rualca

For anyone who really cares about pursuit of truth or the scientific process (and how it tends to be ignored even by science institutions) this would actually be earth-shattering.

I wonder how much is this due to this noble pursuit of truth and the scientific process, and how much is due to having an axe to grind and desperately seeking any scapegoat to be sacrificed in the altar of self-righteousness.

Even your justification reeks of "you're with us or against us" mob mentality.

My point is that actors can and do change over time.

Just because you trust who is in charge today that does not mean that said person/organization will continue indefinitely as-is.

So would not being able to get fuel because there isn't enough of it because no one allowed supply and demand to work.

The UK has strict rules on how much petrol/gas anyone can carry. Consequently this type of law works as an automatic rationing.

https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/uk-news/law-rul...

So yes, "allowing supply and demand to work" is a stupid idea that patently does not work at all, as exemplified by the ridiculous toilet paper shortage of 2020.

You don't get it. just because tge grant was denied, does not mean the work was not done. The fact it was even written at all is evidence someone thought it'd work.

You should really pay attention to what you're claiming, specially as there is absolutely zero substance or evidence supporting your claim. Your accusation boils down to the same exact witch hunt logic that led angry mobs to burn innocent people at the stake: claim you believe someone happened without zero evidence at all, proceed to allege someone of having the means to do it, from a massive logical leap start to accuse someone who you alleged is capable of something of actually doing it in spite, again, of having zero evidence at all, and proceed to throw that victim to the fire.

I suppose our witch hunting days are behind us, but you're dragging them back to the present by repeating the same logical mistakes and in the process throw innocents into the fire.

Do the world a favor and cut out all the baseless accusations and unsubstantiated claims. It's one thing to argue that some bits should be investigated, but it's an entirely different thing to screw up logical and rational thinking so badly to the point that you make the same completely baseless and unsubstantiated claims you're making.

It's not a "weasel word", "Scientific theories placing a low enough probability (...)

If that was the case then go ahead and just show the theory.

Just provide a single evidence that supports said claim. Any at all.

Don't just handwave after claiming something is impossible, otherwise you're just intentionally spreading lies and misinformation.

This is honestly the most damning part of evidence.

What evidence? There was a grant proposal, and the proposal was rejected. Why do you feel that the fact that the rejected proposal referred to North Carolina is supposed to be "damning" at all, or even remotely relevant?

China would have strong motivation to have SARS related research considering SARS originates in their country.

It has. They fund their own lab at Wuhan. Why is this damning in light of a failed grant proposal that never went off the ground?

You cut off the critical part of the parent's comment: "(or well, with such a low chance it may as well be)".

No, I left out the weasel words from the original claim.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word

Either GP's claim is factual and indeed he is aware of proof of impossibility, or he is not and he's just knowingly spreading disinformation.

If you're objecting to the idea that well-accepted scientific theories (...)

I object to the idea of random people on the internet knowingly spreading disinformation with baseless claims that fly on the face of critical thinking, and then resorting to vague appeals to authority, inversions of the burden of truth, and outright bullying to force-fed their disinformation.

If there is any proof whatsoever supporting the claim that such thing is impossible then just support your claim and present the evidence or source. Don't expect everyone to just take your word for it, specially after you tried desperately to invert the burden of proof.

There’s also evidence it cannot possibly (...) have occured naturally.

I feel this claim is simply not believable nor possible to take at face value, given that in order for a proof of impossibility to even be considered you need supporting evidence and a falsifiable model, which you have none.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_impossibility

Given this, do you have any reference that supports your assertion? I'd like to hear your rationale to claim that something like this is outright impossible.

My favorite is to implement a tarpit while moving the ssh port.

For those who, like me, are unfamiliar with the concept of a SSH tarpit, it's a technique consisting of inserting delays into SSH connection attempts.

Old HN discussion on Endlessh:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24491453

It's well-known that there has been high-risk coronavirus research across the globe.

It's the first time I heard of anything of the sort.

Do you have any reference pointing out, or is this just Facebook hearsay?

Daczak serves on the WHO team to investigate the virus origins (...)

As a reference never hurts, specially in a topic prone to disinformation, here's a link to the WHO's page on its official list of members of their "Global Study of the Origins of SARS-COV2".

Dr. Peter Daszak, Ph.D (EcoHealth Alliance, USA) is listed as a member.

https://www.who.int/health-topics/coronavirus/origins-of-the...

When speed mattes, people use libraries that are considerably faster than plain python.

This.

The general guideline has always been that Python is ideal for glue code and non-performance-critical code, and when performance became an issue then Python code would simply be used as glue code to invoke specialized libraries. Perhaps the most popular example of this approach is bumpy, which uses BLAS and LAPACK internally to handle linear algebra stuff.

