skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How do I improve my productivity?
I have been working as a web developer for over a couple of years now. One thing I always end up feeling is that whatever task/story I am working on could have been done much faster and probably with a better solution.
I attribute this to not having expert knowledge of the underlying tech(say Mysql or Python/Django). And to that end, I do try read and practise a lot.
I end up with a similar feeling no matter what.

Is there some other angle to this? Are there some things I am missing?
How do I get more productive in terms of speed and quality of my work?
What's the conspiracy?

China didn't get over COVID-19. They're still seeing double-digit deaths daily and new infections. They're going to see recurring new networks and pockets appear repeatedly. Endlessly if the virus has endured in other countries. They aren't coming out on top of this, especially given the absolutely enormous GDP damage they've already endured.
CUDA can dynamically allocate, more recente versions even support unified shared memory blocks with the host processor.

It is also possible to do native memory allocation in Java.

Imposing restrictions on a Java subset is hardly any different of imposing restrictions on C and C++, which apparently is ok to do.
The counterexample is not apt; you can see by the phrasing of the original algorithm that items arrive in a stream over time. The goal is to maximize the value of the knapsack once the entire stream (of indefinite length) is consumed.

Item B is better than item A, even when you're just choosing from those two items, because more items will come along later to fill the space that item B leaves empty.

Here's a more explicit description of the problem space:

- Items arrive in a stream.

- Picking up an item is free.

- Overlooking an item is free.

- Discarding an item is expensive.

- Once an item is overlooked or discarded, it can't be picked back up.

What you're trying to do is finish the stream with the most valuable knapsack without having to go through too much discarding. An item that fills your entire inventory can never be worth picking up, unless it has an awesome value/space ratio, because picking up any other item guarantees that you have to discard that one.
If you want a real retro NES feel, consider using NES' original 54-color palette.
It lacks deep red and pale orange (suitable for human skins), so the developer of Shovel Knight added 4 colors to it.

https://yachtclubgames.com/2014/07/breaking-the-nes/

https://lospec.com/palette-list/shovel-knight-nes
> as properly organized C++ codebase doesn't have problem

I'm still having hard time to believe that kernels optimized for SIMD architecture will be useful on CPU and vice versa. And OpenCL people advertised this, if memory serves me well.
Idea for an addon: delete popups, delete overlays, fix scrolling ( which is often broken after deleting popups ). Is it possible to earn money with addons?
Perhaps Barry started the rumors? His moat is that he can out-slander every other beekeeper?
Sadly, I’m confronted with a desktop version of an image verification CAPTCHA while on mobile, and can’t get to see the entire grid of images to pass the test.

Reading the article directly worked fine (maybe because I don’t have any cookies from the past?).
2020 Covid-19 Reports – [Google Drive]
Are any those organisations like Walmart or McDonalds that employ a lot of people who often don’t have any savings and any margins at all?
Please see my twitter account for lots on this. I'm in contact with a bunch of top researchers on this topic (renin-angiotensin system; ACE2/Ang 1-7/Mas axis; ARB usage for viral diseases) and will be posting a summary update soon:

https://twitter.com/__philipn__/status/1235756671852589056

It may be the other way around: ACEi/ARB may be protective. HTN without ACEi/ARB would be non-protective, potentially so much so that it skews the group fatality numbers. This is because people with HTN have a different renin-angiotensin system profile: more AT1R, less AT2R, more ACE, potentially less ACE2.

This is being looked at now. But the key is that in every study ever done on viral lung disease, etc, AT1R blockade was highly beneficial, and we know that ACE2-knockout basically screws up lungs, makes viral lung disease way worse, etc. Please see my twitter posts.

The virus eats up ACE2, downregulating it as it binds. This would have delirious effects. Check out the linked "essential reading" twitter post.

Will be posting a summary to my twitter soon.
Welcome to America, where money trumps Human Rights.
We are working toward sharing the data we have and it will show how much time engineering makers and managers spend in meetings. For fun we built a free app that shows individuals their meetings stats and how they compare within their company. And, now we are working to showcase that anonymized data and what we learned.

