skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I do enjoy moments like these on hacker news when someone presents a project for X and the CTO of X shows up and wants to talk. It shows how directly of an impact one can potentially have in this community.

I hope this means we’re getting grep searches for github soon. Cheers.
No, it's not a bad thing. You may not have kids, but you rely on a society that educates children, as employees, as people making goods, providing services etc.

You want to live in a civilised society, you pay the membership club. You want to live in your Randian distopia, go and make one.
In theory, they could. But IMHO it would not be wise to overestimate the EU’s competence when it comes to purchasing software projects and writing a sane requirement specification.

As a citizen within EU I would rather see them donate money to the Signal Technology Foundation instead. OTOH that could be controversial, so perhaps it would be better if citizens and companies would donate directly instead.
Because, again, it would be more efficient to put all that in the solar farm at scale.
...You think that the policy of "Give everyone 1000 USD per month" is designed to dismantle? the welfare state?
Off-topic, but I can't stand cookie banners that link to Google policy documents.

Ironically it's the only way I end up leaking info to Google
This is a mistake. They should at least compile their own version and not something that comes from an US based app store under US law. At any point the US can force a change.

This is as secure as purchasing a machine from Crypto AG. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG
I Mined My Mailbox to Find the Top Email Service Providers
I strongly disagree.

It's a little like saying "learn programming well enough and you'll know if some piece of code works as expected without running it."
Well, in the most broad - but applicable 'enough' - sweeping generalisation I can think of: a degree.
A plan to save Earth's oceans
A fifth death has just been confirmed, sadly.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-italy-death/...
According to this video[1], there are speculations that given its high mortality rate, the virus in Iran has mutated.

[1]: https://youtu.be/02TwdiRUJTA
I never understood why they did not just make all the BBC channels subscription-only.
I don’t know in what way it isn’t treated as a big deal. There are daily updates from every country; the news covers the epidemic in detail; China quarantined tens of millions of people; major trade shows are being cancelled. Unless you literally mean bubonic-plague levels of panic, I’m not sure what else remains to be done in places where the disease has not yet fully spread.
Would love it in monospace variant.
The majority of developers seem to make simple CRUD apps overly complex (in the code I have inherited at least).
Design winning investor pitch deck, business presentation
Perhaps a better idea would be to fund an audit of the Signal app. (Or has that been done already?)
Similar to yesterday's "Ask HN: Share your profitable side project" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22396721 and the popular "Ask HN: One-person SaaS apps that are profitable?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19701783
Any examples of software that accomplishs this well?

A quick summary of my experience:

- Most complex apps are not learnable linearly: Ableton Live, Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro X, Photoshop, After Effects, Blender, all practically require reading the manual.

- A few apps are ok at it: Adobe Lightroom, and Sketch, although those apps also are probably less powerful than those in the first category, e.g., Photoshop can do the majority of what both of those apps can do, and more.

I would actually put shells and text editors as some of the easiest complex apps to learn linearly, because you can do so much with them with just cut and pasting text from the internet. Try following along with a Blender tutorial video that's not for an absolute beginner, and you'll get stuck almost immediately, because you won't know the keyboard shortcuts to perform the actions in the video. This happens far less with programming tutorials involving text editors and terminals.
Not GP, but to me it can be 'negative'-ish in the same way as 'cliché' is, i.e. it doesn't have to be, but can be used like 'well it's a bit of a trope (resp. cliché) that [...]'
I mean... 400k miles is a LOT. I've never personally been in a vehicle with that many miles, the most I've seen in a vehicle I've driven/ridden in is about 190k miles and the car really needed to be shot and put out of its misery. The fact the car was still running at 400k miles is amazing.
While reading the blog post/abstract I had the same thought, but the full paper makes it clear that the author intends something different:

> The second challenge that the uncertainty principle poses for Bayesian statistics is that [...] we routinely treat the act of measurement as a direct application of conditional probability.

Furthermore it states that this problem might also arise for other applications of Bayesian statistics:

> If classical probability theory needs to be generalizedto apply to quantum mechanics, then it makes us wonder if it should be generalized for applicationsin political science, economics, psychometrics, astronomy, and so forth. It’s not clear if there are any practical uses to this idea in statistics, outside of quantum physics. For example, would it make sense to use “two-slit-type” models in psychometrics, to capture the idea that asking one question affects the response to others?
I totally disagree. After reading the landing page, I have no idea what kind of programming language this is.

Someone else mentioned this is based on JVM. There is no mention of JVM on the homepage. So, is it based on JVM? Or some interpreted language? Or compiled to native code?

"The Network in the Language" What does this mean?

"Sequence Diagrams for Programming" What does this mean?

"Structural, Open-by-Default Typing" Looks pretty standard?

