skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It takes about 0.6 tons of fuel to transfer from a 100km to a 20,000km orbit. Well within the payload limits of LGM-30.

A derivative of the LGM-30, Minotaur, is used to launch satellites (or ordnance) directly to GTO @ ~30,000km.
Can an N95 mask prevent viral infection? Those things are typically for particulates and are charged so things like dust attach to the fibers. I’m not sure they’re effective for aerosolized particles
Reports I've seen suggest 1.4 to 2.5, but it's early days. Essentially if the R factor (number of people infected by a single case [0]) is less than 1, it'll die out, otherwise it'll grow.

However, that's very simplistic; one would like to think the R factor would be lowered by better hygiene.

Separately, it seems that (unlike say Spanish Flu) this tends to be worse for people who have pre-existing health issues.

There is concern that possibly people who are asymptomatic could still be infectious.

Time will tell. One number (that'll take quite some time to even have a stab at) is the mortality compared to, say, common flu.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_reproduction_number
Mapping the brain at 30nm x 4 nm x 4nm [video]
For that tax rate, or in general tax rates that range from 0.001% to 99.999% in increments of 0.001%, and amounts in dollars to 2 decimal places, you can safely calculate the tax in cents using floating point, but it is not necessarily obvious how to do it so unless you must do it in floating point, I'd not.

In C:

unsigned long tax_in_cents(double amt, double rate)
{
/* requirement: amt is an integer multiple of 0.01
and rate is an integer multiple of 0.00001 */
const unsigned long M = 10000000;

return (unsigned long)round((round(amt * rate * M) / (M/100)));
}

That should work, at least for amt that isn't too high.

Here is how I would do it, using integers:

unsigned long tax_in_cents(unsigned long amt2, unsigned long rate5)
{
/* amt2 is the amount in cents, rate5 is tax rate * 10000 */
return (amt2 * rate5 + 50000) / 100000;
}

(My convention in this kind of code is that if an underlying thing is represented as an integer by multiplying it by a power of 10, I put that power as a suffix on the integer variable name. So amt2 means the real amount x 100, and rate5 means the tax rate x 100000. A ...2 x ...5 gives something that is ...7, which is why we divide by 10^5 to get the tax in cents (a ...2). Half of the divisor, or 10^5/2, is what you add for rounding).

I've not proven the above floating point code, but I have brute force tested it with every combination of rates from 0.00001 to 0.99999, price from $0.01 to $10000.00, and floating rounding modes FE_UPWARD, FE_TONEAREST, and FE_DOWNWARD.

Most initial attempts to write such a function make the mistake of doing the rounding at the wrong place. They just try something like amt x rate then round that to the nearest cent.

The problem with that can be seen by a very simple example: 10% of $21.15. It should be $2.12. It comes out before rounding as 2.1149999999999998, so rounding to the nearest 0.01 comes out as $2.11. Various "obvious" ways you might do this might work for that case, but they fail in others. For example, here are three ways in Python that readily come to mind:

def tax_f1(amt, rate):
tax = round(amt * rate,2)
return round(tax * 100)

def tax_f2(amt, rate):
return round(amt*rate*100)

def tax_f3(amt, rate):
return round(amt*rate*100+.5)

but try all of those on these:

1% of $21.50
3% of $21.50
6% of $21.50
10% of $21.15

and every one of them fails at least once. The correct answers 22, 65, 129, and 212. Here is what they give, with the wrong ones prefixed with !:

tax_f1: !21 65 129 !211
tax_f2: 22 !64 129 !211
tax_f3: 22 65 !130 212

There was a discussion of this here a couple months ago [1]. In that discussion, someone who knows considerably more about floating point that I do (kccqzy) suggested how to fix it, and even his first try failed when I run it through my brute force testing. He then suggested a method that worked (at least according to my brute force testing).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21688373
I'm sure you could do full duplex coax if you really wanted to. But it's not worth the effort here.
From the comments section of the article:

> Because there are so many power sensitive applications where ARMs are used, much has been invested in power minimization and management and they do very well. It’s easy to get remarkably better power consumption with an ARM part. But, in this particular case, our focus was more on server-side price/performance and, with that focus, our power consumption isn’t really materially better the alternatives.
Similar story here. Just didn’t have enough knowledge to pull off the interesting hacks. I also wanted to get that modified PAL hack for graphics installed. It was talked about on Usenet.

