skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Quickest way to acquire a US passport for children?
I would like to acquire US passports for my children. They are both toddlers. What is the quickest way to do this?

I'm willing to pay a 3rd party to streamline the process. My main priority is speed of acquisition.

My partner and I already hold US passports and are US citizens. Our children are also US citizens.
*talking more
VCs love this virus!
Everyone understands it's insane, but the people with the power to change it have fantastic employer-provided health care, so why would they change things?

In all seriousness, if tax laws were changed to eliminate the employer advantage, things would change. But until then...
Linking to the mpv commit[0] message brought up in the last discussion[1]. It’s absolutely hilarious, and a great example of someone rage typing after dealing with an issue.

[0] https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/commit/1e70e82baa9193f6f02...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21290517
Show HN: Covid-19 Simulation
Tech isn't always a cost center, though. Whether it is depends a lot on what part of the industry you're talking about.
I did NOT downvote you, your comments are 100% legitimate and reasonable. But this is HN where there is some politically correct cabal of the "right" answer, which is that enlightened California is perfect and guys like you that question anything about it, even the homeless shitting on the streets, is an Enemy of the People.

OBVIOUSLY people with covid-19 infections and who are quarantined should be eligible for disability benefits. This is totally clear and should be rolled out nationally.

As you point out, despite this, these trumpeted and celebrated disability "benefits" aren't enough to avoid quick homelessness.
I’m by no stretch of the imagination a modern web developer. I know plain JS well, HTML and enough CSS/Bootstrap to throw together an internal website.

Even then most of my experience is with server side rendering.

However, for any large project, I would much rather be forced into using a modern framework than not. Any web app that is large enough is going to have some type of bespoke framework that was created by the “architect” who has been there forever.

It’s just like dealing with a bespoke ORM, logging, or authentication/authorization framework.
A perceived sense of entitlement, perhaps? Do people have the right to maintain their lifestyles during tragedy at the expense of their fellow taxpayers? In some cases, maybe, but it also doesn't hurt to prepare so one can weather a crisis without being too reliant on others.
I saw Alan Kay speak once, I think at lambda jam 2013. He made a comment that he’s still waiting for mainstream CPUs to allow us to fit an entire interpreter into on-core cache.
Sure. In the absolute worst case, WFH is better. That doesn't really tell us anything.

The average commute is 26.9 minutes, and that is heavily skewed by metropolitan areas. Some data here[1].

Now let's consider the worst case WFH scenario: you're paid less, promotions are less frequent, there is less comradery among your team, you feel lonely because you spent your whole workday alone. You get the point.

Obviously, the best case scenario is to allow workers to decide what they want to do. Picking the form of work that fits your personality, your career, your home life, your values, etc and then trying to force that on 300+ million people is absurd. The good news is that a substantial amount of people do get to choose[2].

[1] https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/interactive/wo...

[2] https://news.gallup.com/businessjournal/206033/america-comin...
https://cdn.factcheck.org/UploadedFiles/cdc-budget.jpg
I really hope we see a dramatic drop in emissions, and lobbying groups, unions, or just employees in general can point to that as a real benefit of being more permissive with WFH.

If this really improved emissions in Salt Lake City for example, I could see this pushing WFH from a being a luxury to being encouraged. Everyone hates the poor air quality here, including decisions makers at companies. Maybe this will give them a reason to back WFH to some extent.
This site has its own version of Godwin's law in which as any submission gathers more comments, the odds go up that someone will draw a contrived link to remote work.

I definitely like going to an office more than I like sitting home or at a coffee shop all day. It's important social ambience that I can participate in as much or as little as I want on a given day. And I'm not in the minority, though it can seem so when tolerance for going to a regular job is more implicitly assumed than something that needs to be posted about regularly.
Not sure how to feel about being author of the most upvoted and also the least upvoted comment.
It takes practice like anything else, but one trick I found is to pick something that you definitely won't ever want to make money or a career from.

Maybe you have absolutely no desire to be a painter or artist. Pick up a pencil and just doodle for 30 minutes. Get some cheap paint and a small canvas on your way home from work and just spend an hour going for it.

Maybe you've always wanted to try fencing. Find a place and take a couple classes just to see what it's like.

I'm also like that, anything I start as a side project almost immediately becomes "if I don't change the world with this, why am I wasting my time?" So I had to start doing things that I know will never amount to anything, and specifically tell myself "This will never matter." When you can accept that you're spending a little time on something that's just for its own sake, then you've done it - you're experiencing an honest-to-goodness leisure activity.
1918 has some good lesssons about controlling viral spread, but there are some key differences with COVID19.

1918 hit 20 year olds the worst while this virus targets the elderly. The biggest issue now is the need for ICU care to survive. We know mortality rates but that implies care, otherwise it turns into Wuhan. Only 90,000 ICU beds in the whole U.S. and this is the situation happening in Italy right now.

