Google results will also rank these “high quality” sites above a self hosted domain. To the point where even a direct string search on an indexed page will never return on Google. Kagi and Brave search do a better job here if you’re looking for content on someone’s self hosted blog.
I believe DARPA is a national treasure, and has driven a ton of otherwise neglected innovation, but let's not overstate their contribution to Moderna. For exsmple, AstraZeneca did a deal with Moderna including a $240MM upfront to another $180MM for potential milestones six months before the DARPA money. That is all on top of a pile of venture money and other corporate deals over those few years. The value of the DARPA $25MM wasn't the money per se, it was the incentive for Moderna to keep a toe in infectious disease, which was a hobby for them (and the industry) at best before COVID. I believe the platform would have been established with or without the DARPA money.
>For exsmple, AstraZeneca did a deal with Moderna including a $240MM upfront to another $180MM for potential milestones six months before the DARPA money.
This is called "biobucks" in the industry. There's an incentive to close big deals for management and business types in biotech, so they love to craft these large headlines to drop it on their resume and grift at another big pharma.
I'd be surprised if they ever received the $180MM, although $240MM upfront is really impressive.
I think "grift" is a bit cynical. I agree the 'biobucks' concept largely exits, but it also good deal-making. A huge upfront is 100% risk on the buyer. Paying out incrementally for accomplishments is common and good business sense risk-sharing and should happen in almost any industry.
The larger point is that Moderna was flush with cash for years before COVID, and the DARPA money wasn't that 'crazy' of an investment, or essential to Moderna's progress.
Apparently yes. Visa/MasterCard pressure Patreon to drop users with views they don’t approve of. Most recently alt-right users. I think it’s important to protect free speech, especially the kind I don’t agree with.
I don’t care that much about Patreon censoring the right, because there are many alternatives to take payments online. There are none however to visa/mastercard. It’s a cartel, where the choice is not even made by a customer (it is made by your bank who won’t even ask you), and there is no real alternative. I am pro-free markets but when that happens, I am actually in favor of regulations hitting these two hard, rather than going after google.
> I don’t care that much about Patreon censoring the right, because there are many alternatives to take payments online. There are none however to visa/mastercard.
This is where you're wrong. If a payment processor doesn't like someone, they'll just threaten a platform after platform wherever you pop up. Block whoever we don't like or you won't be able to process payments.
Case in point: Sargon of Akkad. I'm not going to take any stand in this controversy because I don't know the backstory, however as soon as he switched from Patreon to SubscribeStar, PayPal went after SubscribeStar. I'm assuming they've said no when asked to block Sargon, because you can no longer cash out via PayPal. It wasn't Patreon that was after him, it was PayPal.
Baloney. He's claims to not be alt right despite having identical views on most topics. It's about as convincing as when the KKK says they aren't racist, they just love white people.
> He's claims to not be alt right despite having identical views on most topics
He does cite specific differences from the Alt-Right, e.g., he views as excessively collectivist; he hates most of the things they hate, which makes the difference largely academic to a lot of people outside of the broader far right.
He was fighting against alt righters that had targeted him for months in the clip he got banned for where he called them out on their bigoted opinions and poor behavior, and is a known target of theirs. To say he is alt right is unreasonable and incorrect, although for some he is certainly divisive.
One of the odd things about the clip he got banned for, was that the most likely way it could have come to the attention of Patreon, was for the Alt-Right to have submitted it. Basically, it looks like Patreon was doing the bidding of the Alt-Right by doing what's politically convenient for the far left.
To say he is alt right is unreasonable and incorrect, although for some he is certainly divisive.
That's basically the same kind of tactics religious fundamentalists tried to pull in shaming homosexuals way back when. That sort of social manipulation through dishonest labeling, that spirit of squashing dissent -- it's the same kind of tribalist petty evil practiced by bigots back in the day. People who know better need to stand up and call it out.
You seem correct in the observations that the far right and left believe in the same worldview with opposite arrows, seeking to oppress any dissent to this worldview through fake outrage. Both share the worldview that the superior whites need to either help or rule, depending on which fringe we are talking with. Both unfounded beliefs as there are bigger variance within than between identity politics groups.
This is Horseshoe Theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory). Commentators from both sides will vehemently defend their position and claim it to be nothing like the other side. From the reasonable person's perspective (more towards centre), both extremes are authoritarian, and their similarities are more striking than their differences.
It is not a horseshoe, as it is not a continuum. Far-right is pre-modern and far-left is post-modern, and both have a distinctly different view in opposition to the modern enlightenment project. However, the current dominant ideologies on the fringes seem to share some important core tenets and a tendency towards tyranny.
Btw, the article you link seem to argue that there is a historic parallel to this argument. However, post-modernist is a much newer concept and ideology than the historic events listed in it.
Sargon of Akkad is highly critical of the Alt-Right. He describes himself as a "classical British liberal." However, since he also criticizes the far left, the far left tars him as Alt-Right, which I find to be an authoritarian and highly dishonest tactic. Basically, it's a tactic to get everyone to shut-up and put-up through intimidation, brooking no dissent from their own side. That's not how liberals should be engaging and searching for the truth. That's basically how George W. Bush was acting when he was selling the WMD narrative.
