skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My point of view on this is from a career as a protein x-ray crystallographer, not a mathematician nor computer scientist. I've watched countless tiny crystal dishes, the vast majority of which produce no useful crystals. And while it seems frustratingly random, (especially when faced with months and years of failure), in retrospect from a successful series there are always conditions which likely make causative sense: changes in temperature, stocks of substituent additives, shifts of pH due to carbon dioxide in the air, vibration (or lack thereof) from nearby construction or robotic systems, amount of pollen or air pollution to add nucleation sites. Some crystals will only form along the edges of the crystal dishes; perhaps because there's some complementary dimensions of the molecular surface there. It's a rich list of possibilities, but all would speak against this being as 'random' as say, the exact time of the emergence of an x-ray photon from our source. Nonetheless it's a very creative use of a lot of otherwise non-useful data from vast arrays of robot observed crystallization dishes.
I'm starting to get the feeling that I'm paying protection money to Turbotax to have them ward off the gaze of what IRS auditors still exist. I'm not sure it is even possible to file a return that they couldn't nail you to the wall on something if they wanted to.

But... it took me an hour to do my taxes, and my refund was direct deposited in a little over a week. So at least it works.
Speculation here, but from the article’s description I suspect these are too high in magnitude (they would likely saturate the sensors) and not the right “mode” or frequency. The LIGO method is looking for very small fluctuations in a more complex field (certain components of the “metric tensor” which amounts to measuring tiny time-dependent variations in the speed of light in two different directions). By contrast, this signal would be a change in the direction and strength of gravity’s local pull and is probably one of the things they work hard to filter out at LIGO. As such, the main instrument probably wouldn’t be able to measure them accurately, but I’d expect the instruments used to maintain and isolate the main instrument would see it pretty well.

Similar in concept to how a radio antenna isn’t the best way to measure a shift in the local magnetic field. It’s the “same” thing, but the instrument is sensitive to a very different part of the space of “magnetic field changes”, including in this case the fact that the antenna may actually be measuring the field by looking at different data (electric field) and relying on the way the two interact in the “far field”.

Edit: sorry for the abuse of scare quotes, I’m on mobile and it’s the easiest way I can think of right now to indicate that I’m oversimplifying certain technical digressions that are deep subjects in their own right
Speaking of having a lack of a unified mental model for power , when it comes to the closely-related problem of energy (for society) there are a dozen or more commonly-used units in use, extending to "a cubic mile of oil". I believe that partly as a result of this (and partly due to the magnitudes involved), even those who follow the literature can have a lack of intuition when reading different papers and articles. And that has consequences, e.g., how many MW-GW capacity replacement per day for an energy transition.
> If you can, don’t reach for a goroutine, or a channel, or embed a struct, anonymous functions, going overboard with packages, interfaces for everything, instead prefer simpler approach rather than the clever approach.

This reminds me of an interview I had with a company recently. I mentioned that although I was using go for my current pet project, I had hardly touched goroutines because net/http automatically spins off a new goroutine for every request so I don't have to think about it. The interviewer was incredulous and said that every database call should be put behind a goroutine so that it's not slow. He said the point of go is to leverage its powerful concurrency mechanisms. What I wanted to say was that I believed go's selling point was its simplicity and not its concurrency mechanism, and that it would be more idiomatic to keep it simple first and refactor only if there's performance issues. But he was the senior and I was the new job seeker, so I just ended up agreeing with him.
The lack of testing and testing capacity in the US is deeply alarming. They’ve only run 500 tests so far and criteria still require the patient to have recently traveled from Hubei! By comparison South Korea is running thousands of tests per day, which is why it is picking up so many cases. Absolutely unforgivable complacency and lack of transparency from CDC.

There is almost certainly community spreading in the US that is going undetected.

Once local cases finally start getting reported and tested in the US, there will be panic and a lot of the same irrational hoarding behavior and shortages observed elsewhere. It would be better if the CDC mentally prepared and educated the public for what is to come. Normalcy bias is very real, and people here are still culturally not ready for this reality..

Edit: Some background for the above comments:

Epidemiologist at Harvard/ Brigham and Women’s responsible for virology testing there: https://twitter.com/michaelmina_lab/status/12315038051598131...

“Reminder: As of today (Feb 23), the US remains extremely limited in #COVID19 testing. Only 3 of ~100 public health labs have @CDC test kits working and CDC is not sharing what went wrong with the kits. How to know if COVID19 is spreading here if we are not looking for it.”

“Now >10 days since CDC recalled kits w still no explanation for failure. Failure to share what went wrong hinders progress by all labs nationwide. Expeditious sharing of information is a must during epidemics. We say this to China and CDC should practice as well.”