So since the virus is more or less endemic, spreading infections over time is the best way to save lives. Washing hands and canceling all big group events at least until summer are the teo obvious moves.
1. To give epidemiologists and public health officials a better picture of how widespread the virus is.
2. To make it more likely that infected persons isolate themselves to avoid spreading the virus further.
By that point you should be well beyond just messing around with c.
Polar molecules love them some encapsulation lipids on one side and water on the other. Then, IIRC, doesn't either water attack the naked virus or the virus becomes unprotected? I'm probably totally wrong.

EtOH hand sanitizer up to 70% strips away lipids too and the water content has a synergistic effect. It'd be nice to know how that works. (Seems like a good video project for Destin at SED.)
> Readers: what is your take on it and why?

All the bad stuff that people on both sides of this argument predict is going to happen somewhere in some code base, precisely because people on both sides can't agree and think the world would be better if everyone agreed on those people's personal aesthetic ideals.

So... don't sweat it. Conform to whatever code base you're working on has decided, and if it's inconsistent work to make it so.

And above all, no matter what else: Don't start dumb fights over this nonsense. Yeesh.
This was the first non-sql datastorage I used for online services; a lifetime ago. Glad to see that it is still maintained.
A cap of $1,300 a week means more than just a lifestyle cut in some areas of California.
Do you think that van der Linden's Expert C Programming is still worthwhile?

There's also the comp.lang.c FAQ http://c-faq.com/ , which is also very old now but still seems like a no-brainer to me.
Ask HN: How do viruses transfer across fomite surfaces?
Lately I've been hyper aware of my own body and how EASY it is to contaminate your house even if you're being extremely cautious.

As a contrived example... you very carefully sterilize a doorknob and your phone, after walking the dog. But you hang the dog leash with your hand which dragged against the ground which touched someone's viral-feces covered shoes. Now you put your hand in your pocket. You realize you touched a dirty dog leash, so you wash your hands again, but it's futile because now your pocket is contaminated.

It's this never-ending game of wack-a-mole.

Now... I dont believe that's actually how a virus transfers from surface to surface.

The current mental model I hold is more like a video game... that if ANY part of the surface touches any other surface, even for 1 millisecond, both are 100% contaminated at a 100% transfer rate.

In reality, I want to understand more HOW (exactly) viruses transfer between surfaces (say, the ground... sand... a piece of cloth like a sock... etc).

Is it more like if you covered your hands in flour, and you touch 2 surfaces, and get 20% of the flour on the first surface, and then 20% of that 20% where on the second surface (an exponential decrease)?

How does it vary between pourous/non-porous or organic/non-organic surfaces?

Does contact time affect it? How about materials.

I found this study but I don't know how to understand it, I don't read medical journals often. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3531458/

Thanks!
Covid-19 infection is not a lifestyle "entitlement" contrary to your claim. It's obviously a disability that prevents you from being able to work and absolutely people who get it should receive the disability INSURANCE payments they were forced to pay in to for years. How is an insurance claim on an insurance policy one has been forced to pay for an "entitlement" anyway, in your opinion? Care to explain that one?
What are the economic knock-on effects of a price war in oil?
Due to things like dynamic logic and PLLs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-locked_loop ), modern CPUs can't clock down into the tens of MHz range or lower. There's also the issue of things like DRAM refresh.
"Markup? Who uses markup?

Not many people any more, Markdown being a small exception. Although you can also count Latex with its macros as a kind of markup."

yeah there's this weird old thing called Hyper Text Markup Language that I hear isn't used for anything anymore.
Compared to the library version:

import numpy as np
np.linalg.inv([[1,2],[3,4]])

and this does handle the case where the determinant is 0 (by throwing an error about it being a singular matrix).
Maybe I'm missing something, a quick websearch leads to results https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/passports/get-fas...
Insurance companies are free to not cover an FDA approved product. CVS publishes a list every year, although they tend to either be the branded drug when a generic is available or a drug where there are as effective, but cheaper products are available.

It’s a cost versus benefit analysis and no different than what you see in single payer systems.

I will say from experience that oncology is one therapeutic area where payers wield much less control. Insurers don't like bad press and denying cancer drugs is a great way to end up in the NY Times. That said, if a drug is regarded as "experimental" (either the FDA hasn't approved it for that type of cancer OR there is limited data to suggest it works) they will say "no".

https://www.caremark.com/portal/asset/Formulary_Exclusion_Dr...
Also, some flexibility to WFH is nice.

A friend and I are starting to do "workcations" several times per year (he typically works in office, I work 100% remotely).