Example report here: https://app.shepherd.com/personal-report/sample

If you get a chance to look let me know what you think!

We hope to have the report on how it looks big picture in maybe 2 or 3 months. I'll post on Show HN when its done.
In the tabletop exercise performed at Johns Hopkins just a few months ago, the world didn't fare so well. Even though some countries initially control it, it continues to spread and be reintroduced, ultimately leading to 65 million deaths worldwide: http://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/event201/scenario.htm...

A chilling, and somewhat likely simulation.
Fun, create a struct on the stack. Set the elements individually. Padding is now filled with garbage. Any elements you forget to set will also be garbage. When you copy the struct the garbage goes with it.

I've been burnt too.
It seems normal to me to speak of the angle of handwriting as slanting forwards or backwards, corresponding to slash and backslash. Most people’s handwriting is angled either upright or slightly forwards—leaning into the writing; backwards is uncommon.
Chesterton’s Fence: A Lesson in Second Order Thinking
Just like the first versions of C, C++, Rust did not support GPGPU properly, they were rather small subsets, that have taken several years to achieve some of the GPGPU support.

Even Rust wouldn't be that much, if it wasn't being built on top of LLVM.
Nigerians Hurricane Senate, Decline Anti-Social Media Bill
Personally I’d go with JavaScript, easy to learn ( lots of online courses ) and if you learn something like react / angular you will be pretty well sought after.

Source: I’ve been a web dev / CTO for the past 15 years and this is what I really need right now.

Your likely going to be working on webapps and not desktop apps though.
Defining Regression Checks – Why, When and Its Best Practices
This makes no sense to me : malaria is due to a bacteria and COVID19 is a virus, why choloroquine would work on both ?
What is it with the Java ecosystem and the term/name tornado. A lot of projects have been named tornado. Any interesting reasons for this?
No losses for SXSW.
Oh and pick something that interests you and make a personal project out of it, use this as your portfolio - extra credit if it solves a real world problem and you can get this across in an interview, a programmer with business sense is worth a lot more than one without ( to me anyway )
Researchers introduce new algorithm to reduce machine learning time
Why is it terrifying? Are you acting on data or by relying on media scare?

It is only somewhat worse than typical flu, Heck lesser than Spanish Flu. Nowhere near plagues humanity weathered already. Much less terrible then wars too.

Tests have some 15% false positive rate and are not useful in a viruses that propagate this fast for any other intent than confirmation. They are getting improved.

Treatment is supportive, if you're afraid care will be overloaded, get a pulse oximeter, oxygen tanks, reduction and mask, disinfectants (esp. water treatment) and about month store of easily digestible, easy to prepare food, and certainly water to smooth over any interruptions. (Don't kid yourself, you cannot store a month of water. Maybe drinking water, but not technical. Still bulky.)

Multivitamin and extra vitamin C which maybe will help. (It is slightly effective in colds, which it is a kind of.)

If you're really rich, get some hydroquinone synthesized. Useful chemical even if you won't use it for this epidemic.

This, and quarantine, is the most anyone can do. Walking around in protective gear is a joke as operator error will kill effectiveness.
The relief valve worked perfectly, as they said, there was no steam explosion.

Unfortunately too much of the steam was released and the reactor melted.
As far as I know minifiers don't do this since it changes semantics. Take this for example:

// 1
doSomething();
console.log(Math.sin(2));

// 2
var s = Math.sin;
doSomething();
console.log(s(2));

Now, consider this definition for `doSomething()`:

function doSomething() {
Math.sin = x => x
}

Now, the first prints 2 and the second snippet prints 0.9092.

Keeping track of globals to get around this is complicated. Even if you do, you can't always be sure the behaviour of the code isn't changing since `doSomething` could be defined in a module your minifier doesn't know about.
imho.

