skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think we actually agree the fundamentals, like most people participating in this thread. I'd say luck is necessary, but is not enough alone. And by maximising the odds you have better chance of winning. By hero ingredient I meant that a steak dish in restaurant needs a good steak, but that does not make the dish alone. There also needs to be other ingredients. Accepting that luck plays a very important role in building something new can help you overcome defeats and surrender yourself to opportunities that appear while working on the initial idea. For me it has not been counterproductive. I guess it matters how we understand "luck" as a concept.
The DIY (or, if you must, “Ghetto”) UPS (2001)
No, they list Google as one of the PRISM data sources. It doesn't say if Google was breached or if Google volunteered.

Again:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/11/googl...
Never heard of Uberconference. Everyone has Zoom though, so that's sort of the default choice for that sort of thing - to the point where it's becoming a verb. And the product is pretty good.
The bulk of our deployed Yealink T56 phones displayed February calendar events for the wrong day. I never did find out why.
the whole pan needs to be seasoned if you don't want it to rust. the actual cooking surface needs to get "refreshed" more often though.

in any case, the same problem occurs if any random drops of fat get sandwiched between the pan and surface, which happens pretty often just from splattering.
I have worn N95 masks for probably hundreds of hours due to having had a job in a factory with poor indoor air quality. Wearing them for 30-60 minutes during high risk activities like riding in a packed subway car would not be a problem for most people.
Actually there were many more successful conquerors of Afganistan (Greco-Baktrian Kingdon, Mauryan Empire, Kushan Empire, Sassanian Empire, Ghaznavids, Mongol Empire, Timurid Empire, Mughal Empire and Safavid Empire to name just a few) then failed ones.

Alexander of Macedon[2], British, Soviets and now USA have failed because they all have had unrealistic objectives.

But Afghanistan had been ruled by "foreign" rulers for most of it's history. They all had one thing in common - they have kept multiple forces in balance and limited their rule to the capital.

> He shows how governing these peoples was relatively easy when power was concentrated in a small dynastic elite, but how this delicate political order broke down in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when Afghanistan's rulers mobilized rural militias to expel first the British and later the Soviets. Armed insurgency proved remarkably successful against the foreign occupiers, but it also undermined the Afghan government's authority and rendered the country ever more difficult to govern as time passed.

> Afghanistan is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how a land conquered and ruled by foreign dynasties for more than a thousand years became the "graveyard of empires" for the British and Soviets, and what the United States must do to avoid a similar fate.

Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History
by Thomas Barfield [1]

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7718203-afghanistan

> Recounting the plight of the most powerful leader of the time as he led the most sophisticated army of its day into the treacherous world of tribal warlords, Holt describes those grueling campaigns and the impact they had on Alexander, his generals, their troops, and the world. Into the Land of Bones also examines the conflict from the point of view of the local warlords who pushed the invading Greeks to the limits of their endurance—and sometimes beyond, into mania and mutiny.

[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1584212.Into_the_Land_of...
Now you seem to be just arguing for arguments sake or you’re the kind of person who can’t ever admit to making a mistake or being wrong.

Your linked image in no way objectively looks “just like” cheap square pleated surgical masks. https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/LyoAAOSwMTFeMbmh/s-l300.png
Your point about genetic engineering capability is true (source: spent two years working in an advanced plant science lab).

The latter one I'm not sure about, it's complicated.

The downvoting of this comment seems a little strange to me.

Edit: Thanks for explaining, I get it now, I shouldn't have mentioned it anyway, I was just interested in the scientific substance of parent comment and wondered why others seemed not to be (I get it now, it wasn't the scientific aspect of the comment which was against HN guidelines).
Have you worn an N95 for any particular amount of time? Honest question. Because Uou refer to a few grams as “not uncomfortable.”

I find N95 face masks insufferably hot and muggy, with their “few grams” hanging off my nose and ears eventually very annoying. I don’t know if any hc workers that find N95s tolerable for very long.
> FounderPhone (free) - Send and receive texts and calls directly in Slack. Free since we built it ourselves :)

Can you tell us more about this? Is this part of your product?
So that's what they call this software.I think I've seen it at least in every second establishment out there.
I've tried trick programming questions when I started interviewing coders, the SNR was simply awful and it was frustrating for me and the candidates.

Any evaluation system have to be calibrated on a large enough pool of candidates, when you're building a company and start interviewing you don't really have the luxury of wasting the first dozens applications.

Today I tend to completely avoid programming questions, except to reject complete newbies.
Not to mention the reputational damage around the world and the lasting legacy of hatred that will be felt for generations of Afghan people towards the US. That kind of thing can take more than century to forget. The Chinese still hate the Japanese for the Rape of Nanjing in 1938 (there are probably better examples but I'm not a historian).
I've come up with a few interview questions, and reviewed a few more. In my experience there's a ~decent rule of thumb for gauging difficulty and time required to solve a given problem.

