skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sorry, I misquoted: it's 75 million cases of food borne illness in general, and 5,000 deaths, using older statistics from smaller population sizes.

Using your stats, this outbreak was responsible for 0.1% of e.coli illnesses and 1/6th the deaths. But it's also 1/300,000 of the overall food poisoning illnesses, and 0.1% of the deaths.

So it hit the lettuce industry significantly harder than normal, even though the actual effect on health was minimal compared to the norm.
> I believe it will be hard to get those numbers.

I believe it is worth the effort

> It was rather the norm. The strong eat the weak.

There are a variety of reasons for this. Different reasons have different most effective solutions. If we choose as our general solution something that has narrow scope of significant positive effect and wide scope of moderate negative effect, I'd say we've chosen poorly as that will harm society as a whole rather than help it. Which is why the hard task of getting those numbers is worth it.
This is absolutely a problem we thought about, but we never found a good solution. Try getting the general public to use two-factor auth. Just try and see how that works out.
Indeed I have conjectured multiple times that I think the only application of blockchains is in cryptocurrency. Introducing any physical asset like a yacht or a banana in Laos or a diamond in Africa really doesn't make sense: you can't literally put those physical things in the blockchain.
Basically yeah. You probably aren't gonna be adding rebasing functionality to your supply chain git repo.

But again, that's why I mentioned a blockchain in the true sense, as a chain of blocks containing a hash of previous blocks, because git is a blockchain by that definition.
Troy's skill is taking security and privacy topics and translating them with practical tips to an IT enthusiast audience that is much broader than hn

Look at his comments and replies to gauge the audience for his content - deploying more privacy and security tools and knowledge can only be a good thing
There's a better solution: Stop collecting and keeping personal data.

I can't even read this article without using firefox reader mode to skip the cookie warning / prompt (this works for a lot of sites!).

That's a choice that techdirt make. By framing it as an unavoidable consequence of the cookie legislation or GDPR moves the focus to the wrong place.
Ask HN: Do you subscribe to daily/weekly/monthly roundups of HN?
Do you subscribe to any daily/weekly/monthly roundups of HN? Which ones? What's the frequency? And how do you like the links that get delivered to you?
Garfield Cyber Safety Adventures Series Program
I agree. The append-only nature of blocks chained together using hashes can build the most tamper-proof transaction log i can imagine. Even without mining/consensus algorithm and with it only being centrally host (but still published), i can upload a file to e.g. some government agency, see the file hash appear in the block and save the block hash. As long as that same block hash is used to continue the chain, upcoming block hashes would have to change to remove my entry from that chain-log.

I would love such cryptographically safe systems actually being used, especially whenever we don't trust the db operator. E.g. for Reddit admins it might lessen the appeal to alter posts again :D
Blog has more details: https://blog.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/
An Introduction to Serverless Microservices
Using a datacentre such as S3 will gain the benefits of an economy of scale. Per-website S3 energy costs are going to be substantially lower than the energy cost of a solar-server: each solar-server that is installed will have had to have been built in factories which cost energy to run, shipped in delivery vehicles which cost energy to drive, plus the humans behind the website would require energy while building the server... all of which would easily be more than the net energy consumption of a single website in S3.

That being said, the point of the project is to produce a website that is 100% solar powered. They never said they were aiming for something that is feasibly sustainable.
> blockchain is a decentralized database which does not require the individual instances to have perfect connectivity

Only because in the case of a fork it has a defined way to choose whose work to throw away.

You cannot meaningfully operate on a blockchain like bitcoin while disconnected from the majority. Each fork will be internally consistent, and you can continue to work on it if you like - you probably wouldn't even notice anything wrong, but at some point you'll connect to the longer chain and an arbitrary amount of history will be blown away.
It has been the norm in Silicone Valley for many years, unfortunately. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be appalled by it anyway, but perhaps just more cynical.
or in other words, we can thank the stock market and pressure on public companies to focus on quarterly growth at all costs over long-term sustainability and a balanced approach.
Show HN: You Need Feeds – Introduce friends/family/workmates to RSS and webfeeds
Partially inspired by recent discussions on HN and other places.

