skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> By the way, isn't depending on SAT for years and everyone bitching about SAT is a gross failure of our education system? Take any serious test, be it STEM competitions, JEE, or NCEE, multiple-choice questions are the easiest part. The differentiating questions are all kinds of word problems. Yet the US can't afford such test, but countries like India and China can.

We do have this kind of system in place, I'm closely involved in it. The Olympiads in the US basically fill the vacuum of objective assessment at a high level. The entry round for each Olympiad is pretty similar in level to, e.g. what you would get in JEE-Advanced. But they're also far less popular...
As far as the XKCD comic is concerned, if a brute force hacker knows this strategy for password generation, they'd only need to brute-force four "bits" (common words) of information. Of course, "knowing that strategy" is a monumental assumption, but password managers trump both those options any day.
It is terribly depressing that a '/s' was needed. The times we live in.
Naive question: in the states I looked at, the "California-style shelter-in-place" line consistently goes up again toward the right side of the graph (end of June to July), whereas none of the other approaches have that second lift. Why is that?
Is that Ive or Cook though
Well seeing as how fatalities from workplace related injuries average about 5,000-6,000 a year, maybe we'll end up ahead.

In all seriousness the math around the trade-offs inherent in all these discussions seems oddly absent. About three million people die every year in the U.S., many of those deaths preventable with far less drastic measures than we are taking here, and it doesn't seem like we're having anything like the same discussion about priorities with this specific situation.

I'm not saying the answer would necessarily come out any different, but it's strange we're not really asking the questions.
GPUs aren't really designed for 2D graphics out of the box. I've written about this before [0].

Text rendering can be tricky, but not that much trickier -- it's just the same curves at smaller scales.

Not sure what you mean by stencil textures. Are you talking about the NV_path_rendering approach where you stencil out the path? Yeah, that's not really a thing that people do these days.

[0] https://blog.mecheye.net/2019/05/why-is-2d-graphics-is-harde...
There is a lot of evidence that this is absolutely not the case. On of my links in a prior comment indicated there are now many universities that are standard test optional and keep stats comparing the performance between standard test students versus other students to find no difference in performance.

Consider your example. You are a famous developer well known for a performance oriented programming language. Of the many computer science students that graduated from MIT I cannot name any who are as well known for such. It is impossible to say that if your SAT scores were closer to perfect you might have gained admission. Regardless you have clearly excelled where others have not regardless of institution or institutional entry. At the least this suggests the incorrect combination of parameters were assessed given real world performance.
Nobody knows the asymptomatic rate for certain, one way or the other. We don't know the rate of false positives with existing tests.
Founding conditions and the survival of new firms (2016)
Absolutely world class DJ set right now.
That's generally what you should do with a scientific model: state your assumptions and methodology clearly.

And most if not all scientific and engineering models spread properties across a group of objects and use averages. R_0 is an average. And it's the average behavior that matters here

In a well tested population, you might be able to focus interventions on infected people and their contacts. In the US population, the people most likely to spread the disease are those who interact most with other people. That means getting those people to reduce their interaction rate.

It's a semi-empirical model, as are many if not most models used to make decisions.
A big issue here are mobile/touch devices.

You don't want to force your users into keyboard driven interaction there.

But as decent mobile support is almost a requirement nowadays (even if just inside the browser), you end up with two completely different interaction designs and would require users learning everything twice.
I'd put a $5 bottle that's been aerated against a $50 that hasn't any day of the week.
> It's not that you didn't have a supply of patients for clinical trials.

No, it's that you couldn't guarantee that every patient could be tested every day in order to measure whether the drug is effective. That is what people are complaining about, and it won't be fixed until testing capacity is reliably there.

Bigger trials would only make that worse.
This is pretty much it. OSX is what locks me in to Apple. Ironic that it (OSX) is free.
A landline costs just as much as a smart phone plan, so very few people can justify the cost of both. I find that having just one end of a conversation on a landline improves the quality greatly and pay the ~$40 a month to have one (also, the long ago installed alarm is hooked up to it). Smart phone to smart phone calls are bad in many ways (drops, static, distortion, etc.) but what I find the most annoying is the excess delay. The old landline to landline calls had no more delay than talking to someone in person.
Loosely related threads from recent days:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22453100

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22573188

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22573656

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22573926
YouTube Marketing, What Is and How To
My point is... If you have enough foodstore for X% of the population to make it through the 5-10 year period of crop failure, but can't do that if you try to feed 100% of the people what do you do?

I choose the 10% and continuity of civilization over 100% and complete destruction of society. And if I'm in the 90% .... I'll be pissed, but what needs to be done must be done.

In WW2 sailors sealed themselves up below the waterline to save the ship at certain doom to themselves.

