skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How do I convince my employer to let me work from home?
I am 8 months post Autologous stem-cell transplant for treatment of Hodgkin's Lymphoma and as such, I am still immuno-suppressed. I am already extremely concerned about contracting COVID-19 since I am required to visit the hospital once every three weeks for post transplant treatment, and I know they're already under-equipped to handle the situation. I am a developer who could work from home, if my employer allowed. Unfortunately, my employer has taken the "wait until it's an issue" stance, and expects that employees use their PTO to cover any days we take off. Their current work from home stance is "it is not currently possible to allow all employees to work remotely" meaning that no employees can work remotely.

For the health and safety of myself and those around me, how can I convince my employer to allow me to work from home?
I had the same feeling when listening to the audio version of Robert Sheckley's Dimension of Miracles. (Recommended!)
My impression is the same as dwheeler. Y2K could have been a crisis were it not for the swift, expensive and sometimes heroic actions of coders who saved us from a calamity. I don't know that putting gallons of water in the basement was a necessity - water treatment plants probably would have still functioned - but even those plants are controlled by computers, so I'd say it was collective action.
Bringing an artifact forward in time would skip over the times where degradation occurred. Wouldn't it?
This is a clear externality caused by having a contracting company between an employer and employee. Contracting companies are incentivize to increase their margin by reducing benefits, including maintaining employee health.

If we're going to also start a better discussion about working from home, can we do the same for the proliferation of second-class contractors? The lack of health care and sick leave is going to drastically increase the spread of coronavirus.

To say nothing of employees in retail, food service, and maintenance.
That was very rude. But it made me realize just how inaccurate my mouse is.
The third option is "because they don't want to be blamed for model error". Governments aren't necessarily competent, but you can try to get them to understand 5%/95% confidence intervals, at least in hindsight. If you publicly release a prediction, and then the real outcome is the 10% confidence line, you're probably going to be yelled at for being wrong regardless of the error bars.

Of course, if the center of the prediction is horrifying, "people don't understand confidence intervals" then becomes a case of avoiding societal breakdown.
Ask HN: Plausibility of an idea to limit the spread of Covid-19
The challenge of the current COVID-19 pandemic is well-known.

Could a voluntary user-tracking app help reduce the R0 level of the COVID-19 virus?

One of the main challenges with this virus is that carriers of the virus become infectious well before they show symptoms. Consequently, they pass on the infection before they can be isolated.

Apps such as Google Maps already track users' movements to a high level of precision. A similar app could be created that tracked users' movements and notified people they had interacted with if they got infected.

It would work like this:

- Users' movements are tracked

- Upon developing a fever (etc.) the user notifies the app

- The app checks their movements during the estimated period they could have been infectious

- Every other user who was in their presence for X minutes gets notified and requested to isolate themselves

- Recursively check those users' movements to see if they may have passed on the virus

Disadvantages I can think of off the top of my head:

- Requires simultaneous voluntary use by a large proportion of a regional population

- Possibility of false positives by bad actors (would an occasional false positive be so bad)?

- Requires some minimal altruism by the user (they won't be helped directly)
Isn't it possible for the contractors to unite and force altogether to let their individual contracts with Facebook be changed?
You are wrong. While the majority can create the rules the people that matter aren't the majority but creators and skilled professionals. When someone creates something they have absolute power over it until they reveal it to the world. They can even choose to destroy what they create rather than reveal it.

When the majority (consumers) decide they want everything for free and that they want absolute power over the creations of others creators will simply stop revealing what they create and stop making their creations available for purchase. Instead creating things for private use.
that one is complicated too. see how he jokes about the last president being involved in the crime and that he would have won the election if he wasn't in jail? well, turn out after the election, investigations found out there was zero credible evidence and last week he was receiving an homage in europe for his political career. https://en.mercopress.com/2020/03/03/socialist-paris-mayor-m...
Is Java in fashion? This thread is about the fashionability of languages, not the age of the language.
I have a buddy who works with Prolog for a "major credit analysis firm" (his words). His code is basically fraud detection and credit scores (i.e. suitability for receiving a loan that you will pay off)

On a different note, does anyone know if WAM (or any logic programming advanced Instruction Set Archictecture) has been implemented in hardware, such as VHDL etc ?
Good list. I would add a clear and accessible way to report a perceived problem without fear of some type of reprisal from the company.

