skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Crimea was unilaterally annexed after a military invasion; the sanctions are intended to maintain the idea that it belongs to Ukraine, not Russia.

I actually don't object to sanctioning the area - it is less aggressive than sanctioning all of Russia, and Russians entering Crimea against the wishes of the Ukrainian government could be seen as invaders. After all, the original invasion was done under the cover of "mercenary separatists" who did not identify themselves as the soldiers that they were. And let's not forget, those "separatists" did also shoot down a civilian airliner with a Russian anti-air missile, killing hundreds.

Personally, I would prefer that organizations like Github remain impartial to this sort of thing, but they aren't discriminating against Crimea in particular; they're applying the same "it's out of our hands" attitude as they do for developers from areas with similar sanctions, such as Iran.
How will they pay for it

Opensource on the whole doesn't pay unless it's sponsored by a company.
I mean, what would normally happen is employees look for new jobs, equipment is sold, and tech is thrown away (or open sourced in rare cases). Doesn't this already happen all the time?
> just put it aside and save

You'd better put it aside and save it, because they're going to raise your taxes by $2000 to pay for it.
You are aware the US is not the only country affected by this right?
What does a world with non bounced back airlines look like? No flights? Cheap flights? Expensive flights?
Jeez, I probably invented using Javascript to generate site passwords by hashing the domain with a master password (see e.g. https://books.google.com/books?id=4jYEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA34) – and I certainly don't use it any more!

http://www.angel.net/~nic/passwd.current.html
> complain about centralized corporate content-hosting

> post that on Medium

Hoo boy.
"GitHub has monopolized open source development."

How exactly has GitHub done that? What actions has GitHub taken, other than providing a useful service?

Open source developers have chosen to make GitHub a near monopoly.
I hope this doesn't alter the current GitHub npm package registry policy where all packages must be published under a scope corresponding to name of the owning GitHub user/org. The resulting increased transparency and clarity of ownership will be great for the JS ecosystem.

The existing npm ownership model is markedly less clear and has led to several problems, including the transfer of package publishing rights to bad actors without anyone being aware. On the whole, npm accounts and orgs were always just an unnecessary abstraction that obscured the actual provenance of software, of which GitHub is the de facto source.
I have friends whose startups are already freezing hiring, and cutting back on unnecessary expenses (as they should).

Lowered demand for consumer goods and services naturally mean that these companies will be trimming the fat on SaaS products, and infrastructure (unless it's truly critical for work, ie Zoom) which in turn means less technical jobs.
OK you got me, but my point is that's ALL the other guy had. ;-)
Microsoft is aware of their reputation. So much that they even have a policy of not allowing Microsoft+Github co-brand promotions. They want the Github brand to stay strong instead of being diluted into some mix of Github and Microsoft.
clicky link to online version: https://exploras.typeform.com/to/ohA5cU
My fear might probably be unfounded, but NPM is an integral part of the JS ecosystem. And given MicroSoft has .NET Core, I have a strange feeling that they'll concentrate on npm less.
Whether people like it or not, shrinking global economic activity in fuel-heavy and extractive industries (by extension, via demand destruction) is inevitably linked to reducing carbon emissions. We must be prepared to give up certain things for the sake of our ecosystem.
imagine the headlines by Fox News as soon as they find 4 people living together playing video games all day. or smoking pot. or etc.

You're right that it'll require a pretty fundamental shift in attitude. Some folks will still think people like that are losers. That's fine. But maybe we'll get to a point where they won't think such people, losers that they may be, are doing anything they're not entitled to be doing. That's the kind of shift in perception that's required to make it work.

We're never going to agree with everyone else's choices. We need to agree that they're entitled to those choices.
We need a mortgage and rent payment moratorium nationwide if the majority of the country is expected to just stop working.
It depends how essential flights are deemed to be. If people want them and a market exists, fares will be very expensive at first and then eventually normalize as demand increases and capacity scales back up.

Since all of the infrastructure already exists it shouldn't take that long to scale back up.
Every market has some underlying conditions, but I see no reason to think any of it would have happened purely because of the reasons you cite.

Many of those conditions have been present for a LONG time and people have been predicting a correction or other events for years ... and they just haven't happened.

Fair or not, I have serious doubts anyone is selling stock right now because they're concerned about student debt or etc.

I feel like in every crisis we get laundry lists of people who cite "things that I'm concerned about are the real reasons" and so on.
Yes. No one believes he's capable of handling the current crisis. He had the chance to handle it a month ago and he blew it. Worse, he laid off the team that could have prevented this. This is the tech equivalent of laying off your security team and having a massive security breach.
What else to expect from a company calling itself "brave" without a hint of irony?
Well if airlines go bankrupt, that's a lot of assets that could be sold at fire-sale prices, and an opportunity for other surviving airlines to jump in and take over those planes and routes. Since China seems to have contained the outbreak, and probably have the economic power to do it, maybe they'll buy up a bunch of failed airlines...
An interesting experiment is about to be carried out with the British as the control group.

