skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is an interesting bias going on here. I'm wondering how many people upvoting this text has actually built a business, or just want to believe that what was written here is true?

Building a business is messy. Most ideas suck initially. Companies who got the problem right the first time are extremely rare. Just as rare as companies who succeeded with a crappy idea having great execution.

The hero ingredient is luck. Using all the tricks of the non scientific entrepreneurship self-help literature may grant you better odds at getting lucky, or may not.

You know if the problem/idea/execution was good/real after you have customers paying you. And even after that you don't really know was it execution or idea that won the game, only that they were enough good to succeed.
It probably would, because i believe objects blinking at 40hz facilitate certain motor responses.
"In addition, it has been shown in humans that stimuli which flicker at gamma frequencies are processed faster by our brains than when they flicker at different frequencies" [1]

I'm super curious whether 40hz line AC might not be healthier for aging populations. Or 80hz. [2]

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/38134861_Human_EEG_...

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6700637/
There is no difference between city centers and suburbia in much of Europe. Apart from that, the Netherlands has a few bike highways now to cater to faster intercity transport.

What you want to do is enable fast biking everywhere (so a bike first infra) and seperate modalities for safety and comfort. Any urban transport research will show that bikes in foot traffic is a Very Bad Idea(tm).
> I find the core team involvement of two of the biggest Chinese companies a bit worrying as somebody who tries not to support unacceptable totalitarian politics in that country, considering that it's not a secret how obedient the big companies have to be in order to even exist there. A pity because it's a great framework and community, I just can't ignore that aspect..
Anyone know of any available-online courses that teach functional programming using Miranda?
I really hope they do. In reality they will probably only cancel if they can get insurance to pay out. Does anyone know if event insurance pays out for "not a pandemic but actually it is"?

My hunch would be they don't.
I've heard of a Dyson Sphere. I had to look up who Katherine Johnson was.

I'm a woman and I'm painfully aware that women and other underrepresented groups face uphill battles to have a career at all and these battles are worthy of note in their own right.

I don't know what the solution is. I think about such things a great deal and wonder a lot what I would need to do to achieve recognition for my work and not for "a woman who did that kind of work."

I'm medically handicapped. I don't want to be remembered either as "a handicapped person who achieved something."

We don't remember Stephen Hawking that way. His work stood on its own for its merit. It didn't make news because he was wheelchair bound and did it. It would have made news even if he had been able bodied.

Certainly, a lot of underrepresented groups simply aren't getting the recognition they deserve. But I think about this problem space quite a lot and my first-hand experience has been that I tend to get attention for all the wrong reasons routed in my gender. My feeling is this is a factor in Theranos becoming such a debacle. I feel like men mostly either squee at women or dismiss them simply because they are women and women mostly don't get the kind critical engagement that helps one pursue excellence.

I don't know what criteria gets used to determine who deserves the black bar. I mostly don't think too much about that.

But I feel like this is about the worst possible way to pursue the subject.

Obits that posted get treated like a virtual wake. Discussion isn't off limits, but coming here to complain about this person getting recognition when someone else didn't seems like a pretty bad way to try to explore why the black bar is given and what we, as a society, can do to try to continue to reduce social injustice.
Comments when Google reverted their iconic Material UI text inputs (2017)
innate resistance, not "increase" resistance!

To be read as:
Low air humidity impairs two things in the human body: the barrier function against viruses, and the innate resistance against viruses.
H1Bs are no different than https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slaves
Google says Microsoft edge isn't secure
> we already use 28 different tools regularly totaling $227 / month
And I think its important to note that 2% is the mortality rate in a hospital where they have respirators, etc. The mortality rate outside of a hospital (e.g. in a quarantine wharehouse) is something like 20%. (I wish I could remember the source for this, will look and edit but it may have been The Atlantic).

It also seems like some survivors come out of this with pretty severe damage to their organs, especially lungs, because the persons immune system goes overboard and attacks healthy tissue. So, some fraction of people will live, but be disabled.
Context: https://www.reddit.com/r/nyc/comments/fayko1/my_covid19_stor...
Airtable and HubSpot would cross over a fair bit, no?
We can just give them a leave or have them work from home.

Using facial tech to track everyone and isolate them sounds too orwelian for my taste. I understand the implications but that's not going to work like all the other self checks. People will ignore it due to the cost or other reasons.
That should be email, not sms, but I guess they are more or less the same from that perspective.
From https://www.statista.com/statistics/241572/death-rate-by-age...

Looks like 6% of 80-84 and 14% of 85+.
Someone better at statistics than me could probably say what the relative and absolute risk increase is for contracting COVID-19 at those ages is.

