skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> ... like ACID. shelve doesn't provide this, and IIUC nor does kdb+. So if you're handling 50 billion events a day, live, and you need these to persist, you'd use SQL or something similar. That would then ultimately determine how you add and manipulate records. …

ACID is overrated. You can get atomicity, consistency, isolation and durability easily with kdb as I'll illustrate. I appreciate you won't understand everything I am saying though, so I hope you'll be able to ask a few questions and get the gist.

First, I start write my program in g.q and start a logged process:

q g -L

This process receives every event in a function like this:

upd:{r[`u?y`url;y`metric]+:1}

There's my enumeration, saved in the variable "u". "r" is a keyed table where the keys are that enumeration, and the metric is whatever metric I'm tracking.

I checkpoint daily:

eod:{.Q.dd[p:.Q.dd[`:.;.z.d];`r] set r;.Q.dd[p;`u] set u;r::0#r;system"l"}

This creates a directory structure where I have one directory per date, e.g. 2020.03.11 which has a file (u or r) referring to the snapshots I took. I truncate my keyed table (since it's a new day), and then I tell q the logfile can be truncated and processing continues! To look at an (emptyish) tree right after a forced checkpoint:

total 24
drwxr-xr-x 4 geocar staff 128 11 Mar 16:59 2020.03.11
-rw-r--r-- 1 geocar staff 8 11 Mar 16:59 g.log
-rw-r--r-- 1 geocar staff 206 11 Mar 16:55 g.q
-rw-r--r-- 1 geocar staff 130 11 Mar 16:59 g.qdb

geocar@gcmba a % ls -l 2020.03.11
total 16
-rw-r--r-- 1 geocar staff 120 11 Mar 16:59 r
-rw-r--r-- 1 geocar staff 31 11 Mar 16:59 u

The g.q file is the source code we've been exploring, but the rest are binary files in q's "native format" (it's basically the same as in memory; that's why q can get this data with mmap).

If I've made a mistake and something crashes, I can edit g.q and restart it, the log replays, no data is lost. If I want to do some testing, I can copy g.log off the server, and load it into my local process running on my laptop. This can be really helpful!

I can kill the process, turn off the server, add more disks in it, turn it back on, and resume the process from the last checkpoint.

You can see some of these qualities are things only databases seem to have, and it's for that reason that kdb is marketed as a database. But that's just because management has a hard time thinking of SQL as a programming language (even though it's there in the name! I can't fault them, it is a pretty horrible language), and while nobody wants to write stored procedures in SQL, that's one way to think about how your entire application is built in q.

That's basically it. There's a little bit more code to load state from the checkpoint and set up the initial days' schema for r:

u:@[get;.Q.dd[.Q.dd[`:.;last key `:.];`u];{0#`}];
r:([url:`u$()]; req:0#0; imp:0#0; clk:0#0; vt:0#0);

but there's no material difference between "temporary calculations" or ones that will later become permanent: All of my input was in the event log, I just have to decide how to process it.
good comparison with the city v.s. house burning!
Ask HN: Podcast/newsletter on cybersecurity for an average programmer?
Hi folks,

I'm an software developer who's been inactive for a few years. I do web development, but I'm a user when it comes to security and crytography tech. Years back, I used to listen to the Security Now! podcast to try to stay abreast of the best practices for security in my personal and professional life, but it was too long and often adapted to people who don't know how computers work.

I follow HN somewhat via Hacker New Daily. Is there anything similar with regards to security / crytography news?
https://twitter.com/univofdayton/status/1237517695081279488

> UD housing will close at 6 pm March 11. If you are approved for an extended stay or housing over spring break, you are permitted to stay. Students should take any items necessary to continue their education from home as well as other essential items in case time away is extended.

How are they so sure that students have any other home?
100%. Would you, personally, rather still be plowing with livestock?
You know Democrats (media and Schumer's tweet) immediately accused Trump of sinophobia when he (appropriately) shut down travel with China?

This is really not the time for petty partisan politics. Both parties are propaganda machines. It is the nature of the two party system.
Congrats!
Any plans to add support for more languages?
Few weeks or even months of lost school - especially at an early age - is something that can be compensated for somewhat easily. Schools are very inefficient at teaching. You'll help her a bit, ensure she does some focused learning, and she'll be fine.
> Now people in Lombardy are dying from strokes because hospitals can't admit them

Now wait a minute. If you have a source on that, please do provide it. Because I am from Italy and I have never heard of such things. (There were cases of people who died from a stroke and tested positive to COVID-19, but that's all I know)
It also doesn't help that Trump is still keeping up his cult rallies and still has one scheduled next week.

