skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm sure it works but it is an interesting angle for a scam.

I can't imagine a reason the WHO would contact me directly, ever.

Now my wife, she gets constant calls from the "FBI" demanding information. I mean that's hard to belive too (they're very mean and threatening but somehow have never found us...) but at least the FBI seems like a government organization that I would belive would have some sort of ... jurisdiction.

But I suppose when I have a lot of government related conversations with people and have to have the "that's not how it works ... at all" type discussions, I guess a lot of people just don't know.
I read the overview, cool language, very cool to see it open sourced, and just looking at the code it is clear how much it inspired Haskell.

I started hacking (a lot!) this week on an experimental project in Swift. Swift is similar to Haskell and Miranda in supporting functional programming. I like Haskell’s syntax and in general REPL based Haskell development, so at first Swift’s syntax bugged me. However, when I set my project up with Playgrounds for developing bits of low level functionality in what is effectively a REPL environment, and spent a day with XCode, I now think Swift is a worthy substitute for Haskell for some projects (i.e., when targeting macOS and/or iOS).
Show HN: Free beautiful landing page for your links, with Instagram super powers
Props to him for not having an ego with that. Jodatime even recommends using JSR-310 time for new development.
Freeman Dyson did speak out against climate alarmism. He provides some insightful counterpoints to the prevailing APW narrative, particularly about taking models on faith & the provisional nature of science. Given he was directly involved with some of the initial climate models, it's an interesting take on how models of complex nonlinear systems often oversimplify reality with assumptions. It seems like good general wisdom re: models in any domain exhibiting similar complexity & nonlinearity.

https://youtu.be/BiKfWdXXfIs
I think this is 100% true for the west coast. We know this virus has been in the wild for at least two weeks, likely more. It's more likely than not that most large cities nationwide have been exposed at this point.
That's an unnecessary rabbit-hole to go down.

The root cause was likely Github returning 200 when they should've returned a 5xx error.

A better solution in this case is to verify the push worked by looking at the remote for a ref in the push before returning success. I would never just depend on git2 to libgit2 callbacks succeeding as "proof" that it worked, because there's too much to go wrong.

Also, the crates.io patch should be upstreamed into git2 by wrapping the block. And, the ultimate fix is to address libgit2 to make sure it's handling errors correctly. It's not a very good fix, but it's better than what exists now.

Furthermore, it seems like a pure Rust git would be better than problematic wrapper layers stacked one on of top of the other.
For what it's worth, I was surprised to see not just that there's age skew in mortality (no children have died) but also age skew in diagnosed infection (far fewer children are reporting symptoms than you'd expect).

Of course, we can still worry about children infecting high-risk groups, etc.
>It’s only money

It will be interesting to compare the death tolls from the covid-19 to the economic recession it causes.

For example, the there were an estimated 500,000 additional cancer deaths between 2008 and 2010 due to unemployment and healthcare cuts [1]. When you consider other diseases, you are easily in the millions dead.

[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
Most suppliers will prioritize government over civilians and I know this because I was purchasing 700 masks for my company. Besides, government can setup its own factory. I know enough how these masks are assembled to tell you its not a rocket science.
Money Report – Feb 29'th 2020
There are a lot of other groups this applies to. For example, the current Korean outbreak was started by a religious member who refused to be quarantined.
The US’s response is being lead by someone that doesn’t believe in science.
If you want to get worried about something, there are a lot of other places to start
This seems wrong to me. I don't know statistics well enough to say why, and I may be totally off, but I'm thinking like "birthday paradox" type of thing.

Anyone with more statistics knowledge have a better answer?
There is actually at least three subs on reddit:
r/Coronavirus and r/China_Flu initially, but both are kind of out of control with drama

Then the same mods spun off r/covid19, which is heavily moderated to remove all the drama and focus on science only
Excerpt:

"At AWS Reinvent 2018, Werner Vogels said it was now possible to use any language in AWS Lambda. I thought I’d put that to the test!

I thought it’d be interesting to add lambda support for Pascal, specifically the FreePascal 3.0.0 variant found with Lazarus (the free, cross-platform version of Delphi). Mainly because it doesn’t really fit, it’s a compiled language, but I do have a remaining soft spot for the Lazarus project so I thought I’d give it a go.

