skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unfortunately, he acted like a non-expert when he hand-waved away quantitative arguments. Being wary of long-term predictions does not in any way justify using claims that are not even predictions, in any scientific sense, to argue for the opposite outcome.
From the article :
"It's been said that ideas don't matter, execution does. I wholeheartedly disagree. You need both to succeed, but you can only get so good at execution. A great idea gives you much more leverage."

I think it underestimates execution. A great execution makes the dumbest ideas succeed. Reminds me of 'potatoparcel.com'. The business is solely focused on mailing potatoes, which sounds ridiculous, but it found its place.
Also known as not a free market.
Is there a term for someone like this? It's like a reverse imposter syndrome. Really sad.
Mods: could we get 2018 in the title please?
This is unfolding amazingly quickly.
Given this, I wonder what the future holds for JetBrains. They've made a good business out of providing standalone solutions for the more popular languages.
WebSocket Demo Server in Node.js
Some of the US Coronavirus evacuees from China were not handled properly, according to a whistleblower. One plane landed in the Bay Area. Better to be cautious at this point.

“ U.S. Health Workers Responding to Coronavirus Lacked Training and Protective Gear, Whistle-Blower Says”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/27/us/politics/coronavirus-u...
Links for these prior books?
That's great, until all the major corporate sites you actually use stop serving any content in HTML.

This future seems inevitable. The only sites you'll be able to actually use without some custom web assembly renderer will be those which don't serve ads at all now - wikis, open source projects, non profits, corporate web sites, etc. Any site funded by ad revenue will effectively remove itself from the web and into its own web assembly app instead.

We might even see the rebirth of something like AOL, a meta app that will be a portal to render content for others who want to use the platform. It might even just be an upcoming version of amp, or a new feature offered by Facebook or cloudflare...
He's right! Haskell is still stuck with most of the wrong decisions they made in '88, and it was intended as a (clunkier) Miranda clone, anyway.
Yeah, it was a bit ridiculous. Incredibly good software compared to what we've got now, though.
Isnt this a good thing? Isnt the fact that 8% of the bay area is not dying an indication the diamond princess cmr is more accurate than iran or wuhan, which is to say this is a normal seasonal virus?
I didn't realize that about the original predictions for the Kuwaiti oil well fires, that's interesting.

They are still cleaning up the oil from the sands on the eastern coast of Saudi Arabia 30 years later though.
I agree but understanding both errors and the cost function is also important as GD is used more in other places and trying the derivatives is as much important than just implementing it. That will help for beginners to understand why we need GD in the first place and how does it improve the optimization
It's also hilarious when you think about it. For almost all startup employees, a long enough time scale reveals that the real value of those stock options is exactly zero dollars.

This would have people paying taxes on fictional or purported wealth. As dumb as the tax code is, this isn't even reform.
Besides the overlooked possibility that people are just better at waking up at specific times than is generally expected (which I think is true and probably explains most cases, but maybe not all), there's another explanation the author didn't consider: it's possible that people frequently half-wake-up, and then fall back asleep and forget the experience. However, if you half-wake-up right before the alarm, then the alarm interrupts you before you get the chance to fall back asleep and forget the experience. You just think that you unusually woke up right before the alarm, without remembering the many other times you woke up in the morning not immediately before the alarm.

I used to have an alarm clock very close to my bed, and I would be able to turn it off or hit the snooze button very quickly after it went off without getting up. I believe I could hit the button in my sleep, or wake up just enough to hit it and then fall back asleep fast enough to forget the experience. I remember many times waking up at my alarm starting to go off at 9:30am (or some other round ten minute interval time after 9am) even though I scheduled it at 9am; I must have snoozed it several times and fell back to sleep quickly enough to forget the experience.