* java - it's very heavily used in enterprise and somehow becomes "the new cobol" - jobs may be often a bit boring, but they pay :)

* kotlin - mobile/android development and integrates well with java

* python - used everywhere from scripting, webapps, ml to hpc; lots of good libraries around ... even if they are often just wrappers around fortran/c code a la scipy/numpy

* c - yes, c ... because its the "workhorse" of system/embedded programming; simple and you get full control over your system

* javascript - because its everywhere nowadays ;)

* why not php!? personally i used php since php3 (!) and still use it for quick projects / the occasional webpage where a static site-gen is not enough, but i avoid jobs using/announcing php, because those projects are often utterly crap ...

cheers
v.

ps.: don't forget to learn the language-specific tooling ...
If you're disappointed in the American government on this, you haven't been paying attention for the past two years. They are handling this crisis exactly as they showed us they would.
Privitisation of some of the profits, but not of the state-mandated signup scheme or the payments:

> The insured person pays the insurance premium for the basic plan up to 8% of their personal income.

So some huge portion is state-subsidized for lower incomes.

Medicare advantage in the US has similar privitisation aspects as well.
The same people are content to have a drone blow up a house full of children to kill a single target.
I spent a few years as an insurance regulator (albeit on the P&C side) and I was following these regulations. I'm glad that you are out there evangelizing this, but I think in the long-run you may have to figure out how to provide additional value or you may be disintermediated. We are already at the point where we need to wring every little bit of unnecessary cost out of healthcare.
Fascinating! If Bornholm had remained a Soviet garrison, it would have completely reshaped the cold war in the Baltic.
The water part is more horrifying. Once that's gone, whole swathes of US would have to be evacuated.
I suppose this is the impetus. I think that this gives them a way to prioritize which issues to fix in a better than the arbitrary hunch way. We assign "weights" all the time to issues either based on expected "time to complete" or on the severity of not fixing this. However, someone's severe is another's meh. This could give a score in a systematic way and help alleviate the guesswork.
Textile workers from Wuhan
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-21350013
and

..."According to data published by the Italian Ministry of Labor and Social Policies, 309,110 Chinese people were officially living in the country in 2018, comprising 155,305 men and 153,805 women with an average age of 31 years. Lombardy and Tuscany emerged as the two regions that received the largest number. Specifically, several businesses producing or selling clothes, supermarkets, and technological-device stores have been concentrated in the city of Milan, boosting a vibrant multicultural environment in Lombardy."...

https://asiatimes.com/2020/03/on-being-a-chinese-in-italy-du...
> Bornholm was quietly evacuated leaving no Soviet presence in Scandinavia.

Arguably incorrect, since the Soviets maintained a naval base in Porkkala, Finland, just west of Helsinki, until 1956. (Arguably because Finland is culturally but not strictly geographically Scandinavian.)
Yep WorkDNA, no webpage yet, we've got two clients as of last week! (we pivoted from building a meeting analytics and behavioral change platform for enterprise companies). My work email is ben@shepherd.com too.

You can see a slide deck showing our MVP here: https://speakerdeck.com/bwb/workdna-pitch?slide=13

We are basically a supercharged careers site designed for engineers by engineers. It is kinda like Zillow, when you look for a house you want to get a feel for what it would be like to live there, we do that but for engineering teams.
Just throw enough huge concrete blocks around it and you're safe from trucks. A tank or an ICBM is a different matter altogether.
Ask HN: Global (local) atmosphere changes because of Covid-19
I wanna ask if someone saw any studies about atmospheric changes (dont wanna write "positive atmospheric changes") since the Wutan incident. I believe that in Wutan the air quality should go up because of 3 months of virtually no traffic (as a side note, traffic accidents should go down aswell) there are no CO2 gasses. On the global scale, less air traffic, less sea traffic and less car traffic in quarantine zones around the world should be visible. And positive? Am I right? PS: to spark the conspiracy: Greta would be happy as things people should be doing for years one tiny organism forced in few months :) Gaia made?
His anti-intellectualism, anti-science history of saying catastrophically stupid things earned him that response. Just to be clear, this is an anti-vax president who continues to state just completely wrong things, and you're complaining about the poor guy being mistreated? The fact that this isn't much bigger news, the guy ousted by his own party, indicts the entire US political system.

