skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The population density map of Switzerland and the elevation map of Switzerland look like inverses of each other. The famous Swiss villages don’t have many people in them compared to the cities, so the situation you describe, while real, isn’t important.
AI method determines quantum advantage for advanced computing
It makes perfect sense if your indexing is very slow or broken..
A collection of challenge based hack-a-thons
Invented auto-complete feature and it increased conversation quality of chatbots
And your use case makes sense; but your use case is not typical for 99% of desktop OS users.

And instantaneous results mean nothing if they're worthless. I'd rather let you turn on indexing because you need it and it matches your use case. Leave the other 99% alone.
Quite so.

The data I got is that among the people who really got the virus, positive rate of the test is only 30% - 50%. So false negative rate is as high as 50-70%.

The news report (in Chinese):

http://www.caixin.com/2020-02-07/101512517.html
WSL also has some tooling, in Safari.

Given that Vulkan is only a viable option on post Android 10 devices, Linux and unsandboxed Win32 apps, being faster with Vulkan is a relative merit.

Now, if SPIR-V is part of the browser and does not require to bundle a JIT compiler, as apparently has been discussed then great.

Then again, maybe some tooling besides shaderc would be welcomed.
I mostly agree with you, but:

> And it is abundantly clear how to get a promotion: make a good impression on your team. Cooperate, teach, help out, be nice, do good work.

… it strikes me that the problem is that the way to get a promotion would be to seem to cooperate, teach, help out, be nice & do good work, not necessarily actually do those things — one might end up with promotees who simply know how to game the system.

It might still be preferable to the current state of affairs, which as you note hardly works.
Trump administration to propose big jump in funding for AI, Quantum R&D
Maybe unrelated but what are the server costs and hardware used etc for such a thing?
I am working towards a side-project but it's not live yet. I hope to launch it in the summer. I plan to document the process and release some posts about it "kalzumeus style" once I start it. My main blog right now is https://statagroup.com/
I think this is more what years of teaching people the wrong things entirely looks like. There was an opinion piece in the New York Times of all places that equated criticism of that show with misogyny because 'women in particular have been mocked, reviled, and murdered for maintaining knowledge and practices that frightened, confused and confounded “the authorities.”' https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/opinion/goop-gwyneth-palt... Like, this is an argument that they expect the most educated and informed members of American society to buy, and given what we've been teaching people maybe they're right.
> Say solar panels cost $2 per watt

Not for a large desalination project. You will pay close to the spot price. Which is 30-45 cents.

Your biggest cost will be labor anyway. And the osmosis membrane, which needs to be regularly replaced, unlike the panels.
There's another completely different theory. I'm not saying it's strictly true but it's worth thinking.

Moore's law has ended around 2016 or so. As progress is slowing, CPU technology is commoditizing. Successive Intel CPU models aren't much faster than previous ones anymore. So all the manufacturers will just end up in the same place and will only compete on price.

We will end up running everything on very efficient cores, massively parallelized. The software frameworks for that will be very different from current ones.

This is a polemic version from 2014: Cost of transistors stopped decreasing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBrEx-FINEI
It is, look on the bottom right.
How to “Floss” as a Web Designer
I spent a couple of years in NZ and Australia a few years ago, and since then I've been hearing about quite a few places I loved that have been severely damaged by water or fire. I have a wonderful memory of a week spent on the Routeburn track in winter, your link is a bit of a shock.
> IMHO organising correctly your files using aptly named directories

I have a lot of ebooks on my computer (> 10000). One problem with organising books and other PDFs is that sometimes they fall into multiple categories. (Should a new scientific article on lucid dreaming go into 'brain and cognitive science' or 'meditation' or 'hypnosis' or 'sleep' or 'self improvement'?) I could dump each new file into the directory representing the first category that comes to mind and make symbolic links from directories referring to other categories, but in the end the number of categories is practically endless. Search is in practice the only workable solution.
shameless self plug: https://victorzhou.com has a mix of machine learning, web development, and other topics. You may have seen some posts from there on HN in the past
I had a similar question the other day. I asked a few people and no one seemed to have a good collection to point to.