Search for "all cause mortality by age" if you want to do some more research.
How Silicon Valley ruined work for everyone, everywhere
> This is a very silly post

For the sake of example, suppose I live in a country with 100 millions inhabitants, with 100 reported cases. Suppose that there are currently 100 times more cases. What do you think is the probability to get close enough to one of these cases to get infected? how does it compare with something like having a car accident, or getting complications for the common seasonal flu?

This virus is going to be a concern. A rough estimation tells us that number of cases increases tenfold every 10 to 15 days, depending on containment measures. It could peak at 10-20% of the population. We also expect the mortality rate to be something between 0.5% and 1%. So yes, there will be causalities, and we'll need to be especially vigilant in the near future, especially April and May. But right now, the probability to be infected if virtually zero. There is also not much we can do besides following CDC recommendations. The virus is going to spread no matter what.
In other words, keep indoor air sufficiently humid. When it drops below 40%, I switch on a humidifier.
It's easy to raise the billions required to fight this. It's peanuts for governments and even larger companies hoarding tens of billions that have a lot to lose because of such pandemics.
Grip – Elegant framework for the Crystal programming language, easy to use
VS Code Shortcuts Every Developer Should Memorize
Data Visualizations for Optimizing Patient Flow
But even if your brain is measuring time operating at a precision of "around five minutes before," the variance will sometimes cause that to be 3 seconds before.
Makefiles for Python and Beyond
If you haven't seen it, I consider the best-in-class argument parsing library to be Optparse-Applicative. https://github.com/pcapriotti/optparse-applicative

It provides an applicative interface, which it turns out is very precisely impedance-matched to the nature of command line arguments.

It also integrates nicely with e.g. https://hackage.haskell.org/package/optparse-generic to automatically derive command line parsers from data structures.

An example from a recent process of mine: https://github.com/wyager/zfs-backup/blob/master/src/Lib.hs . You can see what the generated help text looks like in the README.

The argument parser is automatically derived from the data structure describing the commands available in my program, using optparse-generic. Some extra type annotations on the command data structure provide the detailed document text.

Of course, you don't have to use the fancy auto-generation stuff if you don't want to. Writing optparse-applicative parsers by hand is very pleasant as well. Here is the argument parser code for my website's server: http://paste.best/p/22_rCSCen8M=
What is Memex?
"In any crisis, leaders have two equally important responsibilities: solve the immediate problem and keep it from happening again. "

First line here got me.

In the past, I think this is what was expected of leaders; However, in 2020? It feels like the definition needs to be updated.

I'm not so sure what people expect of leaders these days. I remember what was expected of leaders, now look at the type of leaders that are getting elected and see if that first sentence makes sense.

Maybe in 2020, leaders are supposed to just tell you what you want to hear.

I'd even argue that it's poor leadership that got us here in the first place. Yes there is a virus, yes it is spreading, could it have been handled better? Most likely.
Yep, it’s because of all the obnoxious “idea men” out there that try to treat technically skilled makers like ditch diggers who just need to be told where to dig the hole and how big.
Does that mean you don't run any peer servers yourself? Is that recommended?
This is far too optimistic. Where is the hard data that a vaccine could (even in a completely sunshine and rainbows scenario) be "ready" as early as June? The best I've been able to estimate is 18 months. This includes manufacturing and supply of course - a vaccine is useless if you can't get it to people at reasonable cost.
If it goes through, startups will need to change their employee incentives to compensate, and companies who don't will find that they're now way below market rate.

For example: https://danluu.com/startup-options/
While I appreciate the firsthand information, I think this is true of practically anywhere. Frankly, trying to prevent catastrophe through changing individuals’ behavior is practically impossible. Consider the amount of people who still smoke cigarettes as an example.J
This is exactly what's happening in Italy. The majority of people are asymptomatic or only have mild symptoms, but smaller hospitals are nearing full capacity and thus are redirecting patients to other hospitals. ICU beds cannot all be reserved to covid patients, there are regular patients as well. All the restrictive measures put in place should help contain the spread and avoid overwhelming the healthcare system.
The death rate was "small" but the reach was large. 1/4 of the world's population got it so the total death toll was large.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-reinfection-...
The gripe was not that it doesn't work well on Windows. It was about a culture of not caring about getting details right or valuing correctness. Windows was just used as an example of not caring about correctness. The time API was another.
Can't edit anymore, it should be

P1 + P2 = C1 + C2 - 2K
2K = C1 + C2 - (P1 + P2)

etc...
You do realize that if those death rates [0] hold up, when you take today's global population by age demographic and tally up how many people are expected to die within each age group, you get a total of 90 million dead.

Given that top epidemiologists are predicting 40-70% of adults will be infected this year, that would mean roughly 35 to 62 million people would die this year.

I would consider that a harrowing experience.

[0] I assume you got them from here https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se...

