skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Popular JS VMs...are often not maintained

The V8 engine, in 2020, is one of the most actively-maintained software projects of any kind. And (for better or worse) nearly everyone who needs a JS engine uses that one. This includes - among others - Chrome, NodeJS (which means Electron too), and now Edge. The only major outliers I can think of are JavaScriptCore (iOS/Safari) and SpiderMonkey (Firefox).

The sin committed by Avast was rolling their own version of something, as a less-than-massive-company, when the state-of-the-art implementation is OSS. That has nothing to do with JavaScript the language. You're commenting on things you clearly know nothing about.
Credibility is the quality one has when one's statements ought to be believed. OP claims the WHO lacks this quality. OP doesn't illustrate what specific statements the WHO could make that aren't trustworthy; but in the very same comment only quotes a single one from them: the fact that Covid-19 would be a pandemic.

So the only (provided) statement we should disbelieve is that Covid-19 is a pandemic. Which is precisely what OP wanted them to say. Hence the contradiction.

Obviously, this line of reasoning is tenuous, but the initial claim isn't much better, as nothing is said of what it really means for the WHO to have credibility.

I read that comment as an additional armchair semanticist making the strong claim that (exaggeration mine) the WHO should have declared the pandemic before the virus reached their own country.
Did this happen after SARS and MERS outbreaks?

Did this happen after Ebola outbreak?

Did this happen after Zika outbreak?

Don't get your hopes up.
https://twitter.com/julianborger/status/1237748572415762437

> Robert Redfield, CDC Director, said there are no plans to set up drive through #COVID19 test centres because "We're tryinjg to maintain the relationship between individuals and their healthcare providers."

Bunch of ostriches with their heads in the sand.
For H1N1 as far as I remember the pandemic designation happened far earlier and that was a joke of virus compared to covid-19 comparing the mortality rates.
>and still seems sharp as a tack

That's highly subjective and no doubt any assessment is likely to strongly align with partisanship.

Which is why we need age limits. You can't expect people to objectively evaluate whether those inside or outside their party are still legislating or judging effectively in their 80s. Obviously most Republicans would lean towards arguing that she's senile and most Democrats would lean toward the opposite.

And then I imagine cognitive decline does not affect all faculties equally - so someone may still, say, have no trouble writing essays, but their judgement may be compromised.
I think this comes with a big asterisk.

As far as I can tell, there was a lot of room for caveats in that statement. In particular, it was scoped to companies they met with.
It's also not actually sound to begin with. MERS was transmitted to humans from camels, which are not exotic at all in the middle east. Livestock frequently interacts with wild animals, and this isn't really preventable, especially against bats. Worse yet, livestock is generally kept in large groups in close proximity to each other, and once slaughtered is distributed quickly and widely. While it doesn't get the same media coverage, it is not that uncommon for diseased meat to make it into the food supply. While meat inspection practices go a long way to help, they for obvious reasons have a hard time dealing with new diseases.
They're talking about exponential growth in general, i think.
Show HN: Refinery – Data anonymization and governance for the masses
https://www.openquery.io/refinery

We are Christos, Damien and Nodar, founders of OpenQuery. We are building Refinery, an Open Source deployment written in Rust to automate the process of anonymizing sensitive data and governing how different consumers access that data using our 'policy-as-code' framework (It's based on Hashicorp's HCL).

We noticed that companies have been solving the same problem over and over in different ways. The problem boils down to giving a data-consumer (this could be an analyst, a BI tool, an ML workflow, a different company etc. ) access to a sensitive dataset. Sensitive data can come in different shapes and sizes, maybe it's spatial data, maybe it's financial information, maybe it's sensitive patient health data. There is also the context in which this data is being shared - is the data crossing national borders? Is it leaving the organisation?

Refinery allows you to easily define how data-consumers access sensitive data, you can add users, groups, datasets and then define entities within datasets. Next, leverage multiple anonymization algorithms (from basic hashing and bucketing to differential privacy) and policies (built for spatial data or financial data etc.) to define how consumers interact with the data. Our query engine will then enforce that policies are upheld at runtime, so for a data-consumer it feels like they are interfacing with a plain old SQL database. Furthermore, having the configuration as code allows you to use your favourite editor and version control system to manage your policies.