> He describes himself as a "classical British liberal”
“Classical liberal”, with or without “British”, is a standard self-identification for modern conservatives, especially right-libertarians; a very wide portion of the political spectrum—reaching pretty far both left and right and everywhere in between—in the modern West, especially the Anglo-American subset, has or claims roots in 18th century British liberal thought.
> However, since he also criticizes the far left, the far left tars him as Alt-Right,
Lots of people criticize the far left without being labelled Alt-Right; OTOH, he does seem to be from a space slightly more libertarian though equally far right and equally, or nearly so, xenophobic on most social axes to the Alt-Right. So there is a real, if perhaps exquisitely fine, distinction there.
That's more of that dishonest narrative/tarring. The man's not even white, IIRC. He's part middle eastern in descent. "Xenophobic" is the label used by the far left to tar anyone who believes in stricter border policies. He's also highly critical of all groups he perceives as using Identity Politics, which in present day includes both the far left and far right of the political spectrum. Both the far left and the far right target him, the far left doing it by using the "Alt-Right" mislabeling, with the far right going along with it for trolling purposes.
So there is a real, if perhaps exquisitely fine, distinction there.
In 2018, this is called an "exquisitely fine, distinction" where in years past, he would just have been called center-left.
He seems to think he is, since part of his criticism of the Alt-Right was that they weren't sufficiently nice to him personally, violating the maxim that “White people are meant to be polite and respectful to one another” (he later claimed this was a criticism of them violating their own standards, but whoever the standard is attributed to his invocation of it only makes sense if he believes he is White.)
> "Xenophobic" is the label used by the far left to tar anyone who believes in stricter border policies.
That may be how some subset of the far left uses it, but it is nevertheless a word with actual meaning, that applies to Sargon, and I'm not a member of the far left.
> in years past, he would just have been called center-left.
Which years past? Maybe the 19th Century. Not anytime in living memory.
That's not how he identifies, though he doesn't think identity should be an issue and that people should be judged by the content of their character.
violating the maxim that “White people are meant to be polite and respectful to one another”
Again, trolling white supremacists by throwing their own broken beliefs (and inability to live up to even those broken ones) back in their face.
I'm not a member of the far left.
Really?
> in years past, he would just have been called center-left.
Which years past? Maybe the 19th Century. Not anytime in living memory.
In my living memory, certainly. Someone being against identity politics, for strict border controls, and being for "equality of opportunity" but opposing "equality of outcome" is a perfectly reasonable liberal position to me, and could have been claimed as such with no comment in the 80's, 90's, and 2000's. It's a dishonest far left narrative to try and label those as "conservative" or even "Alt Right."
Would you please stop it with the ideological comments on Hacker News? After a brief respite, you've reverted back to way overdoing it. That is why we rate limited your account in the first place.
Sargon long self-identified as a liberal. For a long time, he ended up right where the UK Green party was on the Political Compass test, and also matched me pretty spot on. (I'm a child of immigrants, non-white, and a lifelong liberal.) He's moved a bit to the right, but could be rightly called a "centrist."
There's a dishonest tactic of tarring at play here.
Is it really 'dishonest tarring' to point out how silly it is to point out how he criticizes the Alt-Right and White Nationalists, when the method he uses to criticize them is to tell them they act like n * * * ers?
IIRC, he used that word specifically because he knew they were racists, so he deliberatley used a slur he knew they'd hate. It'd be like him referring to communists as capitalist pigs. He may not have a problem with capitalism, but he's using an anti-capitalist insult to drive home the point that they are acting no better than the people they hate.
Is it really 'dishonest tarring' to point out how silly it is to point out how he criticizes the Alt-Right and White Nationalists, when the method he uses to criticize them is to tell them they act like n... ers?
No. What's dishonest is to call people like Sargon of Akkad, Tim Pool, Sam Harris, Dave Rubin, or Steven Pinker "Alt Right" in an attempt to silence them purely by association. All of those people oppose the alt right! Really, no one should be getting away with those cheesy 80's Moral Majority tactics. If just using the n-word makes one alt right, then my creole ex-girlfriend's transvestite creole musician brother is "Alt Right" -- NOT!
The more obviously objectionable thing with Sargon, from Patreon’s POV, is probably that he’s a Gamergater, if we’re talking about controversies of the past five years.
Alt right is neo nazis and white nationalists. Good to know this guy is alt right. Need to stay away from them! It’s so strange that banning of Neo nazis (as you describe him) is controversial!
The guy spends considerable time and effort criticizing and debating the Alt Right, neo nazis, and white nationalists.
It’s so strange that banning of Neo nazis (as you describe him) is controversial!
It's controversial, because many people are being labeled thusly as a dishonest authoritarian intimidation tactic. Tim Pool, who's non-white, a lifelong liberal, and left leaning, is another alternative journalist who is similarly -- and dishonestly, inaccurately -- tarred.