The only thing we know for certain about C19 is we don't know anything for certain. The EU recognise that fact and are playing for time. The UK, on the other hand, is pretending to have a sciencey fix based on some adolescent game theory nerdgasm. Herd immunity can be conferred by both vaccine and disease. But there's a difference between vaccine and disease that seems too subtle for Whitehall to grasp.

The UK is planning for 60% of its population - forty million people - to contract C19. The gamble is that this won't overwhelm the health system. How? Because the government has told the virus not to infect people who might get ill.

In China, healthcare workers were at greater risk than the general population because of elevated exposure. The UK has told the virus not to infect doctors.

The big risk with RNA viruses is mutation: we could develop a vaccine this year that's useless next. Obviously, the larger the infected population, the higher the viral mutation rate. China and the EU are responding by locking down. The UK has told the virus not to mutate.

When declaring a pandemic, the WHO director-general said, “The idea that countries should shift from containment to mitigation is wrong and dangerous.”
honest question why is the market still open? So we all sit around and read crazy news and watch investors get destroyed for the next 2 months?
NPM is a lot more than the CLI. Even if you use yarn as the CLI you are still using npm for hosting and all the other parts that don't run on your computer. You can run your own npm repo, but hardly anyone does for all their dependencies (not talking about just caching here).

I'd wager most people who use yarn even installed it via the npm CLI.
Yes. Mid-meeting we actually switched from Skype for Business to Teams because the sound quality was very bad and screen sharing was essentially impossible.
Don’t Feel Sorry for the Airlines
Embrace, extend, extinguish?
>financial event triggering this,

There is a financial event. Massive drops in demand. I think people have gotten used to market crashes caused by issues in the financial system itself (bubbles/subprime mortgages) and forget that there can be other issues
The comparison of symptoms on slide 26 seems particularly useful.
The post covers this.

> Later this year, we will enable npm’s paying customers to move their private npm packages to GitHub Packages—allowing npm to exclusively focus on being a great public registry for JavaScript.

Packages will continue to develop its npm registry. We have a lot of work to do in securing the software supply chain.
You're not wrong but what are the alternatives?

(1) Have a vague spec that doesn't distinguish between defined and undefined behavior.

(2) Define everything, at the cost of performance/hardware support.

Remember that C works on 50-year-old hardware, and current hardware.
Does it has cross-platform? One codebase, multiple targets? That's how you evangelize any programming language. In today's environment where the customer wants his solution to work on all devices, the programming language that has the least (zero might be impossible) quirks when targeting different OS'es wins my heart.

So far, IMO, there are zero programming languages that do this. Java comes closest but is like only half-way there, rest are either lagging behind or even don't even approach this. Also I hate Java, but that's my personal choice.
It is, but who is doing that? The users of NPM all are choosing to stay on Github.
I support the concept of open source including some restrictions. It would be open source depending on user/application. We've seen some open source depending on usage liceases (can't be used in a sass, you can't sue us clauses).

It does feel like a poison pill that would reduce usage. But maybe it's worth it.
I totally agree with this! My spouse was making fun of me for staring at our Neato for almost its whole cleaning session. Watching the 2D LiDAR work while the robot does the path planning is absolutely fascinating to me for a machine that is less than $400.
In a weird way, the way this played out kind of helps the CCP. They can let their economy reset without loss of face, because they can blame it all on the Coronavirus (and, as they will put it, their heroic response to it).
So you want to build a generator (2017)
IIRC, "layoff" originally meant the same thing as "furlough" until it became a euphemism for "terminated due to failing business" or just "terminated".
You know, my initial reaction was... oh no, the toxic people who run NPM and Node.js[1][2] are going to infect GitHub.

But then I read that other front page article about the guy that got mysteriously "flagged", and the invasive questions he was asked. Maybe Github is already too far gone.

Maybe it should be... please, bundle all the toxic people together in one spot, and let it all come crashing to the ground. I've had serious reservations about using Node.js in a product I've been tasked to work on, for the reasons I listed below. It'd be great if they just... ceased to exist.

1 - left-pad incedent

2 - The Ayo fork drama
There’s also just straight up luck. I was fortunate enough to get a decent job that paid well largely because I knew the right people; I have friends with similar levels of education who aren’t so well off.

They’re not any less thoughtful with their money than I am (in fact probably more so), it’s just a matter of circumstance.
Strip Clubs Are Handling the Coronavirus Outbreak
Some companies are, some are not. Many have been juicing their stock price with stock buybacks at the expense of cash reserves (see Boeing).
Universal weapon, huh? Why not 5K or 100K? Why not give free money to illegal immigrants, or better, to the entire world?

