3,470 karma · joined November 18, 2009
Bubble cursor:
https://codepen.io/anon/pen/bjwKdX
https://unlikely.ai/cryptic-crossword-genius-unlikely-ai-art... has a little more detail.
https://crosswordgenius.com/clue/who-may-get-drunk-with-real... example solution with anagram.
https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/1639
They're also looking at static analysis of the maximum stack depth which might help in some cases.
And a previous related article indicating the scale of these efforts:
https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202108/1231485.shtml
"According to the Shenzhen Cross-border E-commerce Association at least 50,000 Chinese merchant accounts had been affected by Amazon's move since May, and that Chinese cross-border e-commerce companies had suffered losses of more than 100 billion yuan ($15.4 billion)."
And previous discussion about the percentage of top sellers on Amazon from China (40%+):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23153043
Might be worth including some contact details in your public profile so people can reach out to you in future.
Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
At large scale climate change isn’t that complicated - sun hits earth, heats it up, some energy escapes. We can get a pretty good picture from models and the details just add to that.
https://www.maritime-executive.com/editorials/how-china-is-w...
Basically China is providing digital connectivity in Africa and will likely have some measure of surveillance capability connected with this, probably in collaboration with regional governments.
Perhaps I’ve misunderstood but you seem to be saying it’s a problem without any caveats regarding any potential benefits.
Artificial splicing is common, I agree, but we are talking a handful of mutations per paper rather than the billions of natural mutations that occur. I wasn’t arguing for frequency of mutations that follow the exact path of Covid 19 genetics, I would expect those to be very uncommon, but you only need one in a billion or more.
I've read the Yuri Deigin paper now. It touches on convergent evolution as a possible explanation for the existence of similar protein spike morphologies, but dismisses it without argument ("Talk about Intelligent Design!). It also seems to miss the key point of "computational analysis" when deciding exactly which viruses to synthesise.
The problem isn't synthesising a virus given its genome, it's choosing the genome of the virus to synthesise. As Yuri states, it took 30 days for a Swiss team to synthesise the virus given the genome. You just can't iterate this process very many times, and the chance of getting a virus that spreads effectively is not very high with each mutation (or recombination).
Gain of function research seems valuable precisely in the sense it is identifying the mechanisms that govern infectivity. We wouldn’t have this discussion on furin cleavage sites without it.
The most likely case if we accept the lab leak hypothesis is that there was a base virus that was modified, with a similar virus that had a slightly different spike protein. This then infected staff and from there entered society.
This gains plausibility from the fact that it wouldn’t be readily distinguishable from a natural virus, as it would just be a combination of the two genomes.
However this is exactly why we can’t say for certain either way whether the source is natural or not - they’d be indistinguishable genetically.
It is more likely on the face of it that evolutionary pressure on the virus to spread and the natural process of mutation and selection caused the mutations in question, simply because of the volume of natural mutations versus artificial mutations.
This is not a new issue. Here's a discussion on the subject:
There won’t be a scientific conclusion based on an analysis of what media leaked what when.
“As such, he appears almost more interested in eliminating the people who are suffering than the source of the suffering itself.” - this conclusion is unjustified by the article and seems unfair
https://www.theguardian.com/global/2021/may/07/funeral-grace...
The scientist provides a scientific explanation (“Recombination is naturally very, very frequent in these viruses, there are recombination breakpoints in the spike protein and these codons appear unusual exactly because we’ve not sampled enough.”).
If I'm right the reason it's not being analysed or investigated is that from a scientific perspective it's just not an interesting question, rather than for a deeper ideological reason as suggested in this article.
I drew the conclusion that this furin cleavage site theory wasn't actually convincing after a few days of wading through scientific literature, but as a non-expert I was pretty disappointed that there wasn't more accessible analysis of well-written arguments as presented in the article that would put it into a more objective perspective. It would have been great if that scientist they quote would have provided a more detailed rebuttal.
The problem is it actually isn't the job of scientists to dispel wrong or inaccurate information for the most part. They do detailed esoteric studies and write them up for specialists. It's nobody's job to rebut bad arguments, and that's the problem.
At the same time, China risks looking guilty because they are defensive and try to control the information. All this leaves this kind of article with a seemingly plausible scientific and ideological basis that is difficult for laymen and even scientific journalists to evaluate due to the complexity of the science involved, and not many scientists interested in spelling out why the reasoning might be flawed.
You also see in the quote from the article:
“Yes, but your wording makes this sound unlikely — viruses are specialists at unusual events,” is the riposte of David L. Robertson, a virologist at the University of Glasgow who regards lab escape as a conspiracy theory.