"From Code to Cloud" What does this mean? Just some nice tooling?

"Batteries Included" Like most other languages.

"Developer First" What does this mean? What's different to other languages?

This sounds all like marketing fuzz, without telling actually any information. Really. I have no idea what this language is about.

Is this a competitor to other JVM languages? Or to system languages like C++/Rust/Nim/etc? Or to languages like Go/Erlang? Or to languages like Python/Ruby? And what's special about this language?

mdasen summarized my complaints in a nice way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22402053
As the Startup Boom Deflates, Tech Is Humbled
This is possible with remote attestation. See the "Trust but verify" paragraph in https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/ and also https://signal.org/blog/secure-value-recovery/.
So you did not just "learn vi by just using vi". You have also used a browser, google, and tutorials found by google. There is nothing wrong with that. In fact congratulation on learning vi! But sadly your example does not illustrate that one can "learn vi by just using vi".
Signal uses Intel SGX to give you some assurances about this, at least for parts of their serving stack. You can run the remote attestation tools and get a report back from Intel that says, in effect, "you connected to a genuine CPU and it's running software with this hash". Then you reproduce the build of the open source code and check the hashes match.

I'd be surprised if anyone has ever actually done this. It's a very obscure thing. But to their credit, it's possible.

SGX can't actually make you have secure end to end encryption though. The Signal protocol is necessary but not sufficient. The operators can always just push a software update that invalidates all the security guarantees. It's been a problem since the start but they never talk about fixing it, even though the issue is a glaringly obvious one.

What they could do is allow third parties to audit their software updates, and then cross-sign the binaries. Android allows this but there's no UI for it. It'd benefit from a collaboration with Google to allow multi-vendor apps.

After that comes sandboxing. Dalvik/ART doesn't support the Java SecurityManager API. However, for sandboxing software components cheaply it's hard to beat. If a component is sandboxed in a correct manner then the audit costs get much lower. You don't need to re-audit a component that's changed if the sandbox means it can't access keys or message data, for example (and if everything is memory safe: you'd have to do multi-process on iOS which is a lot more expensive).
That seems mildly optimistic. Fear of corona (an invisible enemy) seems to increase xenophobia overall.

Hell in the Ukraine they were throwing rocks at busses repatriating their own countrymen who had caught corona virus
Plenty of 'customised' useful-to-user apps are just CRUD apps though, nothing unique/interesting/challenging, just domain words mapped on to the same multitudinous/boring/easy shell built hundreds of thousands of times before.
Nowdays merged into wasmtime: https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime
Are you aware if there is any data yet on what proportion of recoveries will experience lasting lung/other damage? For example, is the permanent lung damage seen so far (which I've only anecdotally read about, I must admit) mostly related to ARDS?
not in the field, but transparency/non-transparency of china has very little to do with being able to effectively contain something with a 14 day incubation period that is spread through indirect contact.
Rich Hickey has a pretty interesting take on this very topic where he compares programming languages to instruments, and how instruments aren’t for beginners. How it takes work to become good at playing an instrument, and how that isn’t a bad thing.

> But look at this guitar player with blisters. A harpist has blisters, a base player with blisters. There's this barrier to overcome for every musician. Imagine if you downloaded something from GitHub and it gave you blisters. Right? The horrors!

That whole talk is filled with some interesting takes on designing and building software (with the usual skew that paints Clojure in a good light, so take it with a grain of salt if necessary).

[1] https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi...
Lets blame the media ?

What are you talking about. The media is reporting whats happening as it gets it, if Iran's media is being silenced that got nothing to do with the virus itself and more about the control of panic.

> We also need the immediate relaxation of sanctions around this on Iran

I'm pretty sure the WHO couldn't give a rats about US sanctions when it comes to human rights and world health.
I agree, the blogpost is not written clearly. But there is something fundementally odd about how wavefunctions cause seemingly negative probabilities. And understanding that might lead to improvements in how we deal with probabilities and statistics.

Contrary to what people might think from their schoolbooks, a lot of statistics is built on a swampy foundation.
Not quite

It used to be everyone paid a TV license if they watched TV.

Then about 20 years ago the government offered a bribe to over 75s and said "we'll pay your tv license". This is basically was basically giving an extra £200 (in 2019 money) a year to every household with an over 75.

This cost something like £750m a year - something like 20% of the BBC budget (a budget that has dropped 25% in the last 10 years)

Then the government said "we don't need to bribe old people any more because brexit", and removed that subsidy. However they then said "The BBC will pay it", and old people lapped it up and blamed the BBC

The BBC then said "ok, we will pay for over 75s who have low income, but we won't pay for a license for millionaires who are living off final salary pensions". This was apparently still outrageous.

