skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It does not logically follow from the low infection rates outside of China that these extreme measures are not warranted, quite possibly it's the opposite: low infections follow from strong containment measures.

As for comparisons to the Flu, I see this so often and it always misses the point: it's not one or the other, so why would the medical establishment not fight in the extreme to stop many thousands of deaths that would result if another flu-like disease came along? Second, there is an entire industrial complex complete with seasonal ramp up in staffing to deal with Flu season, and we still see non-negligible fatality rates. Without that support network, which again we don't have for COVID-19, how much worse would things be with the flu? So we should all stop using the flu as some type of benchmark for what a reasonable COVID-19 response looks like.
... because you know better than they do what’s good for them. That’s definitional paternalism.
Testing. I've never known any great developer with at least good testing skills. I've met many awful developers who don't know how to test.
The system is mostly fed by user contributions. Better communicating this is something I need to improve on the site.
I suspect the optimum balance would still be somewhat technical. Maybe something on the level of a spreadsheet. It takes some specific knowledge to use effectively, but is still fundamentally a simple and intuitive tool.
Ask any locksmith about any door security.

"I am not putting my breakfast behind a locked door, he will say. I always carry it with my backpack and my backpack is always on my back."
Solving the Maximum Sum Descent Problem Using Python
Thanks for the feedback. This is a known issue, but I am working on other higher priority issues at the time.
but if they know about a notebook where you wrote it they can require you to give up the notebook

But if you wrote in a made-up language that only you know, can they force you to translate it?
Yea, makes no sense to me. I’ve forgotten many passwords for things I thought I’d never forget, including a bitcoin wallet. I can only imagine how hard it would be not using the password for months or years because law enforcement seized your device, and then having to produce it.
Oh here we go -- this is a vast subject (and I understand some of your questioning), I wish I had time for a more thorough analysis, but here are some key points.

- Humans are actually fantastic space exploration hardware.

We already have robotic vehicles exploring other planets. They are not autonomous, and have glorified Arduinos in them. Not for lack of money or development, but because it is extremely difficult to do autonomous exploration, and the hardware is essentially currently impossible because there's nothing good enough, and not even remotely close to good enough that can survive radiation and space environment. Exploration currently is extremely slow, done through remote control, with up to 24 minute delays (Mars).

- Humans can self-reproduce with low-tech inputs

We are perhaps from >50 to >>100s years away from machine compact self-reproduction, then imagine self-reproduction with human-like intelligence. Only humans can make colonies for the near future.

- AGI (or just good enough scientist AI, explorer AI, etc) is uncertainly distant

It could be 20, or it could be 100 years or more away (if our civilization even survives that long before wars/climate change/etc), economically viable AGI is uncertain, economically viable compact radiation-resistant AGI is vastly uncertain.

- It is worthwhile to bet on long term space exploration and habitation

This is the most difficult case. I think it's worthwhile to devote resources on long term space exploration and habitation. In particular research since it is so expensive right now and we still experiencing rapid technological change. We want to eventually live on other planets (and even other star systems). The other aspects are complementary, like inspiring people to work in engineering and science; the main thing is giving hope for the future, even if it's a future you won't live.

Most of the research anyways finds applications in terrestrial systems (remember that we still do pure Mathematics, whose research value tends to crop decades later or more).

---

It is expensive, yes (ISS costs about $3 billion per year for NASA apparently), but overall I think it's a tiny investment for great returns (at varying levels of risk).

---

Finally, to expand on hope: hope is great things many things, but one of them is simply the way people act on expectations of the future. If they don't expect to live long, or a long term future worth living for other generations, you expect we will act more selfishly and greedily, a self-fulfilling prophetical aspect. Thus it's extremely important not to neglect sustainability and somewhat distant dreams.
> It would be great if every app could have formally verified code etc.—but the reason they don't has to do with businesses funding these projects, not with the engineers working on them.

You can look at it from the company's point of view: Net profit would go down if they formally validated everything. Put that way, it sounds horribly selfish of the business. But you could also look at it from society's view: Net value to society would go down if everything was formally validated. Why? Because much less software would be created. And, for something like a chat app, we (society) don't actually need the level of reliability that we'd get from formal verification. Don't waste the effort doing it, because it's a net loss. Go spend the time building something else.

The result is that we get chat apps that crash. But we also get much more total stuff. I think that's a net win, even though it's annoying when the chat app crashes.
How does one flag a comment as suspicious?
Or they need cash now (for scaling, for instance) instead of later.
Recommend adding phonetic pronunciation to the README. In practical terms, being uncertain as to the correct pronunciation is an adoption hurdle.
If you're innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?
The mob takes the Fifth.
That seems like a plausible excuse. Years ago I encrypted an email archive with what I thought was an easy to remember password. But I've forgotten the password. I remember some of the password so I wrote a password cracker to try variants of that, but I still can't get in.