I think about 6 months after getting the machine I ended up plowing my savings into my first 486 and I sold off the 3b1. If I had enough know how at the time, I would have kept the machine.
Interesting. Looks like that news is about a month old. They had been trying to get away with that idea of you rent the plane and then you hire a pilot theory for long enough that I thought maybe they’d get away with it.
Dhall for Kubernetes
- Wearing masks is normal because of air pollution. A lot of people wear really loose non-N95/n99 masks though, but there's definitely an uptick in people wearing better masks because of the virus.

- An acquantince of mine went to a supermarket today. Everything seems fine (they live not too far from Beijing where there are confirmed cases).

- There are still people entering Wuhan to see family. (https://youtu.be/cmgPVhubmQA?t=208)

I'm not saying people don't care. My family is worried for me because I left Hanoi the same day an infected individual arrived in Hanoi. I have friends that are worried for their families back home. But I still see a lot of friends celebrating the new year, albeit not in any quarantined areas.

There's reports of people leaving the quarantined areas with symptoms. I wish they would team up with Tencent to flag individuals who have been active in the quarantined regions and left such regions since then.
Household Manager/Cook/Nanny – Menlo Park
At the Bottom of the Sea, They Wait to Feast on Alligators
Just like the guitar mags I grew up with. I looked at all the ads, and even bought stuff based on what I saw in competing ads along with gear reviews.

For that matter, the same goes for motorcycle magazines, and just about every other kind of magazine that caters to a niche market.

Those kinds of ads can be great, even.
Depends on the food. Broccoli, possibly, because you eat all of it. But nobody eats a banana peel.
Point blank I think Mac App Store restrictions, iOS restrictions, and the current decrepit state of AppKit are all a systemic approach by Apple to prevent new powerful tools from emerging that threaten their current market dominance. Ben Thompson wrote the canonical piece about this situation[0], but I think this paragraph from a different article is the best summary[1]:

> The reality for Jobs and Apple was that the company’s users needed Office (along with Adobe’s products) more than they needed a Mac. I’ve long argued that being in this position is a big reason why Apple hasn’t enabled sustainable apps: never again would a software developer hold Apple hostage. The irony, though, is that when it came time to launch the iPad Pro, Apple had no one else to turn to.

[0]: https://stratechery.com/2013/why-doesnt-apple-enable-sustain...

[1]: https://stratechery.com/2015/from-products-to-platforms/
Yes, [dead] means it's visible only to users with 'showdead' turned on in their profile, and [flagged] means it got a significant number of user (or in some cases moderator) flags relative to upvotes. So the two have different meanings. The connection between them is that when flags go above a certain threshold relative to upvotes, they also kill the post, putting it into [dead] status.
Anybody knows when did the YC S20 start?
anybody knows when did the YC s2020 start?
Undertaking nerd-duel with low pay disrespected computer lab janny is shameful. Would not share...
I buy organic fruit and vegetables, but not because I care about pesticides too much.

Mainstream vegetables and fruit are optimized for looks and for shelf life (which measures in many months for much of produce). Taste takes the back seat.

Organic produce is expected to have a shorter shelf life, smaller size, and some visual imperfections, because of how it's marketed. It can compete on taste, though. And noticeably tastier it is.