We go somewhere, work our during the day then go do something in the evenings - typically skiing or mountain biking. It's an amazing setup. We both typically get more done at work, because we're focused and wanting to get to our evening activity. 4 hours of skiing or biking in the evening is more than enough (especially when we do it 8 days straight).

That is one perk, I will never give up. Working on a 100% remote team has made me care about vacation days much less. Instead of taking a 3 to 4 day trip somewhere, I'll simply take a full week and work during the day (possibly still taking some time off.)
Single point of failure. What if your machine needs reboot to apply kernel patches. What if your network connection breaks.

Additionally, new crazy things are emerging like service mesh (Istio, Linkerd) which make observability and security easier.

Of course, it all is getting quite complex. But it brings value in the end.
The former already happened. In this case it was the latter. this would have ruined wine right when stream was beginning to make running games with wine easy.
Sigh. It's not exponential growth, it's best modeled by a differential equation. Like population, the rate of growth is proportional to the amount present up to the current carrying capacity (that varies widely in the real world and with time).
"Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made president, should on no account be allowed to do the job."
I viewed it in portrait on my phone and was surprised how usable it was. The default display mode isn’t great, but there’s tabs/nav at the bottom to let you see the component canvas or demo and then switch back to the component list.
I agree.

What I hope will happen with this is that companies become a lot more flexible and encourage people who want to to regularly work a few days a week remotely.

For my employees, a lot of them do get more heads-down work done at home. It makes sense for them to work from home when they need intense focus. They also usually do better collaborative work in the office.

I also have employees who really like working remotely and others who really don't like working. I wouldn't want to force people who don't like working remotely to do so.

Some people at my work can walk to work, and coming into the office is an opportunity to interact with other driven people to build great stuff. We shoot the shit, get coffee together, and in general enjoy each other's company. For a lot of employees, coming into the office is something they enjoy.
There's a weird subset of HN that think people should still be building desktop apps. It's like they haven't paid any attention to the software market for the last 10 years.
I think as the number of branches grows, people will just start to drown in the huge list of unmerged branches and will start to work as if only trunk/master exists.

With a text file that summarizes all the project's main line of history in a structured, linear way, it's very simple to extract just what you're interested in or find all the entries for a particular thread of research across history, quickly.

I don't think the tooling around git branches really enables that kind of operation in a quick, easy way, partly due to the inherent nature of branches.

I'd be interested to see what your hypothetical workflow turns out like in practice, though. It's certainly possible I'm just not seeing the potential.
Submitted title was "Cities with early interventions to 1918 flu had ~50% lower peak death rates". We've reverted it now.

The site guidelines say: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Yeh.. the scissors paper rock 100% winning rate.. robot is cheating.. every time its waiting till human has made a choice, easy to see in slow mo

Alternative is bunny carrot gun..
An ultra-simplified example of a modern compiler written in JavaScript
Perhaps not "maintain their lifestyles," but certainly to be able to afford to live and have basic necessities. There are many workers who, faced with being quarantined for weeks or days, or going to work to earn money to live, would choose the latter, at everyone else's expense. What do "the taxpayers" think of that?
What I normally do when the rear tire is worn, is get a new tire, mount it on the front and move the original front tire to the rear. Even after 3000 miles of riding, my front tire doesn't show much wear at all. The rear tire, on the other hand, will have virtually no tread left.
Boeing proposal to avoid 737-MAX wiring shift does not win U.S. support
Show HN: Track your events and add analytics easily to your service or app
This is absolutely critical. Giving the workforce reasonably attainable healthcare decoupled from employer would increase job mobility significantly. This is a win for labor and a loss for capital owners.

I would be far more willing to risk assets I had if I knew I'd still have basic necessities in life. You know, the luxuries the very wealthy have...
Sure, but we're talking about F150 type trucks here. Most people in cities have those for completely personal reasons and not for "economic activity."
Outlook 2010 is fantastic
Thanks for saying this. I’m in this camp too.

... but I think the majority are in the “I just need shit to work and develop fast” camp, and don’t care if it’s not optimal, so they can finish their current project and move on.
I agree that this will probably make WFH seem like an option that works for more companies, more people, and more jobs.

I also think it might show us that we don't need to keep road building. Instead, we should incentivize companies to do more WFH. If companies that currently require people to be in the office daily allow workers to even work 1-2 days a week from home, that will greatly reduce rush-hour road congestion.

The governor of Maryland, for instance, is trying to widen the Beltway and I-270. Both roads are mostly heavy traffic during rush hour. I-270, in particular, is relatively light outside of rush hour in one direction. Simply lessoning rush hour demand for these roads would greatly reduce congestion.