[1] https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/prevention-c...
I cannot assert to the full correctness, and I’m aware of the heresay-ness of it, but I’ve seen discussion before on how much “hacking around the lack of generics is in the Kubernetes codebase”
Back in the 2007-2008 timeframe when I added the streaming install/patch/play functionality to World of Warcraft, we also made it operate as an automatic repair system - if a disk block was read that had a hash mismatch, it just downloaded the correct block from the server (and wrote the fixed block to disk, of course). I looked at a month's worth of download logs, and estimated that 1 bit per GB per year flipped on hard disk data for our customers (we had already implemented re-reads before this point, because we had the hashes in place before we did streaming download, and so were pretty sure it was bad data on disk). Even at that fairly low rate, you can imagine that this reduced daily mysterious crashes by a nice amount. And keep in mind that hard disks already have error correction, so bits on magnetic media aren't as stable as you want. And, of course, this was not data at rest, there's lots of Wow play time going on, so lots of reads. I've been told that tape is more durable than spinning hard disks; for the sake of all those enterprise backups, I hope so.

As a side effect, this made me increase how much redundancy I used for data I really cared about.
Sublime Text isn't free.
https://www.sublimehq.com/store/text
Good question!

BCPL's O-Code is far different from LLVM bytecode. O-Code was little more than a virtual stack machine. Very similar to Forth, though slightly more complicated.

I could be wrong, but isn't Open64 more or less dead? The only thing I can think of that actually uses it (CUDA) isn't best-in-class.
Interesting observations regarding the "raw" aspects of HN. I definitely see that too and I would refer to it as "Brutalist" in the true sense of the word, but these days Brutalism in digital design refers to various experimental projects [1]; I would consider these works to be leaning towards fine arts than calling them "unadorned".

[1] https://brutalistwebsites.com/
I feel like a big portion of the apps you accomplish similar things. To name a few, Airtable, Notion, and Trello can all do CRM funnel, product roadmap and issue tracking. Even though 2 out of 3 are free, you guys could probably condense them into a centralized spot.
The Tail at Scale
"PAX Plague" is a common one for PAX.
It's called panpsychism. Most ancients were onto it.
Around ten times more deadly, not basically as deadly.

Around 2% mortality for COVID-19 vs. 0.2% mortality for influenza, with a chance that the COVID figure is underreported because many of the people who are not counted as having died are currently seriously ill.
I agree with your sentiment on what leaders should be, but I suspect your glorious rosy past of yesteryear does not exist. Terrible leaders focused mostly on staying in power have been a thing since the days of bread and circuses.
Ok, if it infected 27% of 1.9 billion, that’s 500M people infected.

50-100M of those die, for a fatality rate of at 10 to 20%, not the 2% referenced in OP.
You're on the right track, though I don't think the welding was common. Chinese neighborhoods are under a type of lockdown where there are some 4 taxis per 10-50k people that are designated for goods and extreme emergency cases. One of the many ways the government makes the numbers look smaller.

They are playing straight out of the old Soviet playbook. Their party is literally an incarnation of the CCCP. Do not treat this country as you would a democratic first world nation - it's culture is nothing of the sort, for better or worse.
Or we can agree that money is the common, well-understood metric.

And immediately allow that it's not the sole metric.
I think this comment is far more newsworthy than the original article
Answering here so everyone in this thread can see:

The most obvious one (and, admittedly, the one that immediately comes to mind at almost 3AM) is their exclusion of non-linear patterns. It didn't reduce complexity, yet made the language worse for the purpose the professor stated in an obvious way.
When I was young, I would prepare to wake up before the alarm if I really wanted to make sure I didn't oversleep. I would stare at the current time for about a minute and then go to sleep. The next day I would always wake up a few minutes before the alarm.

I don't think it's magic. There are plenty of cues (sound and light) that can tell you approximately what time it is without being conscious.
Does London have a reputation for bad food?
Strange. I’ve found that HubSpot’s CRM and salespipe features are pretty good, especially for a small startup. Maybe I am missing something in Airtable.
It’s not 1.9% or 2.1%, the fatality rate would have to be 10% for those numbers to work.
Fun fact - a lot of this is kind of stuff is used in SQL databases! Before you finish a transaction (i.e. a sequence of commands), you can rollback the transaction. This will undo the effects of every command ran as part of the transaction. It's interesting to take a look at how different production databases implement undo:

MySQL and Oracle use the "reconstructing previous states from the current state" strategy. As commands are ran, they keep track of how to undo those commands in the "undo log". If you rollback a transaction, all they do is run the commands in the undo log.

Postgres uses a different strategy. When Postgres modifies a row, it marks the old row as deleted and inserts a new row. Furthermore these changes are associated with the current transaction and considered to be pending until the current transaction completes. If the current transaction fails, Postgres will use the original version of the row because the transaction that modified it never actually completed.

