skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I get that this guide tries to ease you in into low level concurrency concepts.

However, if you try to just get work done in Python, this is not what you want.

Don't do threads/processes yourself, use pools:

import random
import time
from concurrent.futures import ProcessPoolExecutor, as_completed

def hello():
seconds = random.randint(0, 5)
print(f"Start blocking for {seconds}s")
time.sleep(seconds)
print(f"Stopped blocking after {seconds}s")
return seconds

if __name__ == "__main__":

with ProcessPoolExecutor(max_workers=2) as exec:

a = exec.submit(hello)
b = exec.submit(hello)

for future in as_completed((a, b)):
print(future.result())

And don't manage the loop yourself. Use Python 3.7, and replace:

loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
loop.run_until_complete(loop.create_task(foo()))
loop.close()

With:
asyncio.run(foo())

The code is not just shorter, it is way, wayyyyyyyyyyyy, more correct.

Also don't program asyncio by hand. Use a lib. E.G: wanna do http, use aiohttp.

This is Python, don't suffer more than you need to.
Yeah a lot of this is vastly oversimplified. You didn't have to clean ball mice every week or for most people, ever. VHS being crummy didn't mean we enjoyed it less. Fansub sites today are under constant legal attack by copyright lawyers.

Frankly I miss the days when the online racist death threats were posted by xXBoner420Xx to his Xanga page instead of posted on Facebook by Ted Smith from your company's accounting department.
Is it fair to say that this content removal is driven by monetization concerns (making advertisers happy)?
Do you know why they switched to Webex? I work at NIH and there is talk of moving from Webex to Zoom and I can't be more excited. Of course being the government it probably won't happen for another 2 years...
Also: China has (near) universal health care. (https://www.internations.org/go/moving-to-china/healthcare#h..., https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016885101...)

With universal health insurance, you're at the mercy of the government. If the government chooses not to cover your issue, or if the government tells you "you're not sick so stop telling people you are," that's too bad. The same thing happens in private insurance, to be sure (minus the "if you say bad things about us we'll put you in jail" part), since people get denied. With government run health care, you have fewer alternatives though. You can't try some other doctor to see if that one will work financially (since it's the same entity footing the bill ultimately). There's no alternate system or provider to go to (you can't do much to get better health coverage for next time).
I, for one, enjoy power windows. Better yet, I enjoy power windows that you press or half a second and they go up or down all the way. They now have power rear windows for trucks, which I'm marginally excited about when I get my next truck (hopefully not needing to do so for a decade or two). Very related is air conditioning in the car. When I was a kid, if you were hot, you cranked down the window and let hot air blow on you.

Rewinding VHS? One of the selling points for me on DVD was no rewinding and having scene selection. No more "be kind, rewind" signs anymore and getting a small fee at the movie rental store for non-rewound movie.

Sure, these are micro improvements in conveniences, but I enjoy them. People don't like waiting. Anything that improves that will improve someone's impression of the thing. Heck, I now prefer streaming over sliding in a DVD. It is only saving me, at most, a minute or two. But it is less waiting.

Enjoy the little things.
The only industrial-scale process for making hydrogen starts with carbon fuel. Come at me, Chevron lovers.
University of California fires 54 PhD students
No peer review.

There are many bold claims on this website. But you don't screw around with RNGs: they need to be right. Until this author's claims have been verified, I would not use this algorithm.
As many people as possible should post their salary on slack.
Freeman Dyson and Boris Tsirelson
That's even worse, frequent thermal shocks are not good for IC longevity.

ICs frequently passing zero degrees, which aren't packaged in completely water impermeable packaging like ceramics or metal are also having issues
A counterpoint to this that may resonate with some:

* I _feel_ significantly less hopeful than I did in the 1990s. Things _seemed_ to be heading in the right direction in lots of important areas then. Now I feel significant anxiety about whether my kids will live in a dystopia within the next 30 years

* Many of the improvements listed reduce hassle and stress in some ways, and markedly increase stress and anxiety in other ways. I had ZERO concern about my identity being stolen in 1995. My identity has now been stolen 3x in the last 10 years and caused significant anxiety and hassle.