Every dollar you print out of nothing is stolen from the savers who worked for it.
Judging by the questions, that is exactly what he has done, and judging by his answers, he knows it but wishes to make GitHub appear to be at fault for reasons of his own.
But ok, they just go bankrupt right? Leasing companies repossess their planes, and that's it. Then new legal entities are established and planes are leased back to them, and they are debt free.

It's not like anyone is going to scrap the planes, or shoot the pilots.
I'm looking for information for those that provide patient care to covid patients. Infection rate, best practices, transmission to family (I live with a doctor providing care to covid patients...), etc. I've seen some anecdotes and single case reports that are concerning, but anything that is data driven like this will be helpful.

Also, where is non denatured ethanol readily available?
Can't GitHub add a popup asking, "We detected you are in a restricted country, are you sure you want to login?" or just block logging in without locking up the account?
The last slide is a hand sanitizer recipe. It's probably the most useful thing here.
Interestingly, currently shortages are being caused by the reaction, not the virus. King County is reporting "Growing COVID-19 concerns and closures have led to canceled blood drives and 2500 lost donations, putting our local blood supply in danger of collapse."
Factory closures and disrupted supply chains put manufactured supplies in danger going forward, too. Again, we need to make sure that the cure is worse than the disease.
The dates are up to present day. Trump is due to give another press conference during market hours (3:30 today), watch the chaos he's wreaking on your friendly neighbourhood index

Expecting another rally followed by another crash
Define what you mean by "screw the pooch."

Currently COVID-19 response is a finely tuned balance of economic impact to death-toll. React too early and you'll experience an unacceptable economic impact. React too late and you'll experience an unacceptable death-toll.

The reason this situation is so dire is not because of the lethality of the virus. It is because our medical infrastructure is not capable of treating patients in the capacity that this virus can infect them. The goal is not to prevent people from contracting COVID-19. The goal is to slow the spread of COVID-19 so that the number of cases which require hospitalization stays lower than the availability of hospital beds.

If everyone got sick all at once the fatality rate would increase because people would be dying faster than they could be treated. So long as we can treat our ill faster than people become ill we can manage this situation even if 100% of humans eventually become infected. The balancing act comes into play when you also need to consider the impact to the economy.

There is a saturation point that early responding countries will reach where even if they continue to increase their response they will only be increasing their economic impact without significantly decreasing the death-toll. Finding this balance is what governments are trying to do right now.
*temporarily lay off
I always thought furlough was an US-specific thing, Norwegian Air is based in Norway.
"Likely"? You are far more optimistic than I.
They should & deserve to have full control over everything they've created.

You can blame AWS/GCP for letting GitHub & npm be acquired, how many years were they on the open market?

Most of the $$$ in OSS is being funneled towards rent-seeking major cloud providers that are hosting OSS software, whom should all have blank checks with the money they've reaped so far, but seems only Microsoft has the strategic savvy to focus on acquiring the obvious targets for increasing dev mindshare. I don't fault them for their M&A's, it's just good business.
Remember when The Simpson's Canyonero clip was satire/comedy? Now it just looks like an ad for a real car.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PI_Jl5WFQkA
Scraping a Website with Infinite Scroll
In the meantime the Walmart in my home town is firing people for getting sick because they can't afford to go to a doctor for a sick note.
A more useful example would be

struct {
char a;
char b;
char c;
}a;

memset(&a, 0, 2 * sizeof(char));

IE trying to clear only part of a struct using memset. Clearly not a great way to do things.
Fair point, I'd forgotten that.

If only they'd released NetHack for PS3, it would have run in the background easily ;-)
Yes, I love those. We'll keep those around for sure.
The incentive to do a good job is dual.

1: The very first thing the inspecting mechanic does is remove your tag. If they find a fault, they get first dibs on selling you the repair. (yes, you can get a temporary pass) The VA inspection fee, at least through the early 2000s, was minimal. I always assumed that shops did the inspection as a loss-leader, with the profit on the needed repairs.

2: I suspect that if they are found to be passing cars that should not, there is government/administrative hell to pay.

(Also, after leaving Virginia, it blew my mind that other states didn't inspect. It is nice to know that every car on the road has at least one brake with enough brake-pad left to come to a halt.)
I agree. We were overdue for a correction, based on more than a century of stock & economic patterns. Something was gonna knock it down eventually. The longer a bull market goes on, the more fragile it becomes, like an over-inflated balloon. It was already artificially propped up by tax cuts and interest rate cuts. That "stimulus" was premature; reverse Keynes. Save up for a rainy day by paying down debt during the crest. Well, it's raining now and the piggy bank is empty. Enjoy the bacon....
That's a great reference. Thanks.
To be fair, comparing most european airlines seems good when you compare them to US airlines. Would be more fair to compare them to other european airlines.
I'm surprised there's not a single mention of "Microsoft" in this or the npm announcement [1], given the old-evil-history of Microsoft and the new-nice Microsoft we have today.

