skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The RISC-V proof is very close to being completed too. Gernot talked at the RISC-V Summit 2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IXBoVIUuVI
Corona – Norway is now on 3.place by population (Tot cases/1M pop)
Deported to where? :)

Yes, you cannot be refused entry as a US citizen even without a passport. You will be greatly inconvenienced, but not refused. You may be held in a detention center or holding facility until such time as your identity can be verified.
Not really, because thanks to the manifest.json, and if packed as stored app, it also has access to OS APIs, exposed in the browser.
Duh. Thanks. Not my brightest moment.
Let's start with one fundamental assertion that I feel is missing in many of the discussions in this thread: There is no "the government". In most countries "government" is a collection of agencies, staffed by individuals, not completely in sync on all levels (micro, meso, macro).

You see that playing out when measures on one level (most prominently medical advise) are not in line with broader approaches to managing events, groups, tourism and travel. We all notice the disconnect, and some might think of 'dark conspiracies'. There are none (rule of the most kind interpretation). It's the dispersion of institutions in action.

Another one is my assertion, as a former public servant with friends in places that /should know/, that there is no structured economic analysis of possible outcomes of various scenarios of intervention. There are no models, there is no time, there is not enough collaboration between agencies. On the one hand you have the medical staff and agencies doing what they can where they can on a medical level, on the other hand you have bureaucrats making decisions with limited information and way more limited understanding. Politicians probably get in the way more than they support.

My thought: Governments are acting. They are just not acting in a way that we, the public, can understand is internally consistent. That's because the acts aren't internally consistent. That is due to the fact that governement is made up of institutions with different levels of understanding, information, scope and time to act.

In a pandemic, this is all very unfortunate and a more singlehanded style of governement could help. China got it quite right after an initial denial. Nobody in the West is equipped to both think about and act on China-style measures. In normal situation our distributed model of application of knowledge (Hayek) is more efficient. Most we can hope for is rapid learning in our institutions and the fact that a whole lot of capital, both human and monetary, is available for solving this crisis.

I'm quite in a shock (my province is in partial quarantine) with what's happening, but if the world economy proofs resiliant to this shock on a say 2-yr horizon, I'm quite bullish on how strong and adaptable our institutions are and see more hope for f.e. tackling climate change than before.
"You don't want to get in a rut where all the sudden it's Thursday and you haven't showered or left your house."

This is a bigger issue than the non WFH crowd will ever know!
At first glance I thought this was referring to a Bourne or Korn shell.
Pretty sure that graph shows that the sea ice over the last 5 years has been significantly less than the mean value from 1981-2000, even if you allow for 2 standard deviations from the mean.
That's an un peer-reviewed pre-print.
We're not in every thread moving things up and down, but HN is a curated site, and that involves judgment and interpretation. For example, if there's an offtopic comment, especially a generic one [1] sitting at the top of a thread collecting upvotes as they tend to do, it's a standard moderation move to downweight it.

The idea of HN is intellectual curiosity. Sadly, upvotes alone don't optimize for that; the voting system optimizes for indignation and repetition. Countervailing mechanisms, such as software and moderation, are needed. We use software to do what we know how to automate and humans to do what we don't know how to automate—though I wish we did, because most of the human intervention at this level is tedious.

Today is a good moment to illustrate this, actually. If humans weren't curating HN, we wouldn't have had https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22545878 or
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22548217, and probably not even the current thread about AA. It would have been all coronavirus stories, or almost all.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Whose promise? According to tax and immigration laws that is certainly not the case in most of the world.
> This isn't from a company, so the personality isn't that important.

I'm curious what you mean by this? It seems to me that content from individuals is exactly where personality matters. And from a company, it matters less because both sides of the equation just want to get to a decision point on whether you'll use their product. Branding is a tool to help get to their desired outcome, not a goal in and of itself.
I had the impression they are doing so. All the measures taken now aim at flattening the curve. Which spreads cases out to prevent ICU beds and hospitals from being overwhelmed. This helps to keep the hard cases alive and buys time.

Which might also explain why countries act differently, the max threshold for the respective medical system is different. As are projections of the spread. But I don't think we have to believe governments aren't analyzing the development daily at least.
I'm not wild for PWAs but your suggested web app flow sounds like failings in the authentication setup of the PWA and of LastPass rather than the failings of PWAs in general.

If a native app can remain authenticated with whatever service it communicates with a PWA should be able to as well, that's an implementation issue rather than a PWA issue, no? Similarly if LastPass doesn't integrate correctly to the point where you're having to manually look up details rather than having details auto-filled across websites and apps (iOS and Android both support this), that sounds like an issue with LastPass.