Fair warning, this doesn’t make ton’s of sense. As a compiled language, you can’t initialise things in the runtime and then call them from multiple instances of functions, it also doesn’t deliver an amazing cold-start experience since it needs compiling on each run.

But… it does work!"

Random thoughts:

It might be interesting to try the same technique above, but with a smaller compiler, perhaps XD-Pascal:

https://github.com/vtereshkov/xdpw

Or, if you prefer C -- the Tiny C Compiler:

https://bellard.org/tcc/
Love the site. Great landing page. Gonna checkout the app.
If you read through the thread, it becomes clear that mental illness is a factor here. With so many such cases over the years, it's as though cryptography has its own flavor of Jerusalem Syndrome. It's such a magnet for this. The overconfidence of some of these people is really impressive. Plot twist: while being wrong about almost everything technically, perhaps he's right about the NSA wanting the conversation confined to a small, well understood set of algorithms. But still, ugh, no thank you to what he's offering.
Where are you reading this? I have friends in the medical industry telling me that their surgical mask suppliers have started restricting orders.
A chunk I've made open source on Github. Other stuff all fits on one drive, and I'll just give it to a family member(s) who wants it.
+ deffo have a web version. Installing the app is a fair bit of friction.
SpaceX Starship SN1 experiences an anomaly and explodes
You'd hope so, but then we have this: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/27/us/politics/us-coronaviru...

tl;dr- "directing them to coordinate all statements and public appearances with the office of Vice President Mike Pence"
Girlfriend is picking one up at the store right now. A little surprised how hard and fast this came on. Was at a launch party (unfortunately) four hours ago and just had the scratchy throat. Thanks for the concern!
> Is there anyone but me who uses the premium article on medium.com as a filter for what is NOT worth my time?

I humbly suggest that your filter might be broken.

After years of being irritated by Medium's pay wall and reflexively clicking away from blockaded articles, I recently decided to pay the $5, because there was some article I really wanted to read (can't even remember what it was), and because I was tired of paying the mental tax of constantly weighing whether to click on a Medium link because I didn't know if the article would be paywalled or not.

I've since read dozens of high-quality, in-depth articles on a variety of technical topics and other areas of interest.

I find it well worth $5/month and I'll probably continue to subscribe.
Sure, but nobody wants to deal with a terabyte of holes.
ITT: Lots of people seemingly unaware that the cities hosting these events on average _already_ (currently and will continue to do so throughout the coming months) receive 100,000+ tourists _per day_ and nothing will stop that.

The risk profile of transmission is unchanged whether they are canceled or not.
US confirms two new coronavirus cases without links to travel
I had no idea what I was doing when I made it, I just wanted to play it myself.
I'm expecting a cancellation announcement for SXSW in the next days.
>Can you even think of a behavior that isn't pattern matching, at its core? I'd argue it doesn't exist.

Yes, quite trivial ones, for example winograd schema.

(1) John took the water bottle out of the backpack so that it would be lighter.
(2) John took the water bottle out of the backpack so that it would be handy

What does it refer to in each sentence? ML systems absolutely suck at this because the structure of the sentence is identital. The answer is derived from understanding the meaning of the sentence.

ML systems in NLP right now esentially correlate strings without having any idea of the underlying world. To solve a problem like the one above you need to go from syntax -> model of the world -> back to syntax. That would constitute actual understanding.

Similar problems are of course questions of the kind "X was alive in 2000. X was alive in 2010", was X alive in 2005? Pattern matching doesn't help you here, you need a deep model about the world to actually answer the question. (unless you're guessing).

The reason why pattern matching can't solve every problem is because real world problem spaces are open-ended. There are infinite sentences or infinite problems, some entirely new without any solution in historical data.
This is just the typical way that Trump is misquoted. Drop a word here or there, ignore the context, and you have another great headline.

A staffer telling Trump “this is their new ‘hoax’” has a readily understandable meaning which is not even remotely calling Coronavirus itself a hoax.
You don’t need unconstitutional mass surveillance to investigate any of those things. I’m sick of people using terrorists, foreign agents, child exploiters, bigtech, or whatever else they come up with to justify government abuses.
My current favorite is Jerome Powell telling me I have a metric tonne of money to claim.