WFH is a much cheaper and environmentally friendly option. It can also be implemented immediately.
Being in charge of what paper products are purchased is a strong perk as well. Ditto the coffee beans, afternoon tea & Pens stocked by the office manager (me)
Somewhat refreshingly, this is apparently not using any framework or libraries. Would have been madness a decade or two ago, but now it seems to work well for a small project like this, the source is pretty readable (though the single js file is a bit on the large side): https://github.com/adewes/epidemic

Also, I have no idea what the numbers on the X axis represent for the first few graphs. It seems like it should be "days", but the numbers are all over the place.
I'd like to see the data on carbon footprint reductions associated with WFH. Also traffic related deaths would imaginably be reduced.
It's corrupt as soon as politics enters in the least. Since the idea of permanently disfiguring someone is all about how we want other people to mistreat them for the rest of their lives, this horrific branding idea is all politics. If anything it's a slur against the admittedly noble idea of humans banding together with their neighbors to commit violence in the common defense. That violence is done quietly, in secret, or else it is a lynch mob, which is very political.
There...was a screenshot, though? What exactly were you expecting?
Hmm... It looks like for smaller machine types the packet bare metal machines are quite a bit more expensive than the equivalent cloud provider VMs, but as you move to larger machine types Packet's pricing doesn't continue to grow linearly (making them more competitive).

Also, I would need to do some further research to understand how to fairly compare the physical CPU cores on the bare metal systems w/ the vCPUs offered across the major cloud VMs.
Its all about how fast the memory is.

960MiB is prodigiously large for such a microscopic chip, but if it "only" gain 3-5 times latency reduction over external DRAM, it's still very far from a proper L3 implementation, and far behind L2.

Make DRAM work on 1Ghz+, and then you will see miracles. Imagine a fully synchronous on-die DRAM that can sit just behind L1, or even be connected to load registers directly.

The problem is that effective frequencies for memory round-trip haven't got up much since nineties. If you work with 100% cache misses, your mem will still be working at effective frequency of around 100 to 200Mhz
This is the best opportunity individuals have had to push back against fracking in years. I’ll be doing more than I have been to conserve gas after the Corona WFH ends. I’d love to see a concerted national effort along these lines.

Hopefully the price crash will last long enough to bankrupt the shale industry.
I wonder if am in a third camp.

I like to implement everything from scratch (compilers, TCP/IP/arp/rarp stack, databases). But I like to use recommended libraries, not my own code. By implementing everything myself, I have a ready list of questions about how certain problems were handled, and a firmer understanding of where to look when the software misbehaves.
Ha! Given the huge and varied responses to your simple question, I’m stealing it for interviews!
I went back and added in Digital Ocean per the parent comment's request!

The article and Jupyter Notebook now reflect that change.
People can do both. Our last startup had a small permanent HQ, flexible WFH, and a Regus subscription.

All of our employees loved being able to WRF or get an office wherever they needed, especially sales who could meet in a local space close to their meetings for that day.
Can't they just pump up house prices and the FIRE economy even more?
Typical resource curse. Corruption to the max (African countries with diamonds, every non-western country with oil).

Venezuela also nationalised their oil industry with Chavez but they were already in a very weak spot and of course not a nuclear power (or close to being one). Oil price dropping was the huff&puff that brought the house down.
I suspect that at some point the risks from economic harms will outweigh health concerns. I'm not sure exactly what that will mean but I don't think we can assume the world and its controlling elites will sit by as we roll back to the stone age, regardless of the health outcome.
Every time I npm install my projects and get the "you have 10 new critical vulnerabilities!" message it makes me a little more cautious about relying on third party code.

I think there's a balance between rolling your own and using a lib, and it boils down to the domain of the problem being solved. If you're really just flipping a 2x2 matrix, the linear algebra lib will have way too much junk you don't need, and learning to use it would be more work than just solving a math problem. On the other hand, if you need a lot of common functionality (like multitouch events on the frontend), then why reinvent the wheel when there are a handful of great libraries for it.
Why not just find people you like on it first and then use it? Joining a social network you know nobody on seems weird.

Also, the Public Timeline is your local instance's. My local instance has no users that speak different languages than I do, so the timeline is without content I don't understand.

The Whole Known Network goes way too fast to be of use, but it too is mostly filled with English speakers (albeit mostly non-desirable sorts).
Indeed. $1300/week (gross), annualized, is $67.6k. Try living on that in the Bay Area.
You sure about that? An overburdened health care system will cause people to die that otherwise would not have. A patient, for example, who needs a ventilator for some condition other than COVID-19, but can’t get one. These are not reflected in the area under the curve.
> Says who?

Everyone who isn't only on the web to try to make money. That's who. But all you for-profit types are runining it. As the browser becomes more powerful it is more important to secure it. As security becomes more important features are removed and the browser begins telling the user what they can and cannot do. And on the webmaster side it becomes infeasible for browsers to display your site or search engines to index it unless you depend upon the leased whim of third parties to get your centralized authority signed SSL cert.