With all that said, it's hard to deny that it's easier to keep a mobile app performant and flexible than it is a PWA. I'd also add to your list that native apps have familiar UIs by default, which is tricky to replicate in a PWA.
Automatic translations (on cue) would be very useful in almost any setting or environment I can think of.

But if you need to hold your phone in front of you and squint at the screen like and idiot, nobody will use it.

So the use-case is real and valuable, it's just not achievable on a phone, it needs to be a socially acceptable wearable AR device.
Peter Baylies’ encoder is the best I’ve seen: https://github.com/pbaylies/stylegan-encoder

(He has a great twitter account too: https://twitter.com/pbaylies)

It’s incredible. It’s far more stable than the projector that ships with stylegan2. I think it was originally Putzer’s work, and pbaylies honed it to perfection. He has a neat “latent estimate” too, where a resnet model predicts a closer latent starting point to an arbitrary photo. This cuts down on fitting time considerably.

The theory is, that encoder is so good, you can match faces identically. And in fact, the readme in this submission shows Harry Potter’s face, so it’s certainly good enough to provide a very close match to existing images.

Random tangent, but it’s also possible in practice to get close to Dota 2 hero icons: https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1182208124117307392?s=2...

Unfortunately in principle it seems like there isn’t a fully automatic solution to do that yet; those were generated by me carefully tuning various latent sliders and using pbaylies’ encoder to coax the face closer to the target. You can see the workflow here: https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1185278057063632897?s=2...

Point being, you can get an identical match with the encoder for images it was trained on, or you can get pretty close to arbitrary targets by giving artistic control to humans. Perhaps one day an ML model will learn that mapping automatically. There is some impressive work in that direction floating around.

Ultimately, you’re probably right that this might fail to learn smooth interpolations in latent space for one reason or another. But it seems worth implementing and seeing what the failure mode is, if any.
Since it seems deadlier than the common flu at the moment, I personally would prefer to “schedule” my infection by waiting for a vaccine.

I’m in Latin America where it isn’t spreading as fast (my best guess is warm weather), and I’m planning to wait it out until it’s warmer in the northern hemisphere or a vaccine comes out.
Slams is way too common. It's very hard to read the news without seeing "slams" somewhere.
What the sel4 people have achieved is to separate a very small part of the OS and verify it (supposedly - there are some arguments over this).

But is the entire system secure if you use sel4?

Not necessarily. I fact it may be less secure than vanilla Linux because (1) you need to implement more yourself (2) the distributed approach makes your system more susceptible to certain classes of vulnerabilities (e.g. higher risk for race conditions) and (3) the sel4 security proofs apply to a very specific environment and usage and you could unknowingly break any one of them.
A blind person browsing a video site does not necessarily mean they want to watch the videos. They might want to listen to the audio, or share the video links they find.
Except that the head of the US Government just makes up random shit on twitter. So yes, the government does just make up random shit like him.

And there most certainly are many things the government can do about it. How about Medicare for all people, and for all diseases?

Republicans Want Medicare for All, but Just for This One Disease. Everyone’s a socialist in a pandemic.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/11/opinion/coronavirus-socia...
I'd actually prefer less whiteboarding to people spending a bit more of their own time on their ideas. Think about it and research it for a few days before calling a meeting.
France has 11x Denmark's population and 4x it's confirmed cases, so it seems like doing nothing worked better.
>Not sure why you would invest in Snap at their IPO price at $17, given that they had no prospect of profitability

That's typical of social media companies - get users first, and figure out the money later. And it makes sense. If you have a billion active users on your platform, you can always find ways to make money.

>due to Instagram's aggressive copying strategy at the time.

Everyone copies everyone in this space and always has.
The original post probably uses pandemic in the colloquial sense, not by the WHOs definition which seems widely disagreed on. Remember the last WHO pandemic was the swine flu, which turned out to be more mild than the seasonal flu.
Yes, this is y2k/ozone hole syndrome. Arguably financial crisis, too; that would have been a lot worse without the quite extreme government intervention round the world, but it generally didn’t work out well for the politicians involved.

That said, a lot of governments are taking serious measures and apparently not counting the electoral cost.
You make some good points but a company's payroll provider (i.e. Gusto) handles all of these domestic employee taxes automatically so this is generally a non-issue.

Although there are other complications and this is a really good thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17022563
I would say it follows a "politicians act in their own best interest" logic. People with jobs in other industries have similar behavior, but I suppose the politicians have greater impact on society, so most people rally around the cynical view of politicians.
The Raspberry Turk is a robot that can play chess
Politicians are humans with imperfect immune systems too. It's hard to be logical and play realpolitik when getting it wrong kills you or your family
What I need is a seamless interop between C++ and Rust structures. The closest is maybe what the WebAssembly can do.