That said, WHO is an interesting choice. Would anyone really act based on their demands? edit. CDC seems better.
What keeps all the tracks from be electrified? If it's just cost, what would make it cheaper to use fuel cells?
Virtually no email sent on the Internet is protected by DANE, DNSSEC, or TLSA.

Here's a short list of domains that are using DNSSEC, DANE and TLSA to protect their email. I also provide a transcript of a utility that connects to and verifies the SMTP server and the DANE/TLSA records for openssl.org and could have done so for every domain on this list but there's no reason to get carried away.

* geektimes.com

* gmx.com

* mail.com

* comcast.net

* dd24.net

* debian.org

* freebsd.org

* gentoo.org

* ietf.org

* isc.org

* netbsd.org

* openssl.org

* samba.org

* torproject.org

There's a DANE TLS SMTP server checking tool: https://www.huque.com/bin/danecheck-smtp

Here's what it does:
This application checks a DANE SMTP Service. It queries the MX record set for the given domain, looks up DANE TLSA records at the MX targets, connects to the target servers, negotiates STARTTLS, and then attempts to verify the TLS server certificate against the TLSA records.

Lets test openssl.org:

Domain Name: openssl.org

MX host: 50 mta.openssl.org

#################################################################
### CHECKING MX HOST: mta.openssl.org
#################################################################

TLSA records found: 1
TLSA: 3 1 1 6cf12d78fbf242909d01b96ab5590812954058dc32f8415f048fff064291921e

Connecting to IPv6 address: 2001:608:c00:180::1:e6 port 25
recv: 220-mta.openssl.org ESMTP Postfix
recv: 220 mta.openssl.org ESMTP Postfix
send: EHLO cheetara.huque.com
recv: 250-mta.openssl.org
recv: 250-PIPELINING
recv: 250-SIZE 36700160
recv: 250-VRFY
recv: 250-ETRN
recv: 250-STARTTLS
recv: 250-ENHANCEDSTATUSCODES
recv: 250-8BITMIME
recv: 250 DSN
send: STARTTLS
recv: 220 2.0.0 Ready to start TLS
TLSv1.2 handshake succeeded.
Cipher: TLSv1.2 ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384
Peer Certificate chain:
0 Subject CN: mta.openssl.org
Issuer CN: Let's Encrypt Authority X3
1 Subject CN: Let's Encrypt Authority X3
Issuer CN: DST Root CA X3
SAN dNSName: mta.openssl.org
DANE TLSA 3 1 1 [6cf12d78fbf2...] matched EE certificate at depth 0
Validated Certificate chain:
0 Subject CN: mta.openssl.org
Issuer CN: Let's Encrypt Authority X3
SAN dNSName: mta.openssl.org

Connecting to IPv4 address: 194.97.150.230 port 25
recv: 220-mta.openssl.org ESMTP Postfix
recv: 220 mta.openssl.org ESMTP Postfix
send: EHLO cheetara.huque.com
recv: 250-mta.openssl.org
recv: 250-PIPELINING
recv: 250-SIZE 36700160
recv: 250-VRFY
recv: 250-ETRN
recv: 250-STARTTLS
recv: 250-ENHANCEDSTATUSCODES
recv: 250-8BITMIME
recv: 250 DSN
send: STARTTLS
recv: 220 2.0.0 Ready to start TLS
TLSv1.2 handshake succeeded.
Cipher: TLSv1.2 ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384
Peer Certificate chain:
0 Subject CN: mta.openssl.org
Issuer CN: Let's Encrypt Authority X3
1 Subject CN: Let's Encrypt Authority X3
Issuer CN: DST Root CA X3
SAN dNSName: mta.openssl.org
DANE TLSA 3 1 1 [6cf12d78fbf2...] matched EE certificate at depth 0
Validated Certificate chain:
0 Subject CN: mta.openssl.org
Issuer CN: Let's Encrypt Authority X3
SAN dNSName: mta.openssl.org

[0] Authentication succeeded for all (2) peers.
Holy moly. You have slides.com domain. That in itself should be worth a fortune.