I've made a single-focus site to introduce your friends/colleagues/neighbours/family to RSS and web feeds.

https://www.youneedfeeds.com/

The site is meant to give the elevator pitch for feeds, show a newbie what feeds are and how to use them, set them up with a reader, and give them some nice starter content if they want it.

So much tastemaking and newsmaking power is concentrated in the hands of Facebook/Reddit/Twitter, but I'm convinced it's because much of the general populace doesn't know about feeds.
Many people just don't know of any other option than the core three social sites for keeping up with what they like! They're forced to endure all the anger and fighting of social media, just to keep up to date.

The more people know about feeds, the more they use feeds, the more sites support feeds, and then more people learn about feeds in a virtuous cycle.

I hope to create more uptake of feeds amongst the general population, a more decentralised internet, and maybe just make the average user's day a bit nicer.

Let me know what you think. Questions, comments, all appreciated. Spreading the word is very appreciated. :)
I'm not sure the takeaway here is that anybody's conferring personhood on Alexa. I think they're just pointing out that there's meaning conveyed in speech beyond just the content of the words spoken. Regardless of what words someone says, saying it in a whisper implies something about the volume that other parties should respond with. I had a coworker with laryngitis last winter, and I found myself unconsciously lowering my volume to be closer to his raspy voice. Tone and volume of speech can communicate a lot; why not allow a spoken word interface to leverage that extra information?
One of my close family friends (an endocrinologist) participated in a Watson study at Yale New Haven Hospital. Apparently the amount of effort required to input the patient medical history from paper/other EMR into Watson's system was astronomical compared to just doing the analysis themselves. It sounded like it was mainly a UX issue but that's indicative of IBM's understanding of their market.
Mapped: How every part of the world has warmed – and could continue to warm
Must be Mozilla.

Phoenix was a breakout browser from the Mozilla suite, before it was renamed to Firefox, and that was around 2003 I think.
Yeah, and you know what else wasn't scientific at first?

All of Science.

Do you have a point or are you being pointlessly skeptical? I don't mean to seem harsh, I'd love to discuss this sort of thing with open-minded people, but I am well and truly tired of pointless skepticism.
If you and the buyer already have physical contact, you don't need a trustless system, you take him to court or vice versa if one party is unhappy with the transaction.

The blockchain can't (or at the very least shouldn't) overwrite legal infrastructure.
Isn't more an issue about starting out free, attracting business to the platform and then start charging?
New Variants of Cold-Boot Attack
Conducting an Interview Loop–Part 1: Setting Up the Team
Techdirt misses the point.

Companies should only collect what they need, and only keep it for as long as they need it, and they have to store it safely while they have it.

All companies get hacked. GDPR compliant companies will have less personal data than other companies who see personal data as something to be gathered in huge amounts and stored for as long as possible, or even sold off.
I actually conjecture that blockchains are only useful for cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. It's when you see companies using them for tracking their supply chain, their music, their photos, their porn, their bananas in Laos, their weed, that I roll my eyes into the back of my skull. There's no way it has any potential to simplify any beaurcracy, unless you think introducing multiple nodes on a network and constantly making them talk to agree on their own databases is simple. People always compare blockchain in banks to banks using pen and paper. Why not just banks using computers?
Interesting. Is the Samsung watch less effective at heart health tracking, or does Apple just have better partnerships with insurers?
From the article (first paragraph, too):

> Brian Acton, who left Facebook a year ago — before going on to publicly bite the hand that fed him, by voicing support for the #DeleteFacebook movement (and donating $50M to alternative encrypted messaging app, Signal)

And:

> And for leaving a cool ~$850M in unvested stock on the table by not sticking it out a few more months inside Zuckerberg’s mothership, as co-founder Jan Koum did.