And to be clear, a pretty heady amount of the criticism of Trump is coming from "The right". Sam Harris, George Conway, David Frum -- these are not "the left". They also think Trump is an imbecile at the worst possible moment.
I've heard it may be airborne

I haven't heard a single credible claim to that effect from any researcher. It's not like measles.
Numberwise, yes you're right. The problem with is that in the public discussion "suspicious" is going to be understood differently and in ways that don't help.
Free Accounting Software
The difficulty in finding 1099 arrangements these days for tech companies is that they often want to monopolize your time, which they can't do in a 1099 arrangement. Basically, back in the late 90s or so, Microsoft tried to use 1099s to avoid giving out benefits
(such as unemployment insurance) and got hammered by the Labor Department for it. So now most places either put everyone under W2 or are super strict about the number of hours you can work.

It basically comes down to who gets to say when you start and stop working. If the company wants to demand a certain set of hours of the day (not just an aggregate of hours during a work period), then the person doing the work is not a "contractor". Contractors are supposed to be able to make their own hours and find any number of clients they wish to fill their time. If the client doesn't like you doing that, then they are obligated to make you an employee.
this number of days after outbreak

The trick is having trustworthy timelines in the first place.
Absolutely. But saying “the coronavirus panic is dumb” does no such thing. If you want to combat the panic you need to reach out to the people who are panicking and convince them to calm down. Dunno about you, but I’ve never met a person who becomes calmer by being told they’re dumb.

The audience for this tweet isn’t the people who are panicking, it’s the people who are not. Its only effect is striking the egos of people who feel they are too smart to panic about this.
Show HN: Subtask – A Better Task Management
Barry and Mark and whoever else can't make enough honey for everyone. The value proposition is that you can exchange for .
Mark is Uber and Barry is Lyft. The bees are the drivers. Uber and Lyft do not want to put them on payroll, while the drivers filed a class action suit saying they should be treated as employees not contractors. Swap in #1 and #2 from any "gig economy" market, same story.
That made it even worse.
Thanks. There's also an issue of finding such opportunities. Any pointers on that?
I use two devices. The first runs a kernel+userland I can edit and acts as the gateway/AP and DNS server for the second, which runs some commercially-motivated, "locked-down" consumer OS.
High-density hybrid powercapacitors: A new frontier in the energy race
This is how a global crisis begins. The virus is spread more than we know and it's getting further
Thanks. Any guidance on how to find such remote opportunities?
How Hackers Use DNS Tunneling to Own Your Network
The mistake wasn't in giving Object those functions. You get "=" behavior for all types in a given language, and it's nice to be able to control this somehow (i.e. they were actually thinking a little bit about the equality problem here). The problem came when they decided that the default behavior should be a pointer comparison rather than a member-by-member sub-equals. As for hashCode(), it should have thrown an exception as the default behavior, because there's no way a language designer can anticipate what makes a proper hash for class XYZ.
Read the paper. They tried it on many viruses, but it had no effect, except for Hepatitis C, where it had a mild effect. Now a first small study indicates that it may be highly effective for the treatment of COVID-19. Just a try-and-error process I guess, of all available tools use the one that works best.
You sound correct about the hypocracy but as far as I can find out the normal tests are reported about 40-70% accurate (reports vary but my understanding is more near 40 than 70) in non-symptomatic people and around here they are thus only used and done twice if one has symptoms as even then they are not fool-proof. The test is thus pretty useless to perform on everybody as it gives too many false positives and too many false negatives to be useful to people with no symptoms. It would be a lot better though if they explained that. People here (Netherlands) are also complaining about not being tested before having symptoms or even after being admitted, as they assume the test will give them a yes/no answer which it won't.
Understanding Mathematical Symbols with Code
Might be of interest:

“Expert consensus on chloroquine phosphate for the treatment of novel coronavirus pneumonia”

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/32075365/
Lost Boy – Short Film (Trailer) (YouTube)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liV5wKAihh8
Thanks, these are great---I added them!
This needs to be its own post and shared as much as possible.