We haven't launched the product yet - we are deep in development, launching soon and very excited! We would love to hear your ideas, questions and feedback. If this sounds like something that could be helpful to you please get in touch!
This is a state university for what it's worth. I doubt they haven't already run it by lawyers.
How many people die each year from flu worldwide? How many times mortality of Covid-19 is bigger?
The Internet Avoided a Minor Disaster Last Week
I've heard that from my direct manager. I'm sure that's influenced by who he reports to. He was potentially exposed last week but still comes into the office, and we're discouraged from working from home. We're told to use our "best judgement" but the subtext is pretty clear...
The smallest consolation during the insanity of the Trump presidency is that it obvious that Trump and his goons have lived every second of it in fear.
I've heard they were counting off countries with cases. My wife told me the other day that she read that "4 more countries with coronavirus and WHO will call it pandemic".
As I understand it WHO changed the definition of what a pandemic is in ~2009. So take comparisons to earlier pandemics with a grain of salt.
One data point might be Toronto. SARS had a pretty large social impact here, and people are far more cautious and measured in the face of COVID-19, but not panicking. Not yet anyway.

But small changes have been impactful—like some businesses immediately getting on wider WFH policies and self-quarantine for returning business travelers as well as general hygiene—people aren't always great at that but it's a conscious act on everyone's part lately. Businesses and buildings even started placing more sanitizer stations, etc.
If I don't get Elden Ring news soon I am going to go hollow.
They also have to be careful about credibility. It wasn't clear how well the global containment efforts were going to work until very recently. Let's say a week or two ago there's a 33% probability of global pandemic: that means if they call it such then, 2 times out of 3 they're crying wolf and causing people to listen less carefully to the WHO. You already see people claiming all manner of conspiracy theory nonsense and not taking it as seriously as they should; they have to be careful not to amplify that, and balance that against acting too late when it's clear there is a high probability of global community spread.

Other than their censorship in China (they give different advice on their website served to China, even on English-language pages, involving the effectiveness of traditional Chinese medicine against the virus), I think they're doing a mostly okay job so far, from what I can see in the current reporting.
Are you serious? At the Feb. 26 press conference [0], President Trump literally said: "This is a flu. This is like a flu."

The president tweeted this 2 days ago [1]:

> So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!

This is what the Surgeon General said on Sunday [2]:

> "If we had massive numbers of cases we would be seeing more deaths. And so we actually feel pretty good that some parts of the country have contained it just like when you look at the flu," Adams said on CNN's "State of the Union" Sunday. "When we look at the flu tracker, some parts of the country are having much more severe flu seasons. Some are having very mild flu seasons. The same thing for coronavirus."

[0] https://www.c-span.org/video/?469747-1/president-trump-annou...

[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/stocks-dive-coronavirus-spre...

[2] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/stocks-dive-coronavirus-spre...
Western governments do seem to be reacting to this major threat to our lives with a degree of callous disregard ..
I love that the headline says the students "took to the streets" after they were kicked out of their homes onto the streets.
The same thing is true of going to work.
I'm pissed off the iPhone 9 won't come out. With time I will get more pissed off.
Greece is Orthodox, but I imagine each franchise has some leeway in its marketing. It seems that ours are just excessively greedy.
I'm curious how Fox News chose to push for denial rather than, say blaming it on international or ideological opponents.

Perhaps it's just that they can change course without any pushback from their demographic -- they're happy believing that we've always been at war with Eastasia. Still, it must cost them something to be quite so demonstrably wrong on something that's so much in people's faces. (As opposed to, say, climate change, where the effects are much slower and more easily shuffled under "the heat wave and fires are just weather".)
All depends on the mitigations people take.

If people think it's serious, they'll take actions to prevent that serious outcome.

If people think it's not serious, then it may become serious.
Why is gaining access a good idea? If China's being dishonest WHO should just recommend zero travel from/to China and let them stew in it -- they can manipulate their stats internally all they want.
I'm curious about the 2% death rate number. How can we rely on this number if test kits are in such limited supply and the rate of "Severe" symptoms is only 15%? Is the death rate only calculated out of known cases? do we only know about the severe cases?
> 1 service with 2 endpoints A and B. A relies on an external service and the database, A and B both rely on the database. What to do if the external service is down bringing A down?

Make one /health/a endpoint and one /health/b endpoint. Client-service A uses /health/a to check if the service is "healthy in terms of A's ability to use it." Client-service B likewise pings /health/b.

In a scenario with many different dependent services (a crawler that can hit arbitrary third-party sites, say, or something like Hadoop that can load arbitrary not-necessarily-existent extensions per job) these endpoints should be something clients can create/register themselves, ala SQL stored procedures; or the service can offer a connection-oriented health-state-change streaming endpoint, where the client can hold open a connection and be told when about readiness-state-change events.

But to be clear, these are edge-case considerations: in most cases, a service has only critical-path dependencies (which it needs to bootstrap itself, or to "do its job" in the most general SLA sense); and optional dependencies (which it doesn't actually need, and can offer degraded functionality when the service isn't available via circuit-breaking.)

