skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The author either treats it as inevitable that legitimate human biodiversity research will lead to heavy-handed eugenic policy, or pretends to do so for cheap rhetorical scoring. Try re-reading her argument without taking this causation for granted, and you'll see it doesn't hold up; she is blaming scientists -- and even claiming their science to be debunked -- for on political consequences that she is speculating their research will have.
This is so wrong. The ratio between exp(x+ϵ) and exp(x) for even ϵ arbitrarily close to zero is infinity in the limit of large x. There is nothing like it with any polynomial growth for any exponent. The ratio between (x+ϵ)^p and x^p for arbitrarily large p is 1 in the limit of large x, for any ϵ.

Another sign that people don't get exponential growth, even if they think they do.
We are currently not doing any pre-rendering, but it's on the roadmap to enable pre-rendering on a route-by-route basis. Even so, Redwood is still JAMstack because it's JavaScript, APIs, and Markup; it's just that we're delivering the entire client via JavaScript, and the API is our entire backend. Our goal is to let you build a full-stack web app but still deploy in the JAMstack style. We're pushing the boundaries of JAMstack intentionally!
Many production and logistics workplaces can probably implement distancing policies. Care, not so much...
Linux might be where many people's minds go by default in this comparison, but it's not the example I meant to conjure here.

I'm talking more about, for example, the FOSS communities around game-console homebrew tooling, where any given project is usually an outgrowth of some private Discord somewhere—some pre-existing group of friends—and so everyone on the project calls one-another names in the [public] GitHub issues; often actively trolls one-another with counter-productive PRs or issue-filings; sometimes creates new projects from scratch to replace/obsolete someone else's project just because A disagrees with B about some minor non-software-related thing, e.g. taste in music, and so "can't respect them or their software"; etc.

These people are clearly playing around as they make this software—and often producing the software rather sub-optimally in the process—but the goal of most of these project communities is clearly to have fun with the process of making software, not to end up with useful software.

And now, back to the question: are these projects, and their processes, to be considered societally acceptable? Or are they "canceled?" Would adding a Code-of-Conduct stating clearly what they're doing in the project even help? (IMHO it doesn't seem like it'd make much of a difference; it's not like these projects get outside contribution anyways.)
There may not be a "be nice" rule in life, but there are such rules in communities. Especially in professional civilized ones.
cough Media Lab.
I think there's a limit to how well thought out you can expect the response to a global pandemic that's emerged in just a couple of months to be. Sorry it isn't perfect?
The question is whether or not you are willing to take that chance. The people responsible decided - rightly, in my opinion - that they do not want that responsibility.

Risk = impact times likelihood.
Looks like you have already written a lot of low-level code for your device already (https://github.com/meshtastic/Meshtastic-esp32) but have y'all considered taking a look at the Nerves project (https://nerves-project.org)?

You might uncover some really cool stuff in the Erlang/Elixir ecosystem for doing mesh communications.
Being based in Europe, Germany specifically, it seems like the reaction to this situation is much more intense in the US than in Europe. I haven’t heard of any employers going full WFH or universities closing outside of Italy.

And theories why the reaction in the US is or seems to be more intense?
This reads like it was written by someone on a coke binge.
List of OECD countries by hospital beds
If I have no way to evaluate what is objective, than how do I know that I'm closer to objectivity? At the point that we conclude "there isn't a single objective thing in the whole universe" we have no reason to believe that the appearance of getting closer to objectivity actually correlates with getting closer to objectivity. It's entirely possible that "objective" or a global optimum solution is extremely "close" to a solution which appears to be extremely suboptimal. Science finding what appears to be good local solutions using rationality is the same as finding "lottery tickets" in a state space for a problem.

This is why global optimization methods like Simulated Annealing or Genetic Algorithms rely so heavily in efficient exploration of a state space, and why they can easily solve adversarial reinforcement learning problems that backprop techniques (get "global solution" by moving closer to locally better solutions) fail at (the cart hill climbing problem being the classic one)

I'm willing to believe that there are local "solutions" which appear to get better solutions to a problem than random, but I have no reason to believe that my solutions which appear better correspond to actually better solutions (I may have failed at evaluating the correct measure of "good") , or even that by moving towards the appearance of a better solution that it gets me closer to the global solution (which is why backprop fails on cart hill climbing)

tl;dr the post modernists are right on this one and science needs to immediately dispel it's platonic rationalist roots because it's basically just applying backprop (Plato would call it the "dialectic") to a philosophical problem and hoping that human thoughts gets us closer to truth because it appears rational to us. Yeah, actually, you should put the astrik on all science that says "may not actually correspond to truth because we don't know what truth is"
The #1 tip for the depressed learnt the hard way: talk to the doctor.

