Hacker News: riyadparvez

Covid-19 Origins: Investigating a “Complex and Grave Situation” Inside Wuhan Lab

riyadparvez — Fri, 28 Oct 2022 19:06:01 +0000

Article URL: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/10/covid-origins-investigation-wuhan-lab

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33376024

Points: 13

# Comments: 4

New comment by riyadparvez in "Ask HN: Have tech salaries been stagnant for the past decade?"

riyadparvez — Thu, 15 Sep 2022 12:37:50 +0000

> My understanding is that it's dangerous and few want to do it.

Yeah this is the part everyone is ignoring in the conversation. Many highly compensated physical labor jobs are highly compensated because of the associated risk. While being a developer (with exceptions) doesn't expose you to any physical risk.

New comment by riyadparvez in "What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?"

riyadparvez — Sat, 25 Jun 2022 02:29:40 +0000

I've heard it from someone who was in China after the pandemic emerged. Apparently some Chinese people believe exactly that. Some of the lab animals were sold to the wet market. And that's how the virus jumped from animal to host. Although evidence is scant. Then again it's China.

New comment by riyadparvez in "Meta Scrutinizing Sheryl Sandberg’s Use of Facebook Resources over Several Years"

riyadparvez — Sat, 11 Jun 2022 01:18:26 +0000

> In my time at Amazon, I was actually trained and coached on removing myself from certain situations and not interfering or establishing certain relationships because it would help me ultimately do better whatever is right for the company.

Can you please elaborate on this with some concrete examples, if possible?

Mimetic Desire

riyadparvez — Tue, 07 Jun 2022 23:18:51 +0000

Article URL: https://lukeburgis.com/mimetic-desire/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31661237

Points: 25

# Comments: 8

New comment by riyadparvez in "AlloyDB for PostgreSQL under the hood: Columnar engine"

riyadparvez — Fri, 27 May 2022 00:07:27 +0000

Yes it seems to me they have taken the same approach as AWS Aurora. Use Postgres frontend and query parsing and replace the storage layer and query execution with their own.

New comment by riyadparvez in "Python 3.11 beta vs. 3.10 benchmark"

riyadparvez — Wed, 18 May 2022 14:49:39 +0000

Why would it decrease single thread performance? How is python different than other languages that support native full-fledged multi-threading, eg Java, Go, C#?

New comment by riyadparvez in "Python Language Summit: Python Without the GIL"

riyadparvez — Thu, 12 May 2022 02:34:10 +0000

I am curious what exactly is the reason GIL hasn't been removed in one of the most popular languages ever?

New comment by riyadparvez in "Datasette Lite: a server-side Python web application running in a browser"

riyadparvez — Wed, 04 May 2022 18:16:43 +0000

Hi Simon, thank you for the great work. Do you have any plan to support DuckDB in future?

New comment by riyadparvez in "Modern Pandas (Part 2): Method Chaining"

riyadparvez — Sun, 01 May 2022 15:51:55 +0000

The issue is there's a huge ecosystem developed on top of Pandas. So if it's different API, now you lose access to all the ecosystem.

New comment by riyadparvez in "Python’s “type hints” are a bit of a disappointment to me"

riyadparvez — Thu, 21 Apr 2022 21:22:52 +0000

There's also bear-type for runtime type checking: https://github.com/beartype/beartype.

New comment by riyadparvez in "Jack Dorsey’s $2.9M NFT dropped 99% in value"

riyadparvez — Mon, 18 Apr 2022 15:56:13 +0000

The only valid use for NFT I can think of is a pure vehicle for financial speculation. It's better people do wild speculation on NFTs than housing market.

New comment by riyadparvez in "Eden"

riyadparvez — Tue, 12 Apr 2022 20:29:59 +0000

Dan Luu wrote about monorepo. It's worth a read https://danluu.com/monorepo/

New comment by riyadparvez in "Get familiar with workspaces"

riyadparvez — Tue, 12 Apr 2022 00:41:24 +0000

This reminds me of Dan Luu post about outages and post-mortems [1]:

> For more on this, Ding Yuan et al. have a great paper and talk: Simple Testing Can Prevent Most Critical Failures: An Analysis of Production Failures in Distributed Data-Intensive Systems. The paper is basically what it says on the tin. The authors define a critical failure as something that can take down a whole cluster or cause data corruption, and then look at a couple hundred bugs in Cassandra, HBase, HDFS, MapReduce, and Redis, to find 48 critical failures. They then look at the causes of those failures and find that most bugs were due to bad error handling. 92% of those failures are actually from errors that are handled incorrectly.