It's a rare—and IMHO not-well-factored—service that has dependencies that are on the critical path for some use-cases but not others. Such a service should probably be split into two or more services: a core service that all use-cases depend on; and then one or more services that each just do the things unique to a particular use-case, with all their dependencies being on the critical path to achieve their functionality of serving that specific use-case. Then, those use-case-specific services can be healthy or unhealthy.

An example of doing this factoring right: CouchDB. It has a core "database" service, but also a higher-level "view-document querying" service, that can go down if its critical-path dependency (a connection to a Javascript sandbox process) isn't met. Both "services" are contained in one binary and one process, but are presented as two separate collections of endpoints, each with their own health endpoint.

An example of doing this factoring wrong: Wordpress. It's got image thumbnailing! Comment spam filtering! CMS publication! All in one! And yet it's either monolithically "healthy" or "unhealthy"; "ready" or "not ready" to run. That is clearly ridiculous, right?
> I fail to see how what they were doing is any different from what Microsoft tried to pull with Visual J++.

That's because you're repeatedly failing to see the distinction between trademark law and copyright law. The Visual J++ lawsuit that was settled was a trademark infringement suit, because the Java trademarks are what Sun had locked behind license terms mandating compliance to their compatibility test suite. Google was more studious about avoiding use of Sun trademarks in Android, and chose to not seek a license for those trademarks. Now they're being sued over copyrights, not trademarks.
Beyond the legal issue.. it doesn't seem like a smart move to spread people around more if you're worried about your students being infected.
rather than becoming immobilized, panicked, and/or irrational, fear should be a trigger for a learn-plan-do cycle, which you've apparently started (learning what's possible to do about the situation).

however, it's important not to spread irrational fear, which words like "terrified" tend to do, particularly when overblown. the state of being "terrified" leads to immobilization, panic, and irrationality, so it should literally be avoided like the plague.

on the other hand, being concerned and worried, and acknowledging (unhelpful) anxiety, is reasonable. asking for help and information, like you did, is reasonable. discerning and acknowledging the appropriate level of risk (probably worse than a regular flu but not nearly as bad as the 1918 flu) is reasonable.

with that said, children are constantly learning whether you teach them or not. it's ok if learning is not entirely linear. the world is not linear, and our brains are not either. what's needed will get in there eventually, and we're resilient enough to compensate for nearly any kind of deficiency anyways.

(the same case can be made for overly worrying about "getting into good school districts", something worth considering a little bit, but not a lot, and a commonly-cited driver of localized real estate bubbles)
We're that many days behind in raw case numbers. We have a lot more capacity than Italy overall, and our larger hospitals are prepped for mass shootings which means they have procedures in place for a sudden influx of patients who need ventilators.

Story from a couple years back about that last point: https://epmonthly.com/article/not-heroes-wear-capes-one-las-...
They are incapable of occupying the same position at the same time. It's ridiculous. Pure tribalism at work.

"Initially the left was saying flu was a bigger threat. Now they are taking it seriously, shutting down events.

Initially the right was taking it seriously, banning travel. Now they are calling it the flu."

https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1237241527035928576
It's wrong to believe China's numbers are accurate at all. and in Italy, its mostly been in one area, not the entirety of Italy.
Exponential growth.
I really don’t understand why the guy can’t keep quiet and let people who obviously know more about the topic do their job. I don’t understand what he is trying to achieve constantly contradicting experts. He should support them.
A significant portion of the U.S. population not only unconditionally believes everything Donald Trump says, but will ONLY believe what he says.
A few issues from our Python analyzer:

* Dangerous mutable default argument passed in functions

```
def some_func(arg=[1,2,3]):

...

```

which should be

```
def some_func(arg=None):

if arg is None: arg = [1,2,3]
...

```

* `yield` used inside a comprehension (which breaks code in Python 3.8)

* file opened with the "r" flag, but a write is attempted on the file

* i/o detected on a closed file descriptor

* providing an unexpected keyword argument in a function call
> Pandemic label was a response to objective criteria

Modeling the causal impact of their criteria in light of data from the COVID-19 pandemic could reveal how different messaging strategies applied at different thresholds impact the spread of the virus.

The leadership could have done this months ago and estimated how proactive versus inactive quarantine efforts would impact morbidity. They have to know their role in persuading the public and government officials.

You don't have to stick to a rigid and inflexible criteria when thousands of human lives are at stake. When you define the criteria, you can also change them.
This doesn't sound right. In a remote environment it's crucial to be able to find people. You need a good directory/orgchart. In an office you can walk over to section and ask. In a global chat room or such this is harder.
So sad that the mack daddy of removable storage in the late 90's isn't covered. Jaz disks were freaking boss for all of the 5 years they existed.
Almost certainly, anyone who calls themselves "alcoholic" should probably give Alcoholics Anonymous a try. However, alcoholism is not a disease and AA isn't the only answer.
I was using Linux and Solaris in 1998, and doing things on Solaris was a constant pain compared to doing the same things on Linux. (Sun was still trying to push CDE at that point, for crying out loud.) I compiled KDE and Samba for our Sun and dramatically increased its utility.