I even switched to a phone alarm clock app where I had to solve simple arithmetic problems in order to snooze or disable the alarm, and I had the same experience. I'm not sure it if it makes sense to say that I was solving the math problems in my sleep; I think it's more correct to say I woke up, solved it, and then fell back asleep and forgot the experience because I fell asleep quickly enough.
You cannot compare an annual background dose to the dose received in a CT scan. Similarly, the 100 mSv dose of your reference number 2 is an inappropriate comparison because it is spread out over time compared to a CT scan.
Your premise is like saying, walking puts an impact of .8 J on my foot. I walk 10,000 steps a day. 10,000*.8 is 8,000 J. A bullet produces an impact of 168 J when fired from a .22 rifle into a human body. Therefore walking is much more dangerous than a bullet from a rifle.
That’s it?
Short: Haskell made a bunch of poor design decisions that they've since doubled down on, the fastest implementation isn't very good, the art of writing compilers and interpreters has effectively been lost, and Miranda was written by and designed by professionals.
> Limiting infections - especially in higher risk demographics - seems critical at this point.

We've already failed at this - it's in the community, cases are popping up with no known contact with an infected person. Asymptomatic cases are contagious for several days, and in a large chunk of patients it presents as a common cold that they won't go to the hospital for, and even if they could there isn't enough capacity to do the necessary testing. Game over.
I’ve seen reports of 80% mild, 15% hospital (mainly oxygen and managing secondary infections) and 5% critical care (ICU, some intubations). But, yes, even 5% could overrun hospital resources.
John Brockman's Edge.org hosts a myriad of intelligent conversations with amazing people. Freeman Dyson, who died Friday, February 28 at 96 (RIP), was one of the contributors: sometimes right, sometimes wrong, often provocative, always interesting. I love that he never got a PhD and that he knew he really did not need that ticket.
It won't take much to relight that fire. Assuming it's actually out.
Where’s he spreadsheet error that underlies the greatest scam of our time, supply side economics? I’ve heard of it, and would love to see it analyzed.
Is it really unprecedented? I mean, Ebola emerged not too long ago...

Also, keep in mind CDC estimates between 16k-41k have died from the flu in the US alone for the 2019-2020 flu season (dont have a link handy but just Google: CDC 2019 flu deaths). It may be that coronavirus has a higher fatality rate than the flu, but it doesnt have the body count of the flu. I think most of the fear is from it being new and unknown, but I personally have more fear of flu or salmonella poisoning than coronavirus. For instance, I will never eat shrimp from a cafeteria after grtting food poisoning twice. (Sleeping on a bathroom floor so you can easily vomit in the toilet is not fun or comfortable).
I think the GPs point is that the decision is less about free will and more about programming that has taken place through the lifetime of the host.

For example if someone asks me if I want tea or coffee and I know I don’t like coffee then I’m always going to choose tea irrespective of my free will.

This is just a crude example though, our psychology is infinitely more subtle. We are a subject to our experiences and those experiences start out against our control (due to us being kids). We are also a subject to our biology. If your body produces too much of one chemical or not enough of another then our moods could be drastically affected. We have cravings that are often chemical. Diet also plays a part too.

So much of what we think of as “free will” is actually circumstance that happened before the decision and biological states happening elsewhere in your body.
I believe "crank" suffices, or possibly "poseur".
Not tech related but Ultra Music Festival is coming up in a few weeks. Wonder how high the risk will be considering they are cancelling conferences and also I saw Geneva Auto Show is cancelled.
I was asking because of their 3rd paragraph, not their 2nd.
> I've met him and his other daughter.

This seems somewhat impolite. If you've met her one would presume you would remember her name. I would expect she wouldn't like being referred to as simply an 'other daughter'.

Also, Dyson had five daughters including Esther. Not two.
Yes, this sort of person is known as a crank.
Like why didn't they send people who had a few years ago dealt with Ebola. It's not like we didn't have people who went over there to help or people who treated infected people stateside --granted Ebola transmission is different but you still need PPE, but people know the protocol in practice, not just reading about how to wear PPE.
In USA all these communication are supposed to go through the official channels now - it's VP Mike Pence.

