added risk is that per year? 10,000%?

Then to send money to actively seek out bat viruses in the place thought to harbor the worse or most diverse viruses?

And to do all that in partnership with a hostile enemy who most certainly isn't going to tell you all the extras they have planned above and beyond the controllable.

No, I think you are dead wrong. The default assumption from now on is lab leak unless proven otherwise, because that's the risky world we live in. Period. No getting around it. And the risk gets higher every year.

There are literally tens of thousands of BSL-3 labs in the world. They aren't sitting empty doing nothing. They are busy trying to "save us".
I wonder if the timing of these "bad headlines" is connected to this

https://www.reuters.com/world/chinas-top-diplomat-expects-ne...
> I found that the more I worked with [the chromosomes] the bigger and bigger [they] got, and when I was really working with them I wasn’t outside, I was down there. I was part of the system. I was right down there with them, and everything got big. I even was able to see the internal parts of the chromosomes—actually everything was there. It surprised me because I actually felt as if I were right down there and these were my friends.

Sounds remarkably similar to controversial Canadian pyschologist Jordan Peterson talking to Richard Dawkins about how a mushroom trip allowed him to experience DNA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbGoUwmqIEQ&t=2473s
They don’t have support for putting the cpu to sleep yet. A recent update switches it to its lowest frequency when the lid is closed but it’s still not off like with macOS. It sounds like they are pretty close to having it sorted though.
> Tail recursion is clearer and easier to reason about than loops

tail recursion is a complex and subtle expression of control flow that requires substantial background knowledge to be able to even understand, much less reason about based on code on a page

for loops are immediately intuitive to anyone, even without any programming training

no idea how you can come to this conclusion. just ain't so
How about 70x smaller?

cd gnupg-2.4.0; find . -name '.c' | xargs wc -l

350949 total

cd ../age; find . -name '.go' | xargs wc -l

5089 total

There are all kinds of differences between C and Go code, and it's also not fair to compare newer and older projects. But the reality is that I can take an afternoon stroll through Age and see pretty quickly what it is doing and how. As an aside, the very thing I find useful about Monocypher. Hat tips to Loup and Filippo on the way out.
Think I've generally been 19 since the age of 19. Mostly to do with energy and uncertainty about life direction that has nothing to do with sexuality, but most friends my age have kids...

In my earlier teens I might have been able to sound like a young adult talking about something like politics, but if anything I was all the more early teenager in terms of uncertainty over sexuality and how people would react.
You are making the exact blinkered US-centric assumptions I'm poking fun at. US companies may be duty bound to put increasing owner value above other considerations, but fortunately out here in most of the world, your law does not apply to us, and our laws are not modelled on yours.

I can assure you, for example, that in many nations companies can legally have many reasons for choosing not to export a product to a specific country that don't make any reference to profit. Again: all you know is your laws. Your laws are not our laws. It's a big world out here, not encompassed by the mores of the nation you just happen to come from.
I like how the typical JS-library-style README is put separately in a 'Pitch' section.
If we're posting 2D fluid sims that we like, I've always loved this one -- http://haxiomic.github.io/GPU-Fluid-Experiments/html5/?q=Ult...
Yes, I mentioned the AD header. However, I stand by my statement that ssh(1) cannot confirm whether the answer was actually validated because an MITM could have set that flag.

EDIT: I meant for this to be a reply to my sibling comment.
Not sure what you mean but it seems par for the course to me.
All threads need at least one irrelevant pet peeve-aside.
There is way to actually quantify such estimates. Any numbers would just be made up. A qualitative confidence rating like "low" really is the best way to convey intelligence information to policy makers.
See also:

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fviro.2022.8348...
A censor would remove the offending books from circulation. No one is burning the old books. The original book will continue to be found in used book stores, church rummage sales, parents end tables, and so on for years and years to come. Scans are certainly available online at the various pirate sites, so likely available for my lifetime at least.

Please explain how releasing an edited, updated version of a book that is more marketable in today’s world is censorship when the original works are fully available.
Everybody remembers it. Some try to crimestop it, but everybody knows it happened. The right thing would be to admit the screw up, apologize to people who were unjustifiably accused and suppressed, and try to do better next time. But I don't see much readiness to do this, unfortunately.
What makes a meme glyph politically correct and why are they in unicode?
Prior discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34916887
It's vitally important that people get skills and get educated. Just not vitally important enough for any employer, government or other beneficiary to spend even £1 on it...
If USA is engaged in a behavior that lead to a global pandemic, we have to know everything about what they were doing so that we can stop this from ever happening again. Who gives a crap about thawed relations after the extraordinary amount of damage this pandemic has done to the world

The money for WIV risky reasearch mostly came from the USA.
Here's a 2015 paper on successful gain of function work done at the University of North Carolina under the leadership of Ralph Baric. The work involved characterizing a synthetically constructed chimeric virus comprising a SARS-CoV backbone and a bat SARS virus spike.

It received special permission to continue despite a prohibition on gain-of-function research (Refer to the section: Biosafety and Security).[0]

Quoting:

Here we examine the disease potential of a SARS-like virus, SHC014-CoV, which is currently circulating in Chinese horseshoe bat populations1. Using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system2, we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone.

And from the footnote describing author contributions:

[SHI Zhengli] provided SHC014 spike sequences and plasmids

As everyone knows by now, Shi is the director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.[1]

It's pretty clear that Shi subsequently continued that gain-of-function work at Wuhan.

My question is, what is the correlation between the spike sequence Shi supplied
for the 2015 paper and that of the early variants of SARS-CoV-2?

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4797993/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shi_Zhengli

There is also a 2013 paper, written by Peter Dazak and Shi Zhengli, "Isolation and characterization of a bat SARS-like coronavirus that uses the ACE2 receptor".[2] Peter Daszak has been centrally involved in the US funding of the Wuhan Institute, in his capacity as president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York.[3]

[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24172901/

[3] https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-th...