But I can also see how that could be abused by bad actors so I guess it would be a tricky part of the policy to do correctly.
It's adorable that these answers are all in the past tense. This is still going on. Many of these systems still exist.
Do you have any evidence that learning about ethics leads to more ethical behavior?
I'd add:

- 2-factor auth support

- federated login support (i.e. login with Google/Facebook/etc buttons)

- some sort of indication of encryption in-flight and at-rest, and who handles the keys (e.g. is there a per-user key that tech support can't even access without user grant, or is there a single hard-codes AES key in the APK etc that everyone knows)
Yeah, I'm flagging this post.
I find the pin thing after restart absolutely ridiculous. First, it's annoying. Not all of us face the same security threats, so a casual unlock is all that is needed for the vast majority of people in the world. Second, it defeats the "something you have and something you know" premise. It'd be best to just give users a choice.
The 2038 bug is coming. Will the response be complacent because conspiracy theorists think Y2K was fake news?
Covid-19 Quick Resources
Start coughing loudly at your desk.
The language would be more complex if it tried to specify all behavior. UB allows it to be simpler.

Do not confuse simple with easy.
Coronavirus: Some recovered patients may have reduced lung function
I'd appreciate it if you could begin. I read the article and didn't spot anything seriously wrong.
I’m not at my computer, so I can’t double-check this, but IIRC the issue was that ((long long)0xffffffff << 32) is undefined because it shifts past 2^63-1, which causes an overflow of the long long. (I know the undefined behavior sanitizer flagged some equivalent code in a Linux reimplementation I was working on, which is how I noticed it in the kernel.)
> Facebook is not telling them they have to come into the office. Rather, it’s the contracting companies that these people actually work for.

Though that's one of the benefits of outsourcing: you get all the benefits of squeezing your workers to the maximum (which helps the bottom line), while still having deniability for PR purposes.

Facebook is responsible unless they loudly and publicly order their vendors to treat their employees better.
Are you brave enough to hunt for value in a bear market?
I think they have an app like that in China, although I think people in western countries would probably not be that willing to use it, for privacy concerns, and it would probably also violate GDPR.
GPEG can make streaming of games and animations far more efficient
One step forward. Hopefully a positive outcome of this pandemic will be better global corroboration.
A "fallacy that seems universal with healthcare folks" is not expected to be related to universal healthcare.
Switzerland imposes sweeping measures to contain coronavirus
With coronavirus causing shutdowns, what tools are you using to stay productive?
OOC, what does flagging do exactly? What does a flag mean here?
According to this verified tweet, Kaletra didn't seem effective (point #5 in the linked images)

https://twitter.com/katyw2004/status/1236848300143280128

verification tweet: https://twitter.com/mshah85/status/1237231277251514368
> A basic checklist of best practice for internal self-audit (SQL injection, plaintext data, enumeration attacks)

I think this is a massive ask/knowledge expectation for the average person. A simple warning label about changing the device password from the default would be a major step in the right direction for consumers.
"people are corrupted therefore europe bad"
No, it's an omelet.
When is your workplace ever certified disease free?

While you’re at it, file a complaint about them making you drive to work in a car.
This might get me sent home, but this doesn't help me continue to make money while out of work. The problem is I am not in a position where I can take two weeks of unpaid leave. We are already only given 12 days of PTO, and I have to use those to cover the days I go to treatment.
Well, if you want to be more likely to get reaction from any one of 10 or so odd people the typical patch series goes to directly (sometimes simply because they may have contributed some code to some file you're also modifying now) + hundreds more on a bunch of subsys and more general mailing lists, forcing them to register on some random web service of your choice and then monitor it for further communication and replies and patch series revisions is not the easiest proposition.