Please. Don't delay. Your brain is playing tricks to you. But it has bad sense of humor. One of the tricks may become the last trick in your life.

Please.
That's because COVID-19 looks like a JIRA ticket, and people shudder a bit when they type it out.
Thanks for your work. I watched a few presentations this week and read quite a bit. It looks very promising, and I'd be happy to start migrating my components to Svelte step by step. I'm a Rails dev, and there's a Rails integration through webpacker already. What I'm waiting for is TypeScript support. Once that's officially released, you can count one covert more :).
https://xkcd.com/2275/
While this looks great I'm having trouble fitting it to any of the projects I'm already working on.

We already have all those pieces in place, along with the ability of swapping any one piece with a different one; say, if we wanted to go RESTful we only need to swap one block.

It does look gorgeous tho; how would one go about gradually adopting it?
How is it offering 'private' communications on the 33cm band? Does this band even offer good performance in hilly or mountainous terrain? These would be short range line of sight only type devices, correct? I'm still fairly new to amateur radio so I could be off. I don't see the advantage of this over something like APRS on 2M, with the exception that you don't need a license.
Template for Asking Boss to Institute Work-from-Home Policy for Coronavirus
Temperature and Latitude to Predict Potential Spread and Seasonality for COVID19
>My comments are about how a lot of people tend to put the person ( + credentials) before the soundness of their arguments.

Ok fair enough. So what is the argument that you feel was not sound? And who said that they believed the argument was sound because of 'credentialism'?

>(edit: The scientific method is well documented. This is a good place to start if one wants to learn about it, https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Scientific_Outlook....)

I don't know what a "well documented" philosophy book has to do with anything. That doesn't get you anywhere close to understanding deeply technical topics. Today's cutting edge science is deeply technical and you cannot gain knowledge simply by reasoning about it. You have to be an expert yourself to even begin to comprehend complex topics. A good educator can simplify a topic and make it approachable - like I suppose what Neil deGrasse Tyson does, but you are no closer to actually grasping the math or other details without going to grad school ... or putting in an equal amount of work at home using the library and self-study.
If you stay past your lease date in a regular apartment, you will typically be fined as well.
The real reason behind such a move is the culture of litigation in the US. Someone made your coffee too hot? Sue them. Someone stepped on your toe? Sue them. In this case, everyone is ducking for cover because they don't want to be the focus of a lawsuit that claims they didn't do anything to prevent the spread of the disease. The people who make these decisions at MIT are not unintelligent. They have all the resources and risk models at their disposal. They have obviously found that the financial risk to the school is greater if they don't send all the students away vs if they do.
I don't know. On the one hand, the content that gets linked here usually meets the bare minimum of HN's standards. On the other hand, I'm inclined to say "ban it with extreme prejudice" for that Oath popup. Because of that popup, I don't think I've read a single TC article since May 2018.
No, by "users" I meant... users. Those developers have basically nothing to do with using Gutenberg to write content, why do you think their opinion should prevail on that of actual users?
There isn't any limitations, but we're trying to integrate with local sms providers to offer better rates. We're also going to integrate WhatsApp soon.
At my university, Syracuse University, we just learned that school will be online preliminary for one week after our spring break ends. (Finish this week of school, spring break, then online for a week after)[0].

Not sure that all my peers going home is the best idea. Also, we on campus have watch those from the Florence Abroad Program come back to campus and attend events. Not too likely to have been infected, but I'm worried about all our parents and grandparents.

I wonder, what will my Korean or Chinese friends do? If they are expected possibly to have to be back on campus in a month, they can't go home and come back, they can't stay here, so they have to pay for an apartment for a month?

[0] https://www.waer.org/post/syracuse-university-cancels-campus...
This sucks, but it's better to get the students out now before it becomes impossible due to travel restrictions. They must've thought about this carefully, weighed the pros and cons. This is just getting started in the US.
Pointer and length representations are available in C, and we can find programs that get them wrong somewhere.

"Such and such a data structure ... in the middle of Rust" is not a discussion about string representation per se any more.

Rust must have null terminated strings at some level, because it has to integrate with platforms where null terminated strings are the API currency for text. Yet, Rust programs don't fall down because of null-terminated strings.

Likewise, if you have a pointer and length, but no language or library support for it, just a "high level assembly language", you will screw it up.

The pointer has to point to something. There will be cases where that something is a fixed buffer on the stack or in a dynamic object. Out of a hundred programmers coding their pointer and length with fixed buffers, a good many will cause overflows, and a good many will write memory-safe code that causes consequences due to silent truncation.

In C, we can cause problems like:

* returning a pointer to a stack-allocated { length, ptr } structure, which turns to garbage.

* leak dynamically-allocated { length, ptr } objects, or use them after freeing.

* making copies of a { length, ptr } structure (e.g. pass by value), and not keeping all of them in sync when ptr and/or length are updated.