If the feds seized my hard drive and wanted me to decrypt that file, can they lock me up until I give up the password even if I really have forgotten it?
Ask HN: What mobile browser do you use?
I've been using Firefox Focus as my default browser on Android for the past year and love it. I don't usually need logged-in persistence on my phone browser because I'm usually just doing one-off searches or following a link from another app. FFF has been great. What mobile browser do you use?
Carlos Maza: A Thorn in YouTube’s Side Digs in Even Deeper
Yes, the goal is to help people know what is known in an area. I will update the docs to make this more clear.

I am open to supporting pull requests, but my thoughts were that the custom user interface Mathpendium has allows for an easier contribution process.
Also worth noting that the court appears to only be saying that he can't be locked up because the government likely doesn't need the evidence to convict him. That is the stipulation under which he is getting out of jail for contempt. If the government did actually need to compel that evidence to make their case, they would be able to hold him idefinitely. Or else at least this ruling doesn't say otherwise.
As Cosma Shalizi wrote in his review of this book:

> As the saying goes, there is much here that is new and true, but what is true is not new, and what is new is not true; and some of it is even old and false, or at least utterly unsupported.

[1]http://bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/
Sorry, been busy last couple of days, and just got back to this.

Yeah, I quoted your "contender" line in my previous response, but I was seeing that as basically equivalent to what you said earlier: "is very revisionist to call it failed" -- which I interpreted to mean that it was a dishonest assessment of what actually happened.

I'm not sure how you can call something "revisionist" if you aren't actually talking about what really happened in history, so maybe that's the source of disconnnect here.

I saw your comment as not being tied to the imaginary universe, but as an aside reflecting your opinion of the value of the Windows Phone in reality.

I suspect that if Android hadn't happened, it is likely that some other entity would have produced a phone that had an equal chance of stomping out Windows Phone. Not that it really matters, because like I said, my opinion is, that in reality Windows Phone was a failure, and I was just responding thinking you were saying that wasn't a fair assessment.
Estimation.
Not that much faster. Most benchmarks find that GCC is a little ahead, but not much:

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=gcc9-cla...

https://medium.com/@alitech_2017/gcc-vs-clang-llvm-an-in-dep...

Remember that these are both Linux benchmarks; GCC on windows is a bit sketchy with MinGW. Things can usually be made to work, but Clang is the only real competitor to MSVC (unless you're counting Intel's crazy-expensive offering, which is not intended for general use).
Though obviously not because of Clang, the pace of C++ itself significantly increased since Clang was introduced.
This is why I lug around a standard keyboard to go with my laptop. I know exactly where the keys are, including directional and navigation.
Wow I actually didn't know all the history of this town, and I've lived here for a few years.

Thanks for sharing this!
This is one of the worst articles I've ever read. It has the grammar and focus of a terrible youtube comment.
Destiny 2 Outage and Rollback
Significant results do not require significant proof. This is a common misunderstanding. All hypothesis would require the same amount of proof, regardless of a person’s biases going into it.
Automated system can rewrite outdated sentences in Wikipedia articles
That link you sent says that they can charge more if you bring your own casket. One of the options explicitly offered there is for the funeral home to inform potential customers:

"Please note that a fee of (specify dollar amount) for the use of our basic services and overhead is included in the price of our caskets. This same fee shall be added to the total cost of your funeral arrangements if you provide the casket. Our services include (specify)."

It doesn't sound like you can negotiate a price including a casket, but later say you'll make your own casket, saving the bulk of the fee.
This is exactly my thought process. Well put!
Data Science Career Path and Progression
Central thalamic stimulation instantly wakes anesthetized macaques
This is seriously super cool. Thank you for explaining!
I would argue that they were thinking you wouldn't really need to use the web browser that much. The idea would be do whatever it is you need to do and get out.
So at least some blind people would be unaffected by melatonin differences which means you should still be able to find blind schizophrenia cases if the melanonin hypothesis is true
Sure, but owning my own TLD is the only value proposition I see in Handshake. If only big companies can register TLDs, and if I end up renting subdomains from another registrar, what is the benefit to me that the TLD system is decentralized?

I can already rent `.com` subdomains today, and they have price caps. The worst case scenario for a `.com` domain right now is that the current ICANN proposal goes through and the cost jumps up to maybe $20 a year. That's nothing compared to the rent-seeking that can happen on a purely privatized TLD with no oversight.