Maybe Microsoft's reputation is exactly the reason why it was left out of this announcement.

Sometimes a brand is so tarnished that the owner tries to hide it from the people who hate it. (For example, Comcast → Xfinity. I expect Monsanto to go the same way and become Bayer.)
> Companies reduce work hours and salaries across the board and unemployment insurance makes up for some of it.

Isn't that the same overall effect as a lockdown and a direct cash payment?
But it doesn't mean we should upvote every hobbyist project to the top of hacker news - only the useful, interesting, good ones.
Exploring the Linux /Proc Filesystem
Damn, someone just beat me to "Now Part of Microsoft"

https://github.com/npm/npm-expansions/pull/2936
Airlines are too important to the economy - plenty of them will get gov guarantees / bailouts
Pretty much everybody has either rent or a mortgage. Therefore giving someone $1000 towards their rent/mortgage is basically equivalent to just giving them $1000, except that it's a ton of extra administrative complexity and it also screws over a few people who somehow don't qualify but still need help.

Whereas if you make the assistance "we pay the amount of your mortgage" instead of "we pay $1000" then you're giving much more of the money to affluent people, who presumably need it less.
+1

I flew their Premium Economy internationally and it was similar to US domestic first class.
RIP NPM
I think people are tired of EEE being posted on every Microsoft related thread even though Microsoft has been a very different company for at least 10 years.

I do agree with the concerns of open source consolidation though. We need to find better ways of supporting open source projects instead of having them being bought by "large company".
It is a crisis, which is caused by monetary politics and politics overall. The coronavirus was as you say just the catalyst.
The only sense in which an unterminated string literal can be UB is like this.

It's possible that if a string literal is not terminated, the situation will cause a de facto overly long string literal token to exist. For instance:

const char *str = "short str; int x = 42; and now a realy long line follows ...

if the non-termination causes a de facto large literal to exist in the program, and that large literal exceeds a minimum implementation limit, then that is UB. Probably.

Strictly speaking, since the token is not closed, it is not a string literal, and so any limitation on string literals doesn't apply to it. Unless we interpret that limit as pertaining to the implementation's tokenizer, as such, which can plausibly choke on simply the valid prefix of a string literal that is too long.

Anyway, if a newline occurs before the minimum limit on string literal length is reached, and that newline is not escaped with a backslash, then that is a straightforward syntax error.
At least one of the cromulent attempts was successful.
NPM is joining GitHub, GitHub joins Microsoft, Microsoft joins... ;)
So. Say, there is a person living in Crimea, so supposedly they're oppressed by the Russian state, suffer from its illegal governing bodies and long for the day Crimea is reunited with Ukraine once again. And the international community and the US, in particular, famous for their human rights championship, do provide their support and compassion to this person, for instance, by prohibiting them from having business or semi-business transactions or relations with any commercial companies and firms under their jurisdiction. Wait, what?

The ire at such situation can be of basically of two forms: "I wish this damned government didn't antagonize the rest of the world", and "I wish those bloody foregners didn't antagonize this country". And if the person doesn't actually suffer from any repressions from the occupying country, the first raction is unlikely, especially after 6 years of being surrounded by the state propaganda.
New BT Email Scam
> test for the virus in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, with about 200 million people.

> its saliva and finger-prick kit could be ready for sale by June for less than $1 apiece

> Mologic and the Institut Pasteur have joint capacity to produce 8 million tests a year

every little helps, and a low-cost test would obviously be a game-changer. but let's keep things in perspective and be realistic. it sounds quite hypothetical right now. there's no indication it works reliably yet.
New thing aims to help developers deal with the overhead of having too many things to worry about, uses plugins.
Coronavirus was the pin that popped the bubble.

But the pin could have been some other event, at some other time. All crashes have catalysts, but the specific catalyst is usually irrelevant, in hindsight.
Elon Musk is acting like a neo-Conquistador for South America’s lithium
One-to-many relationships in DynamoDB / NoSQL
The day after my sister and I ask our widowed mom to quarantine and two days after my sister and brother in law rearrange everything so my mom isn’t watching my niece, my mom proceed to attend a party held by other widows from her support group and communities to host her daily card games. Quarantine I Guess just means don’t go out to her
Norwegian asks students in poor healthcare countries like USA to return
Yes, indeed - and the dependency is literally right there on the technical level. For years, you've been able to specify a version of a package as a github repo's branch HEAD.

npm i some-package username/repo#branchName
>banks didn't account for this with lax lending standards

Pretty sure the ratings fraud got fixed. Also pretty sure they didn't just go back to handing loans out to anyone with a pulse. I'm sure there's some crazy intricate financial instruments made up of dogshit still around, but it's probably going to be a smaller percentage of the bank's balance sheet.