* sticking a literal "string" into ptr, but then treating it as dynamic elsewhere and trying to free it

* sticking a literal "string" into ptr, and then somewhere trying to modify a character.
It was a cultural comment on the stereotypical heterosexual man focusing entirely on his own pleasure without taking the time to understand his partner's body.

The undercurrent of the joke wasn't that he couldn't find the clitoris so much as he wasn't looking.

EDIT:

This post appears to have been shadow banned so, you know, it seems like we've still a ways to go.
In contract law, there's a concept called force majeure (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_majeure), which comes into play when the normal circumstances under which the contract was signed are changed by a sudden, unpredictable event -- the proverbial "act of God."

Most contracts have a force majeure clause, that either releases the parties from their contractual obligations in such an event, or substantially relaxes the penalties for failing to meet those obligations. The idea is, nobody could have seen these circumstances coming, so it's unfair to hold either party to obligations they suddenly find themselves unable to meet.

(Example. I contract with 5,000 people to give them admission to a concert, and then the night before the show an asteroid falls out of the sky onto the stadium I had contracted to hold that concert in. Force majeure means I'm not obligated to put on another show at my own expense despite losing all the money I'd already invested in the first one. It would be unfair to hold me to that promise, since it was invalidated by circumstances no reasonable person could have foreseen.)

I'm not a lawyer, and I'm not privy to the precise language in the contracts between universities and students for residential housing. But I feel pretty confident that they have a force majeure clause in them. And seeing as how Massachusetts declared a state of emergency over the coronavirus today (https://www.boston25news.com/news/mass-gov-declares-state-em...), it seems like universities in that commonwealth would have a reasonably strong legal argument for exercising them.
Surely they had better things to do than to try to figure out when people had their finals and check door-to-door every day to make sure people left when they should?
From that link: "Undergraduates should not return to campus after spring break."

Harvard have announced the same thing: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2020/3/11/harvard-coronav...
All universities in Austria are closed
The way that science is conducted, the questions that are asked, and the way that results are interpreted are all dependent on culture and politics. Something as simple as understanding that xyz viewpoint was considered politically incorrect or anathema to the goals of whoever was funding given research is important in understanding that conclusions from a study might be on data that was filtered to make a case stronger or specifically chosen and designed so no other conclusion could be drawn. Or that the 19 other runs might have been thrown out for the one that showed the result the sponsor wanted. People used "science" to justify smoking as harmless, leaded gasoline as safe, eugenics as a good idea. We need to under what context all of that came from to understand the confounding factors at play.
I don't know that much about epoch, but isn't the point of it to be completely independent of stuff like timezones or daylight savings? Doesn't it track every second since 1970 no matter if meanwhile time jumped back or forward in some countries?
It seems the website is down. I somehow wonder if it is from the Hacker News crowd.
This is the actual contract template that I've developed myself and used on a number of little ventures. It's optimized for passive-income projects, rather than things you plan on fundraising or making really big.
Yup, that's C. A. Ehmke. I'm not sure why she's so opposed to core FLOSS principles, even going as far as calling them evil and unethical; I feel like we're all circling back somehow to the bad old "Linux is cancer" attitudes from the 1990s.
I tend to favor the rude crowd on principle, but I agree with the logic supporting OSI. More than just "a large group", they're a corporate brand (and one of the most important ones in the open-source world) and as a brand they have to think about their image. ESR doesn't fit their image. OSI wants to present a softer image. That's their prerogative (and I agree, probably important for the open source community to grow with new people who mostly start young and stupid - that's a good thing).

That said, there is probably space for a ROSI: a group with similar benefits to OSI but which prioritizes software over feelings. Being tactful, even for those who can and want to, costs time and energy. Dispensing with that saves time.
To be fair, MIT tends to handle this sort of thing pretty well, and informally. I expect it doesn't have clear policies, but that it will try to do right by people on a case-by-case basis based on people's individual circumstances. I wouldn't take this quite so cynically.

That's not to say the Institute isn't corrupt, evil, and horrible in other ways, but this is not one of the ways in which it's evil. The badness mostly starts with higher-ups and schemes in the many millions of dollars.
Exactly, we say the same thing to people using our product [1]. And the same falls true for team compositions. If you have a 10+ team is already hard to work "as a team" like that. And standup meetings becoming bloated are a strong sign that you need to change and / or split that team and responsibilities.

[1] https://standups.io
I'm fairly sure "mascara" isn't valid as a intransitive verb (transitive would be applying mascara to something), so "when they mascaraed as people" would still be incorrect. Wearing mascara would be "when they were mascaraed as people". (Although it's probably a typo rather than a word choice error, so <shrug>.)
Their site says using 915mhz, and the radios they recommend are all LoRa devices, so that's probably the best way of evaluating distance performance.
Wouldn't it make sense for high risk individuals to self-quarantine and for the rest of society to carry on? There may not be a vaccine for at least another year. They've never successfully produced a vaccine for any coronavirus, whether that's SARS or the common cold.
The subject says "for hosting containers" but the README says "for AWS EKS Kubernetes" which sounds a little less general...