The above may yield a pill that patients can take at home, reducing further spread of infections that can easily occur in clinical settings. Without such a pill, hospital overflow will occur in any area with more than a few thousand cases. And there will be 100s-1000s of cities worldwide that medical resources could be overwhelmed within a few months.

We need to explore all avenues now. In only 3-4 months, there will be 100,000s of deaths worldwide, if an effective treatment that can be administered outside of hospital settings is not available.
They don’t need an understanding of exponential growth, they only need to look at examples: China, extreme measures and barely contained it; Italy delayed measures, turning fast into a disaster. How many examples do we need?
Wow, it really must be promising, given that the second highest number of trials for any other drug is three.
This is America 40 years after the neoliberal revolution.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhYJS80MgYA
A long time ago I worked for Bell Northern Research (which eventually became Nortel, which eventually became insolvent). When I started there they had a retirement savings program where they would sell you BNR stock for half price (though you had to have it in your retirement savings). I said "No thank you" and a lot of people thought I was crazy. At the time the company was pulling in $18 billion a year and was making about a 5% profit (later it was found that the "5% profit" was actually accounting fraud but nobody knew that at the time).

From my perspective, I looked at the business and realised that we were selling hardware at a 90% margin, but only eking out a 5% profit. Where was the rest of the money going? Well, obviously to a very inefficient rest of the company that included the software developers (me ;-) ). Later it was discovered that it was also being imbezzled, but we didn't know about it at that time...

It occurred to me, though, that the only thing that was stopping a company from eating our lunch was that telecom hardware was a capital intensive industry. So you had BNR, AT&T and Seimens capturing practically the entire market, each being as incompetent as the other, but with very little distinction between them. All you needed was a few billion dollars to shake the industry to the core. And, of course, that happened. It took only a couple of years (less than 5 I think) for Nortel to go from 100K employees to zero (with the executives slurping up the retirement fund to pay for their own "retention bonuses", because what would have happened if the executives bolted as soon as bankruptcy proceedings started??? I mean apart from retirees actually getting their retirement money, obviously...)

But it's a funny thing because if I were Barry, I would be selling mead. And I would open up a visitor centre in a "Ye Olde Merry England" vibe where you can sample the mead. And I would start an onsite bakery with Knights in Shining Armour theme where I would test out recipes on my customers. And I would make a joint venture with a factory producing confectionary to try to get into convenience stores. And because I would quickly run out of honey to sell, I would buy up all of Mark's honey and eventually just acquire him so that he's my employee. Then I'd fire him because he's mean to bees.

But realistically, I think Barry will just be trying to figure out how to siphon a few extra dollars out of the business and into his pocket because starting up new ventures are risky and hard work.
Honeybees are delicate creatures. If bee hive is not treated well, it gets sick, decreases honey production and maybe does not survive winter. Mark in this story would probably went bankrupt in a few years.
I never aruedagainst having food at home, did I? But going out to stores now and emty shelves is the opposite of that. especially since over night the majority of stuff will be back in shelves anyway.

Also, if you have grocceries delivered overall demand stays the same. So no additional stress. Also it is way easier to protect and monitor delivery drivers. The group is much smaller than all shoppers.

Fun fact, delivery personnel can only be protected if enough PTE gear is available for them and not horded in someones garage or wherever.
That seems like a pretty unrealistic scenario. I guess it's a thought experiment but positioning (and the existence of branding/marketing) alone would indicate to me that Barry and Mark are not going to be exactly the same.

Positioning is always going to be at the very least a soft-moat and especially in consumable goods it's going to be a pretty strong moat (think Coke vs. Pepsi).
Thanks, this a great quote! I added it as well. Do you happen to have an original source for this? I would love to see how it looks in Sanskrit.