There were things that Solaris was better at in 1998: big iron things, NUMA things, fault-tolerance things, what we now call "observability". (I still don't have a good equivalent for pstack on Linux!) But Linux was enormously better at many other things, including, most crucially, networking.

That was about the time the Top500 list started morphing into a list of the top 500 Beowulfs.
> There's a huge chunk of student for whom that IS their housing. Full stop.

I haven't seen the details of UD's arrangements, but in the case of MIT yesterday, they explicitly provided an exception for students who didn't have any other housing to return to. It would be a sign of extraordinarily bad management at UD if they didn't provide the same.

> This seems like illegal eviction to me.

I discussed this in the MIT thread yesterday, but contract law does provide mechanisms for invalidating or modifying existing agreements under extraordinary circumstances. The doctrine of force majeure (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_majeure), for instance, under which both parties to a contract can be relieved of their obligations if some unforeseeable, unstoppable outside force makes it impossible or impractical for them to meet them. American contracts commonly have a force majeure clause included with the rest of the legal boilerplate.

One potential wrinkle here would be exactly what legal standard would be required for the coronavirus to qualify as a true force majeure. Massachusetts and Ohio both declared states of emergency due to the coronavirus yesterday; I suspect it's not a coincidence that universities in Boston, MA and Dayton, OH waited for those declarations before they started taking these types of actions.
Well, all AV software seems to offer the option, but I don't know many folks who would trust it alone.
What are HNers doing with elementary age school kids in CA / Bay Area? Seems inevitable that we are heading towards school closures en mass - reasonable to get an early start?
What US are you in?

I'm in WA state, where until last week testing wasn't being conducted on anyone that wasn't traveling from a level 3 country or in contact with a known infected person, EVEN IF THE WOULD-BE TESTEE WAS SHOWING SYMPTOMS. We keep talking about the count of infected (and relying on it to decide who to test) but it's unarguably low if we've not been testing, particularly as we apparently have introductions via Europe as well as China, plus community transmission.

Trump just a few days ago said that everyone who wants to be tested can get tested. According to the doctor's offices, that's still false.

Trump himself has a NUMBER of downplaying statements. So many I won't bother to list them. But lots of statements along the lines of "just the flu", among others.

> there's been an overabundance of information and caution

Hard to judge "overabundance" (see other article about how everything with a pandemic is premature until it is too late)

Today's headlines: "The White House has ordered federal health officials to treat top-level coronavirus meetings as classified, an unusual step that has restricted information and hampered the U.S. government’s response to the contagion, according to four Trump administration officials."

Note this prevents any expert who doesn't have clearance from attending.

A few days ago: "US health officials wanted to recommend that elderly Americans avoid flying amid the coronavirus crisis. The White House overruled them"
Blocking TCP port 445 on servers and clients where file sharing isn't necessary is a good idea anyway. Windows Firewall and Group Policy are sufficient to get that rolled out.

Unfortunately, Active Directory Domain Controllers must expose it to function properly, so hitting those machines with the workaround registry value is a good idea.
This is the most absurdly entitled thing I have read today.
Quantum job schedule on D-Wave's computer
Florida Virtual School employs thousands of teachers. And they've been operating for over twenty years. They're publicly funded, though.
I had a phone stolen a couple of weeks ago, and initially I was trying to buy a new phone outright (ended up filing a claim and having my new one overnighted, but lack of SMS access would have prevented me from doing my job, hence the urgency). None of the local Verizon stores had any phones (11 Pro Max) in stock (they explicitly said it was due to China supply chain), but Best Buy did.
I hope it doesn’t screw up our food supply too much. We get a surprising amount of crops from China and the rest of the world.
Greeze is probably orthodox not catholic. There is a difference, but I'm not sure what other than they don't report to the Pope, and they do recognize the pope (and vise versa)
I think he's talking to the serval mesh guy
E3 2020 Canceled
> It's more the argument of what's actually making you money or providing competitive edge

This would factor into the fair use analysis and the damages analysis, but not the analysis of whether or not the material was copyrightable in the first place.

PS. For what it's worth I agree with you that this isn't copyright infringement, I just think it's important to get the arguments for why it isn't copyright infringement right. The two arguments I like best are "the merger doctrine" (If there is only one way to write something, in this case a API that existing java libraries can use, then it isn't copyrightable) and "fair use" (Vaguely speaking an exception for copying we as a society don't mind, defined in the law here https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107).