In parallel to this, the "left" of the country are rather annoyed by the BBC for their perceived bias towards the government and brexit, and thus they are saying "it's time to turn off the BBC"

There is, and always has been, a fundamental unfairness in the license fee. Someone living on their own on minimum wage pays the same as a family of 5 on £500k a year.

Worth noting that today it's easier than ever not to have a license fee, simply use the internet, subscribe to now TV for whatever junk is on sky. There are very few people consume no BBC services and only watch ITV.
According to this article, the image quality on the new glasses from Bosch, should actually be very good: https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/consumer-electronics/gad...

It is easy to imagine someone with these glasses from Bosch, walking around in a bar. Personal information about other people would projected right to the retina.
The Spanish Flu infected a quarter of the world's population and killed 50 million people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu
I wonder what it is about PHP that has led to this and whether you could recreate it in a new language without the historical inconsistencies and traps.
It's not as though staff will be installing it from the App store on their phones.
How to Run a Remote Startup Across Time Zones
Correction: This is a "hipster" art project

Shouldn't even be on Hackernews
I actually agree that WebAssembly is currently overhyped ;) But I guess that's one of the side effects of being a 'web technology'.

(e.g. the difference of code size and performance to plain old asm.js isn't by far as big as many people think).

> such an unbearable experience to use C and C++, it is one of the mechanisms Google uses to improve Android's security.

...as if Android has a spectacular security track record vs iOS ;)
Why would anyone trust a fork of Signal?
You can't watch a ITV without a license, unless you watch it on whatever ITV's iplayer equivelent it. Same with Sky, you can subscribe to nowtv, but you can't watch sky in a legacy OTA way.
They use the Intel sgx (secure enclave) to do exactly this. Although for message contents, it doesn't matter anyway because they are end to end encrypted and cannot be read except by the receiving party.
That's a tad unfortunate. Signal was just low profile enough that my wife and I could use it in China. This raises the profile of it just a bit higher than I'd like. Further, with the likes of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22202110 having a higher profile makes the organisation more vulnerable to harassment from the government.
Yes, performance is a feature.

You have to plan and architecture for it, and you can't just tack it on after the fact by profiling a few hot codepaths (though you should do that too).

Performance can be different from "scalability" though. Sometimes, there is tension between the two.
SMS and phone calls. The infrastructure is all there already.

Interestingly, the EU's position on this looks really confused. SMS messages should (in theory) only transit their own local telcos. The USA doesn't get a look-in unless it hacks the telcos themselves.

What the EU is doing here is routing all Commission traffic through US based server farms and roots of trust. The phones are controlled from the USA, the comms services are too. So their own local firms can no longer see the traffic but US firms can (Signal claim this isn't the case but people are wising up to the fact that this can't be true until more infrastructure is in place).

What actual threat are they trying to block here?
> Then you reproduce the build of the open source code and check the hashes match.

Assuming that the sgx environment hasn't been tampered with. There have been several flaws in sgx, e.g. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/02/12/intel_sgx_hacked/
You likely have fairly accurate priors about that coin flip I just mentioned. They are just not accurate enough to be useful. The math for designing sample sizes may be unfamiliar, so you can just try running the same simulation a few times. Then try a few priors on each data set and compare.

This is effectively pure math so there is nothing to disagree or get upset about. What’s up for debate is how accurate your priors are in the real world.
Our society has drilled into us that in order to be successful, we have to go to college, we need to make money, have money in our 401ks, fund our retirement accounts, take on mortgages, take on loans, use our credit cards, buy a new car every few years, have kids, all while realizing how much you're barely just breaking even to afford the lifestyle that you chose.

I fear the day when my reality sets in.. and I have no memories of anyone or anything I ever did because I was staring at a computer screen all day. I'm in the same boat: working for multiple companies as full-time to part-time to freelance to contract. I can't sleep because I don't feel productive. And the little sleep I get is enough that I'm okay to get up and get going again.

I do not even drink coffee. I try to swim at least an hour a day, and bike for at least a half hour to keep the muscles going and strong. Sitting at a desk all day and then coming home and sitting more... mentally and physically exhausting.

I am addicted to tech and the Internet and my addiction is fed by my skills to keep feeding my visions to life. Rick and Morty moment. Rick has no meaning as a scientist because he knows the truth about the universe and everything in it. Joker moment. When you're good at something, never do it for free. Do what you do best to live the life you want.
The 61 is almost certainly rising much more quickly than the 12. Many cases don't get counted early on, so the fatality rate at this stage is overstated and largely meaningless. Same thing happened everywhere else with a suddenly-noticed largeish outbreak.
Looking around at repositories I'm familiar with this seems to be the case.
I dont think its supposed to be a safety feature, the gate is probably not locked.
If I worked for the intelligence agencies I would be capturing all the info going in and out of the signal servers at the infrastructure level.