This Nim advertisement sounds awfully desperate with the way it resorts to what feels like a poorly assembled strawman, while giving absolutely nothing in return.

It may seem like a design mistake at first glance but it’s surprisingly useful. > It’s intent is to allow a given codebase to maintain a consistent style (eg camel vs snake) even when making use of upstream libraries that use different styles.

That doesn't sound right at all. It sounds like a design choice aimed at achieving the exact opposite: inconsistency without any positive tradeoff in return.

Not including the first letter avoids most of the annoyance of wantonly mixing all cap constants or lower case and linters avoid teams mismatching internal styles.

That does not sound right at all. At most, it sounds like the compiler does not throw errors when stumbling on what would otherwise be syntax errors, but you still have all the mismatches in internal styles and linters complaining about code and teams wasting time with internal piss matches, and more importantly a way to foster completely futile nitpicking discussions within a language community.

1. UBI might increase people's willingness to pay for goods in general, and the prices of goods that are most strongly driven by willingness to pay would rise.

It's reasonable to assume that UBI would be linked with an increase in the demand for some goods and services, but there is no indication that this would reflect in a proportional increase in prices. For example, those who live in poverty already tend to purchase substitute goods due to lower price, which is reflected in some aspects such as the link between poverty and malnutrition. In this scenario it's likely that the increase in purchasing power from UBI would actually cause a shift in the market so that it brings down the demand for said substitute goods and instead spread the newly-found demand through other products.

The same scenario also applies to other markets, such as housing. If UBI grants you a little bit of economic freedom so that you are no longer tied to a specific job or place of residence or even access to public transportation, you can also consider moving to a better/cheaper place somewhere else without your livelihood being a constraint.

Keep in mind that one of the enablers of living frugally/off-the-grif is ensuring that you secure your financial needs. Once people are no longer forced to endure a horrible job to make ends meet, they start to make changes to improve their lives.

Food and clothing depend on other things (cost of employees, equipment, materials, etc.) When the costs of those things rise, the cost of food and clothing will have to rise.

Not really. You're pointing to production costs, but production costs just define the price's lower bound, not the price itself.

Price depends solely on willingness to pay and pricing strategy, which is higher than the production cost when the product/service is not subsidized or a loss leader.

The problem of surveillance isn't a problem at all if you could trust every actor to do things right, it's just that you can't.

I disagree. The problem of surveillance still stands even if you trust each and every single actor directly or indirectly involved in it. The critical aspect is that surveillance is made possible through significant investments in infrastructure, and infrastructure outlives actors and governments and regimes. Once you have the infrastructure in place, all it takes is a bad actor to weaponized it and use it to oppress and control you.

This is an article about the iPhone 13 Pro camera. If you can afford it (...)

Some people who purchase iPhones can't really afford them in the sense of having hundreds of dollars of disposable income, and either save their asses off to treat themselves or take loans.

Apple controls a 20% market share of the smartphone market. Do you really think 20% of the whole world can simply spend $1k without batting an eye?

Even in the US close to 40% of it's population cannot afford an emergency expense of up to $1k, and the US is one of the nations leading in purchasing power.

There is more to life than well-paying STEM jobs in the US.

Did anyone expect anything else? It was either extinction of the virus (which was unrealistic once it was out of China) or it evolving into a sort of cold with lots of casualties on the way there (the better adapted a disease is to their host, the better the survival rate of the host usually is).

The "evolve into a cold" hypothesis was more wishful thinking than a sure thing (i.e., pretending the problem would magically go away), which thankly was made possible with the quick turnaround time of the current batch of vaccines.

However, not only are there serious long-lasting consequences from getting Covid but it is also possible to be reinfected with more serious consequences.

Finally, there was a third scenario which I feel people are glancing over: the inception of new strains that pose bigger health risks. The Delta variant popped up from nowhere, spread like wildfire, and is deadlier. In a scenario where vaccines do not ensure immunity and where restrictions are being lifted then this development needs to be on the table because arguably we are already living it.

Paywalled.

I wouldn't call Lightroom CC "expensive"...it's less than a Netflix subscription.

The site states $126/year.

I guess everything is relative nonetheless.

Right, $126/year might not sound much for someone holding a STEM job in the US, but unfortunately a lot of people live well below that comfort level.

The only currency that has stood the test of time is gold, a private currency.

I'm curious about what leads you to claim that gold is "a private currency". Can you elaborate on the rationale behind your claim?

That's true, but at this point we should clarify what we mean by microservices. By "microservices", I mean "you end up with more services than engineers".

That's not what "microservices" is.

