Hacker News Reader

Good idea. or have a dollar amount limit on the hardware

bigpumpkinon Neeva: Ad-free, subscription-based search engine launches

Feels laggy compared to google.

bigpumpkinon Controversial Alzheimer’s drug could cost US $334B–nearly half of DoD budget

And yet Biogen's stock is only $51B? Either the numbers are off or everyone should be buying it.

bigpumpkinon A coronavirus epidemic hit 20k years ago, new study finds

Maybe the virus was not a pandemic 20k years ago. Small tribes that carried genes that are resistant to the coronaviruses spread later on as they established larger communities/cities.

bigpumpkinon A coronavirus epidemic hit 20k years ago, new study finds

Look at the infection/death rate in Southeast Asia. It strongly suggests past community transmissions of past coronaviruses.

bigpumpkinon Scientist finds early virus sequences that had been mysteriously deleted

"Dr. Goldstein noted that the testing paper listed the individual mutations the Wuhan researchers found in their tests. Although the full sequences are no longer in the archive, the key information has been public for over a year, he said."

bigpumpkinon Apple Daily to shut in days unless government agrees to plea to unfreeze assets

Really? HKFP is still there.

bigpumpkinon Soviets Once Denied a Deadly Anthrax Lab Leak. U.S. Scientists Backed the Story

Aug. 5, 2019: "Deadly Germ Research Is Shut Down at Army Lab Over Safety Concerns" - NYTimes [1]

[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/05/health/germs-fort-detrick...

bigpumpkinon TikTok owner ByteDance sees its earnings double in 2020

you can click and hold on the screen to trigger a pop up menu to dislike a video that's not in your interest.

bigpumpkinon U.S. Antitrust Legislation Would Ban Apple from Pre-Installing Its Own Apps

Won't Apple just integrate the apps into the OS.

No app icon = no app

bigpumpkinon Three stealth fighter jets just scrambled over Hawaii, and no one will say why

China sees them

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3136078/chin...

bigpumpkinon NIH study offers new evidence of early SARS-CoV-2 infections in U.S.

The CDC’s Dr. Thornburg and Josh Denny, chief executive of the NIH’s All of Us program and an author of the latest study, both said they don’t plan to search blood samples earlier than December 2019, given how few they have found back then. “We’ve seen a very low rate of positivity in this time period,” [1]

[1]https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-virus-ranged-from-illi...

Why not sample earlier blood and see how far back COVID originated.

bigpumpkinon China has created a 'dystopian hellscape' in Xinjiang, Amnesty report says

Classic NYTimes taking quotes out of context. Note the reporter can't even quote full sentences but rather construct their own narrative with a very selective use of phrases in the Xi document.

Where in the document did Xi direct the Chinese State against Uighurs? Full paragraph quotes, please.

bigpumpkinon The lab-leak origin claim for Covid-19 is in the news, but it’s still fact-free

Dang, why is this flagged off the front page when articles favoring lab leaks are always kept on it?

bigpumpkinon The lab-leak origin claim for Covid-19 is in the news, but it’s still fact-free

This.

Oftentimes people are mad at the media too quickly dismissing the possibility last year rather than actively suggesting it was a lab leak.

bigpumpkinon Molecular biology clues portray SARS-CoV-2 as a lab manipulation of RaTG13

Correct me if I'm wrong. RaTG13's genome was published in 2020 after the pandemic started by Shi and the Wuhan Institute of technology.

Doesn't seem likely they'll voluntarily publish a paper on a virus they used as the backbone to manufacture SARS-CoV-2...

Even if it was a lab leak, it's unlikely RaTG13 was the progenitor.

bigpumpkinon [dead]

Amazingly, old news can be recycled by the NY Post and they can pretend it's breaking news and part of the "probe".

bigpumpkinon Egyptian Circumnavigation of Africa ~600 BC

With all these advantages, why did the mobile revolution happen with Apple instead of Microsoft?

bigpumpkinon Facebook, Twitter & Instagram can be banned in India tomorrow for non-compliance

Except the evidence that the virus came from a lab leak is provided by the American government, the arguments are constructed by Americans, and the news leaked and propagated by the American press and American social media networks.

The other side of the debate use the same American tools.

This is more a civil war in American discourse between the liberals and conservatives than anything else.

bigpumpkinon NAC Banned from Amazon, FDA Says It's Medication

I take a little NAC before a night of drinking. Too bad the FDA is doing this.

bigpumpkinon [dead]

When breaking news isn't enough, and you can't call it opinion, you rename it "Breaking Views"

Not one piece of reporting was done in the article, this indeed is suitable for the GPT-3 age.

bigpumpkinon More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins

Wuhan is, however, in the range of Horseshoe Bats. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_horseshoe_bat So people who suggest that it's far from Yunnan are missing the point.

bigpumpkinon More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins

In 2003, it was hypothesized that civets were the source. However, this was not conclusively proved until 2017.

bigpumpkinon China increases spending 500% to influence America

"from just over $10 million in 2016 to nearly $64 million last year"

Top sources:

CCTV America $50,244,312

Huawei Technologies $3,495,775

China Daily of Beijing, China $3,004,114

China-US Exchange Foundation $928,209

Fujian Jinhua Integrated Circuit Co $526,925

[1] https://www.opensecrets.org/fara/countries/223?cycle=

bigpumpkinon TSMC looks to double down on U.S. chip factories as talks in Europe falter

Currently, no carrier group is in the South China Sea [1]

[1] https://news.usni.org/category/fleet-tracker

bigpumpkinon TikTok launching jobs service for Gen Z

I find disfigured/ disabled people livestreaming to many people on Tiktok all the time in my feed.

bigpumpkinon The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

For SARS (2003) It took 3 years to find the intermediate host (civets). And 14 years (2017) to find the bat parent of the virus[1].

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

Guess who found the bat host? Shi Zhengli of the very WIV in question.

bigpumpkinon GPT Neo: open-source GPT model, with pretrained 1.3B & 2.7B weight models

perplexity score against a corpus such as wikipedia? Basically how well the model predicts the next word.

bigpumpkinon Is Consciousness Everywhere?

"For instance, with some effort I can notice that a white wall is made of millions of blinking colored neuropixels. "

This I cannot achieve unless I'm staring at a white computer screen up close.

bigpumpkinon The human brain grew as a result of the extinction of large animals: new paper

Alternatively, humans hunted the big games to death after acquiring big brains that enabled more cooperation when hunting. Curious if the decline in big game happened in places without humans.