I specifically like reading posts by people who post regular retrospectives (weekly, monthly, or yearly).

So I started [0]. It only has three entries right now (including the one you mention above), but I would love to see contributions via pull requests.

[0] https://github.com/sixhobbits/technical-writing/blob/master/...
Ouch, that is pretty disappointing numbers :(
Because that's the custom in the US.

Using 24 hours is "military time" there.
> Google's business model is to sell consumers to advertisers as efficiently as possible.

The problem of oversimplifying some concepts is that we end up with absurd statements like this accepted as fact.

> Android makes money for Google by achieving that.

You are confusing tactics with strategy. Android is not a tactic, it is strategy. (Please do read the link I posted before)

> F/OSS is not a good in itself

Yeah, well, that is just, like, your opinion, man. For plenty of people there is a lot of inherit value associated with Software being Libre. The mere fact that I can take a fork of Android, remove the G-Services part that I don't like and install it on a rootable device, while not being able to do the same with iOS, is an concrete example of that.

> A F/OSS data collection program is exactly as bad as a proprietary data collection program.

Your issue here is not with Android, rather with the myriad of other Google Services that come in the OS. I am failing to understand why you keep conflating the two. Are you also going to start asking for Google to stop contributing to the Linux kernel because they use it on Android and their servers?
To me this comes down to answering "what is the simplest possible definition of a shoe?"

A shoe could be anything without moving parts that attaches to your foot.

No moving parts rules out skates.
Foot attachment (below ankle only) rules out jumping stilts.

Does this definition allow for any shoes that feel like obvious cheats?
Usually it's one bill. But even if it weren't it's not a problem because the bill goes straight to my bank and I pay by direct debit. The bank notifies me in plenty of time by email. We don't use paper bills and invoices much in Norway any more. After the first one or two from a new supplier most people switch to email billing and direct debit (eFaktura and Avtalegiro).
Show HN: Metaballs, Generative Art Piece
You must not be aware of Newegg's success in defending themselves against patent trolls. They demonstrated that stonewalling can pay off.
I know what MetalKit and DirectXTK are.

Neither ARB or Khronos had nothing to do with VRML, OpenInventor.

Yes I do believe that it is appropriate for Khronos to specify something, specially for beginners.

I did my first GL serious application porting a particles visualization engine from NeXTSTEP into Windows, ironically what is a basic feature in any modern graphics engine.

Yet, whatever is coming out of Khronos has already changed since then, other than now we have Khronos instead of ARB and get some PDFs with overview of APIs.

It appears there is a certain culture that every beginner has to through the same rite of passage to be worthy of using Khronos APIs.

It is like only IP would be standard, and after learning how to send an ICMP package, one would need to go out and get libraries for UDP, TCP, or do their own protocol on top of IP.
Software is changing very slowly, the multiprocessing shift in hardware is a 20 year old phenomenon and yet only niche apps are parallelized outside gaming. Maybe in another 20 or 40 years.

I think it'll take a lot more happening in programming language technologies than Rust or the current fragmented and janky set of mostly proprietary GPU languages.
The whole patent system needs a good looking at. I'm not a lawyer, but I did manage to get a patent a few years ago. It was for something obvious (math in fact!), but my business partners at the time thought it was worth getting. Haven't used it to troll anyone, and I don't like the idea, but the process did get me thinking a lot about whether patents are a net positive to society.

I think they aren't.

Having a patent system gives people the wrong impression that there's some special nugget of knowledge that is crucial to creating value. You often hear people who aren't in the entrepreneurial space talk about how they just need a "good idea". In practice, there's very few things that work that way. Every time I've started a business, there's been a lot of work that isn't so much developing "the idea" as much as finding ways to connect it economically the rest of the world. Whereas the naive view would be something like "once we invent fusion, it will be easy to sell".