The current White House is essentially the worst case scenario in dealing with this outbreak and is going to get people killed. There is still current exponential growth in the USA, and there is near zero testing going on due to incompetence and coverup. Things are going to get much worse.

Downvote all you want, but these are facts.
It's not that simple to just close schools, especially for long periods of time.

Who is supposed to watch these kids if the parents can't stay home with them?

What about the thousands of low income kids that rely on school for most of their meals?

I'm sure these are solvable problems, but I think there are good reasons that it's taking longer than most people want.
Chinese Company Donates Tens of Thousands of Masks to Coronavirus-Striken Italy
> No, only if there has been some copying of substantial portions of copyrighted works.

The only 'substantial portions' at stake in this lawsuit are the API declaration itself, which merely tells the system where to find the right code and does not implement any logic.

It is absolutely required to copy that and other APIs in order to be compatible, which is why I'm really worried about a lot of judges who have minimal, if any, understanding of the ramifications of this deciding it.

Alsup actually understood the issues, but he got overruled by clueless judges.
Yeah, people don't eat bushmeat and from the garbage can because they choose to - they have (or feel they have) no other choice.
I have many ideas for blog posts but i cannot execute them myself.

I am solo founder and i am not great at writing English technical docs. Well i havent write a technical blog post in Greek either, so i am not sure if English is the only reason i havent written a single blog post.

Should i find a buddy for this? Proofreading? But could he provide the quality i want?

I think i will implement an excellent blog platform in Jekyll and github pages. Maybe mak it open source, this is the closest i can get to blogging.
> How should we be preparing for that?

Step 1: Chill.

We home-schooled from preschool through high-school. Today I am trying to figure out how to help (from the opposite coast) my MIT senior deal with getting kicked out of their dorm in a few days. Home-schooling can work just fine. Chill.

1. Remember that of things that can be measured, the thing most highly correlated with academic success is parental involvement. So no matter how wonky your pedagogy, you will be involved. Hopefully that factoid helps you chill.

2. My first piece of advice to all new home-schooling parents is: Don't try to do everything at once. Get one subject working well, when you have established momentum and routine on that, add another. Cook until done.

3. There are many great online resources now. But I suspect your school is going to be providing curriculum information so you may have a usable starter kit.

4. As to the "self-learner" issues, all that does is help you find your happy place on the home schooling spectrum. At one end you have "school at home" -- trying to replicate the school environment in your dining room. There is also "unschooling" -- completely self-directed learning. This may not work for you. This may be a good chance to help your child develop some self-learning instincts.

(unschooling in my definition is: "You can work on what you want, but you MUST work on something." Which is NOT what I call "raised by wolves" -- a home schooling philosophy that I have seen occasionally, but doesn't often yield a good result.)
I honestly see no reason for events that far out to cancel today. It does seem likely that they will have to do so eventually but they don't have to commit to that until the end of the month.
That's true that the, er, "partisan mortality" difference is likely to be negligible. Bodies are bodies.

There absolutely does seem to be a difference between the partisan cohorts in preparation quality and infection likelihood though. Republicans have been told by their leaders and their media for weeks (Trump was still doing this as of yesterday) that this is no big deal, it's just like the flu, they don't need to do anything. Where democrats have been cancelling travel and buying toilet paper, republicans didn't even believe the crisis was real until the market crashed.

We'll see. But I bet before the smoke clears, we'll find there's good science showing a real partisan correlation with COVID-19 impact.
Also, there might be non-technical founders or you might not be able to test a freelancers even if you are technical, but they have skills that are out of your expertise
I don't know anything about the likelihood of the bat origin theory, but it wouldn't have to pass through the gut. It could pass from mucous, saliva, or other secretion, or internal fluids/tissues. If it got on a surface at any point during processing, either the people handling the animal or someone else could transfer it to their own noise/eyes/mouth just by accident.
> They -are- essentially tech illiterate once they step outside of google sheets, etc, or the web browser in general.

25 years ago there were people who were essentially tech illiterate as soon as they were put in front of a computer, not just when they stepped outside of Google sheets or the web browser in general.

You think having grown up with computers, in a world where technology is easily-available and part of pop culture means nothing, but it has been years since I've last had to explain a grown-up that some computers are faster than others, that something which is available on paper can be made easily made available on a computer (scanning, photography etc.), what a server is, or that a website can become unavailable if too many people access it.

It used to be that writing for a non-technical audience entailed unthinkable effort for seemingly trivial things. Not just explaining technical terms. We had lists of words we had to be especially careful with because they also had non-technical meanings, and if someone wasn't aware of that, they could get the wrong idea. That list included words like "server", "mouse" and "window", and I've personally seen grown-up people standing behind imposing desks who got really confused upon hearing these words without the proper context.