A person in your company, after having read the problem and glancing at the rough description figures out a clean solution in time X. That's without the interview stress, knowledge of the problem domain, with the pacing of the problem laid out in writing. A well-performing candidate coming in cold, stressed from the interview setup and under time pressure will take 3X time to solve it.

So if it takes much more than 10 minutes for someone at your company solve your proposed interview question reasonably well, it's almost certainly too difficult.
Most of this is pretty new to me. Why is it nasty? It looks neat to me!
North Vietnam was going to break in 1989, US just had to hold the fort with yearly Linebacker bombings for 30 more years.
For plants only I also use Picture This app.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/picturethis-plant-identifier/i...
I don't consider MySQL since I've invested so much time to learn PostgreSQL and its ecosystem of extensions. MySQL is a proved database, but my money is simply on a different horse.
left things such a mess after trying to stop the Soviets

So much contained in this one sentence. People need to go look at what backing an insurgency against a repressive but modernising government does and ask questions.
It's already been stated that for those it doesn't kill, this strain of coronavirus produces a rather mild flu.

The containment activity isn't intended to soothe the people who carry the virus symptom-free or with mild flu symptoms. It is to lower the mortality rate in the overall population due to the higher-than-typical death rate associated with the strain.
That style of capitalization is not part of any Rust style guide.
I especially liked this point:

"IT pros always and without fail, quietly self-organize around those who make the work easier, while shunning those who make the work harder, independent of the organizational chart."
When your political power comes from the ability to regulate every aspect of life due to a supposed existential threat that comes from all economic activity, an educated, informed, and well-spoken critic of the supposed existential threat is dangerous.
It is accurate.
> Hillary doesn’t run twitter.

That's not the point. It wouldn't be Hillary making Twitter ban Trump, it would be Twitter not having to ban the president. Trump's tweets may not have changed (I'd say they did; his reach and the importance certainly has), but Twitters policies have evolved and what was okay 5 years ago isn't okay today.
This is certainly a situation that makes clearer the failings of our healthcare policy.

We might end up worse than China with so many not having access or being able to afford a doctor or hospital visit.
When someone recommended it to me last summer, I was hesitant to be yet another content creator for yet another platform. Then I saw it was run by science foundations! Signed up immediately. It’s been fun in Colorado to learn plants that I see on hikes.
Well, perhaps the Americans and the rest of NATO can go back to ignoring it.

Afghanistan is a country that has been in a civil war for over 40 years. It’s a tragedy for sure, especially when you compare photos of Kabul in 1979[0] to today, but ultimately no one is going to impose a peace there. Neither the Soviets nor the Americans could.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/weekinreview/18bumiller.h...
Surgical masks. We all know that. Everyone knows that.

N95 masks are distinctly and absolutely worn to protect the wearer. N95 masks are recommended for front-line staff when dealing with viral outbreaks. H1N1, SARS, MERS, and now COVID-19 -- staff wear self-protection masks. During flu outbreaks front-line staff wear N95 for clinics.

This discussion -- what we are talking about -- is COVID-19. Every front-line staff dealing with this, worldwide, is equipped with an N95 mask, or there is a problem. Because when your front-line staff get sick things really break down.
A parody Twitter account hits a nerve with Silicon Valley VCs
"Is there an easy way to download results from that vault in mass ..."

This is neither a rebuke nor pedantry - I genuinely hope this will be useful to you:

It's "en masse".
That's an overly broad statement, I think we have plenty of examples from history where it did work. I'd say it worked fine in WWII Germany.
Is Trump throwing Mike under the bus just before the elections?
Great IRC client for the Linux users but this might as well be 'only for Linux' since GTK apps looks very out of place when used on macOS and Windows, but that might not put them off so can we get binaries for this app?

It turns out that scrolling down to the downloads section, macOS and Windows users get the typical 'build it yourself' response which is just unacceptable and a bad UX for the end user. The effort involved will just simply turn them away.

If you are going to create apps that instruct the user to 'build it themselves' then you might as well give them a full blown manual with that.
Jean-Jacques Muyembe-Tamfum (Ebola Co-Discoverer)
I've heard N100 would be the next best thing, but I'm not sure.
Learning how is as easy as watching a 5 minute YouTube video. I have read this argument in other places and it is never mentioned that, while laypeople may not know how to properly wear a mask right now, it is not hard at all for them to learn.
Reputational damage? Are you forgetting that the Taliban were utter bastards who banned female education, were unrecognized by most countries and murdered 3,000 US civilians one fine fall day? The reputational damage is done because we didn't kill them all when we had the chance.