* Many of the improvements to convenience feel like a bad trade. Having information and services a click away has begun to feel almost like a burden. Everything has to happen instantly now. This has been a negative from a psychological perspective for me.

----

I know some of this is just that I'm 25 years older and I'm trying to subtract that out.

I understand that objectively this is a good time to be alive in many, many ways but I feel significantly worse than I did then.

If I could return to the 1990s at my current age I would do so in a heartbeat.
It's not. This season's flu is linked to killing 14,000 people in the US alone (according to the CDC), corvid-19 has been diagnosed in 2,835 deaths worldwide.

The death rate is about 0.1% for a normal flu (0.05% for the current season) and corvid-19 about 3.4%[1]. So it is indeed a lot more deadly than the flu for those who contract it, which makes it important to prevent infections. And as pointed out elsewhere, the vast majority corvid-19 related deaths happen to the elderly (tho the same is true for the flu).

[1]
https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h...

That number is skew by the Chinese Hubei Province, the epicenter, which was hit first and hardest and most widely and reported a death rate of ~4.1%, while other Chinese provinces reported a death rate of ~0.8%. The death rates for most other nations are not meaningful because of the tiny number of infections so far. South Korea, with 3,150 cases and 21 death had a death rate of ~0.7% so far, Italy at 889 infections and 21 deaths a rate of ~2.3%
'Rusty lump' turns out to be 2k-year-old silver dagger used by Roman soldier
What's with this dismissive attitude?
Not just in written language, although the difference between a “word” and “noun phrase” in spoken language is in the ear of the beholder.

But in a linguistic sense indeed, German is not at all an agglutinative language.
Spendthrift
What's the net carbon emission from 1 kWh from a liquid hydrogen engine compared to a modern diesel engine?
Beautiful Desolation game developers plea with pirates to stop
It's a neat idea to write the entire book as notebooks - so you can have run-able code right in line.

Definitely excited to check this out; thanks Jeremy and Sylvain!
Seems like a reasonable approach would be based on how much they made from the sale of the data rather than how deep their pockets are.

I don’t think it’s reasonable for the FCC to be levying excessively punitive fines that put businesses at risk just to make a point. The fine seems like it should be based on the violation.

And unfortunately each of the big careers was doing this sort of thing. If we don’t like it then we should look to support congress passing some form of data privacy rules for carriers.
That would just create a federal policy to strengthen the status quo.
So the question according to those numbers is, are we prepared to hospitalize 10% of the 30% of people who may get infected in the United States? In particular, do we have enough ventilation beds, the isolation infrastructure, the staffing? During a crisis you’d want daily briefings where questions like these could be asked.

I’ve said in other threads: it feels like the US is sleepwalking through this. If the CDC believes, as they said last week, that this will spread inevitably — what exactly are we waiting for? We have two cases of unknown origin in Santa Clara county, yet schools are still open as of now. Wouldn’t it make sense to close them for two weeks now to hopefully slow the spread and give us additional time to ramp up our medical response?
They did in fact encourage him to learn and even pointed him to various entry-level resources and mailing lists.
> Internal communication and supporting customers in shared Slack channels

If you're using Slack solely for the purpose of talking to your co-founder over a few categorized channels then the price is definitely not worth it over using email etc. IMO - unless you're willing to pay $13 a month to click on reaction emojis.

However Slack's ability to be used as a sort of centralized dashboard for most if not all of the other services listed on the blog article might just be convenient enough to merit that price point. In addition to supporting customers and probably being able to chat with them right through the app, it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if they've set up one-click integrations for the other paid suites including Sentry, LinkedIn Sales, Hubspot.
Right now the Deaths/(Deaths+resolved) is 8%, which is on par with SARS in 2002-2004. This affects most demographics, but mostly the elderly. I'm not here to advocate for panic, but we need to take this very seriously now while the outbreak is still young. The more we can slow this the less dangerous the virus will become.
Or you can set up email notifications and do the exact same thing in any mail client, like people have been doing for ages.