Eight year-olds who just learned how to read and write can pick up a word processor with way less effort than eight year-olds (and non-technical fifty year-olds) could twenty years ago. They understand, for example, how scrolling works. Teaching people how to use a word processor used to entail explaining things such as "you can keep typing once you're at the end of the page". You needed to say that explicitly because the interface didn't seem to have any way for you to get another sheet of paper once you filled one up. People would write things on a page until they got near the bottom, then proceeded to stare quizzically at the screen wondering how they could get another one -- because that's exactly what they did in real life.

I'm not saying that people who grew up with computers don't need to be told what TCP is and what a load balancer does. But they do have an intuitive understanding of things that a non-technical audience from twenty years ago didn't have. Including super basic things that you take for granted now, but it used to be that you couldn't -- that things from the Internet don't show up on your computer instantly, that how quickly they do depends on the quality of a connection, that computers need to be given explicit instructions each time (i.e. they'll always ask if you want to save your work before quitting -- they'll never figure out that you always say yes).
Very Neat! Gonna explore this to my heart's content. Huge fan of your personal website - all those writeups, thoughts on hypertext, decentralization and that dadaesque/surrealist aesthetic dripping everywhere. Discovered you when you listed my blog in one of your listicles. Good luck!
The next question is, will they. I know of a town in Indiana where a surprising number of people don't get medical help. Some of it is money, but a big part is cultural. Indianapolis scares them. I dare say, for too many Indianapolis is scarier than COVID-19.
I share an office with a travel agent, and I can tell you a lot of people with "cancel for any reason" travel insurance are getting screwed by force majeure clauses. Unsurprisingly, insurance companies have no interest in paying out policies that threaten the existence of their company.
MIT (and I imagine other schools) say that if you can't leave (specifically calling out as examples visa issues, not having another home, or having a home where you could not safely go) that you don't have to move out. Not sure why this school would not make the same allowance.
What country are you in? Both the media and government in my country (US) have been sending the exact opposite message of "just the flu". As with anywhere, there are a few local outlets and politicians trying to downplay it, likely for economic reasons, but I haven't seen it downplayed on the Federal level at all. In fact, there's been an overabundance of information and caution.
I mean... that's what circuit breakers are for. If a component of a service is optional to its operation, then it wraps calls to that service in a circuit-breaker and fails requests that ask for that service. And if a component of a service is not optional to the operation of a service, then the failure should cascade to the service's dependent clients, and their dependent clients, and so on, so that there's backpressure all the way back to the origin of the request.
And Bernie is 78. There should really be age limits for government, especially given how much we now know about cognitive decline.
There's a lot more going on here than just implementing an interface. If Google had just used OpenJDK, there wouldn't have been a problem. I fail to see how what they were doing is any different from what Microsoft tried to pull with Visual J++.
You're probably right. But don't forget that people are ultimately stronger than the platforms. Where is Snapchat now that TikTok arrived?
Sometimes the meaning can be different between the literal or regulatory defined meaning and what people assume or expect.

The USDA's minimum for "free range" labeling for example for non-certified organic foods can be met with a standard chicken coop with a door and a few feet of screened in porch the chickens may or may not ever actually use. "No Hormones" on the other hand has the technical definition and the layman definition aligned, but is federally mandated anyway making it a meaningless feature.

https://www.thebalancesmb.com/what-does-free-range-really-me...
> I thought that the bat soup origin was debunked

Bat soup was used as an example. It would help the discussion if we stop taking everything in the most literal way possible.
As an organizer of a very small event coming up in mid April, I'm terrified of the flu ransacking our group and killing some of our members many of whom are straight up sick and elderly. We're giving guidance to stay home if they're at risk, but I know if we have the show they'll be there.

If we cancel the show it'll be devastating in other ways, and our group is overall conservative and fiercely advocates personal responsibility. Needless to say, if we cancel it will possibly implode the group or cause similar clubs to take over a 30 year tradition.

What do I do?
Trump's opposition to telework tested by coronavirus
This are great news for many insurance companies because if you get sick the won't need to cover your expenses. Stay safe!
Autonomous Vehicles Should Start Small, Go Slow
I'm in a similar boat as you.

Most school districts may start doing things like video instruction or give parents a curriculum to work on, I'm not worried about that aspect. It may become an entirely remote education for the rest of this school year across the world.

I'm considering taking leave of absence and teaching him the curriculum. The problem is I'm not a good teacher, I know this about myself.