Everyone knows how to reply to an e-mail. It's very low effort way to find interested people to review your patch/and get some reaction from maintainers.

That's how it is now. That's not to say, current system is not somewhat problematic to some maintainers/subsystems, but that's not really your businesss as a contributor.
I agree. It belongs to a conspiracy theories or advocacy sub-reddit, not to HN.
This is a snide and irrelevant comment.
That'd need at least 2L gin to wash it down with though, which could be problematic depending on the frequency of your 500mg prescription.
Yeah, bad vibes.
Notes on COVID19 from UCSF Expert Panel – March 10
Don't forget multi-player mAngband. :) https://mangband.org/
Mustermenschen
Accenture and WiPro

I think at this point it's fair to dox the individual middle-managers and C-level schmucks, expose them to the consequences of their choices.
Someone just has to put 10 minutes in, the rest is copy paste.
Heads of government and ministers are a near-perfect demographic for its spread. Older than average, travel a lot, often stressed/jetlagged, frequently in meetings, and always shaking hands with an endless stream of strangers.
GitHub’s new notifications: a case of regressive design
> When is your workplace ever certified disease free?

Never, but taking these actions in this situation is definitely negligence at best. It's like running a hospital forcing people to work without providing soap or hand sanitizer.
I graduated college in 4.5 years, with 6 different short internship stints at companies and research groups.

At my first internship, I was more dead weight than productive, but by my last three I was a contributor to many nontrivial projects.

Those experiences (1) were absolutely invaluable in my growth into a capable engineer (2) gave me a sharp perception of what life is like at different-stage companies (headcount 5-10 to headcount 5000+), and (3) gave me an idea of how “industry trends” actually manifested in different companies. By the end of my years in college, it seemed like these experiences had put me on a different track, career-wise, even though I was no smarter than my peers.

Friends who had maxed out their investment in GPA and personal projects were in a relative bubble. They could crack the coding interview, but didn’t know their way around a shell, or what the relative risks of adopting one database over another might be. In hindsight, I guess these internships might have leapfrogged me past the “junior engineer” phase. In any case, the experience had positive impacts on my career.

I guess it might not be a path for everyone (and I’m very grateful for those first few companies that paid me for those relatively unproductive summers), but I agree that these kinds of expected-to-be-unproductive incubative periods are under-looked milestones to growth that I can’t recommend enough, especially if you get them at completely different places.
Show HN: DSLR Webcam List (Cam Link Compatible)
Typically people aren't replacing the antennas or radio amps, so I'd keep the radiation issue in the theoretical bin.

As for bad parts and bad repair jobs, sure. I would think that owners are incentivized to buy parts that are safe and to install them correctly.
Of course some battery batches will be bad, but that's true for authentic parts too. Remember the Samsung Note battery issues?
Maybe because the false-positive rate for asymptomatic patients is estimated at 80%?
Yeah; it seems like someone should make an open source competitor just to spite these clowns.

Arguably, the German weather service should be forced to open source their ad-supported app to “encourage competition”.
So you need an additional password to reach your e-mail on your phone? Because once you're in e-msil almost everything is open.
Exactly. If you're going to do a birthday-based PIN, it's important to consider that the 10s digit of month and year have heavily reduced search-space.

4-digit Birthday-pins are probably good as long as they're not your birthday or that of your kids, and you do the last 2 digits of year, last digit of month, last digit of day, go capture as much of the entropy from the date as possible.
Aren’t we just allowing the idea of licensing contract overwhelm ourselves for little reasons?

When you buy a book, you own the hardware but not IP. You’re “licensed a nonexclusive irrevocable right to use, that allows reverse engineering but without sublicensing clauses” aka you can’t xerox the full book and sell it for $5. When you buy a sandwich, same except hardware can be eaten.