But that's not cool any more I guess.
Maybe conservatism is about preserving existing power structures and not much else?
YouTube how-to videos. You can look up so much. From fixing a washing machine to replacing parts on cars, to installing windows on a house, and learning math or programming, and a million other things. I'm learning the Banjo as my first insrument with online videos.
Their product is built on the Slack platform. They probably need (and want) to be paid users if not for anything more than having a better understanding of their customer.

Why you’d start (and fund?!) a business built entirely on a “hip” chat client, in a world where we’ve seen how walled gardens have ruined business models overnight (mobile app stores) is the real question. But it’s not my money (or apparently the blog authors either). So spend away!
Ok, to be fair - Teams video calls is much better than hangouts we were using earlier.

We do like chatting where threads are not a second thought like Slack (and UX is not "perfect" for threads).

But major pain point for us is sharing code snippets or inline code in chat, inline code - just doesn't work and code snippets - really buggy, forget syntax highlighting.
> In many applications there are negative consequences to your RNG being compromised.

Witness the security researcher's mindset. RNGs aren't just used in security applications.

A large chunk of RNG needs are in simulation. Simulation has no need for security guarantees. It does need to be as fast as possible. A great many secure generators are pokey.
Yup, doing the same for a frontend we're currently building. Basically some of the core features exposes warnings (on purpose) to the user once they do an action that they might want to do in a different way. These errors just have error codes assigned to them on the backend side and the frontend loads the real messages from AirTable on boot, which then is used to show the user-friendly title and description. We're doing the same thing for a couple of things and it has really cut down and development time as product team can now change the frontend themselves by just editing cells in AirTable instead of creating tasks for the development team.
> If you got hosed in 2008 you're still way up
Except for the fact that the money isn't worth what it used to be.
The next frontier for Big Science
Sorry for forgetting the source, but I learned recently that the person that writes the article does not choose the headline, generally.
> Thanks for always spreading those colds you had throughout your life.

Oddly enough, I heard a man on the radio speculate that the reason kids seem to be less affected by this than expected is because they have terrible hygiene and have built up immunity to many other coronaviruses floating around out there, giving them a leg up.

But also I think we must have different definitions of what a cold is.
Companies with the Most Software Job Postings in Each U.S. State
Okay, now that people are treating this worldometers.info page as gospel, some clarification is in order.

The fatality stats from that page is entirely from Table 1 of this paper, http://weekly.chinacdc.cn/en/article/id/e53946e2-c6c4-41e9-9..., analyzing 44,672 confirmed cases (including 1023 deaths) in China as of Feb 11. Apparently at that point most non-death cases haven’t been cured yet, but some of those people have died since, which would push the fatality rates up. Just compare the daily reported stats:

- Feb 11, 44,653 confirmed, 8204 severe (ongoing), 4740 cured, 1113 dead (I guess deaths data were lagging by a day in that paper);[1]

- Feb 28, 79,251 confirmed, 7664 severe (ongoing), 39002 cured, 2727 dead.[2]

Also, it is possible (in my layman’s opinion) that older people succumb to the virus faster, while some young people struggle for a long time before dying.

[1] http://www.nhc.gov.cn/yjb/s7860/202002/395f075a5f3a411f80335...

[2] http://www.nhc.gov.cn/yjb/s7860/202002/4ef8b5221b4d4740bda31...