Sounds like this actor may in fact be worthy of a little sympathy.
Having done a lot of "audio engineer" type of work for my own podcast, I can say that there is a lot to it, and it varies depending on the sound the podcast is aiming for.

For example, if you listen to NPR interviews, you'll notice that questions and answers are articulate and succinct, with very few "ums" and "ahs " and such. This is because an editor removes most of the extra sounds, lengthy pauses, stammering, intakes of breath, etc.

There is also capturing the audio in decent quality. Having good microphones and equipment is just the first step. If recording indoors, one must account for room noise and echo. If outdoors, one must consider wind and background noise. Experienced audio engineers will be sure to record 1+ minutes of the ambient sound at the recording location, so they can use this if they need to insert any pauses. If recording multiple people, one must ensure they are all captured at a similar volume, especially if the recordings are all mixed together at capture time (if captured on separate mics/tracks this is easier to deal with). Some people also have a lot of "mouth noise" that is amplified by the mic, so you can hear clicks and squirts of saliva as they speak. It can be kinda gross, and there are tricks to working around this.

Editing the audio for content is also a substantial task. It takes skill to know what to leave in and what to remove, particularly if one wishes to be true to the speakers' intentions. Real conversation, if you listen to it, is messy. Lots of thought-switching mid-sentence, lengthy digressions, and things like that. Those are hard to listen to in a podcast, so a podcast that wishes to remain successful will need a skilled editor to smooth it all out. Often a 2 hour interview will become 25 minutes of usable audio. And it's especially tricky if recording with background noise, which will often betray the editing locations if one doesn't know how to mask them (usually with aforementioned ambient recording).

"Sound design" is another facet; if your podcast has music, audio clips, sound effects, etc., somebody needs to put them in the right place, set the volume levels correctly (some art, some science), fade in/out, etc.

So, yes, proper audio engineering takes some skill and makes a big difference in production quality.
SSS has been done with point clouds for a long time. Only recently have films switched to ray tracing for SSS.

Games these days implement SSS in screen space using rasterisation, no rays tracing either.
>It felt good to be detached emotionally. Never again will I sacrifice my personal time again at work. Its not worth it to yourself, and also to the company.

If you happen to fall into emotional attachment and feeling guilty again, don't beat yourself up for feeling those things. There's a big gap between not taking time off in 4 years/feeling guilt and being able to emotionally detach. Sometimes it takes years to reorient your life and values away from feeling guilt for asking for what you want. Many times the people who have manipulated you will refuse to accept you are trying to change and this will make it much harder.
Is this generally a good idea? We have data in multiple SQL databases and one of our departments wants to run analytics on the data. My plan was to export the data and then import it into a big consolidated SQL database. But our IT department talked them into using their Hadoop instance so now we export from SQL to JSON which then gets moved to Hadoop and queried with SQL and Hive. I still don't see the advantage of this over using a SQL database. Queries that should run in milliseconds take minutes in Hive. The data size is only a few terabytes so I wouldn't call it "big data".

Is there any advantage in using Hadoop for such a use case?
>> What year would it be ok to be naive enough to think that any for profit company’s main motivation is not to make as much money possible?

> There is such a thing as business ethics.

> Facebook's complete disregard for them should not be the norm, even if it, sadly, might be more often than not.

It's alarming how businesses' lack of business ethics is getting normalized by comments like the grandparent's. We should require that companies be ethical and condemn them when they aren't. Yes, we'll often be disappointed, just like we're disappointed with the fraction of humanity that becomes criminal, but that doesn't mean we should lower our standards.
I agree for this particular case, which is why I think a DAG with local consensus (something like IOTA) is more applicable for this application.
Safari’s “Siri Suggested” Results Highlighted Conspiracy Sites and Fake News
`rm *` doesn't remove files starting with `.` (on most shells)...
Yes, but the hijacker will still need to present a valid cert for that domain, which is much harder.
> I don't think this is true for Coq. Ultimately, Coq relies on a type/inhabitant separation. When you spoke of Coq as a programming language, the terms you can always "run" are only the inhabitants.