If you are not familiar with the concept then you should refrain from post personal assertions on guidelines or best practices.

Most companies won't see the kind of scale Facebook/Google/etc sees, not because they won't have that much clients, but also because there's a good chance that they don't need all clients in the same system.

I feel this line of argument is disingenuous and is based on a mix of strong personal opinions and very limited to non-existent insight onto which problems other orgs experience.

For starters, the main selling point of microscopes is not performance. It is organizational advantages. It is a way to draw clear and crisp lines regarding ownership and ops. Small teams are able to design and deploy and run and troubleshoot small bits of a large machine without wasting time in back-and-forths with other teams, and they can put in place safeguards so that if other teams screw up then their blast radius is limited.

But regarding performance, let's not fool ourselves into believing that there's always a fatter network pipe and a beefier box to deploy to. Often there is, but often there simply isn't. Once you are forced to deploy your monolith into multiple instances, most of the criticism directed at microservices is rendered moot. Also, beefier boxes are far more expensive to operate, so let's not pretend there are no costs.

Also, there's the reliability aspect. If you want to have a reliable service then you need redundancy, which means multiple deployments. Once you have to deal with load balancers serving traffic to multiple instances of your monolith, there is no longer a significant architectural and ops difference in whether you operate a monolith or shave a service or two out of it. Thus most of the criticism directed at microservices is rendered moot.

Lastly, some orgs are ok with serving users in a very limited geographical region. That's perfectly fine. Other orgs might have users in different parts of the globe. Do you expect them to tolerate latencies in the 200-500ms range routinely, or do you find acceptable to reel in those latencies back to the 50ms territory by deploying a part of the service closer?

I get the Monolith first principle, but you're fooling yourself if you believe that only FAANG-level companies can benefit from it.

Oh dear God...

WEBRING!

I haven't heard that in a while.

I'm starting to have flashbacks, hearing the sound of 56kb dialup modems...

It's hardly fair to go to a thread on an embedded JavaScript implementation to criticize JavaScript by focusing on the JavaScript ecosystem. It's up to you to decide which and how you use a third-party package. If you adopt a dependency that's so bloated that it drags in half of NPM's repository them the responsibility of your personal choices lies solely on you and on you alone. I mean, you can fall for that mistake with pretty much any stack or framework or programming language which supports modularization and provides a package manager. Why single out JavaScript?

There was absolutely nothing wrong with the "ugly" framework code, it was quite beautiful, well structured, configurable and fast.

I'm sure there is far more to the story than the new guys doing a poor job writig a replacement service.

For example, old code does add maintenance costs just by the fact that it's either tied to old frameworks or even OSes, either of which might not be maintained anymore. Also, I don't feel it's a honest argument to criticize java for the sake of being java. If there was ever a production-minded programming language and tech stack, that would undoubtedly be java.

I'm sure the guys who designed the replacement service would have a few choice words regarding the old service.

You don't usually see e.g. windowmakers or installers coming up with windows in the shapes of superellipses because square windows are already solved, or stoves coming with integrated fridges because "just an oven and a top" is already solved.

Well, actually you do. You'd be surprised. Let's ignore for now that there are different window makes and models. There has been a transition from custom-made windows to ready-made windows, whose production cost is higher but the total cost ends up being low because you can have a crew drop by in a construction site and get it done in a few minutes.

Then there's the current progresses in energy efficiency, and also fancy gizmos like actuators and sensors and all kinds of domotics.

Then there's security systems embedded into windows, which further adds sensors and networking and actuators.

You're now far beyond your mom and pop's windows.

And progress ain't done yet. We're starting to see self-dimming windows and also self-cleaning windows.

Does anyone know why this comment is being buried? It's clearly a good spirited joke.

I fail to see how that's whataboutism. I'm not trying to justify one form of plastic packaging with another. I'm merely questioning how much stuff actually leeches out and how it compares to how much leeches out during normal consumption.

It's textbook whataboutism, in the letter and in the spirit. The proposal consists of replacing plastic-based packaging with paper-based packaging for fruits and vegetables, which have a notoriously short shelf life. You, on the other hand, tried to divert attentions to "plastic wrapped foods that last for years", as if it was relevant or meaningful. That's a totally unrelated usecase, which has zero to do with the discussion.

If the company describes itself as "cool" because they have pool tables, that's a great thing. It's signal that thats what "cool" is to them.

No, not really. It just means that HR had a PR budget to sell themselves as cool, and they bought a game as a prop.

My point is that this blend of signaling is pure bait-and-switch. The mods operandi is that they sell this false idea that they are all about fun and games but in the end it's just a low-paying cubicle hellhole with crunch time as the baseline.