That way functions written in both languages can be mixed.
Fixing this now! Thanks for letting me know :)
The idea of not letting one noisy person overshadow the more quiet ones reminds me of one of my old projects Latest Tweets [1].

It was a single page that displayed just a one latest tweet from everyone you followed on Twitter. I wanted to be able to see people who tweet indecently more easily.

It stopped working after Twitter shut down the v1 API and I didn’t try to update it, but there was something intriguing about the premise compared to the traditional feed, and I miss being able to use it.

I’m really glad to see this project that is much more polished and featureful!

[1]: https://github.com/shurcooL-legacy/latest-tweets
Mobile apps:

- High battery consumption and no way to control background services

- 100% access to local user data

- Fast and unsafe languages such as C and C++ (yes they also come in the SDK tooling)

Web apps:

- Fast with WebGL 2.0, and proper use of hardware accelerated CSS

- Limited access is actually a positive

- WebAssembly
Ireland just closed all schools and creches until the end of March. Indoor public gatherings limited to 100 people, outdoor to 250. Hope fully this will slow it enough to allow the health services to cope.
I admit I've never lived in or visited any typical dormitories, so I'll agree that doesn't sound workable.

Consider my parent post voided (but past edit window).
COVID-eotherapy – A free therapy session for people who have to WFH
Wait, been I've been told "you can't just shut down travel", and that closing borders doesn't work, for reasons that are completely self-evident. So I'm utterly mystified that there are virtually no cases and 0 deaths in countries like Russia and Mongolia that closed their borders.
I don't understand why we should be worried Corona Virus more than Common Cold
This is both a financial ("will this investment make money?") and a signaling ("what does (not)owning Snap say about us?") decision.

They say "quietly" because NBCU didn't publicize this at all, suggesting that they liked the signal of buying Snap, but no longer like the financial investment.

You could compare this to Sequoia walking away Finix two days ago[1], where Sequoia wanted to be very loud and squash the financial signal by letting Finix keep the money.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22527943
I do remember that, and I admit I haven't researched current distributions yet, so I'm a few years out of date.
Good related thread here! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17022563
Really interesting distro to just test things and to use Curl without exposing your real IP.

However, it always bothers me when Tails detects the virtual machine VirtualBox as being nonfree.
Real or counterfeit?
Far more enlightening than reading some inexpert web log with wobbly hand-drawn graphs with unmarked axes is to read the actual after-the-fact analyses of the measures taken against the 1918 Influenza pandemic. People learned from history, what actually did not work. It influenced what they did the next time around, in the 1920s.

Don't read some Belgian web developer's web log.

Read the likes of Ethical and Legal Considerations in Mitigating Pandemic Disease: Workshop Summary published by the National Academies Press in 2007 (ISBN 9780309107693 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK54167/).

Read “Destroyer and Teacher”: Managing the Masses During the 1918–1919 Influenza Pandemic (Nancy Tomes. Public Health Rep. 2010. 125(Suppl 3) 48–62. PMC2862334. PMID 20568568. https://dx.doi.org/10.1177/00333549101250S308 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2862334/)

Tomes is particularly enlightening on the internal conflicts between government public heath departments.
Good analysis but I think

1) Governments are not profit motivated and are generally incompetent

2) Most measures to protect taxpayers don't play along with the overall globalist agenda
I raise you that Japan has higher population density, especially vulnerable old people. Which is more important? Nobody knows.

(And it wasn't closed to travel until recently either.)
Stocking Your Pantry, the Smart Way
While I agree with you, there is also the thing that the powers-that-be are not all that threatened by climate change.
This may be true if politicians are selfishly focused on reelection, and it’s one of the core reasons western democracies have term limits.

In times of crisis our system needs leaders who do the right thing over the popular thing, even when it means risking losing office. This is called statesmanship.

Voters would do well to remember this when choosing leaders, it’s an increasingly rare quality we select for.
No NDA when interviewing at the Fortune 100s/Global Fortune 500 I've worked at.
It's complicated. https://doi.org/10.1093/nsr/nwaa036
Fsh would be the only one extant back then.
The rule "no gatherings over 250 people" isn't a blanket rule. It will impact cities more than rural places. The flexibility is already built into the schema.
> Even if you have ideological or economical reasons for wanting to believe the climate crisis to be a hoax - at one point or another the drive for self-preservation simply has to kick in, doesn't it?

