someuser54541

I'm fairly confident posts like these are artificially weighted to fall off the front page..that seems to happen when a COVID related post gets popular on HN. This post has more points and comments than the majority of stuff on the front page but it's currently on page 3.

I've casually noticed something similar over the past ~18 months with posts related to COVID.

Isn't Discord the new platform? I used IRC quite extensively for asking development related questions, but after the freenode fiasco it seemed Discord became the best place to get development questions answered for a large variety of languages and frameworks.

I did basically that. It was a natural language processing tool for asking questions about securities. There didn't seem to be much interest.

What about $18.2 million for 260 tents? That's ~$5,000 a month per tent, which is more than I paid for my apartment in downtown SF.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/S-F-officials-w...

It's just plain corruption, and it won't stop until voters make it stop.

> My opinion is we are not capable of developing in a lab a virus that is so transmissible and survivable in human species only. I think the complexity of the virus machinery and its interactions inside of our bodies and immune system is beyond astronomical in complexity. It's laughable to suggest that we are so intelligent as to invent a better version of the machinery that is hypothesized as the very machinery responsible for creation of multi cellular life itself.

The very first synthetic virus created in 2002 and was modeled after polio, which is fairly transmissible and affects humans. That virus was made 20 years ago; synthetic biology has come a very long way since then.

Does that fact alter your opinion?

> My Occam's razor says that every other virus has a natural origin, why wouldnt this one too?

That's simply not true. There's an entire branch of virology dedicated to synthetic viruses; the first was made over 20 years ago.

Genuinely surprises me that there are people out there who think or have been persuaded the virus is of natural origin. The lab right next to the market was literally studying and experimenting with the exact same type of virus. How can a someone think that that's just a coincidence?

Add that to the fact that the funding for that research lab was approved by the same guy who become the de facto thought leader on the virus in the U.S., AND funded by the foundation of one of the most recognizable American billionaires. To put the cherry on top, even suggesting a synthetic origin resulted in bans on most social platforms!

This stuff is common sense...Occam's razor comes to mind. No wonder there were so many "conspiracy theories".

Do you keep in apartment in the United States? I'm curious about how you handle residency/address stuff. My employer, for example, requires all employees to have a U.S. address on file.

Keeping an apartment while traveling seems like an expensive idea.

Very cool! Are you working for a U.S. company?

I'd love to travel and work but I work for a U.S. employer and need to keep a U.S. address, which is an expensive requirement if one doesn't already own property!

In what regard?

> Of course, if you're buying on Amazon, who knows.. but you are very, very unlikely to have this problem with people who make pottery for a living (like local artists, or reputable Etsy shops)..

Purchasing decisions by buyers are probably not based on whether or not the seller produces pottery for a living. I'd wager price, convenience (fast shipping, etc.), size, and design matter far more to a buyer.

Here's how the mugs were selected:

> The five mugs chosen for this study were selected because they were found to contain lead in a screening-level assessment. Specifically, 24 mugs from the authors’ office were tested using an Olympus Innov-X Delta handheld X-Ray fluorescent (XRF) analyzer. Each mug was measured once with the XRF gun at its highest sensitivity setting, which required the tester to hold the analyzer over the mug for 45 s. The three mugs with the highest resulting lead concentrations (1,223 to 7,034 mg/kg) were selected for the present study. These mugs each had decorative elements and will be referred to by their predominant colors: Green Decorative, Yellow Decorative, and Red Decorative. In addition, two representative mugs were selected from the batch of office mugs baring the authors' company’s logo. These will be referred to as Black Logo1 and Black Logo2. All five mugs selected were in active use in the authors’ San Francisco, California, office environment, and were typically washed daily in an automatic dish washer. Four of the five mugs were purchased in the U.S., and one was purchased in Europe (Red Decorative). The mugs all appeared to be in good condition, with no obvious signs of damage or wear.

The types of mugs found in a standard office probably match the types of mugs many people have in their homes. Regardless, lots of coffee is regularly consumed in an office environment.

I believe the results of this study are a little more relevant than your comment suggests.

If inflation is at %6-%7 and mortgage rates are at ~3%, aren't people literally getting paid to borrow money?

Someone please correct me if I am wrong.

Is there any precedence that might give the state the authority to close a business, indefinitely, if the business has not broken any laws?

> i have an honest question here

I think you may have forgotten the question.

I've lived in San Francisco for a couple of years now, and I'll tell you why I have no current plans to leave: the startup ecosystem.

When I moved to San Francisco, my goal was (and still is) to move into entrepreneurship. Some people working in tech might move away, but the startup community, venture community, and general notion of SF being a "startup capital" seems like it's going to be more or less unaffected by the pandemic.

This is what's confusing me about this chain of comments. All the big banks i'm aware of have APIs (Wells, Capital One, etc.). Most of the "neobanks" do as well (Monzo, Mercury, etc.)

If that's not enough, you can just use Plaid. Am I missing something here?

> Have you ever had to debug a "blackbox" before, Application code or hardware that you had really nothing to do with and had to figure out how in the hell it works?

I suppose so, yes, but probably not to the extent required in some of these challenges.

I just read through https://cybersecurity.att.com/blogs/security-essentials/capt... and some of the accompanying write ups[0] on Github which was very insightful.

[0]: https://github.com/1337pwnie/ctf-writeups/tree/master/2017/U...

No, I haven't.

My work focuses primarily on consumer application development, however cybersecurity and CTF challenges like this have always been an interest.

What specific technical skills are required to successfully complete challenges like this?

> Having been working on open banking for the past 12 months

What are you working on?

Slack?

I'm curious, is this actually enforced? If so, how? It seems like it would be trivial to attend with a pre-built project if one were so inclined.