Really the deal of “mandatory licensed” software is that you can’t pirate it, and that should already be covered by laws. It should not require a million page contract and those contract mustn’t be much more than blank pages.
This is in Germany or the U.S.?
Greatly detailed report and impressive resolution speed, indeed, but sadly it fell behind the cracks regarding disclosure.
True. I updated my comment.
If this is a valid basis, should they be blocked from offering a website too? If you don't think so, why? I can add a page to my home screen.
Sick Politicians and a Lack of Urgency: Tracking Iran’s Response to Coronavirus
Jonathan Blow on Slow Software
Right, so it's a variable, but if we can independently nail down a false negative/positive rate, then we could try to infer the true rate of infection, but problem is (assuming US numbers):

* assume false positive rate of 10%, assume true positive rate of 100% (it's not but let's be generous)

* maybe 1/10 of the population (30 million) gets tested

* lets say 100,000 people have COVID right now (50x the official number)

number of positive tests = 30 million * 0.1 + 100k * 1 = 3,100,000

fraction of postive tests that actually have the disease = 1 / 31 = 3.2%

problem is FPR (1) depends on the population tested (i.e. p(covid | positive test) != p(covid|positive test, some symptoms) != ...), (2) we need very accurate measurements of FPR because:

lets say we constrain FPR to 10% +/- 1% ==> 10% uncertainty in FPR -- that means our inference of the number of infected people is:

n_infected = (n_positive_tests - FPR * n_tested)

which is: -200,000 to 400,000

so...not very useful.
This is why systems like this ought to have reason codes, each reason code should have a different friendly message sent to the user.
Heard something about this on one of Sam Harris' two podcasts on the subject this week - that this is typically because of a false negative test (indicating recovery from the virus) during what in reality is a longer, uninterrupted period of infection.
How 15 Minutes saved me $1k in car insurance (2011)
Update: Apparently the test was negative (although there are unreliable narrators abound): https://twitter.com/johnrobertsFox/status/123849011476819149...

> After telling
@FoxNews that his father had a preliminary POSITIVE test for coronavirus, Eduardo Bolsonaro now tells
@FoxNews the test was NEGATIVE. Bolsonaro says has been in touch with the White House.
This seems like it would increase the distance that you need to hold the phone to take a selfie. And won't have Bokeh.

Bokeh is the effect of blurring out the background. Its important because it lets you isolated the subject, like a human face, from the background.

Still, if it does one thing better than other lenses, it will be useful.
I once had a signal processing problem, for which I heard a rumor that Guy had solved (or at least investigated) in one of his books.

The problem reduces to finding the shortest ordered sequence of integers drawn from 1..N, whose content and pairwise differences contain a complete set of all the integers from 1..N.

Obviously the complete 1..N is a trivial solution, so the interesting solutions must be shorter than that.

Without loss of generality, from symmetry we always put an interval of 1 at beginning. We write the solution in a line, with the differences calculated below in a lattice. The aim is to get every integer up to N appearing in the triangle somewhere.

So the simplest non-trivial solution is:

[1 3]
2

Where [13] is the solution, and 2 is the distance 3-1.

The relative effectiveness of the solution can be measured as length/n, e.g. [13] is 2/3 = 0.66. The ratio must be less than 1 to be non-trivial and interesting.

The next solutions have the same length (is N odd or N even easier to achieve, due to symmetry arguments?):

1 2 4 3/4 = 0.75
1 2
3

1 3 5 3/5 = 0.6
2 2
4

There can be more than one non-symmetric solution, e.g. for N=6 even:

1 2 3 6 4/6 = 0.66
1 1 3
2 4
5

1 3 4 6
2 1 2
3 3
5

N=7 odd has symmetric solutions:

1 3 6 7 4/7 = 0.57
2 3 1
5 4
6

1 2 5 7
1 3 2
4 5
6

These are equivalent, and we disambiguate by putting the shortest interval 12 first, so 1257 implies 1367 is also a solution.