It's impossible to WFH and take care of a child. So your productivity will suffer, hopefully your company understands this, but then again everyone will be in the same boat once the school districts start closing things down.
How do you know that? I'd be more willing to bet that Americans have been mostly complacent as they haven't dealt with any meaningful threat since 9/11. Most of them don't prepare like they should anyway, even when Obama told them to do so.

If there's any racism going on, it's with the people who fear Asians because they think they're all contaminated with COVID-19.

> They had 3 months to prepare and, still, they believe that to fight the virus is just enough to wash hands and stay a few feet away from their coworkers, just as with a normal seasonal flu. That's ridiculous.

That's what they've been told to do by government officials and journalists.
Not true. There are growth limiting factors in infectious disease models, e.g., herd immunity.
I'm in university right now and our housing contract has a clause stating:

"The University reserves the right to repossess student rooms and residence hall facilities in the event of an epidemic or other emergency as defined by the University."

Happy I live off campus.
Sussman and Steele were quite surprised too! From the original Scheme paper:

"This work developed out of an initial attempt to understand the actorness of actors... we discovered that the 'actors' and the lambda expressions were identical in implementation."

https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/5794/AIM-349....
How do you find out if your insurance has a pandemic clause?
> their alt-right propaganda channels

Sure, those classic alt-right propaganda outlets like the Today show.
that is true. what is also true is that nature abhors a naked exponential nearly as much as she abhors a naked singularity.

it's nearly always a sigmoid in disguise.

What we are trying our damndest to control is the carrying capacity.
Depends on the disease.

Something like a stroke requires immediate action (say, within 2 hours) to be able to use the best treatments available. Living very far away from a good hospital makes your survival chances quite lower.

For Covid-19, as far as I read, some people have gone to the hospital (already having trouble to breath) and died after a few hours. But those seem extreme cases. Normally you would have a couple days to go to the hospital from the moment you realize something is odd.
I suppose that depends on your local feeds; if you are in NA you probably have a hard time getting correct information/governance/leadership at this time. (hence your question) It used to be 'good enough' or even 'fine' over there, i.e. with HIV or malaria issues or even H1N1.

But even with the research on pandemic readiness showing that neither capacity nor governance has been up to the task people are still pretending it's just a political choice and the results will be fine. If I remember correctly it as CSIS thing: https://healthsecurity.csis.org/final-report/
These are variants sequenced from individuals. There so far is very little diversity in these sequences. The branch lengths are very short. There is isn't anything yet to describe any qualitative difference.
The New Donkey Kong 64 Any% TAS Explained [video]
Looks like stock's back on menu boys!
yes. If your radio doesn't have GPS the phone will provide GPS updates to the radio. Everything is treated identially (though there will be a bit higher battery consumption on both the phone and the radio)
Finally - vigorous, coordinated action. That's exactly what's needed right now and I'm glad to see countries stepping up to the challenge.
It's worth noting that the US test situation is still going to be held up for a while due to a shortage of lab chemicals: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/10/coronavirus-testing...
As an Asian American... no, I don’t think racism played into this at all. Would have been exactly the same if it started in London.
The landing page was, in fact, Bootstrap! https://web.archive.org/web/20130613201137/http://www.algoli...
Everyone on board the ship was actually paid a share of the profits. But yes, there were disproportionate rewards to those at the top, just like in a modern startup.
Yes! So yes. But also no.

When Microsoft released Windows Phone 7, it really got people excited. It was a shot across Skeuomorph UI's bow. Big fonts, dark mode by default, flat and chromeless to an almost fault. It was a serious departure from the Windows Mobile days. People were (more) comfortable with it not being backward compatible. Plus WM had turned into a mess of scaling problems, 3rd party skins, over the top launchers, and apps that weren't necessary cross device compatible.

But then they did it again, Windows Phone 8 was not coming to any Windows Phone 7 devices. Even though MS originally said it would. Instead, all the WP7 phones got some 7.x feature update. Everyone showing off their shining new Nokias were burned during the honeymoon and that cooled interest. Especially when compared to Apple's sterling record.

And then, they did it again, sorta. Many of the Windows phone 8 devices were not going to get updates to Windows 10 Mobile. Worse yet, Microsoft walked the striking UI way back. Except for the launcher, things starter looking rather conventional.

There was no coming back from that. 41MP and real OIS, Zeiss optics and xenon flash. Things that were basically unheard of until 2019 (rip xenon) were not going recollect all that lost good will.
What’s next lawyers and attorneys refuse to represent people of poor moral standing or worse are known felons?

WTF are we coming to?