Organic produce does cost a bit more (sometimes quite a bit). But eating untasty vegetables and plastic-feeling fruit is unpleasant, so I just avoid it, missing all the health benefits. Tasty organic produce does not have this problem :)
Otoh the Go is usable for most purposes in terms of performance, whereas the previous small Surfaces really weren't. Perhaps faster SSD helped.
I think the idea is that when you flag or downvote you have to provide a comment on the action, and that comment is then displayed when someone asks for a list of downvotes and/or flags. Those comments are not part of the regular comment system, and one can't reply to them.

It's what happens on Lobsters, but whether or not it makes a difference is hard to say. The traffic is small enough that I doubt the effect is properly measurable.
I think Twitter has been bad for journalism in that it presents a huge distraction, on top of the dangers of being an echo chamber (which varies depending on who you choose to follow).

But the phenomenon of reporters being able to personally convey their behind-the-scene thinking and experience? I think that’s been a huge boon of valuable, informative insights we previously could only get in memoirs and 10-year anniversary reflections. What you see published as articles is something that’s been trimmed and edited for largely pragmatic purposes and convention, not through some rigorous standard of epistemology.

The NYT’s Rukmini Callimachi is a great example of someone whose tweets greatly enrich her published work. Here is a thread of insights and reporting that became part of a next-day story on Iran and Sulemani: ‪

https://twitter.com/rcallimachi/status/1213421769777909761

One of the best examples of all is David Farhenthoid, who tweeted the progress of what seemed like a very picayune (relatively speaking) factcheck of Trump's charity claims:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/david-fahr...

> I spent a day searching for Trump’s money on Twitter, asking vets’ organizations if they’d gotten any of it. I used Trump’s Twitter handle, @realdonaldtrump, because I wanted Trump to see me searching.

> Trump saw.

> The next night, he called me to say he had just then given away the $1 million, all in one swoop, to a nonprofit run by a friend. That meant when Lewandowski said Trump’s money was “fully spent,” it was actually still in Trump’s pocket.

Here's a more detailed breakdown of how Farenthold conveyed the progress of his reporting through Twitter, including screenshots of the legal pad he used as a checklist:

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/12/5/13810210/h...

By "picayune", I mean that in late 2016 (e.g. September through November) Trump's charity claims were extremely small-time compared to the actual presidential race. Without a way to publicly convey and accumulate (i.e. snowball) his reporting, Fahrenthold may not have been given enough time (by his editors) to have the critical mass needed for a meaningful story. His work eventually resulted in a Pulitzer-winning investigation, and the impetus for the most damaging ongoing state-level investigations into Trump today:

https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/david-fahrenthold
How come fiber can't use the same frequency for uplink and downlink? Coherent and focused laser light only travels in one direction, so I'd expect the transmission not to interfere with the receiver.
> "Lessig’s defamation suit covers a September 2019 article titled “A Harvard Professor Doubles Down: If You Take Epstein’s Money, Do It in Secret.” He claims the headline misrepresents his interview, where he condemns the donation, but says that “if you’re going to take the money, you damn well better make it anonymous.”"

If you see the egregious defamation there, then you're a more nuanced reader than I am.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/13/21063873/jeffrey-epstein-...
I'm not sure that you would find any product on the market which shines the same frequency of light in both directions on a single fiber. All of the bi-directional on a single fiber products that I know of send a different frequency of light in each direction.

Therefore it would seem strange to me to claim that a single strand of fiber can do full duplex, as frequency "B" of light could instead be used to send data in the same direction as frequency "A". So really you are just choosing to allocate some part of the overall capacity of the single fiber to return traffic.
Normal HN racism.

Of the 41 people in the initial cohort at the hospital the ~1/3 from the market all did what?

They all kissed the same snake?

Or did one person catch it and then spread it at one of the most packed locations in the area?

And since it's a market it also contains farmers that easily could have brought it from out of the city.

Saying it comes from markets is like saying it comes from airplane meetups.

Their reasons for saying it comes from snakes I assume is genetic, the fact they are all quickly traced to such packed locations proves nothing.

I know snakes are used to feed omnivorous livestock in some countries for instance.

It can also be spread from fecal matter. It doesn't mean everyone eats poo. It means poor people live among animals.