Tight information control from Dear Leader's right hand man is how we know everything will be OK.
Here's the actual WHO situation report: https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situati...

The US is shown has having "local transmission". "Community transmission" is defined as "the inability to relate confirmed cases through chains of transmission for a large number of cases, or by increasing positive tests through routine screening of sentinel samples".

Maybe this is just a terminology issue... "spreading freely in communities" could refer to "community transmission" defined above.
"the art of writing compilers and interpreters has effectively been lost"

I'm curious, how does that happen? Were the techniques used in compilers and interpreters of yore never recorded for posterity in academic papers or technical documentation?
Because if anyone took this seriously (shelter in place worldwide 1 month ago) we would not be in this situation.
When I see a site that attempts to stalk me (even if my countermeasures manage to block it) the last thing I would do is to hand them my personal and billing details on a platter, give them money, and act as a "manual" tracking cookie by logging into my account every time I visit the website (to bypass the paywall).

At least beforehand the best they could do is to get pseudonymous network & browser data (if they managed to get past my countermeasures like uBlock and nasty IP ranges blocked at the network level), where as once I pay they now have confirmed billing details they can do whatever they want with. If they don't respect my privacy before I pay then I have no reason to trust they'll suddenly respect it after I pay. Most likely they'll just attempt to have their cake and eat it, aka take my money and still stalk me.
I remember on an old crypto mailing list some lowly PHP programmer asking if instead of a grab bag of primitives there was some library where he could just encrypt/decrypt a random object. Without having to build a Frankenstein thing out of random cryptographic parts.

Everyone peed on him and he never came back.

The poor sap was right though. The proven algorithms tend to fail catastrophically when used or implemented incorrectly.
One could be officially called Dr. after getting honorary degree
In my non-epidemiologist view, yes, it's a good thing.

The denominator for the ~1% mortality rate is obviously bigger than we realize -- which means the mortality rate is potentially a lot lower.

There are cases like this one popping up, where people are asymptomatic (and even test negative) and are not getting sick, despite being infected:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/22/coronavirus-as...
My husband is a career public health clinician who organizes vaccination clinics (has given out hundreds of thousands of vaccines for infectious disease, many for free via grants). At the state level here in US, he has mounted responses to H1N1, ebola, measles and now this coronavirus. The conventional wisdom around this outbreak, right from the beginning, has been that almost everyone on the planet will be exposed. It's no surprise this is hopping around stateside.

The virus has a two week incubation period, during which the host is not infectious, but also has no symptoms, making tracking vectors difficult. In addition, after incubation there are a couple of days where the host is highly infectious, and still has no symptoms. The term for this period is "prodrome" (pre syndrome). Under certain circumstances, it's also airborne, which is can be a problem for providers. It's spreading fast because of these characteristics.

Similar to flu, it is expected that this virus will find enough hosts to essentially never stop circulating. Expect to see it again next year, and the year after, etc, in perpetuity.

Get your flu shots! You might prevent someone from getting very sick or dying, even if you don't see symptoms yourself.
There's a simpler explanation: your brain is associating other environmental (internal or external) conditions with the alarm going off, and reacting to those instead of (or in addition to) the actual alarm.

This seems to happen to me pretty often, given that I'll wake up in "the middle of the night" (usually because I need to use the bathroom, or because I want a glass of water), then check the clock, realize that the alarm goes off in 3 minutes, and grumble about the lost sleep time.
It seems hopeless... to even try and reply to the doomers with some sense of rationality.

It’s human nature to get excited in a way about the end of times. Like the preacher on the sidewalk in NYC holding a sign, except now everyone can get away with it and maybe they’re not crazy?!

A couple hundred cases per day (and decreasing) of a virus which will be significantly less deadly than an average flu season.