Firstly, yes, it is absolutely true for Coq (or at least, a large subset of it). The set model is essentially the entire basis for CiC's claim to consistency. I'm fairly sure TLA+ also has such a model (somewhere).

Secondly, all terms in Coq, including types and universes, are inhabitants of some type, so there is no distinction between "the inhabitants" and all Coq terms (it's true that weak head reduction leaves products and other obvious types alone, but that's not the case for stronger forms of reduction like strong normalization, or for full conversion). Moreover, the conversion that occurs in the static phase (typechecking) has the same semantics as the execution during the dynamic phase (runtime). So I really don't understand what you're driving at.

> I don't know if it is entirely binary, but it is sufficiently precise for useful terminology. A programming language is a language that can be used for programming, namely it is a language whose every term can be mechanically interpreted in an "efficient manner."

"Efficient manner" is pretty vague. I suspect there are widely used programming languages that will differ by 3 or 4 orders of magnitude while evaluating semantically identical expressions, while nonetheless both clearly being programming languages. Besides, many optimizations are only optimizations for certain data distributions, and if the compiler guesses wrong it can hurt performance; but that doesn't seem to me to have anything to do with whether something is a programming language or not. If all you care about is the default reduction, Coq's certainly tries to be fairly efficient: beyond optimizing the usual lazy reduction, it exposes many other reduction strategies, tuning knobs to tweak how reduction runs to improve performance when domain information is available, and even contains multiple implementations of some reduction strategies so people can select the appropriate one for their use case.

> I don't think that any existing dependently typed languages do anything particularly effectively (neither programming nor specification), but that is beside the point :)

I'm well aware of your biases here. Regardless of their origins in PL research, plenty of useful work has been done in dependently typed languages, including much larger developments than any I'm aware of in TLA+. I'm not really interested in arguing their relative merits--clearly, both are useful--I'm just asking you not to pretend to make general statements about programming languages while actually talking about TLA+.
Oracle can easily stop or delay updates to OpenJDK if they want. Remember how things worked out for OpenSolaris?
I think this could be doable, the only problem is that you are introducing an extra failure point (i.e. watch works, support device is down/battery dead/unable/ to connect to Internet/outside of wifi range) and if I have to choose between "data privacy" and "I had a stroke and need medical care" I'd go for the latter.
As a European, I cannot believe that millions of people just across the ocean are putting always-on closed-sourced internet-connected listening devices in the hearts of their homes. Maybe it's the lack of shared history? I highly recommend seeing The Lives of Others (2006)[1] to those, who want to understand why Europeans take their privacy so seriously.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others
Apple watches can only be paired with iphones. I suppose you could use an iphone without LTE setup, but it would still have a radio.

That said, I believe health data is end to end encrypted within icloud.
I think the majority of cases where it's helpful is between some traditional computing device, such as a laptop or desktop, and a mobile device such as a smart phone or small tablet. I think that's actually a fairly large amount of people.

That's also one of the situations it's most useful in, as having your saved passwords already present on your phone when you try to log into a site you generally don't from your phone is extremely helpful.
How far along is it towards becoming the underlying runtime for Emacs lisp?
On device only is the model they are promoting:

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/healthkit/protecti...
Citymapper does have Hamburg: https://citymapper.com/hamburg?set_region=de-hamburg
It's funny that this has just been announced, as I was doing an audit of our outgoing bandwidth costs and saw that our data being flagged as outgoing data in our Azure Service Plans was much much lower compared to our other data center despite Azure having larger sites. The key difference was that Cloudflare had been implemented on our Azure webapps, but not on the other data center sites. I'm not sure if this has been happening for a while for Azure and is just being announced or if it's pure coincidence.