This deal is capitulation. Only this time there won't be refugees grasping at the skies of helicopters. We'll just lock them out and watch the Taliban kill every educated woman in the country.
I've been totally demoralized over nearly two decades of being AD, reserve and a civilian, at the level to which appointees and senior defense civilians just completely ignore those of us who have actual, ya know, experience with war.
sqlite and datasette is a killer combo imo
https://datasette.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

12GB is not a lot of data, not sure what was happening with your python that it took several hours. Don't get me wrong though, SQL seems like it could be the right tool for this use case.
I absolutely love it. I click decline, go into reader mode, and have by far the most readable and best designed news site on the internet.
In the mean time, why not import test kits from Italy or South Korea? Those countries test hundreds daily, if not thousands.
Peace deal with Taliban sounds like an oxymoron
For the Bush administration, they ignored initial recommendations to work with the locals after the initial invasion, creating a lot of unemployed, angry, young people with military training. For the Obama administration, they ignored recommendations to increase the military presence to a level that they could effectively remove the Taliban. Forces were kept low so they could keep saying "we're bringing the troops home" during speaches. It was like quitting an antibiotic treatment too soon; we eliminated the low hanging fruit, but the Taliban that remained had even better training, and could point to our prescence as a recruiting tool.
Would you rather proceed on blind faith?

Proceed by testing and accepting or disproving hypothesis. Nothing more, nothing less.
I believe accurately conveying identical information in a manner everyone can understand is an impossible, or at least unreasonable, burden to place on individuals.

Instead, what if people tried to hear graciously and "assume good faith"?

The quote is ripped from HN's guidelines.
I imagine it was downvoted because of "You can just stop reading right there", which is an internet trope (-> repetitive -> bad for HN) and also needlessly aggressive. The comment would be just fine without that bit—well, plus the snarky "magical". Snark is deprecated on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Not sure how it’s pronounced, `ed-trio`?

What is a “web editor”? Is that establish as terminology for this type of wyswiyg editor?

Does it or doesn’t it support mobile? It mostly doesn’t work but with some fiddly stubbornness I was able to get a few of the controls to do something.
War's changed. We don't line up on either side of the battlefield and run at eachother. Guerrilla warfare gives smaller numbers the advantage. All out blowing something up and paying the civilian penalty is a non-starter.
Chinese Hospitals Deploy AI to Help Diagnose Covid-19
The Eternal Honeymoons Theory of Fast Cutting Music Videos
Drug lords of Eurasia are unbeatable even by the US. Because government officials get involved in growing opioids.

Corruption everywhere.

Help Afghanistan to take their market niche of supplying neighbors with tons of drugs!
Someone 100 years ago: "You can stop reading right there. We do not have the ability to breed corn with the ears the size of a man's forearm."

Yet here we are: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpKlvxnspXs
Thanks for linking that, interesting read and funny to see my showerthought having some merit.
https://outline.com/tPYAhc
From the article
I have used this and love it!
Sounds like a good idea for the environment
If a Democrat had done the same, they would be called a coward and a traitor.
Independent of the morality, etc. of America’s involvement: equating it to the Rape of Nanking, and drawing conclusions from there, is absurd.
The PRISM slides list per company agreement dates spanning over five years. Microsoft started first in 2007, Google was added in 2009, with Apple being one of the last in 2012. If it was a system that was simply ingesting FBI data, why would it wait until 2012, unless you're suggesting that Apple didn't respond to FBI requests at all until late 2012?

Just because the NSA had a program to exceed even what had been negotiated via PRISM, doesn't mean that PRISM didn't involve collaboration.
The battery is removable, you just need a screwdriver.

This seems like a bad thing, any changes to make battery replacements significantly easier will almost certainly come at a significant cost. And in any case, it’s already really easy to replace the battery if you can get your hands on one.
Predatory Songbirds: the case of the murderous tits
Firefox preview has two really annoying bugs -

a) when closing a tab the option to revert that action gets stuck most of the time on my screen and it's hard to get the timing right - if you do it too soon you gonna actually restore the tab but if you do it later it'll stop working and just disappear

b) downloading some attachments creates 0byte or incomplete file in my download folder, not sure what's going on there
Literally page five lists the companies, and page six lists the per company agreement dates.

Stop gaslighting us.
I was using NextCloud for a while, but I find the SSL to be so excruciatingly slow (even on an rpi4 with 4G ram) that our household universally stopped using it even with occasional prompting. Otherwise it's a really nice intranet for the home.

Given what it is, I'm just not willing to use it without SSL enabled, so it's a no go for now. I just can't arse myself or anyone else in our household to put up with the lag.