As a user, buying a subdomain controlled by a single source is not decentralization. I'll still have a single company that can do anything it wants to my domain, and by extension, anything it wants to my online identity. It'll still be trivial for governments to pressure that company into transferring my domain. I won't get to manage my own keys or set up my own security. I won't be able to renew the domain for free.

Unless I'm missing something really big, the only benefit I see from Handshake is democratizing TLDs for ordinary, everyday people.
That's true, and like everything I'm sure writing JS visualizations gets faster with practice, and you become more familiar with the tools.

Still, after finishing the article, I'm impressed by not just the the number visualizations, but by their legibility and smoothness. I can't in any universe imagine it taking less than a week of full-time work. If you told me it took a month of full-time work I wouldn't be surprised at all.

----

I liked this concept of "interpretive labor" and that's what I'm really getting at:

https://distill.pub/2017/research-debt/

There’s a tradeoff between the energy put into explaining an idea, and the energy needed to understand it. On one extreme, the explainer can painstakingly craft a beautiful explanation, leading their audience to understanding without even realizing it could have been difficult. On the other extreme, the explainer can do the absolute minimum and abandon their audience to struggle.

I've been writing for public consumption for about 3 years and really feel that tradeoff. When I put effort into some writing or explanation, the result is better. People tell me it clicked, etc.

And I would say you can go a lot further than you think in bridging the gap. This article is evidence of that! Lots of people here are saying they wished they had this in high school, etc.

3Blue1Brown's videos are another example of that. I was fairly good at math in high school but if those videos existed then, I would have probably gotten a lot further.

----

This ties in nicely to your Dercuano notes which I have had open in my browser for awhile! There are many interesting topics there. But I also feel like you went to the other extreme and there's a lot of interpretive labor involved in reading them :)

Why did you decide to polish and publish the "memory models" post? I'd like to see more posts like that. (I could send you the notes that jumped out at me if interested.) Whenever I've taken the time to polish some writing, I've never regretted it. For some reason it feels annoying to start (probably because I have to clear my brain of other things), but when I'm doing it it's fun, and when I'm done, it's worthwhile.
They probably did the math and figured out they could cover the distribution and all for less than the 30% slice of the pie to Google.

Hopefully they learned from that flaw.
Containers are useful for more than just site isolation.

For example, I use one container for browsing this website, and another for Reddit.

If I click an Amazon link from reddit, it might be a funny product I want to look at, but wouldn't consider buying.
I don't necessarily want Amazon to know that.

Or similarly for Google Accounts: I can log into separate accounts for youtube and gmail, work and personal, etc. Google has some account-switching built-in, but I find it easier to work this way.

At work, I use multiple AWS accounts, and if I want to look at the AWS dashboards, containers let me use multiple AWS accounts at once. That's not something Amazon makes easy otherwise.
We're interested in moving away from GA completely - a self-hosted solution is what we've been looking for.

Could I know what your product is? If you'd prefer not to post it here, please feel free to inbox me (contact details in my profile). Thanks!
Thanks so much for sharing (I knew about [0] and [2], but not [1])! Always a pleasure to hear about the stuff you've done!
Keith, do you plan to support other languages beyond javascript?

This brings me back to 2004 when I used to work for Safeco.
Business analysts / insurance agents would write business rules in VB.NET. Engineers would write application / integration code which would execute the business rules (both languages compiled to the .NET runtime so were compatible)
Interesting they are soliciting personalities, rather than infrastructure, sysadmins and others who might have more power to push Handshake. Leaves out a lot of the Great Old Ones too, like say a big hunk of Debian and Ubuntu developers. Or Firefox devs, who have a lot of power here. Lots of projects predate Github. When I looked, I'm honestly surprised how many followers I have there - why would you follow me personally? Rather than the projects? I wouldn't follow me. Seems rather creepy.

Edit: I see elsewhere there have been cash drops to Debian, Arch and probably some other projects. Which makes sense.
Tangentially related I stumbled unto this the other day https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/git_issue_management/
> Next have someone qualified on every single board of directors and have each board create an appropriate sub committee. The same way you have a qualified accountant and audit sub-comittee.

I think it makes sense to note that corporations don't adhere to GAAP voluntarily, or because it makes good business sense. They do it because they will be de-listed from stock exchanges and shut down by the government if they do not.

The stock exchanges won't do this for "tech malpractice." From a financial standpoint, tech malpractice is just another calculated risk. Versus financial malpractice, which creates an unlevel playing field on the stock exchange itself. And history has shown that the fallout from "tech malpractice" ends up costing comparatively low dollar amounts anyway.