Either way I am a happy user of both Azure and Cloudflare. Anecdotally though I have also noticed on Cloudflare as they have moved to more pricing models that uncached hits on free plans have increased while our higher plans have fallen/remained the same. That too could be coincidence or a need for rule changes.

I also wonder how this will effect using CDNs from Azure Edge, Akamai, etc. Are those included in the bandwidth alliance?
Well, I guess it starts even in the CoC itself it you read it closely?

For example, it says "Examples of unacceptable behavior by participants include: The use of sexualized language or imagery [...]". That is codifying a very specific value, namely one of sex negativity. If you are sex positive, you are at risk of being labeled an asshole for that. (And mind you, that quote continues "[...] and unwelcome sexual attention or advances", so it is clearly in addition to what could be reasonably considered a neutral "respect others' personal boundaries" sort of "don't be an asshole").

Then, there is this whole problem of not considering people who have deficiencies of sorts with regards to social interaction, and it seems to me that that is very much part of the ideology. Try to read the kernel CoC from the viewpoint of an autist, and try to reflect on how included you feel from that perspective when you are essentially told "because we want to have a welcoming environment for everyone, we shun people like you".

And more broadly, not necessarily directly tied to the specific authors (I just don't know the specific authors well enough to be sure), occurrences like this come to my mind: https://www.berkeleyside.com/2017/07/21/kpfa-cancels-richard...

"Inappropriate" and "offensive" are so subjective that you could argue the "code" doesn't really codify anything, it just is a tool to use and to interpret as you see fit if you have the power to do so, while claiming that it's somehow a more objective judgement that you arrive at based on "rules that have to be followed".
The current world record in tool-assisted speedrunning is at http://tasvideos.org/1715M.html beating the game in 4:54.03 (RTA timing, measured from start menu) or 04:57.31 (TAS timing, measured from console power-on)
Those are blockchains which come to global consensus, which I don't think would work here. You would either need a state channel (2nd layer) or a DAG structure.
Google's claim (which I'm inclined to believe) is that the previous state is more confusing to the average user. While we think in terms of "content" vs "browser", apparently the average user does not, and finds it confusing that part of the browser is signed into Google, but part isn't.
I tried pi-hole but my family couldn't make it work. Pihole blocks a lot of content they want to see, for example, email newsletters from our city gov. I understand why (privacy/tracking concerns) but it was just blocking too much and frustrating non-technical users in my house.
When you have money and principles you believe in, its not that hard.
Radiosity would qualify better as `based on physics` than ray tracing, but can't do things like mirrors. I could live with classifying ray tracing as `geometry based`, like Newton studied mirrors.

(You could do something that uses ray tracing to determine what's visible and what isn't and radiosity to determine the colour, but that's an entirely different story).
XlogicX wasn’t complaining about the existence of the AAD and AAM instructions. He was complaining that they had useful variants that couldn’t be expressed in assembly.

edit: See http://www.rcollins.org/secrets/opcodes/AAD.html
I'm curious about this comment:

> The ultimate performance boost from compression comes when operators can act directly on compressed values without needing to decompress. Consider a sum operator and RLE encoded values. It suffices to multiply the value by the run length.

It sounds very impressive and I can see in theory how it could benefit COUNT(), COUNT(DISTINCT ), SUM(), AVG(), MIN(), and MAX()... in other words, pretty much all of the common aggregation functions. For example, COUNT(DISTINCT *), MIN(), and MAX() can literally just ignore run length as those are known duplicates, while the others simply need to use the run length as a factor.

Does anyone know if this specific optimization is actually implemented in any real-world database?
"likely only possible in TAS" has this habit of becoming possible.

SethBling turning Super Mario World into Super Flappy Birds on a console comes to mind. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hB6eY73sLV0
Is everything on HN tech-related?