Edit: Actually the worldometers page also lists some stats from another paper, but the point stands.
^This is exactly why we should take this seriously. Even if this "isn't a big deal" that attitude will get people you love and care about sick potentially leading to their death. I'm advocating that people be mindful and try to take this very seriously.
The sad thing is that it takes someone quite smart (or let’s say someone with an abstract mind more or less) to understand how mediocre this idea essentially is.
No one is downplaying anything. If anything, people are overemphasizing the danger. Even in Wuhan, the center of the outbreak, less than half a percent of the population has contracted this thing, and of that half percent, 4 out of 5 have mild symptoms. And the outbreak there seems to be stabilizing.

That isn’t to say it isn’t serious, or that we shouldn’t be taking measures to guard against it. But a large contingent of people are acting as if it’s the Walking Dead outside, and the apocalypse is just around the corner. But irrationally overblown fear and misinformation is just as likely to result in suffering and loss of life as the disease right now. An increase of unemployment of 1% is estimated to result in anywhere from 1500-40000 deaths in the US, and vague fears over this disease have been driving some of the biggest free falls in the market in decades. Part of an appropriate response to something like this means not overreacting just as much as it means not undereacting.
At some point they ceased being conservative and just became obsessed with a fetish to offend and destroy instead of progress and nurture.
That is pretty high risk and irresponsible - imagine traveling to the US without travel insurance and you could be on the hook for 100s of thousands USD for a small hospital visit!

Travel insurance is usually quite cheap, about 100-150 EUR per year in Norway
A friend trained his kids to go to sleep while he held them and danced to heavy metal music. I was shockingly effective and so far from the classic routine I really think consistency is the important factor.
> This looks pretty interesting and may well be an improvement over PCG[1].

Like this website, the PCG website also makes rather bold claims and has no peer review to back it up. What's the deal with this?
The author was talking about 30 years ago. Google did well in 1998 because the state of search was dire and it was a commonplace that it couldn’t get much better. The first decade of google was revolutionary. The last decade as been a slow slide backwards in terms of utility.
It just looks kinda wrong to me - If your generic template has to switch on what type it's been passed, surely you've made it too generic somewhere?
Adding back conditional compilation or execution afterwards strikes me as the same sort of code-smell as checking if something is an instance of a given class before then casting it and calling a member - you've lost information and using some sort of reflection to get it back looks like poorly thought out code. Sure, there are times when you more or less have to, but you ought to try to avoid them.

But what do I know, I haven't done C++ for about 5 years and was never that into it.
"Hey it's not as bad as people making it out" will make people complacent. People need to self quarantine if we want this to be well contained. We need people to understand that if they don't take this seriously people will die, people they care about.
Native Oregonian here. It's probably the flu; read the linked FAQ:

> Right now, influenza is still circulating in Oregon. It is a much more likely cause of cough and fever than coronavirus. The symptoms of novel coronavirus are similar to flu and other respiratory viral illnesses. Symptoms can include fever, cough and shortness of breath. Illness can range from mild to severe. The only way to tell what specific germ is causing illness is through laboratory testing. We recommend people with fever and cough be tested for respiratory germs. If a person meets criteria for novel coronavirus testing, providers should call their local health department.

Panicking will not help, so don't bother.
It's crazy to think that SK might have stamped this thing out if it weren't for the selfish and shortsighted actions of one person. It reminds me of a book series I read called the Second Apocalypse by R. Scott Bakker. One of the themes of the series is how (at least in his story) history often turns on the seemingly minor, self-interested actions of important people. I don't know if that's generally true in the real world, but it certainly seems true in this case.
The $7/month option is flexible enough for a small company and is not per user, thus negligible.

The per user options start to add up...
Possibly stupid question here but how are they counting illegal downloads?
Mediocre in what sense?
Hah this story sounded familiar. Makes sense.
This is an excellent example of Waterbed Theory: "This is a theory which says that if you push down the complexity in one part of a language or tool, there is a compensation which increases the complexity of another part of the language or tool."
http://wiki.c2.com/?WaterbedTheory
... and come to realize how undervalued the work of full-time stay-at-home parents is :)
One-time MACs... The most widely used constructions are based on polynomials: GHASH (from GCM) and Poly1305.
>do these technologies provide any lasting benefit

While there are downsides to having these different targets, there are upsides as well. For instance on any given platform, be it Metal for IOS or DirectX for Windows, the "native" options has usually been the most bug free and best performing option. It helps when you can build something like DirectX and know that this will only run in windows. Making something cross platform like Vulkan is more effort and complexity.