The universe is an ugly place... But to see the light of humanity possibly extinguished is a worse prospect for me personally.
Website appears to have just taken down my PC.

Opened tab, everythings slows down instantly, then black screen.

Brand new 32gb ryzen 3700 build that's otherwise stable (memtest, games etc)
I wanted to write this comment. The researcher is indeed a specialist from what I read on the internet but given his total turn about concerning Covid I would personally not put any trust in his work. He participated in the crisis the country is facing right now, by saying on social networks there was no real danger about the virus.
Securing Capital Through Downturn
This is all fine and good. And I should state that I am on board with the actions (in San Francisco/California) taken so far. However, I'm not unconditionally so.

I get that right now we're buying time. My current understanding is that we're trying to slow the spread of the disease because the existing health care system was going to quickly collapse under the weight; whether or not that should have been the case or not is a discussion for another day. I also understand that we are -not- trying to contain the disease, just "serialize" its progression (so to speak) through the population.

Assuming that understanding is sufficiently correct, what I'm not hearing enough of is what is being done with the time we're buying. Many in the Hacker News audience likes to talk about "externalities" and how the wise appreciates those externalities in their actions. Shutting down the economy has externalities; those externatlities can be life or death as well. If the strategy of those implementing the "shelter in place" is one of just waiting it out: then I'm going to be off the wagon fairly quickly. I want to start hearing strategies that start to address the issues of how we minimize impacts of this problem. I want to know what we're buying for the pain that we're being sold on. I want to know when people estimate that the societal damages of the illness start to be outweighed by the damages of our response.

I see the admin of the site suggesting we're buying time for these things. I want to start hearing this from the officials making policy.
I mean, what if I posted a write-up on how to use a bellows from a forge in lieu of a ventilator. Wouldn't you agree that's downright negligent if not actively harmful? Distracting from the actual problem? Would you at least agree it's totally unhelpful?

Just because it's got firmware doesn't mean that description isn't apt.
Those are hospitalizations, not infections.
Yeah, I think it would have to be used as a way to get people to pay extra. Like, some private rooms are available for an extra charge, but when the crisis hits, they aren't available anymore?
The graphs are the number of cases requiring hospital care.
>We have a core developer team publishing open source designs with ongoing communication with medical professionals regarding needs requirements, testing and validation processes. The developer team is led by OpenLung in Canada in collaboration with an Irish based engineering and operations team. The developer team is led by Trevor Smale, Dr. Andrew Finkle, and David O’Reilly from OpenLung as well as Conall Laverty and Dr. Keith Kennedy from Ireland.

It sounds like a lot of these vents will end up in the hands of medical professionals. We're looking at a future with warehouses or stadiums full of sick individuals, and also a future where everyone will be pulled from every specialty to work on COVID-19, so there is some evidence that trained professionals and patients will outnumber commercial ventilators. Depending on how many people get sick at once, we could easily end up in a situation where the patients waiting outside are so numerous that they could consume as much equipment as anyone could put together, no matter how much the real manufacturers ramp up production.
lots of “reinfections” were debunked as false positives. search on r/COVID19 for details.
Yeah, writing a scanline rasterizer from scratch is fun. For beginners, I advocate the sample-based approach I've written about, as functional "is inside shape" can be easier to reason about for simple cases. It's harder for non-convex polygons though :)

https://magcius.github.io/xplain/article/rast1.html

The edge cases are similar -- precision in computing the path intersections and winding curves.
We are not doing 16,000 / 42 = 380x more tests per day on March 20th vs March 1st. It’s not even obvious if we are overlooking a larger fraction of infections today than back then.

Also of note that 30% daily increase I spoke of underestimates the difference between March 1 and March 20th.
Check out JQBX (https://www.jqbx.fm)
Tesla Model 3 Vulnerability – Disable Autopilot Notifications, Speedometer, etc.
It's doubling even faster right now, but that may be more related to increased testing than anything.

Unfortunately, the US is further along the curve than all these sites are showing due to the fact that we didn't have any testing in the beginning (and still don't have enough).
There's a Coffee API for that. Uses the covfefe protocol.
I have a laptop with 8gb of RAM and have never had any problems browsing the internet or even playing intensive games.
I agree. The graphs are very pretty but would look very different if the R0 was even slightly modified. The mortality rates probably varies widely by state demographics as well.

That said, the implication that strict isolation should be maintained is almost certainly correct.
The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra is doing just this, and it’s been pretty successful they believe (!)

https://www.mso.com.au/contact/mso-coronavirus-statement/
He's done great, too, and if either of them were in charge of coordinating the response it would be preferable.
Don't hold your breath on repair kits. It's a very difficult repair and you can't separate the butterfly keyboard from the top case. You have to replace the whole top case. The best you could maybe do is not replace the battery - but it's all glued. Good luck. I wouldn't attempt that sort of thing, and Apple doesn't.