The N=8 solution is the same length as N=7, and it has the lowest ratio of 0.5:

1 2 5 8 4/8 = 0.5
1 3 3
4 6
7

What are some non-trivial solutions for N > 8 ?

1 2 3 7 9 5/9 = 0.56
1 1 4 2
2 5 6
6 7
8

1 2 3 5 8 10 6/10 = 0.6
1 1 2 3 2
2 3 5 5
4 6 7
7 8
9

1 2 3 5 9 11 6/11 = 0.55
1 1 2 4 2
2 3 6 6
4 7 8
8 9
10

...

I never looked-up Guy's literature (this was long before the internet), and I have not returned to the problem until now.

Does anyone know the relevant reference by Guy?

In fact, there were many other engineering considerations, to do with simplicity, small cost difference, failures & replacements, variable operational lengths, and especially noise reduction, which rendered the mathematical problem moot.

Can anyone guess my original signal processing application :)

The easiest answer is pretty good in most operational respects, and so represents the preferred engineering solution: just use the complete sequence 1..N and forget the cute math.

However, there seems something beautiful about that compact N=8 sequence with ratio 0.5:

1 2 5 8
Free text-based Covid-19 screening program
Thank you. I do not enjoy flagging.
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Please apply your own advice and bikeshed in your mind. Let people who come here for discussions discuss.
This isn't about me or what workflow I can learn. It's really about the entry point for beginners contributing to operating systems in general and making it accessible for them. Not just Linux.

On that matter, the barrier for being a long term Linux contributor is still very high and this is from the perspective of outsiders in general. So unless you're working at a company that does professional Linux development with the hardware and software resources available to you, it is actually the outsiders that will be definitely burned out and won't bother with contributing anyway and will go to another OS kernel project to start from.

Unlike you, I don't push beginners into the deep end for them to later drown. I get them started on an easier yet similar path where they use similar tools which eventually they later become potential Linux contributors at a company working on the kernel. But the starting path is certainly not Linux.
OpenSilver doesn't need to solve a problem other than the itch of their developers.

If other developers feel the same itch, or maybe if there are still projects out there that need to be ported, then OpenSilver will live, otherwise no. I'm pretty sure that there are Silverlight apps or games out there that were never ported to JavaScript. It might not have reached Flash's level of popularity, but I remember some.

Regardless, OpenSilver is an interesting piece of technology. And whether it lives or not, such opinion pieces are worthless.
Definitely not during a global pandemic, which is the whole fucking point.
Agreed on appliances, but I don't believe that 95% of new furniture like tables and couches will contain an IoT chip within 15 years. Hardly anyone is working on that.
It pretty much ruined my life in college and I haven't touched it since. After I stopped playing I still loved reading all those YACD posts on Usenet.
Satellite images show Iran has built mass graves amid coronavirus outbreak
Do you have a source for this information? This is the first I've heard of false-positives.
The article is talking about the traditional swiss/german model where an apprentice signed papers for a fixed term contract - they are not employees

Also certainly in the UK and the USA the cohort that would have filled the advanced apprentices (not trade ) that realistically could train junior developers now just goes to university.

So you have lost the ideal entry cohort - maybe ex vets in technical areas might but they would have all ready had the training to that level NVQ 3 4 and 5
Founder here. Happy to answer any questions
I really hope it's simply poor diagnosis. It appears to be, so it's not yet time to be scared.

But, if the virus is capable of mutating at the rate of the common cold and reinfect - I see no way out from under this other than a new way of life.
Surely privacy concerns are secondary under the current outbreak? And would GDPR be so important if a user opted out?
source??
Who cares? Now we have WebAsm.

This article is flogging a dead horse.
Niantic updates Pokémon Go in effort to limit coronavirus spread