[edit] More on patient zero (Not from the market according to SCMP, no surprise) https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3047646/no-l...
I want the law to allow such things, because it is extremely useful to me as a consumer and a customer if the system can automatically identify me and attach me to my past history with the company.

This dimension of privacy is still open for debate.
Full duplex DOCSIS 3.1 has theoretical maximums of 10Gbps down and up. It relies on precise timing and echo cancellation to allow the cable modem and CMTS to transmit simultaneously on the same frequency bands. Kind of like how gigabit Ethernet allows both ends to transmit simultaneously on the same four pairs.
We've fixed the typo in the GP.
well, face recognition is more specific than you'd need in this case.

if you went that route, you could get away with simpler person recognition (height, width, clothing color, accessories, etc.). or you could just track phones and other devices via wifi/bluetooth (and presumably uwb in the near future).

but you could also just have salespeople on the floor doing the recognition & ad placement part of it, for a lower-tech solution.

i'd actually bet trained salespeople would have better hit rates over algorithmic solutions, where access to large amounts of dislocated data is the main advantage (at the cost of our privacy).
The point of organic food was never for it to be healthier though right? From my understanding, it was pretty much always about reducing the use of synthetic fertilizers and -pesticides in order to increase (or at least not reduce) biodiversity in farmland wildlife.
Consider using https://duckduckgo.com. You'll find comparable, occasionally superior, search results provided by a company that has more respect for you as a human.
https://soylentnews.org

https://lobste.rs

If starting a new site, note that pipedot.org is a clean reimplementation of slashdot.org that didn't gain a critical mass of users. Source code here: http://pipedot.org/source

An old version of the reddit source is still around. With the right moderation, that could be like HN.
And it does not seem to have succeeded, If the mass proliferation of cookie tracking warnings is any indication.
This phone is looking fantastic. I‘m getting one for sure.

Perhaps the GPS issue can be solved by disconnecting the GPS antenna using a kill switch.
> You didn't found out who your actual friends were, you simply lost actual friends by making it harder to contact you and you slowly made them become acquaintances.

I reduced my social media usage because they were a huge time sink with the endless feeds, but I agree with you. It takes two to tango, so saying doing so lets one finds out who your real friends are is just condescending imo. Friendships don't start out 'real'; like any relationships, they require constant reaching out to people and be a part of their lives, and this has to work both ways.
They always find the car first, especially if it's going to be visible from the air.

There's just too many stories of people who decided to leave just before the car was found, and then they were found dead some short distance away due to under-estimating how hard it would be to travel.
What does it mean that I have a unique user agent? I just use normal brave browser.
There's a protocol for this and it's called remoteStorage[0]. It has a JavaScript implementation that just works and different compatible servers, plus anyone can run its own.

[0]: https://remotestorage.io/
Very, very nice. I have been pondering getting into pico-8, and this might be a way to do something similar _and_ have fun with Racket.
This is what R0 measures. So far the estimates are in the 1.5 - 4 range. For comparison, in an unvaccinated population, measles is in the 12-16 range. It's early stages, though - due to the latency/carrier thing, they're not really sure, and in Wuhan, the R0 number is going to be higher than it would be for worldwide average.
It was reported in the BBC today that while SARS originated in bats, the vector for humans were a species of cats that got the disease from the bats.

For coronavirus what we know so far is that it originated in a seafood market, but as to what species was eaten that is speculation at this point.
We've banned this account for using HN for nationalistic and religious flamewar. You can't do that here, regardless of which nation/religion you're for/against.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You can get certification from an auditing organization that you are following organic practices, so for farms willing to spend the extra money on that, it's a little better than someone's word. I know someone who works as an auditor in this space for a living, and they are pretty busy.
Not snakes? The first reports I read were about snakes.
Pretty much any country has some form of martial law. For example, the US very quickly shut down one of their largest cities and all air travel in the country on 9/11.
Good news! I am unique. My experience is valid. I really needed to hear this.
As a counterpoint, I am a computational neuroscientist who transitioned form working in human cognition to fruit fly motor control. Fruit fly neuroscience in the past decade has advanced tremendously. With the latest tools, we can record activity from specific genetically labeled neurons while stimulating others. We have identified specific groups of neurons to stimulate to get the fly to groom, walk, turn, and even walk backwards. The full fly brain has been scanned with similar techniques and the connectome is beginning to be mapped out (e.g. see this very recent post from Google AI research https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/01/releasing-drosophila-hemib... ).