[1] https://danluu.com/postmortem-lessons/

New comment by riyadparvez in "An Open Letter from the CEO of Puppet: Puppet and Perforce"

riyadparvez — Mon, 11 Apr 2022 15:14:57 +0000

> Perforce is basically Git, but shittier and proprietary. I think it's mostly popular in the games industry.

I think Google also uses Perforce. It's understandable because Google started before git.

Small Functions Considered Harmful

riyadparvez — Wed, 02 Mar 2022 21:04:30 +0000

Article URL: https://copyconstruct.medium.com/small-functions-considered-harmful-91035d316c29

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30533133

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Gitlab is down

riyadparvez — Mon, 31 Jan 2022 15:18:39 +0000

Article URL: https://gitlab.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30148806

Points: 66

# Comments: 59

New comment by riyadparvez in "Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt"

riyadparvez — Wed, 12 Jan 2022 06:43:14 +0000

This is what I've written:

> while privately discussed that not only it is a possibility, some of them believed it's *highly probable*.

This is what you have written:

> proof positive that the author's mind was *absolutely settled* that it was a lab leak

Judge for yourself. I am not going to respond to any of your comment on this thread. Peace.

New comment by riyadparvez in "Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt"

riyadparvez — Wed, 12 Jan 2022 06:31:39 +0000

I don't have the time to go through lawyer-speak arguments. The cables from officials regarding WIV safety have been verified. Just because it's on the opinion page doesn't mean it's false. It has way more credibility than some random virologist's claim about WIV safety on Reddit. Period.

Just few points:

* There's no agreement that this virus hasn't been engineered. Ralph Baric has said that just looking at the DNA it's not possible to distinguish whether a virus has been engineered or not. Alina Chan had raised this point and Vox has even made a correction on their article [1]:

> A previous version of this story stated that SARS-CoV-2 had been definitively proven not to be a bioengineered virus. While an August 2021 US intelligence report concluded, “Most agencies … assess with low confidence that SARS-CoV-2 probably was not genetically engineered,” and many scientists agree with that assessment, it was an overstatement to claim that the theory has been definitively ruled out. The introduction and conclusion of the story have been updated to reflect this lower level of certainty. (h/t to Alina Chan, biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, for her critique and input)

Please don't spread misinformation.

* A bio safety expert has weighed in and also expressed his concern about possible lab leak of SARS-CoV-2 [2].

* Viruses escape labs on regular basis [3]. Someone else on this thread also posted a link of a recent virus escape from a Taiwan lab.

* This is not the first time a lab leak happened and virologists tried to cover up. It happened during Soviet era in the 70s [4]. The truth came out after the fall of Soviet Union.

[1] https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22734496/genetic-engineer...

[2] https://twitter.com/jbloom_lab/status/1479170984343064579

[3] https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/3/20/18260669/deadly...

[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/20/world/europe/coronavirus-...

New comment by riyadparvez in "Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt"

riyadparvez — Wed, 12 Jan 2022 05:58:47 +0000

According to this

> Sep 9, 2003 (CIDRAP News) – Chinese scientists found that animals sold at street markets in Guangdong, China, carried a coronavirus nearly identical to the SARS coronavirus, according to a report published recently in Science.

> The animal viruses were found in Himalayan palm civets and raccoon dogs, which were sold for food in the markets, according to the report. The findings indicate a route of transmission between species but do not reveal whether these animals are the virus's natural reservoir or contracted it from another source, according to the report.

Source [1].

The same thing didn't happen for SARS-CoV2. I believe none of the animals in the wet market has been tested positive for SARS-CoV2 or SARS-CoV2-like viruses [2].

[1] https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2003/09/animals-...

[2] https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/03/26/1021263/bat-covi...