Even if I couldn't break the encryption I'd have timing and connectivity data.

So, if I were a user, I would always operate on the assumption that info would leak.
> Just like how you can watch TV without a Netflix subscription, just not Netflix.

This is incorrect. You cannot watch or record broadcast TV of any sort without a TV license. That includes any channels on freeview (funded by ad-breaks) or any live TV from another service e.g. watch live TV through the internet (even on services that aren't the iPlayer).

From the TV licensing website:

> Live TV means any programme you watch or record as it’s being shown on TV or live on any online TV service. It’s not just live events like sport, news and music. It covers all programmes on any channel, including soaps, series, documentaries and even movies.

https://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/check-if-you-need-one

> It's equivalent to buying a ticket for a film as another example.

No it isn't. You have no choice in the matter. When I paid for the TV license I never watched the BBC's content but I still had to pay for the BBC's content.

e.g. If I were to pay for Sky TV I would still need to pay a TV license. I cannot opt out of paying the BBC. The only way to not pay the BBC is to use only online services or only use your TV for consoles / bluray / dvd.
This is offensive. Do you want to mean all Clojure developers are garbage? What technology are you working with? Does your entire community consist of stellar individuals with no faults?

Clojure problems typically start because some member of the team had enough power to convince their manager to do something in Clojure. It is not an organization that typically hires Clojure developers and has already people that know Clojure and can interview Clojure candidates. Clojure projects are typically a byproduct of having developers who are not satisfied with your language (Java most of the time) and try to seek out a better tool for the job.

It is not an inherent problem with Clojure or those people. Most developers need an organization to support them and lacking expertise around them they tend to fail in one way or another.

Programming Clojure requires huge amount of discipline and guidance with regards to the structure of actual code which you don't have when you just had got hooked up on it and red through couple of articles. Lacking the discipline and guidance, the code reflects thinking process and understanding of Clojure by a single, novice developer who has the most power within the project. But that is because of how powerful and malleable lisp is.

Languages like Java force you to use particular solutions to particular problems and have huge amount of public guidance and expectations with regards to program structure which means the code is easier to read and interact with by other developers.

You would do better by, instead of being lazy in your thinking and offensive to other communities, to actually try to use your head and try to understand the problem.
But they don't. One vote doesn't influence others - that would be magical thinking.
Is that "day 1" before, after or during the 14 day incubation period that I keep seeing repeated? Do you have some good sources about the length of incubation?
Security is not the same thing as anonymity. Maybe Signal's design goals just don't align with your requirements, and that's okay. But that doesn't mean that it can't be the right tool for people with a different set of requirements.
While 2% is indeed the WHO's current official early estimate, it's still very early to give accurate numbers here.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
Using the "closed cases" figures on this page (currently: 27892 closed cases, 25265 recovered, 2627 deaths), we get a fatality rate closer to 9.4%, but I've been monitoring this page for a while, and the fatality rate based on this calculation has improved a lot. For example, on 2020-02-10, the figures were 4376 closed cases, 3466 recovered, 910 deaths, resulting in a fatality rate of 20.8%. (https://web.archive.org/web/20200210100748/https://www.world... <3 archive.org)
For additional, evidence-based research along these lines, I'd recommend the coronavirus section of the Lancet:

https://www.thelancet.com/coronavirus

They are hosting preliminary research, case reports, commentary and discussion from qualified experts in the area, many of which are on the ground in affected areas.
Is it still in progress, or does the sample omit some information on purpose? E.g the logarithmic operations. Good book, good idea!
Doesn't help figure out if the signal update of the day that comes from the store is any good.
The comment was not snark, it was based on your hyperbolic statement that this is unprecedented.

But whatever doctor, like any coronavirus, hygiene and good considerate practices will help.

The mortality rate is still around 2%-ish and hugely dependent on the health condition of the patient at time of contracting.

Its annoying, its serious and it's spreading for sure. But it is not Armageddon-scale unprecedented contagion.
> Stay vigilant, stay careful, but most importantly, do not spread mass hysteria and panic.

In the last month almost 1% of the current population of the earth quarantined in China [0].

What exactly worries you about mass hysteria and panic? Why would that be worse than what is likely to happen as Covid-19 spreads outside of China?

I'm all in favor of not overselling the danger; but this virus is a real concern. I mean, unless someone has a very good argument why Hubei are somehow special and it can't happen again elsewhere everyone should be stocking up on supplies in case they are caught in a serious quarantine. The actions taken don't seem to be stopping exponential growth of this virus; if anything all that seems to be actively measured is how good countries are at producing testing kits.

> Only a small fraction die: The current fatality rate hovers around 2%.

If 2% of the people I know died this year, that would be the worst disaster in my country in my lifetime.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Wuhan_lockdown
Secure communication app for financial sector