We still use the rpi as an easily maintained file share, using SAMBA which is significantly faster and seamless between the various operating systems at large. It is super easy to simply back up the external drive, and if the OS goes kaput, it is a very fast reinstall with very little configuration overhead required. Gmail is plenty fine for our shared calendars and todo activities. Not everyone is willing to use Google for such things, but for those who are...
Total defeat tends to do that, yeah. A better description might be that resisted regime change usually doesn’t work. Which is certainly not unfair with regards to Afghanistan.
Four critical charts to watch as the coronavirus spreads globally
That's itself a very political view. I think political ads are good for democracy.
Some clarification based on what I've been able to put together (caveat: I'm not an expert in this area)

The CDC developed a testing protocol (crudely, a set of 3 conserved RNA sequences of the virus to chemically "grep" for). The protocol is here [1] and I think anyone with suitable equipment (an RT-PCR machine and an oligonucleotide synthesizer to make the primers and probes?) could run tests using just the information on that web page, though they would probably also want known positive samples of the virus to validate against. And there are lots of labs with suitable equipment. But as that page says, it is not legal to do this clinically.

The CDC also sent out test kits [2]. These are just vials of primer/probe pairs synthesized from the short sequences on the above page, and a fake positive control to validate with. These were authorized by the FDA, and so are legal to use. But apparently somehow they screwed up the production of primer #3 (or maybe the sequence itself is wrong), and so almost all the labs were not able to validate the test. After several weeks the CDC has still not fixed this problem, but labs are now allowed to run tests using just primer 1 and 2, so testing capacity is rapidly increasing (though of course who knows how sensitive or specific the tests are).

The federal organization preventing labs from running tests is the FDA [3], not the CDC. It is also the FDA who would have to approve the commercially produced test kits.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/lab/rt-pcr-panel-p...
[2] https://www.fda.gov/media/134922/download
[3] https://www.fda.gov/emergency-preparedness-and-response/mcm-...
I don't know if it's really fair to say that after 9/11 we were playing world police when we invaded Afghanistan. They were harboring Al Qaeda who had been carrying out smaller scale attacks on US assets for a while, culminating with 9/11. At that point you can't just ignore them and hope they stop; they'd been escalating violence for years.
A CPU costs at least $50 already. Is it that much more expensive to package it in metal?

Also, aren't they already packaged in metal? On graphics cards, the dies are directly exposed.

Liquid nitrogen cooling can already get good results in overclocking, so it seems like it should work here too.
Trolling? It’s referred to as “async_executors” in the article. I think HN just capitalizes the first letter of post titles.
See, that's what I was getting at. I know Turkey is an authoritarian state, and you know Turkey is an authoritarian state, but it's still a bit of circular reasoning:

1. It's authoritarian because it hurts the free press.

2. It hurts the free press because it's Turkey doing it.

3. Turkey is doing it because they are authoritarian.

And looking from the outside, I can't see a difference. The Western media, who are funded by the Western governments, praise the Western governments for their support of freedom and democracy.

The third world media, who are funded by the third world governments, praise the third world governments for their support of tradition and family values, or whatever it is they do down there.

My point is that it's absurd to call media free when they are getting paid by those who they are supposed to investigate. A better model, I think, would be this:

1. Each year, the government gives the media money.

2. If they wish to partake in this scheme, they have to put the money they get in a fund, which must be kept separate from the rest of their assets.

3. By law, they are prohibited from withdrawing more than say 5% of the assets each year, just as they must maintain a minimum share capital.

4. At registration, the government should give the various media corporations 20x the annual contribution for their such funds.

5. Upon liquidation, they must return the excess assets in the fund to the government.

This would insulate them from short-term political decisions. Even after ten years of no funding, they would still have 60% of their assets plus whatever the return on the way they invested them in was.
What is the evidence that people who question the black box have great reputational risk? Dyson raises this point, but I don't really see that this would be different from any other area.

There is more money at stake with climate change than most areas of science, which means it becomes a political issue. There would seem to be a very strong incentive to show existing models are not accurate, or to come up with scientifically plausible models with very different outcomes. However no arguments against climate change do this, presumably because it's not very easy to do so.

Dyson here points out some areas that he thinks are not possible to model accurately or are not currently modelled accurately, such as the benefits and threats of various changes to the climate, the impact of climate change on sea level change, cloud modelling uncertainties, and the chaotic effects of different carbon reservoirs on each other.

His points on the exact impact of climate change and what the ideal climate is are important, but they are also studied and discussed. The supposed political reasons for supporting or being against climate change theories do not change the facts. If there are real problems with the models these can be flagged up - sensitivity testing can be done for all of these issues.

One major problem here is that the communication of the climate mainstream is very poor. The IPCC produces massive reports that are designed to be printed as PDF, and are targeted at policy experts. They're not really readable, the web versions don't really use hyperlinks and have minimal pictures and poor structure.

They're slowly getting better, but still a long way from ideal. Example for reference:

https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/spm/
Should my grocery store be allowed to kick me out because they don't like my political views?

Should all grocery stores in the country be allowed to do this?

If so, how do I eat?
This has been reposted with lengthier discussion. [1]

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22448747