“Without more information, public health labs & well resourced hospital labs setting up CDC published assay in-house are held at complete standstill, unable to prepare for what will inevitably be concern for local transmission.”

“Without rapid diagnostics ready to go, healthcare infrastructure may become rapidly inundated, even if cases turn out all negative - an abundance of caution will require quarantines until test rules out a case. Any backlog can quickly hamper hospitals.”

“Additionally, recommendations for testing continue to tie in to recent travel to China or some contact. With cases in at least 28 countries, and local transmission increasing, testing and surveillance nationally must move forward”

“We cannot know if there is coronavirus here in US if we are not testing. We must get the US up to speed for diagnostics and we need expeditious information sharing from @CDC to the lab testing community here and abroad.”
How would a device based on natural stochastic processes not solve boot entropy? I thought that was exactly how such devices were used now, except most users don't even have one.
yes, vim is entirely optional software, nobody is arguing that.
> Rockets are dangerous

What an insight! If only all these daredevils knew that their occupation was hazardous, they could die a healthy death by cardiovascular disease, like the rest of us.
How did you pick the 500k repositories to index out of the 28 million or so which are public?
That doesn't sound like a terribly convincing reason why a complex tax code made possible only by for-profit services is desirable, unless you only evaluate it from the perspective of an $INTU/$V/$BAC... shareholder.

In Belgium, most people's taxes are a postcard that says "here's what we think you owe, do nothing if you agree". Before that it was about the work of a single 1099-EZ. (Belgium is not unique in this.)
Is Riak still supported and used?

I was under the impression that it’s dead.

Is that not the case?
I would say this needs a list of indexed repos and mainly an explanation of how it exactly works to be usable (how's the index build and how often it's refreshed, what types of files are being indexed, etc.). Otherwise, there's no much value in searching in an unknown data, is it?

Anyway, to not only criticize, good job! It's definitely one of GitHub's missing features. And I can imagine it's not an easy job to build something like that. But as I wrote, it really has to be well explained to be actually usable.
Doctors have more exposure to stressors of the immune system. They get sick and injured surprisingly often; while they know how to avoid exposure and injury and how to treat themselves, they cannot help but work in places like hospitals where they are constantly exposed.

Additionally, air quality is worse in that area compared to where you likely live.

Really, treat this like a really bad flu season. It will be bad, but it is much worse for some demographics than others.
According to AWS you could only afford 10 instances each with 976GB of RAM for that salary (500k). If you were to do nothing but just buy the raw RAM it would cost you 50k. But you also need servers [0] to actually put the ram into. So it's probably closer to 70k. RAM isn't as cheap as you think.

[0] and a network and network admins and server admins and and and
I wonder if this would affect their UK product which gives free credit reports, I was moved over to them after Credit Karma US/CA acquired Noddle [0] and they rebranded. It was a little frustrating that they gave no opt-out to move customers and their data over to Credit Karma.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/04/credit-karma-acquires-nodd...
Well, you don't call the company whose software you pirated and ask them for tech support...
FYI, the article you linked is the same one the OP links to. Did you mean to link something else?
No it isn't. If it cracks in half it is no longer useful as a chair, but the overall volume of garbage hasn't been reduced.
Reality distortion field
Thanks, my friend! Hopefully people will run with it.
Sorry! Just edited that out
> You make the world a safer and more welcoming place for those who actually believe it.

I prefer the world in which people do the crazy stunts.
Thanks, Have a nice day!
The only real difference is that there are ways the server can know if you are downloading it for inspection, or if you're piping it straight to bash. A hacked/untrusted site could serve up a malicious script file if it detects that it's being sent straight into bash, and a clean script if you aren't. With most things you download from the Internet, you download then run the software if you want. Curl to bash is download and run with no confirmation step in the middle.
The simplicity of the language means no gigantic class hierarchies. Theres are fewer ways to do something.

Since engineers spend most of their time reading and debugging, readability and low abstractions facilitate collaboration: it should be relatively straightforward to jump into any Go codebase.

People often laud the relative ease of picking up the language. They're productive quickly, that's not by accident.
I always wonder how German words end up with these weird changes when they get replicated in English. It seems someone got it wrong and other authors just replicated (incl. this one).

It's Stangenkunst (no 'en' postfix)[1].
This literally translates to "the art of rods".