How tied in to the AWS model is this? Are the places that would need to be expanded known?

Also at least at a glance, this is a neat use of real-world Rust
That's my question, if you have a field that represents something and that field is a string that can be empty, null or contains anny string, if you don't use NULL how do you make the difference between an empty string and a null string ( user set "" vs never set anything )
My college is doing the same right now. It’s a small residential college about an hour’s drive from the nearest confirmed case. Campus mood is indescribable. I think the move is for the best but as a graduating senior it’s a very emotional time.
Not an expert by any means, but I'd suggest looking at the Dash7 protocol/ firmware as a reference for the mesh, security and positioning. It's been around a while and seems robust.

Open source, royalty free, low power, high range (several km even in urban areas), medium bandwidth, runs on several lora boards.

https://dash7-alliance.org/
As well as being the founder of what became MTV and one of the originators of the music video.
I and almost all my friends are WFH in UK.
Needing to tip-toe around with every word to avoid the risk of offending someone isn't really new, it's just that many people in skewed power dynamics have been able to be avoid doing so for years. Nowadays, if you're the one being offended, you have a lot more tools to connect with others who may feel the same way, and bring attention to your point of view.

The armor against true accusations is the same as it always has been: don't be a jerk. The armor against false accusations is very similar: don't be a jerk to people with whom you have a skewed power dynamic, as you may find your word against that of your accuser, and you may find yourself reliant on your accuser's peers to come to your defense.
Coronavirus Prompts Hospitals to Fast-Track Telemedicine Projects
How do you handle things like chemistry labs? Vocational training and art curricula are also going to be very difficult to do remotely, since you're probably not going to have requisite materials at home.
when used in good faith is the key part there, though.

If everything everybody ever proposed was only used in good faith, we'd be living in Utopia.

> You have written, formalised proof you can link to that e.g. you're expected to use XYZ pronouns - no tedious offtopic argument that drives people away.

They are usually way too vague to do that. "Be kind" hangs on who decides what is and isn't kind. It's my impression that that is generally by design, because they are supposed to enable selective enforcement.
> but this couldn't have happened to a nicer person.

I think maybe you meant "couldn't have happened to a more deserving person"?

The way you phrased it implies you think ESR is actually quite a nice person who didn't deserve what he got, while the remainder of your post clearly shows that's not what you mean.
Flipped class example https://youtu.be/zec5cq6WiAk the students participate in live chat and sign into some software (Canvas and Gradescope) to answer exercises. Twitch stream/Youtube works fine though MIT has some kind of video software that automatically follows the lecturer with numerous angles for blackboards https://video.odl.mit.edu/collections/99c40d462fcf457e961185...
It is absolutely a free choice, social pressure isn't the law.
Universities also have their own judicial systems under Title IX as well.
Reaction in Switzerland has been quite intense. All public events above 150 people require cantonal approval, above 1000 are banned outright. The government is recommending wfh for everyone who can, and many employers are following this.
This column by a conservative columnist does a good job of explaining how the extra time gained by that decision was unfortunately completely wasted: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/07/opinion/coronavirus-trump...
What does “better” mean? Is it science that produces results that you like? It is science that produces that produces useful technologies. Or is it science that produces models that reflect reality.

If you go by the first two definitions then brining politics is helpful. If you go by the third, then politics is decidedly unhelpful.
Microsoft only recommended WFH in SF/Seattle so far, other sites waiting for it.
You're right, it's a paid service, but they usually get substantial discounts (smaller schools can even get it for free if they have the right contacts)
CBOR is also used on WebAuthn, usage in a web spec means to me that someone smart considered it a sane choice -- and more importantly that the format is here to stay.
Ireland has seen a pretty strong shift to wfh.
I'm certain that's not the case here. This isn't about avoiding litigation. It's about flattening the curve.

https://www.flattenthecurve.com/

Universities are taking this extremely disruptive step because they have a very large influence on how quickly this disease spreads, and they know it.
This looks pretty sweet. It seems to be a continuation of the same trend of "just enough Linux to run containerd" that CoreOS started, linuxkit continued, then Project EVE expanded to cover virtualization.

It is also interesting to note that every step on that journey seems to have picked the coolest runtime to implement it in (C/early Go, established Go, and now Rust)
This inspires a lot of confidence...
There is no problem with an individuals choosing not to engage based on their own experience. The problem with cancel culture is that we are encouraged to treat people as "cancelled" based on hearsay.