Eventually it will happen. But then it might already be too late. People live in their filter bubbles and these can be really hard to burst. Especially, when you deal with ideology and an us-versus-them mentality, where the opposite party is for climate protection and you are in the climate change hoax camp.
Everything you know about Twitter character counting is wrong
If you believe them, they don't have any gay people either.
There’s a lot that governments can do. Ireland just closed schools and universities, and banned large indoor gatherings, for instance, and directed companies to make work from home available where possible (though this last one is really more a suggestion). This won’t get rid of the virus, but it may help to slow it and thus reduce deaths.

Closing borders, certainly at this point, seems largely futile.
Shopify did not respond to Business Insider's request
for comment. It's unclear if whether the $1,000 amount
is a bonus employees will see in their paychecks, or
whether workers will need to expense the items they
purchase.

Does it make any actual difference? Yes, it could theoretically impact somebody's tax bracket, but do we need that level of detail?

Also someone is blaming a lot of companies with the "why wait?" theme.

The thing is, moving to all remote is not a company does overnight. Particularly with matters of security perimeters, there's a lot of planning that has to be done. Corporate firewalling on premise is a thing... Corporate firewalling a laptop at home is a completely different matter. Assumptions you can make about network in the office vanish once the employee is at home.

Maybe the wait was to implement at least some basic VPN connectivity, proper firewalling and stuff like that?
I think one of the big things here is that the refinement proofs from the models for isolation, IPC fast path, capability access control, and scheduling to C source to binary are strongest when the kernel is built with a particular configuration on particular hardware. When all of these are satisfied and you are on a trusted platform, you have very very strong guarantees that what is modeled is what you get. But it's not like this is hidden. They have make it pretty clear what the verified platforms and configurations are[1].

You should take a look at the verification chain though[1]. It is fairly extensive. It's not like they proved just a small part of a system in a general way.

1: https://docs.sel4.systems/Hardware/

2: https://github.com/seL4/l4v
Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
There was very little fallout to the Y2K bug, which begs the question: was the Y2K crisis real and well handled or not really a crisis at all?
This all assumes that executive level government functions rationally and in the long-term national interest. Which is normally the case, but this is an abnormal decade.

Let me be extremely cynical (at risk of down-voting) about the current US administration's motives:

Consider Trump's just-announced travel ban on the EU-26. It misses out the UK and Ireland, despite COVID-19 having a toe-hold in those countries ... but the UK and Ireland have Trump-branded golf courses! A ban on travel from UK and IE would hurt their viability, so it was quietly omitted.

Meanwhile, the Trump hotel chain is being hit as badly as anyone else in the hospitality trade by fears of a pandemic, and revenue of his hotels in Florida is driven by spring break traffic. So he's downplaying anything that might reduce vacation travel at spring break.

Denying that COVID-19 is anything to worry about is personally advantageous for Donald Trump as a hotel magnate, because it protects his investments. It's disadvantageous for the USA as a whole, but where do his priorities lie?
Japan's density is way higher though.
What’d scummy about being easy to defeat? Or do you mean google?
It's disappointing that the WHO and national agencies seem not able to adequately inform the public about their assessment of the situations, the models they're using and the conclusions they're drawing.

Right now, the most shared article on Corona is written by a growth hacker from SF who cobbled together an Excel sheet and recommends it to people to decide whether they should close their companies or stay at home.

I'm not saying this is bad, I just think such recommendations and articles should come from people that have more experience with modeling such epidemics.

Fitting a dataset with an exponential function is easy, it just doesn't tell us much beyond the current growth rate. It's also a bit ridiculous to judge how bad the situation is in a given country without accounting for differences like the number of tests that are done and the overall population of these countries.
So the dataset is good, the calculation rubbish. Says a lot about the site. Why don't we just stick to the WHO, and the official last cal sources (CDC, Johns Hopkins, Robert Koch, whatever)?
Some thing I was wondering about this kind of architecture, how would you express some constrains, like foreign key constraints or unique key constraint? Would they still be in the database, or would you put them into some inner layer?
This reminds me of my department head. It hurts.
Does McDonald's burger flipper gets paid same everywhere in the world? Or for any other local service or product do these people will pay Silicon valley prices? Otherwise it would just mean software people do think of themselves as a superior species that earthly rules of economics must not apply to them.
You don't get rich off of wage income.
Issue Trackers having a blast on GCC-announce
Somehow I had not heard about the James Webb Space Telescope before now. The Hubble means a lot to me personally, and I have dreading the day I'd hear it was going out of service. I can't wait to see what this new telescope will provide for us.
This meta-analysis isn't ground breaking. What has been known for awhile is that AA works very well for some, but not at all for others. This has always been the dilemma with AA in research as well as clinically. It won't affect treatment because no one was ever discouraged from trying it at least in my experience.
If it's not happening in my back yard then it can't possibly be happening anywhere else. That's the level of delusion we're dealing with.