I wouldn't be surprised if Apple bended that 4 year rule, though. But also realize that Apple will eventually stop repairing all computers just due to time passage. And also, eventually, from a financial perspective it's more cost effective to find a working used computer (after heavy depreciation) than to actually do a repair even if that repair is doable.

I do think that their replacement keyboards have better reliability than the early models. I didn't have any problems after getting mine replaced - I believe I used the replacement keyboard for around two years. But I still wasn't willing to keep the computer longer. I went straight from the 2016 to the 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro.

In any event, it was a nice opportunity for an upgrade. My 2016 was still worth $1000, and I ended up with 4 more cores, double the storage, and an absolutely massive increase in graphics performance. Using the education store and picking up in a state with no sales tax did a lot to make that price more palatable.
Very much the same here. First job is harder, but demonstrate ability and no recruiter has ever asked since.

School is essentially trash for demonstrating "can program in a business environment". If you're aiming for a research-heavy position it may help, but that's an extreme minority of jobs. And after a couple years it's useless again anyway - you're either continuing your self-education and improving, or you're stagnant, and your prior education doesn't play all that much of a role.
How is the fan noise?
If this game is as good as the previous instalment in the series it won't make a difference. There are several types of players, the ones who buy games on launch day, those will still buy. The ones who wait for sales, those will still buy it, the pirates who try and then buy and those who only play cracked games. Only the latter group won't be buying the game and they weren't going to in the first place.
Imagine a stadium filled with cots, where there are many doctors walking around telling people "you're going to be okay" while triaging equipment. (An extreme example but not impossible.) I think if you gave a nurse in that situation some forge bellows and realistic instructions for using them, they just might try it. When you're in a real sticky situation, plenty of medical professionals will be willing to shoot for remote chances. What would they rather do, push someone out of triage or try the servo contraption?
I wrote about that... wow, close to exactly 10 years ago:

https://journal.dedasys.com/2010/03/30/where-tcl-and-tk-went...

Still worth a look if you like to learn new stuff though. Tk is neat, and Tcl's C API is still the bees knees in my opinion.
Tandem- Every Company Is Remote
Attention Hacker News – Combat Covid19: Schools can't waste the school year
Dear Hackernews community,

We, at TAI, have just opened up our internal online whiteboard classroom application for external teachers and professors to continue teaching even during the Covid19 times. Most schools are not prepared for so many months of the Covid19 crisis. We are trying to do our bit to ensure that student learning doesn't stop. It's a very easy UI and allows parallel classes with up to 60 people per class. Do check out https://class.tai.school/. You can share files, videos, screen, access premium K-12 teaching content, record the entire meeting and join classes with one click. It's free. Available in English & Hindi. Do try it out. I think it will work great if you are looking for an easy to use meeting application.

I love this product myself. The TAI classroom design simulates a real classroom and captures small details to enhance the learning/ meeting experience amongst teachers and students. It's perfected after doing classes with thousands of TAI students who use basic mobile and tough internet connections - now the UI has become so easy and robust that even children can use it.

Your voice matters a lot. It will be great if your share can help even one more teacher continue classes during tough times.

Kind Regards, Trina
I really don't want to get into an argument about this again, but I would add to this list -- if you're already being responsible about your NodeJS dependencies and paying attention to their source, consider going a step farther and vendoring them as well.

If you're building a library that you want to put on NPM, obviously don't vendor those dependencies. But if you're building a website, or a game, or an electron app, there are a lot of scenarios where without too much work you can make sure that all of your dependencies are pure-JS, and then you can just commit them to your Git repo. You get a lot of benefits out of that, but specifically for security you get to know that when you download a repository you're not getting any unvetted code in your dependencies.

For a non-trivial portion of time, vendoring dependencies was just advised as good behavior by the NPM maintainers. And at some point the advice flipped and now everyone in the JS ecosystem hates the idea, and for the life of me I can't figure out why -- as far as I know, languages like Go and Rust still have good support for this, so it's not like it's a fringe practice.

----

"But won't that spike the size of my Git repo?"

Usually no, not unless your dependencies contain large binaries or you have a massive repo. Most of the projects from most of the people reading this don't fall into that category.

"But can't I just set up a private NPM mirror?"

Sure, but you probably won't. And if you do, you'll probably set it up to do something like auto-pull new versions from NPM which defeats the security gains.

"But don't lockfiles solve this problem?"