The postfix makes it sound like the plural of the word in a Scandinavian language or maybe Dutch. But it's neither.
The German plural (not used) would be Stangenkünste (Stangenkuenste, with the umlaut written out). This would translate the "arts of rods"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatrod_system
> I'm not saying Go programmed products are lower quality

I've met plenty of good developers that complain at how Go ties their hands and creativity. Unsurprisingly, the language has been designed for "cogs":

---

The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt. – Rob Pike

---
This was my first thought as well, although I’m having a hard time judging the value proposition of TurboTax right now. I was going to test out credit karmas tax filing this year but TurboTax definitely has a lot more thorough integrations. I could definitely get my taxes done in credit karma and save some cash but its pretty clear there is a fair time vs. money proposition at play.

That said this experiment may come to an early end with this acquisition ;-).
Some notes on the setup, ctrl-P and command-T are nicely replaced by fzf nowadays.

I also believe plugins like nerdtree are not alined with the "vim way" of doing things. If you're trying to recreate an IDE you're pulling in the wrong direction. I've found, after some getting used to that having the project tree always visible on the right side is actually not a necessity so there's some valuable horizontal screen real estate to gain here! Have a nice vim voyage

edit: typos
People say things like this, but how many antibiotic compounds are in the soil naturally? Living creatures exist in an environment with countless bacteria and evolve to survive, and some of the compounds they produce are turned into human drugs. So I feel like there's something missing in the ordinary narrative about antibiotic resistance. Where did penicillin come from again?
You could take a normal calculator, put it in scientific notation, and stick a piece of cardboard over the exponent.
There is no such thing as studio purge at EA, I'm actually pretty sure the turnover rate is lower or equal than other bug publisher.
The best way is to keep away from wechat. They still can collect your message. There is nothing you can hide.
In my youth, I believed that people hundreds of years earlier were not as intelligent as modern folks. I was obviously very wrong. Their inventions simply used the scientific awareness of the time (I usually call that a "scientific vocabulary" and I don't know if that's the right way to put it.)

My point is that they were just as smart and industrious as any other people of any other time, and like everyone of every time, they were limited by the resources available at the time.
Lcc, a Retargetable Compiler for ANSI C
Big of true
These are generally people that suffer from paranoid delusions.

If it wasn't flat earth, it would be some other conspiracy theory, but a lot of the time it's simply all the conspiracy they can fit in their head.
Closing the Loop – the effect of hidden feedback loops
They also get really hot and bendy if you leave them in the sun. I recall have the legs of one collapse under me in Brazil because of this (I'm not a particular large person!).
I did some stubby pencil work a while back and if I recall correctly, the mass energy conversion of 1kg of material (i.e. nuclear test) on the other side of the planet was orders of magnitude 'louder' than anything that LIGO has detected so far.

It still suffers from having no chirp before that you get from two orbiting bodies that merge, but I think it would technically be detectable as a pop in the signal.
> Not much faster than C# or Java in practice

Go compile times are pretty inarguably faster than these in practice, yes.
The premise of this article is that we should essentially press the “panic button” now, to get people through the shock of preparing for a pandemic while we know it’s safe to do so.

> Suggesting things people can do to prepare for a possible hard time to come doesn’t just get them better prepared logistically. It also helps get them better prepared emotionally. It helps get them through the Oh My God (OMG) moment everyone needs to have, and needs to get through, preferably without being accused of hysteria.

> It is better to get through this OMG moment now rather than later.

The preparedness tips in the article are generic enough, but worth skimming. Basically:

- Get extra prescription medicine now if you might need it

- A couple months of non-perishable food storage is a good idea

- Practice band washing and avoid touching your face.

- Cross train employees at work to minimize the impact of absences.
For the tax payer who uses a free file option or one of the lower tiers of a product like Turbo Tax, I consider it a crime that the government doesn’t do the tax calc for those people and simply send out either a bill or a refund.

The government has all the information they need to do this, and over time the gaps can be filled by requiring additional paperwork from tax entities like employers, non-profits, financial institutions, etc. There is way less paperwork this way and instead of filing a return one would simply file a dispute with documentation or else accept the government’s numbers. For the vast majority of Americans the math is dead simple.

For those of us who run a business and pass through as ordinary income, we should really only have to file the business return, not both business and personal.
Homebrew – The Missing Package Manager for macOS (and Linux)
High unemployment means working conditions are a race to the bottom in some sectors. Is this what we want?
If Intuit's strategy is to spend billions to kill free tax products, then that would suggest that there's a huge reward for the next organization that can replicate Credit Karma's success. Is it really that difficult to build tax software?
You may not like nuclear engineers designing nuclear power plants, because they are too beholden to the establishment, but is it a good idea to have some other sort of person do it?
This is so true. The key to building something that succeeds in the longer term is because you are providing value to the market.

Using shiny/new tech is just complementary, and might even come back to bite you later on.
As Hacker News is usually full of people that can provide good advice: What should I personally do to prepare? I'm living alone and have the ability to work remotely once the virus starts spreading here.