My family and I are heading to Disney World. Hopefully the lines will be shorter than average.
South Korea has tested 66k 2 days ago. China has no such capacity to test even that much, let along 800 million in quanrantine, and people have been welded in their own homes with no escape. The dead bodies have been going straight to the furnace in Wuhan. Which government’s number would you rather trust?
I don't work at Google, I might be wrong, and I strongly dislike the company. But from what I've gathered they're on my "lesser evil" side of the data-gathering game, in that they don't appear to actually sell it.

My understanding is that what they actually sell is their ability to serve and target advertisers' ads, using the massive amounts of data they gather by violating their users' privacy.

Unlike these ISPs, who just sell the data itself, or Facebook who just gave it away for free for years.
It’s a good demonstration of failure that might otherwise be masked
The CDC is targetting routine bedside testing of COVID19 like we have for flu. It will take "months". Surveillance testing is enhanced by this. Recently an attempt to broaden testing ran into issues, now resolved. I expect test numbers to increase sharply. Monitoring those who are most likely vectors makes sense.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/cdc-moves-rapidly-expand-cov...
Does HIPAA come into play here?
My biggest fear is this virus hitting an antivax community. It’s really hard to stop a virus like this in the US because travel rate is higher while we still have high density areas. It’s very difficult to contain without resorting to Martial law type of traffic ban which is not feasible in the US.
Seriously wondering about SXSW. Hugh Forrest keeps pumping out blog posts about events, but no answers to questions about covid and no transparency on the SXSW site.
What does it matter anymore who can and can't enter really ? It's everywhere, it's spread the globe, it's now in American communities and it's here to stay. It's no longer just a foreign issue now.

It's time to assume the brace position, prepare for the worst and hope for the best.
It was predicted that the fires would burn from two to five years before losing pressure and going out on their own, optimists estimating two years and pessimists estimating five while the majority estimated three years until this occurred.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuwaiti_oil_fires
Harley-Davidson CEO exits as iconic bike brand struggles
That's the No True Scotsman Fallacy. The only absolutely "free" market is a state of nature, without laws and where might is right. Once you impose laws, it's not completely free.

The US telecom market could be more "free" than it is, but there are lots of options, none of which are perfectly "free".
> two gestation

Missing a word there. Now I'm in suspense.
Ask HN: novel use cases for Real-Time OLAP SQL DB? NLP / Video Processing / RL?
Basically what happened is that due to some strange luck I have gotten a real-time OLAP mysql database for 3 months with a storage of 2000 GB.

This is the first time I've come into contact with OLAP so I'm still reading up on it. (am still looking into this HN Post: ["The Rise and Fall of the OLAP Cube"](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22189178) && also on [OLAP mining](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.55.1181&rep=rep1&type=pdf) )

From what I understand an OLAP mysql db is basically a highly performative mysql db that can do very fast search on a large amount of data (with the so-called OLAP operations to cater for the needs to do boring business logic in a more organised way), and is extended with co-operate-ish data visualisation tools.

Presumably an OLAP mysql db is something that early-stage start-ups won't touch at all because most of the things are kind of useless unless you have a lot of transaction-related data, or very complex business logic with data in a very weird shape, etc. (as far as my understanding goes)

So here I'm wondering if anyone knows or has experimented interesting use cases of real-time OLAP sql db? e.g. in an app that does NLP or video processing? Or more generally, in machine learning and neural networks?

Or what are some possible use cases e.g. in reinforcement learning or evolution algorithm that has to perform search & access GBs of data in real-time? Or in knowledge representation? Or automated reasoning?

Many thanks!
It's funny because all the major corporate sites could already have stopped serving HTML and just gone completely with Flash, Silverlight or Java, and yet the doomsday scenario never happened. Hell, Android apps are basically the closed "meta apps" you're talking about, and have been around for years, and yet corporate, ad-driven sites still use HTML.