Virtually none of the engineers at your company care about lock file security. If they get a warning that a hash mismatches, they'll just delete the lockfile and reinstall. Never mind the fact that lockfiles are tied to semantic versioning and allow bug-fix changes unless you run `npm ci` instead of `npm install`. Your engineers are probably not running `npm ci`, and malware can be snuck into bug-fixes.

"But won't this break platform-specific code?"

Yes, but many projects don't need platform specific code. And to be blunt, if your dependencies are pulling in `node-gyp`, you're probably going to end up with an install error some day on an unfamiliar environment that makes you hate yourself anyway. So only use platform-specific code if you really have to. For example, pure-JS implementations of SASS are fast enough that for most projects you do not need the C-compiled version.
Yeah I'm talking about that. What do people use then?
>Also, the claim that it's an "open-source" mask is somewhat soured by the fact that they appear to have patented it.

The article did not say that the mask itself was patented. They may have patented a small component (probably the copper voodoo stuff which may or may not actually work) and are giving people freedom to print the mask, patented component included, in the time of crisis.

It's ethical business dealing. You get to save lives and make a buck off the IP later. Win/win.
I get by with 8GB in my 2015 MPB, but only because I use aggressive ad blocking to keep browser memory usage somewhat in check. I still have 3.5GB of swap in use and 1.25GB of RAM compressed. I suppose for a light user who doesn't keep as many browser tabs open, 8GB may be sufficient even without an ad blocker, but it's close.

16GB is definitely more than "marginal". There's nothing wrong with a mid-range laptop shipping with 16GB of DRAM.
> The SNES was basically a mid-range Apple II with some slightly different hardware.

I assume you mean the IIgs with the 65816 like the SNES.

This made me dive into what the IIgs video hardware was like. I know it had an Ensoniq chip for 32-voice sound but didn't know too much about the graphics. Looks like it could do 640x200 with 256 colors.

The Wolfenstein 3d port is interesting even if it does need an accelerator card to run decently. I'm not sure how that was pulled off on the SNES (I don't think Wolf3d had the SuperFX).
> Is there any technical/security benefit at all to private blockchains?

It really depends on what you want out of your blockchain.

For example, the backend of git is essentially a blockchain. It's extremely useful, even for a solo developer.
The web coffee API is a troll FYI. There is no covfefe protocol.
With browsers eating half a gig just to launch these days, I agree 8 GB is borderline. I often hit the limit even just doing web browsing, e-mailing and a mix of other apps here and there, nothing fancy.
It's really really good!
Caleesi is phenomenal, here's her SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/caleesi
They're starting to open up now. It works fine as long as you have broad testing & can identify everyone who has been exposed to it.

Exponential curves are easy to stop as long as you catch them early.
Are you sure it’s 16GB RAM? I maxed out mine and only have 8GB.
From my reading of it, the NY order is directed at businesses—essentially, "you must not require your employees to be on site."

It's not primarily intended to tell individuals "you must stay home," just to strongly encourage that and make it easier for us to do so.
It's shipping. My kit arrived today.
Live DJ, live mixing.

There's a drum kit in the background if that helps :P
Interesting. I've listened to Gruber's podcast before, but don't think I've heard Ritchie on as a guest. I'll find an episode and dig in.

I've watched Ritchie's Youtube channel on and off over the last few years, and he still gives me the same feeling as his written work.
Mortality rate of people who get put on a ventilator is in the ballpark of 40%.
Trump Invokes Defense Production Act to Get Medical Supplies to Hospitals
Everything you need to know about the MacBook Air 2020
That group is not large but they weren't buyers to start with so they aren't counted as lost sales.
If i enjoyed power broker will i enjoy this book? How do the two compare in terms of density? Power broker was very information dense
> seller A was powerless to stop it

They could select the "Amazon barcode" option (instead of the default "Manufacturer barcode") under "Barcode preference" which prevents commingling (but requires the seller to apply seller-specific barcode labels to all units).
The part where Ive stopped working on Apple products for years so the Park could have cooler door handles rubbed some people the wrong way.
I can see it being incredibly frustrating in actual use though. If it's anything like how the Apple TV's remote works, I expect it's going to screen record as looking very intuitive, but in practice it's going to be all about inertia and how to break out of the current selection.

I personally absolutely hate this feeling. Tactile feedback is useful for things like knowing if you've drilled into a stud or just drywall... not for moving a cursor around screen.

QUICK EDIT: It's the same reason we hate scroll jacking. Let me do my inputs as it feels natural, don't have the app dictate how I should motion.
>
Inflammation can be combated with commonly available non drug remedies, like caffeine, lettuce, avoiding pro inflammatory foods (avoid peanut oil like the devil himself made it for you, limit or avoid bacon as it is hard on the lungs).

This sounds like very suspicious folk advice, maybe based off a handful of data mined studies. I appreciate the tip about coughing up a lung though.