It's controversial, because there are those of us in the liberal camp seeing such dishonest and authoritarian tactics used to silence dissent from within the left. That's not how democratic institutions and organizations who supposedly care about truth are supposed to act.
Yeah the lack of acoustic treatment is a running thing I see. A few absorbing panels at primary reflection points coupled with diffusers should be the next upgrade on a midrange system. Bass traps as well depending on your sub and music.
Agree. I have been using Postgres and Oracle in production since ~2000 (oracle 8i). Postgres is an amazing project but the oracle core database has billions of R&D dollars. Don't confuse the oracle core database with the awful applications they hang off of it. Oracle will still destroy pg for most OLAP workloads, now you have to decide if the insane licencing cost is worth it.
Also just want to add an oracle developers post that I find hilarious...
I disagree. Most of the time, I find a debugger just slows me down. It's super helpful in some cases, but good logs can pinpoint problems far before a debugger can. Also, building in debug mode can change everything, so you may not even catch your bug, especially if it's concurrent in nature.
This idea that debugging with print statements is superior to using a debugger is simply false. Learn to use the debugger for your platform it will pay huge dividends throughout your career.
I regularly see pais+ of println debuggers debate and speculate while the guy with the debugger drills straight down to the issue, and fixes it.
I think it is a fallacy to choose either printing or debugging. I forgot where I read this, but the two techniques are fundamentally different. A debugger lets you stop execution and examine data structures at one point in time. Printing lets you accumulate a log of one particular data structure over a span of time. I think these techniques are complementary and have different effectiveness on different problems.
Yep. They call it “tracing” in debugging and a good debugger will be able to directly catch and log the values of any variable at a particular line of code.
By using logging instead you’re reimplementing years of good work done by engineers before you.
1st you have to add the useless print statements and after decades of programming a debugger is vastly superios in terms of 'debugging' when compared to printing. (Back in time basic had no debugger even)
Also printing is utterly useless for high concurrent code, as printing alters memory visibility, usually adds global sync, etc..
This would depend on the language/compiler/linker - take Java (which the article is about). Attaching debugger does nothing prior to adding a breakpoint.
The breakpoint would cause the method to be deoptimized, executed in the interpreter. Removing the breakpoint would allow the method to be optimized again.
Now obviously during stepping in, the thread would be blocked and not highly concurrent. However print statements just bare the concurrency.
I think there are two use cases here, I was referring to debugging during development and a lot of replies are regarding troubleshooting an active prod system.
Of course we all hope for well thought out logging to troubleshoot issues we're seeing in prod.
I'm referencing an pattern I see with junior devs who simply use "printf debugging" in development instead of learning to use a debugger properly, even with distributed systems.
If I have easy access to a debugger. It’s extra work to hook things up to a debugger, and there are certain restrictions that may apply (attach too late if process launch is not under our control, program may behave differently, etc.). If I do have access to a debugger, often I will just do “printf debugging” there by setting a breakpoint and adding an action to “p someVariable; c”. Usually I treat my debugger a sort of IPython for statically compiled languages, to mess around with and inspect values as programs are executing.
Again, attaching a debugger is occasionally not helpful–for example, if you're trying to figure out why your program isn't loading certain plugins at launch, you trying to attach the debugger may happen after this step occurs. So you don't get to debug this process.
Or if an issue happens in your staging environment but not locally. That happened to me just yesterday, and a simple print statement gave me the information I needed to resolve the issue.
I probably could have attached a remote debugger, and executed the relevant function a few times until my request got routed to the right process in the cluster, but that honestly would have taken me more time than just committing the print statement and letting CI take it away.
Exactly, and in the replies it is really obvious what the debate is really colored by.
In many cases there is no debugger available for someone's favorite platform. And so they "hate debugging". Go programmers, javascript people (where you can't do client->server debugging, but really, really have to), ...
How many Java programmers don't use debuggers ? How many C# developers ? Those languages have excellent debuggers. Python, C/C++, ... decent at best. Go/Javascript/... dismal debugging support.
Fair enough, but attaching multiple debuggers across several interacting components with conditional breaks gets me there faster than incrementally inserting progressively more print statements, in a dev environment. Proper logging is a given doping out problems in a production system to then verify and correct in dev.
Sometimes having a debugger on prod is the right answer.
"The Remote Agent software, running on a custom port of Harlequin Common Lisp, flew aboard Deep Space 1 (DS1), the first mission of NASA's New Millennium program. Remote
Agent controlled DS1 for two days in May of 1999. During that time we were able to debug and fix a race condition that had not shown up during ground testing. (Debugging a
program running on a $100M piece of hardware that is 100 million miles away is an interesting experience. Having a read-eval-print loop running on the spacecraft proved
invaluable in finding and fixing the problem. The story of the Remote Agent bug is an interesting one in and of itself.)
"The Remote Agent was subsequently named "NASA Software of the Year"."
No one said otherwise, and the comment you replied to specifies "in a dev environment". The language you are using is unnecessarily combative: this is likely to inhibit the adoption of your ideas.