I find that as we gain new tools to study the nervous system more specifically, both data and models of how neurons are organized at the circuit level become more important. To advance on an analogy in the article, it's like trying to explore the dynamics of NYC without a map. For instance, it's hard to tell how/why people interact with central park if you don't even know where they live. The more specifically you are able to pin down people, the more it matters where exactly they live to understand.

Granted, the fly is much simpler than humans or even mice, and it will likely take decades and new tools for us to study humans in this way. However, when we get there, mapping out the brain connections will be crucial to make sense of it all.
Since the author mentions that his goal was "deeper understanding of some fundamental concepts of computer graphics and real-time rendering in particular."...

> you just took pong and glommed some 3D models on it

that's probably exactly what he did, and was probably exactly all that was intended to be done
It's because as soon as people militarize space nobody can get anything done in space.

In space you are so much more vulnerable than in any conceivable environment on earth. Survival depends on others not having layers of other agendas, several of which may be to find ways to kill you.

Imagine how much space exploration will cost if not only do you need to get to space, but you need to bring defensive and offensive weapons as well.
Are you thinking of user-to-user sharing (ex: daniel shares his list with justin) or something more global?

To give an example:
The indiehackers website uses firebase as its data store. It's a blog/forum, so posts and comments made by individual users can be seen by people who don't have accounts. Is this a use case you plan to support in the future?

If not, the potential use cases are much narrower than firebase. Not necessarily a bad thing but I'm just trying to understand the product.
Haven't had the connection issue on my end. Ah well, seems like there's no reason to switch things over!
As a merchant in general, an e-commerce site is also responsible for mitigating fraud. Too much online anonymity can compromise their ability to comply with the law and to protect themselves from money-losing scams.
Ask HN: What's state of the art for screen scraping these days?
Any recommendations for super user friendly tools out there for screen scraping? Mostly looking for hosted services that have the experience dialed in.
The above site beachballed and was nonfunctional for me.

A better site with similar functioning is: https://panopticlick.eff.org/
Please don't take HN on generic ideological and/or partisan tangents. It just leads to predictable flamewars. Also, please don't post insinuations about brigading unless you have some objective basis for doing so. Perception of these things is notoriously (if not entirely) unreliable. That's why we have a site guideline about that: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Like any large, widely distributed community, HN is divided on any issue that society is divided about—or rather, societies, since it's also a highly international site. Moreover, HN is a non-siloed community [1], unlike most places on the web, so you're more likely to encounter a cross-section of things you don't normally run into. Ironically, this more unbiased distribution of views is precisely what creates the feeling of bizarre contingents, brigading, and so on, because users aren't accustomed to running into perspectives from outside their usual demographic segments. This is something we all experience online.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
I did research this topic many years ago during the bird flu panic, and the short answer is yes, a PROPERLY USED N95 mask prevents infection. The properly used part is quite tricky though, for example you touch the outside of the mask with your fingers when you remove it, and then rub your eyes... There's a reason those guys are in a full suit and not just a mask.

But even if it's not 100% effective, even if it's just 90% it's still a massive win.
The logic in this article is way too cut and dry in almost every way. For example the article exclaims that "parallel is always faster than serial". That assertion does not hold up in software engineering and it doesn't hold up with teams either.
This is an awesome comment and makes me very happy. Though I'm not a founder, just the first employee :) Looking forward to seeing what you create with it!!

Thank you!