For similar reasons, exclusivity is not necessarily a good way to reward innovators. Essentially my thinking is that innovating is actually only half the work, if even. Say you invent the cure for coronavirus. How useful is that actually, without a plan for making it at scale and distributing it? And what is the chance that the guy who spent his life building cures for viral diseases is also the guy who can build factories and delivery networks? The retort to that may be that the innovator can outsource those things, but why would we give them the exclusive right to do that, when he'd only gotten one piece of the puzzle?

Patents also allow incumbents to create costs that deter new entrants. They seem to be so loosely defined that any suitably large corporation that feels threatened can throw them at any other player and the lawyers win, like this article is talking about. It's great that they are fighting but there's a problem if the troll has deep pockets.

One big issue that is mentioned is that the troll doesn't need to produce anything working. So basically they don't need to show that they are making anything of value. No customers needs to ever have benefitted from the patent. So somehow the system would still punish an honest player who tries to be useful to other people.

Finally, the thesis itself of how patents are supposed to work needs evidence to support it. I don't see any evidence other than thought experiment to say that something was invented because the patent system existed. All I see is that if you can patent something, you do. Not that you try to invent something because patents exist.
I try not to say things like that anymore, you've never met the person and have no idea of the context or their skills.

Could be that they were forced to change it at the 11th hour just before Windows 10 was being demo'd and it was never changed back. Could be a committee decision. Could be the programmer hated the surveillance installed by MS and so deliberately made the search bad.
https://rubenerd.com/ is a dude from Australia who posts about BSD, anime and various tech-related stuff.
If you've not watched "Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle", run, do not walk, to see it.
Author here, this year I started with generative art, and I'm absolutely loving it. This is my latest piece, and I wanted to share it with you.

The output are vector images which I plan to pen plot (I ordered AxiDraw plotter) and make them available on my site.

For those interested in how it works, I wrote a blog post:
https://muffinman.io/metaballs-generative-art/

Cheers!
> I think there's no question the barcelona conference would have spread the virus

The conference isn't cancelled. Just Ericson won't have their booth. But at the moment the conference itself is scheduled to proceed.
Scuse me, I ran an NTP server on a net4501, which has a CPU so slow you can't even imagine it these days, and that left practically all of that CPU free for other work.

NTP is demanding of the CPU and OS, but what it demands isn't a lot of seconds (or a lot of memory), it is being run at precisely the right time. The OS can't run the NTP server when there's nothing else to do, the NTP server needs the right nanoseconds in order to work well.
Actually I bought a mirrorless Fujifilm xt-2 but that's beside the point.
WebRTC is end-to-end encrypted, but the handshake goes over the server in cleartext. So you need to trust the server, but not the TURN relays.
My favorite part of Windows 10 search is how when I enter "bittorrent" it has absolutely no idea what I mean. The program is called qbittorrent.
While the lawyer in this case is probably garbage, it is important to note who the company is comprised of (greedy and manipulative merchants).

Voice Tech Inc
Type: Corporation for Profit
Entity #: 1551867
Partner: MICHAEL D. GOLLER
Partner: STUART E. GOLLER
Agent: MICHAEL D. GOLLER, 2204 BLUEGRASS LANE, CINCINNATI OH 45237
Filed: 06/21/2005

Who are the Goller's? https://www.kentucky.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/tom-e...

Not much unlike the entire cloudflare courtroom. Typically, these people live secret dirty lives.

Here's a photo of them: https://www.kentucky.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/tom-e...

Same ugly schnoz can be seen at: https://www.crunchbase.com/person/s-e-goller
if she really did get "fired" for that column, it looks like they must have changed their minds? because here she is with another byline in the NYT, two years later.

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/31/fashion/31CRITIC.html
WebP version 2 is in the work at AOM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zogxpP2lm-o

It is complementary to AVIF (which targets photo capture more than delivery over the web).

WebP2 is like WebP: keep it simple, with only useful and efficient features, no fancy stuff. And aim at very low bitrate, it's the current trend, favoring image size over pristine quality.