My guess is mostly stocking up on food, which I've planned to do for a long time - sounds like a good motivation to finally prepare a list and get shopping.

Should I bother with a N95 mask? I already have surgical masks that I used last year when I got a cold, but FWIU they only help protecting others when you're already sick. I can spare the money for a N95 mask even if I don't end up using it, but I'm not sure it'll actually help.

Touching your face less and using knuckles to touch buttons as well as washing your hands more often are things I'm already working on. I guess I'll start carrying hand sanitizer when leaving the house.

What else can/should I do?
GPT-2 generated political punditry podcast
Presumably by "unconditional" they mean not conditioned on you using a flag.
It won't go away, at least not immediately. It'll get dumbed down and users will be offered an "upgrade" to TurboTax for more features.
Three people start a credit website because they want free access to their information. 11 years later they sell it to a company who actively tries to squash free access. Is there a German word for companies that grow and then exit this way?
The woodcuts of the mining machinery remind me of a book I obsessed over as a child. Pick it up if you have kids. Written by L. Sprauge De Camp too, whose was a prolific writer like Asimov.

https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/man-and-power-the-story-of-pow...

Lawrence, KS had a mechanical transmission shaft running from the river front, down town for industrial power transmission. Of course replaced by generators at the same location. Excellent tour of the power plant if you are in the area.
What I have noticed is that the CLI commands like rm -rf <dir> are orders of magnitude faster than the file explorer on linux. When I want to remove and then copy 500 .wav files for my anki deck it takes a minute or longer in the file explorer. With rm -rf media.collection/ && cp -rf <dir> media.collection/ it doesn't even take a second.
I think the WHO not declaring a pandemic is mostly wishful thinking on their part, the longer they wait the bigger the impact to the system. There are now 30 countries with known infections, a large number with likely undetected cases due to lack of local infrastructure. Impact to the economy and general panic are on the one side of the scale, there is still only a very small chance that they will be able to contain this.
I appreciate the systems perspective and find the writeup useful. However, from a production perspective, I think security should be topic one.
Recommendations for what individuals can do are buried but very practical:

* Try to get a few extra months’ worth of prescription meds, if possible.

* Think through now how we will take care of sick family members while trying not to get infected.
Cross-train key staff at work so one person’s absence won’t derail our organization’s ability to function.

* Practice touching our faces less. So how about a face-counter app like the step-counters so many of us use?

* Replace handshakes with elbow-bumps (the “Ebola handshake”).

* Start building harm-reduction habits like pushing elevator buttons with a knuckle instead of a fingertip.
> build times for actual large scale projects (pulling many dependencies) were not much better (if at all) than Java's.

My experience is radically different; I don't believe you.
Very insightful, and as usual with systems thinking, I think that we don't understand the field well.

I once found a comment on HN to read "The Systems Bible" by John Gall, this is a great occasion to relay the proverbial baton. If tou like this article I strongly recommend reading this book.
Paper Clay Air Humidifier
Melione talks about love for her craft, upcoming project and more
I think that’s been promised by several presidents over the years and never delivered. That or just a simple 1 page post card sized file.
Sounds like a douche.
It's exactly these types of deals that regulators should look at if they want to prevent more monopolies in tech. You have what amounts to an entrenched business maintained by millions of lobbying dollars [1], buying a younger player offering the same service for free.

[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...
Productive Tools for Web Development
Heat wave melts 20% of snow cover from Antarctic island in days
Tribalism almost always subverts logic.
Did 'The Simpsons' Accurately Portray Stem Education and the Gig Economy?
A Guide to Understanding AdaBoost
We will see. The graphs of numbers of confirmed infected all seem to be bending down, but of course there's the possibility of biases like unreleased numbers and incomplete testing. I guess we will know in a few weeks which direction it is going to go.

That being said, with death being so rare among the young, I don't see why most people should panic more than they do about flu season. Obviously it is a serious concern, but I think on the extremes there is a bit more alarmism than is warranted. Of course, those same sensational articles are going to be the ones that get upvoted on social media sites like this one. I remember when the avian influenza scare was on how many end of the world articles there were. Not that it wasn't a pressing concern but it seems like these types of situations capture the public's imagination and fears a little more than is justified by the facts on the ground.

Also keep in mind that this message is coming from a "risk communication expert" who probably gets more exposure and therefore more business the more extreme their predictions are. Are they actually privy to any information or knowledge the other experts aren't aware of? Do they have any skin in the game at all when they make this prediction? Consider the source is all I'm saying.
Should you be blaming the CDC or the political environment writ large for the last decade?