This leaves me at: this won't improve without government regulation.
The condensed "syntax" (notation) is actually a feature! Read "Notation as a Tool of Thought" to learn more, it's actually one of the best parts of APL as a whole.
Top CDE official says US should prepare for coronavirus “to take a foothold”
> I just remind myself that this world has 7.5 billion people on it, and as a programmer I have a better income than the VAST majority of them.

That's just not true.
That cartoon points out that airplane engineers create good, reliable things, and software engineers don't. But airplanes are reliable in part because of the software that they run. So to me the question boils down to "How come we create good software in one case and terrible software in another?". Well, if you give a programmer incorrect/incomplete requirements, not enough time, don't do enough testing, and generally cut corners, the software is probably not going to work very well.
And while it's true that some programmers are better than others, poor quality work should never make it past the testing phase.
It's not a modern problem. You could always rig a tamper-proof device (eg booby trap) to destroy evidence if forced without the key.
Going beyond regular expressions with structural code search
It’s a wonderful book. The “sequel” Predicate Calculus and Program Semantics by Dijkstra and Scholten gives a more rigorous treatment of the ideas presented in A Discipline of Programming. Both are fantastic.
Very cool! It looks like the output shaft has quite a bit of lateral movement, perhaps something like a Schmidt coupling (https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:233667) could be used to remove that movement and allow a fixed output shaft.

I last saw one of these inside an IBM 3890 check reader machine.
I second TOT, his videos are just fun to watch. Plus, you learn something.
in the 2020s, I hope we can get learn out to make complex type systems simple to use!
Meeting a Mountain Lion, Painting Like Old Masters, & an Intro to After Effects
The Other Billy Collins
Pretty sure I can spend 15 min on Wikipedia and find dozens of engineering fields vastly harder than software engineering.

Also, your definition of software is really far from reality. 99% of software don’t have to deal with hardware directly and are compatible with a number of environments I can count on one hand.
Those aren't the only reasons. Some more:

1. Software is easy to fix. Compared to other construction disciplines, software is the cheapest to fix.

2. The consequences of failure are typically minimal. Most software is not mission critical. Failure means minor inconvenience for a lot of people. Moreover, since your competitors are no more reliable than you are, you don't even stand to lose customers by having an occasional failure. (This is the one the article discusses.)

3. Software has more degrees of freedom. Unlike physical building disciplines where the types of materials are limited and generally well known, and where the number of physical dimensions is at most three, software takes place in an extremely complex and multidimensional operation space. Moreover, we have no evolved intuition about how things behave in that space.

4. Comparatively minor errors result in comparatively major failures. If you forget one rivet on a building, the engineering tolerances will make it such that the building will not fail as a result. But it is not really possible to make a server resilient to null pointer exceptions. It either works or it doesn't. Software fails partially much less often than physical things.
We're going through the HN hug of death. We're focusing on scaling it (but I'm a HS student running this on an old desktop my dad gave me on my family's slow internet, so not sure how far scalability will go for me... going to see if I can get some cache'd page link here).
The first mainstream browsers with support: Chrome and Edge!

https://caniuse.com/#feat=loading-lazy-attr
I was in the senior leadership team of a company a while back (I was brought on to build a software team from scratch). I worked with the other execs to ask the question "what culture do you want in your software development team; what will be compatible with the rest of the company culture?"

Some of the options we discussed...

- Is your plan to sell the company in a year or two? Then you will probably write a lot of throwaway code, and speed of development of basic stuff is most important. If you want this, I'll hire you a team of Python or NodeJS or Ruby programmers.

- Is your plan to have software that supports your company over the long term, but the goal of the software itself is more around cost savings? Is the software development team going to be a cost centre? If so, you will end up with a revolving door of programmers coming in for short periods of time to work on it? If you want this, I will hire a team of Java or Go or C# programmers.

- Do you want to build very technically complicated software as a differentiation strategy? Then you will be looking at a team of very smart software developers who love their craft with a passion that will be a bit foreign to non-technical staff. If you want this, I'll hire a team of Haskell / Lisp / Ocaml / F# programmers.

At the time, the rest of the leadership team wanted the last option, so that's the software team we built. As far as I remember it worked quite well, I remember that there was only one significant bug that made it into production.
Because the branch prediction cache puns an error check with a loop predicate and some other random branch.

Branch predictors steadily get better, sure, but they're not infallible. Remember that reducing the total number of branches in a program helps the branch predictor predict better.
The accumulator goes on the left if you're folding left and on the right if you're folding right.
UrbanFootprint pitches new tools for urban development
are there any modern (fiat) currencies still backed by gold?
He evaluated Rust and Go a few years ago and strongly preferred Go.

https://blog.ntpsec.org/2017/01/18/rust-vs-go.html