Progressive rendering uses ~3x more resources on client side. So, instead, better have efficient 300-bytes thumbnails in the header.
LulzSec are apparently claiming responsibility for hacking a Crypto exchange
You can switch to 24 hour format, but I can't confirm it works, because it's AM and it still does say AM.
Interesting. I wouldn't try to do this with "true" AR (magic leap / hololens) - not enough benefit - but just a location aware layer would do it.

Seems like you'd want to pair it with a browser extension (want to avoid making that booking in the first place), and the back-end engineering is very similar to what (IMO/AFAIK) you'd need to support similar reality overlays in "true" AR.
Weren't a lot of those windows ce back in the day? So regular c/cpp/... Apps under the hood, just terrible ones and on asthmatic hardware
Lots of undiagnosed cases and under reporting of deaths is a possibility.
I have an easier fix than most people on here.

I would like the start menu search to be confined to the programs installed on the computer. To search settings make me click the 'cog' first. To search for files there is Explorer, which is already better at the job. To search the web I will use Firefox to access a search engine.

Wouldn't that be simpler?
Not sure about those tests, but TDP is 280W, usage a bit lower. See https://www.computerbase.de/2020-02/amd-ryzen-threadripper-3... for that and https://www.computerbase.de/2020-02/amd-ryzen-threadripper-3... for temps, note that this review used a Kraken X62.

That energy usage is below the specified TDP is surprising. Some other recent processors - especially from Intel, but to a lesser extreme also some AMD models - happily went way above their specifications.
Nvidia will skip MWC 2020 due to concerns about coronavirus
What implementation techniques are used, and which OS/GOUs does it run on?
There is a toggle for switching it to a 24hour clock.
“Pigeon Neck” Illusion
TIL there are cpus in USB chargers. Ain't it crazy ?
Like atm and other common access point : used to be windows ce under the hood. Since the new line it can be windows 10 now, it's lightweight / embed version offers a kiosk mode (pick an app and the account at boot auto login and auto start the app and refuse anything that takes focus from the app basically... Except when something crash then you might see the underlying parts)
Maybe this is pretentious, but to say vinyl sounds "better" or "warmer" is missing the point for me. IMO one thing that records have is "personality". Those clicks and cracks of the old records I found for £2 in a jumble sale, and their stained jackets that have been passed around since the 1950s become part of the listening experience. You're connecting with the history of the music in some way.

The pure sound of those crackles are important to more modern music too. Think about how many modern records add record noise to add atmosphere. Burial's Untrue or Portishead's Dummy wouldn't sound the same without them.
The sad story of the pregant woman described in the Strait Times article, is described in this link

http://www.sixthtone.com/news/1005146/dispatches-from-hubei-...
Having it as a dynamic library is not enough. It has to be a dynamic library tgat you can replace. This doesn’t work when, for instance, distributing through many app stores.
Hardly "third-party", it's just a second domain of the same institute.
Beats me. I still have a collection of LPs I bought in the 1970s and early 80s, and while many of them are pretty good pressings and I don't mind listening to them, some are pretty bad. I have a lot more CDs, and they almost all sound very good to excellent (any defects being in the master, not the medium, of course).

What I do get nostalgic for is music without compression. So many recent recordings I find unlistenable, even when I like the music, because they're compressed to within a dB of their lives. This is a much bigger deal to me than digital vs. analog.
Google Colab is a hosted jupyter notebooks service and is free. It includes the use of a Tesla k80. Runtimes reset after 12 hours

This is the pro/paid offering with fewer limitations and better resources.
Car race or endurance events cannot be compared to that of human ones.

In the former case machine is the subject; and humans are innovating to evolve them to next level.