The other benefit is you have different groups exploring this space. While things might have been simpler in some ways if there had only been OpenGL, OpenGL might not have been forced to evolve as much as it did. vulkan might not have happened as soon as it did, etc.
Wow, Orielly lawyers are determined to screw this up. The thing is GPL v3 licensed which means I can’t copy any of the book code in my closed-source product or competitions or even MIT licensed code. The readme says I cannot make copies of this material but it’s ok to fork. Huh?
Yes. So is that really the point here, to make it increasingly harder for people to not work in large companies? Perhaps this is another example of progressive legislation that gets hijacked by incumbent big business by some clause agreed to during negotiation where people don’t know what they are agreeing to. I imagine this draft law was negotiated between concerned parties.

I read a fascinating book called The Power Broker by Robert Caro, that showed how lawyers conduct a type of ambush warfare with new laws. What they are really gunning for is not apparent until the law goes into effect, it’s too subtle for people to see from the text.
I had AIM in the 90s and some behavior I experienced back then would now be considered cyber bullying. It's not unique to this era.

I also would not say that relying on being able to escape your physical tormentors on the weekends is a good solution either. Dealing with bullying has always been a challenge.
Why is Discord always ignored in discussions of slack alternatives? It's literally a slack clone. Are you all just put off by the marketing or the fact that it's not exclusively used by 'professionals'?
If C<X>O titles are meaningless if they don't confer absolute authority over <X> then they are pretty much all meaningless, so what's your point?
Exploring the Darkweb
I am honestly very triggered by any tone of elitism in the sphere of intellectual or professional pursuits. It's not just in tech - just try googling 'DIY HVAC Repair'. Now, I don't advocate partaking in activities which are legitimately dangerous without training and certification (e.g. charging an HVAC system with freon or operating a crane), but when all you are trying to do is replace a contactor in your HVAC system and you get a wall of "DIY is not allowed here" when asking basic questions, it really puts some hate into your soul. Cryptographers give me the exact same sensation with their 'no DIY' rhetoric.

At the end of the day for me, it mostly boils down to some ulterior agenda which seeks to keep competition or perceived threats to the incumbents' control at bay.

Does the NSA have a vested interest in most technology workers being able to competently roll their own encryption schemes? From my very jaded political perspective, I would say absolutely not. It arguably makes their mission exponentially harder if they have to deal with novel approaches to securing communications. They would probably prefer everyone just use ECC with their hand-selected curve parameters.
> I had ZERO concern about my identity being stolen in 1995. My identity has now been stolen 3x in the last 10 years and caused significant anxiety and hassle.

I have never been robbed, and I live in a place American suburbanites have told me is “dangerous.” But I have had my ID stolen. And to be honest I’d much rather be hacked or miss an ATM skimmer than having someone sticking a gun in my face demanding my wallet.
There were stockpiles of supplies in Puerto Rico, too, but that didn't mean it was successfully distributed to the people who needed it.[1] Is there a secret plan for disbursing this stockpile to 300+ million Americans? If so, why wasn't that plan utilized in PR?

[1]https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/puerto-rico-fires-em...
The cost of missed experiences? I think a great many (most? Nearly all?) people are missing out on a great deal. Working two jobs seems relatively normal. I'm of the impression that most people work so much to just get by and largely miss out on the category of "missed experiences." Missing their kids grow up, missing the scenery as it goes by, not having the time to keep friendships going. I think that someone who builds an empire like Trader Joe's likely led a more rich in experience life than most.