I don't see why Webassembly should the inevitable slippery slope to the entire web becoming some kind of closed source binary-only dystopia, other than it being loosely associated with Javascript, which half of HN hates and fears to a degree bordering on mania. The FUD really needs to end already.
Galileo didn't get into trouble because of a general consensus, he got into trouble because he made fun of the Pope. It was straight up authoritarianism that put him on trial, not his scientific position.
why would you trust a startup that could obviously fail and close tomorrow with long term storage
The title about "Save Moore's Law" appears to have been inserted as click bait. The chiplet idea as an approach to building configurable logic has some merit but is really unrelated to Moore's Law.
Have a look at gitgrep.com and quicklog.io and let me know if interested in either of those. I also run hackerer.news but that's a public service and to keep me from wasting too much Fomo time 'refreshing'.
The same thing as always, making kick ass IDEs and actually working, robust productivity tools?

A few rows down someone is praising "language servers" as some sort of Einstein discovery. I'd argue that was the easy part and they are rapidly learning about the difficulties involved, and the way is paved with auto-generated configuration pages wrapping json.
>why don’t they open this to everyone and people can apply with their official ID?!

Probably has something to do with there being no apparent rhyme nor reason behind their verification process nor criteria. This says to me that they simply don't know what they're doing (with it) and that "knowing someone" will continue to be the main driver for acceptance in the program.

And people look down at cowboy coding...
and all of those copies have to be garbage collected, concurrently to the operations being run. Memory isn't infinite on long-lived servers.
Suggest HN: Google, Apple and FB work together to stop coronavirus spread
To limit the spread of coronavirus, in China they have been using widespread facial recognition technology to track who has been near who. From this you can download an app and be informed if someone you have been near has it.

In the west we do not have this in place, but nearly everyone in the west has a smart phone running iOS or Android (with FB, WhatsApp, Instagram, Chrome, etc... installed). If these devices/apps could:

(1) Regularly track location data

(2) Regularly ask users for their symptoms

Then this system could allow people to know if someone they have crossed paths with has the disease or symptoms, so that they could then self isolate.

I do not know anyone from these companies, but HackerNews does. Please ask them to consider this suggestion.
I'm curious how it's going to hit the remainder of the NBA season and upcoming NCAA basketball tournament. What choices they're going to make given the crowds. The responsible thing to do, three weeks out, will surely be to cancel the NCAA tournament, and or only broadcast the games on TV.
Fines should go up exponentially for repeat offenses. 10th infringement? Might as well shut down the company.
I think you'll find those people were actually trained in their respective fields and not fielding essentially uneducated opinions, however.
Agree. Can't imagine Freeman himself having any problems with his stance on the issue being discussed now (or at any other time).
(IANAL!) It might be PHI ("protected health information") under US law (I don't see how it isn't, but again, not a lawyer), and if it is, one probably shouldn't be posting it to Internet forums.
Why? There doesn't exist a vaccine for the coronavirus yet.
Their blog post (linked in the post you linked) states that you've been able to use electronic boards for a while.

https://lichess.org/blog/XlE48hEAACIAQv2F/regium-extraordina...

I'm curious on where that "plot point" comes up? As far as I can tell, Lichess is the only one that did support electronic boards. In fact, in the blog post linked in that one, it says that Lichess has supported electronic boards being used for ranked play since 2018:

https://lichess.org/blog/WvDNticAAMu_mHKP/welcome-lichess-bo...
I thought F8 had only cancelled the IRL parts, with a webinar part that remains.
They opened it to everyone for a while and then were doing such a bad job of it that they closed it up again to stop the complaints and suggested in public that they were discontinuing verification. (Of course, that wasn't true)

You can see here https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/about-twit... that they used to accept requests but it is now "on hold"
It's closer to the cold than the flu, so like the cold people have been reported to have been infected after having had it, then not had it, then to have it once more. Though, at this point it's not known if it was dormant or through new infection.
What are your specific fears about it hitting an antivax community? It’s not like they have any ad- or disadvantage compared to the rest of the population wrt. Immunity at the current time