Loved the demo. Although I kinda wanted to see how easy it is to put together something.

Like May he show snippets of existing codebases. May be like how git works under the hood with its merkle tree.

Or how a SAAS app works with frontend, database etc and the relevant snippets. Little useful examples like that that are valuable on its own but really showcase the technology.
Prayers and God's promises for healing and breakthrough
You're correct. They have never sold information as the parent commenter is claiming.
You can stream Midsomer Murders if you are still in the mood for 3-hour long British murder mysteries.
Show HN: ReactJS – Simple Line Icon Component
Two new presumed-positive Covid-19 cases in Washington State
I haven't been in ages, but the "SXSW Crud" used to be a common concept. Too much booze, lack of sleep, lots of handshaking, + cold and flu. It knocked me out hard 2 years in a row. After that I started getting the flu shot yearly and avoiding physical touching at events. Hosting SXSW during this inevitable pandemic is a terrible terrible idea.
I was part of such a church. It’s not active anymore.

http://www.churchofvirus.org/

It was good. Then it was bad. It got worse. Then it died a sad death.

I am pretty sure some of it’s members are probably right here on HN. Different time and another lifetime for me.
:: for type signatures, for one; I think that came straight from Miranda.

Honestly though there weren't too many outright "mistakes", but some parts of Haskell have evolved significantly, for example the introduction of the IO monad and all the associated type classes, compared to the original based on infinite lazy lists.
https://www.thenaturalbeddingcompany.com.au/
Notice that this operates on a lexer stream to transform a source file into the destination without any macros/macro-substitutions remaining. It's not the same lexer as that in the C compiler, which doesn't know anything about macros.

Also, on the C compiler-side, people might be interested in the lexer hack because C isn't a CFG.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexer_hack
I can't believe you just changed the value of your life to a money amount you would theoretically lose.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjbSCEhmjJA
Building Bridges as a Technical IC
So far it seems to be isolated to the west coast. Unfortunately I don't expect it to stay there. At some point (if not already happened), somebody will get on a plane headed to the midwest, south, or east coast and spread it.
All very interesting discussions. Some have broached on it, but let's be clear: mechanically generated sequences are not copyrightable. The program that generates them is, of course.

It doesn't matter if there isn't enough space to enumerate them all. It doesn't matter if most of them sound like crap. It doesn't matter if some match a pre-existing song. It doesn't matter if you do or do not highlight "interesting" songs.

The very fact that they are machine generated eliminates the element of creativity that is a central requirement to copyright.

Copyright law may be stupid, but it isn't this stupid. An even more stupid argument that isn't even valid doesn't really help.

> 503.03(a) Works-not originated by a human author.

> In order to be entitled to copyright registration, a work must be the product of human authorship. Works produced by mechanical processes or random selection without any contribution by a human author are not registrable.
How does it know what is expensable and what isn’t ?
On Tuesday, California will be going to primary elections...
Over here in Norway, people who suspect Covid-19 are urged to call the doctor instead of visiting the emergency room. If there are any local phone numbers for information, I'd call those first. They'll give you a check-list of stuff to verify if you're even a candidate. And if you are, then most likely a health crew will come and visit you with tests. Note: How they go about this may be different depending on your local area's response plan for the disease, though, so listen to local media, or official announcements, or find official information online if you know where. Anyway, if you haven't visited areas known for having outbreaks, then you're most likely just suffering a regular flu. Media coverage of this thing really spreads more anxiety than it's worth. Even in China there's only cases in the tens of thousands, and China has a total population of 1.4 billion people, so the chance of you actually having it is still pretty small. ^^
first thought came to my mind is competition.
Because GP's username is "taiwan boy" and if you look at his comment history it would be obvious why it matters for him.
Iran Became a New Epicenter of the Coronavirus Outbreak
You go to the bank's website and it has a link to the app on the store?

If they dist an apk, how is the bank to provide updates for their app? Build their own updater architecture? If there was a mitmed update from a store they could cancel it centrally.

Telling people to prefer apks is setting them up to be hacked.
Nobody can read minds, and certainly not the one of an entire religion, and by its very nature this is something which could never be spoken about publicly by its representatives. So we have only the actions of religions to go on. If we discount all the actions which can readily be explained as the kind of random madness stemming from any cult-like organization and/or culture, I get the impression that many religions actually do try to reign in the population at large and keep them in reasonable behavioral patterns.