In the later case, assumption is that all humans are at same level of evolution and race is among equal - ideally marathon and races should be bare bodied and bare foot; but if we are making concessions for comfort, it should not be seen as license to augment human capabilities.
Dariusz Sikora (Limitless.lu) – Fraud from Poland Alert
Ask HN: How do you Learn from video tutorials?
Yeah. It's not that bad outside Wuhan, people who infected will get top level treatment, there will be best experts doing the diagnostics. But for Wuhan, where medical resources are extremely in short, we can only pray for the people there. Hope it's gonna be better.
Do they just sit and wait to hear back and then give up when they don't?
AWS Lambda lead
Articles about distributed systems and more

http://brooker.co.za/blog/
"In 2020, he was awarded the Padmashri, India's fourth-highest civilian award, for his commendable initiative."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harekala_Hajabba
The vinyl gets noisier when it's recycled. The best pressings are on virgin vinyl.
This was the most valuable piece of info for me, which I shared among my social circle:

Doctor observed that three weeks seemed to determine the difference between life and death.

- Patients with stronger immune systems would start to recover in a couple of weeks

- Second week, some cases would take a turn for the worse.

- In the third week, keeping some of these acute patients alive might require extraordinary intervention. For this group, the death rate seems to be 4 per cent to 5 per cent.
What the Brain Really Thinks About Forever Chemicals
I find it so strange that even people who should know better say yeah there is 30k cases and 600 deaths so only 2% die. They should look at the clinical progression of the disease, if it takes 2 weeks from hospitalization to death - how many cases where there 2 weeks ago: those were the people that died.
Courts don't decide facts, and they are not the usual venue to invalidate patents.
Are you actually trying to argue that smooth scrolling is hard, and specifically because of the display size?

On the CPU side, you can figure out how to position a line of text in less than 100 instructions if you store it right. But even if you use 10 million instructions to lay out a handful of lines, you'll never have to hitch.

On the GPU side, the pre-retina A5 had a fill rate of 2 billion pixels per second, and a brand new high-DPI phone has 100-200 million pixels per second to draw at 60fps. Let alone comparing like to like. A high-end qualcomm chip from 2013-2014 would match that, and a low end phone would have half the power and half the pixels.

We are in a wonderful age of overpowered GPUs for 2D work. There are no excuses for dropped frames.
Is Open Source a diversion from what users want?
U.S., Japan showcases its strength during bilateral aerial training
The Lost History of FDR’s Court-Packing Scandal (2019)
Thank you so much for this comment. I feel it quite balanced and Lola at the topic from multiple angles.

However I would like to inquire why you see Dr.Li's detention as evidence of "shutting down initial reports of the outbreak"?

First of all we do not have any kind of real insight on what Dr.Li was actually saying, and what was the severity of his reprimandation.

When something is on the lose that has the potential to kill millions, you need to be quick and purposeful in controlling the message. Wrong information can make people underprepare, but it can also make people overprepare.
My First Steps with the BraveHeart PinePhone
How to Mend Your Broken Heart with Food
Dispatches From Hubei: Deaths due to expansive care system in China
Weird. I too have qBittorent installed and the Start menu search finds it as first option when I type 'bitt' ('bit' gives 64-bit Python launcher)... not too shabby.
Perspective on the Cornavirus by an HK Doctor
I'd like this visualisation for the world!
> Is there a catch?

No rr/Pernosco.
The article writes about the death of an acutely ill pregnant woman when treatment stopped for lack of money. Sadly it was the day before the government decided to pick up the costs of all coronavirus treatments.
The infection was spreading quickly due to a sum of factors. One of them, the expansive access to care, then people goes home instead of being threated and quarantined.

The woman in the article is also mentioned in another article that made the front page on HN [1]

[1] https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/reporters-notebo...
Quadratic Coronavirus Epidemic Growth Model Seems Like the Best Fit
First Steps with the BraveHeart PinePhone
This post is dripping in antisemitism.
Four Charts That Help Explain How the Coronavirus Spread
Yes, and it is my preferred method of editing `.gitignore` files:

cat >> .gitignore

*.pyc

^D
And we finally make it.

Go change the guidelines. No need to tell anyone anything at that point.
Yeah if people could put more effort into naming things that'd be great.