SQL databases have a completely separate form of undo used for point in time backups. This is the ability to restore a copy of your database from any point in time in the past. As far as I know, use a combination of the "recording each state" and "reconstructing previous state from initial state". There's two parts to your typical database backup. There's the base backup which captures the state of your DB at a specific point in time. Separately there's a redo log that captures every change made to the data after the base backup was created. By replaying the changes made before a certain time, you can restore the DB to any state after the base backup was created.
I've experimented with using it together with TensorFlow.js to avoid blocking the UI thread while performing computationally expensive operations. Operations do take a bit longer to complete in a web worker compared to the main thread, but in return you get a smooth UI and a better user experience
Well, kind of (at least last time I used it, which was Sublime Text 2). They say it's an evaluation but there is no time-limit, just an annoying popup every now and then (or on start? Can't remember) but it's effectively free if you're OK with that.
The main issue is the overall efficiency of the process. Creating hydrogen by electrolysis is about 80% and then a fuel cell electric efficiency is 60-70%. So overall the whole process is not very good.
Call for the resignation of Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director General
fwiw, dave beazley writings on similar (and everything else as well) are excellent.
Why is Slack needed if GSuite is there. It's decent for chat in a small Startup.

Also Google meet does basic video conferencing bearable. Zoom may be an overkill.
gsuite, hubspot, github, jira, bitbucket, confluence, codeship, vs code, slack, discord

partially our product botium is open source, thats why we have github and bitbucket.
> They were put out in six months. This was never celebrated.

Red Adair was already a celebrated oil well firefighter in the 1960s, when 'Hellfighters' was filmed. His fame continued to grow. I remember a number of pieces praising Red Adair Company and others involved in putting out the Kuwait oil well fires. Putting out an oil well fire with a jet engine made for eye-grabbing news.

Obituaries about him include praise like this, from CBS, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hellfighter-red-adair-dies-at-8... :

"Thanks in part to his expertise, an operation expected to last three to five years was completed in nine months, saving millions of barrels of oil and stopping an intercontinental air pollution disaster."

I therefore think you exaggerate when you write "never celebrated."

Do you have a citation for the desert bloom? I looked, but couldn't find any mention of it. Since much of the water for putting out the fires was sea water, pumped in reverse through oil pipes, I'm curious about salt water could be beneficial to a desert bloom. Was it downwind moisture?

It was far easier to find publications like "Remediation of Oil Contaminated Sludge and Soil in Kuwait":

"The destruction of oil fields in Kuwait during the Gulf War resulted in unprecedented large environmental damage. More than 500 oil lakes were formed covering more than 49 km2 area. The volume of contaminated oily sludge’s and soil, which needs to be treated in Kuwait, is estimated to be more than 20 million m3 ... Within Burgan, all lake beds, particularly the ones near the city of Ahmadi and in the working areas such as gathering centers in the oil field, are considered to be a threat to human health and harmful to all types of life, including native flora and fauna."

an "Ecology of Arabian deserts" (doi:10.1007/1-4020-3970-0_5 )

"Lakes of oil deliberately released in Kuwait by the Iraqi Armyin the 1991 Gulf War were up to 2.5 m deep and contaminated the environment, as well as the north-eastern shores of Saudi Arabia. The movement of armies and their vehicles during the first Gulf War in 1991 and the Iraq war in 2003–2005 has caused the fragile desert pavements laid down over thousands of years to be broken and destroyed over large areas of north-eastern Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and many areas of Iraq. This caused a dramatic increase in the number of violent sandstorms and dust storms, new dunes blocked roads in northern Kuwait (El-Baz, 1992), and pilots reported a doubling of dust storms following the Iraq–Iran war in the 1980s."

so I also would like to know how well benefits like the desert bloom balances the many better-known negative effects.
It's a reasonable and well phrased question, so it's unfortunate that people are down voting it.

There are a few reasons as far as I understand it. Bear in mind how quickly our understanding of the virus (symptoms, transmission, infection rate & severity, etc) has evolved.

Initially, the only sensible thing to do was to attempt containment if at all possible. In my opinion, the US demonstrated a complete lack of preparedness and coordination here. Remember, we didn't know how bad it might (or might not) be. If it had turned out to be as deadly as SARS (it's not), things would be very bad right now. You have to assume the worst until you know for certain (within reason, of course).

There's also a preparedness aspect to things. Buying only a little more time can sometimes allow you to be much better equipped to handle the situation.

Then there's the logistical aspect. The tide may be inevitable, but how suddenly it arrives will make a huge difference in the quality of care (and thus outcomes) that is available to the few who exhibit severe symptoms. There are only so many hospital beds in the country, and we can only manufacture supplies so quickly. Imagine the difference between everyone in the country coming down with the flu on the same day, versus spread out over the course of a year.