But no, no evidence, only my impression.
Don't they vote by mail now?
The key to using C# for manipulating Excel for me was ExcelDNA. The development workflow and binary packing was pretty good, I thought.

Before ending up on ExcelDNA, I had started with a VSTO template from Visual Studio, and the development workflow was hell because of how buggy the interactions with Excel were. And I thought the ClickOnce deployment was annoying, if you can instead merely copy an excel file as well as its add-in file(s).

You don't really need to sign your add-in, though I guess that's not good.
A half-hour to learn Rust
I want to be clear, I'm talking about the city metro areas. Not commuting from suburbia. We should have fully separated bike paths for longer distance commute bike traffic, because mixed speed traffic with cars just doesn't work when cars are going faster, and unprotected bike lanes are just a bandaid solution to that problem.

But once you're in the metro area, everyone should slow right down. The dominant traffic in the city is foot traffic.

Cars go at 50km/h through my city, meaning they need to be separated really strictly. Slow them down to 20km/h with narrower roads, and you can reclaim the area for mixed pedestrian traffic, allowing more free movement for everyone in the city. Something as simple as crossing the road shouldn't take 10 minutes for 200 people just so five cars can cross the road.

With narrower streets and slower traffic, you can reasonably cross the road anywhere you want. That also allows bikes to move reasonably along the road but slowly on the footpaths, you open the whole area up for the people using the city.

It's all a balance, not everywhere in a city should be like that. I'm just advocating to move away from the heavy car-oriented lean many places currently have for their city centers.
Do they? I didn't realize that.

Edit: This article suggests that ballots get mailed but that there are still physical polling places https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/sluggish-mail-ballot...
AFAIK Microsoft did the same a few days ago too.
I mean.. there are tons of conferences happening every weekend. Widespread dispersal is not inevitable, just like everyone doesn't get the flu every year, despite new viruses appearing [1].

Wash your hands often, don't touch your face, and carry alcohol sanitizer.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/prevent/keyfacts.htm

> Why do I need a flu vaccine every year?

> A flu vaccine is needed every season for two reasons. First, a person’s immune protection from vaccination declines over time, so an annual vaccine is needed for optimal protection. Second, because flu viruses are constantly changing, flu vaccines may be updated from one season to the next to protect against the viruses that research suggests may be most common during the upcoming flu season. For the best protection, everyone 6 months and older should get vaccinated annually.
Really cool. Didn’t really observablehq would make it this easy.

Would be nice to see why the countries are on the level they are.
I hadn't even thought about that. I really hope they postpone/cancel it like every other major convention is doing right now.
> But then, later, I'd see them making the exact same argument to someone else.

When someone continues to cargo culting useful fragments of knowledge instead of actually learning how/why those fragments actually work, the cargo cult behavior tends to incorporate increasing levels of magical thinking.

A good example of an extreme form of this are the "sovereign citizens" that try to use their "creative" reinterpretations of legal code and procedure almost as an incantation or spell. The like to read from Black's Law Dictionary as if it was a grimoire.
"So far" is doing a bit of work, but ignoring that...

We know that COVID-19 has a high mortality rate (and a high rate of requiring ICU care). "High" doesn't mean 50% or higher; it means high compared to influenza or high compared to the capacity the US health system is intended to handle.

This article shouldn't be reassuring. Read this line in particular:

If I were at home with similar symptoms, I probably would have gone to work as usual.

That should scare the fuck out of you.
but how would you know if you have covid-19 if you have symptoms of a common cold and you haven't been exposed to the reported high risk items.
Although as it gets more widespread it could come from anywhere.

Will we get to a point where if we have cold like symptoms we are expected to consider the virus and act accordingly?
> "TBH if you've developed software in the past ten years, it's unlikely you haven't been hugely affected by what the FP community has been doing."

Apart from HN / reddit bubble, not many people know about FP, and not to imply that's their fault. FP is still weird, difficult for mere mortals, and ivory tower elitism is holding some of its useful ideas back.