skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Every time I hear about percentiles I am thinking: Why not just show the whole distribution instead of picking a few values? I was immediately thinking of just showing the latency distribution in a histogram and was pleased by the article doing exactly that. Of course graphing percentiles over time is much easier because they just represent a single value. Percentiles are very useful for finding latency spikes but not that good for analyzing them.
Non-paywalled: http://archive.md/hAx1V
Because patent trolls are hackers, just in a diffrent field. They abuse and subvert the societal algorithm that is law, which governs the limits of behaviour for synthetic organisms like companys.
The New Slack Experience
>I definitely got the impression that companies were just idly trawling for fresh meat, without seriously pursuing any senior talent

Well, there are also laws to consider. I can't prove this but I believe companies put out requests for super high level roles with bad conditions purposefully so they can go to the government and say they need HB1/Outsourcing/whatever because they can't fill all these open positions.
I still don't understand what problem ORMs solve and I've used many different ORM solutions for over a decade. SQL really is the best and simplest interface to get data out of a relational database.
Some people will argue that SQL is too complicated for simple queries like CREATE, READ, UPDATE, DELETE but I would disagree because these simple operations require simple queries.
Reading an element by ID is the easiest operation of all: `SELECT * from tablename WHERE id=idnumber`. It's not difficult at all.
Abstracting this away inside complex objects doesn't solve any real problems, it just creates more problems.

Sometimes developers will argue that they end up reusing variants of the same query in too many places... That is a poor argument; if that's the case, it means that your code is poorly designed.
If you organize your code in such a way that components have clear and distinct responsibilities, you're not going to end up with duplicated queries.

Also, the perceived 'impedence mismatch' between OOP languages and relational databases is only apparent when you try to design a data layer in OOP code which exposes a general purpose interface to execute specific queries.
Impedence mismatch can be solved simply by dealing with each database operation on a case-by-case basis using raw SQL or Language Integrated Queries (E.g. LINQ). It adds a little bit of boilerplate, but it's absolutely worth it. You don't need general purpose entities just to access data.
It has less to do with capacity required for the task than it has to do with justifying the IT manager's budget and general dickwavery. Although, if IT really needed to justify its budget, today it'd be talking about how many AWS nodes they use and how big their Kubernetes cluster is. To serve FTP.
Its important to see trials not working too, because every drug sounds like it works in some cases. We pin a lot of hope on chloroquine, remdesivir etc

Yes, they may work, I hope they work. But because we heard of a case here or there is no reason to think it works.
> buy us time

> slowing down the spread of the virus

This is a whimsical idea that things will remain in stasis until something happens. Explain it to the newly unemployed with expiring healthcare and diminishing prospects.
Can you debug C++ with line breaks in VS Code?
Supporting Artists During the Covid-19 Pandemic
Due diligence only somewhat mitigates the damage done by having a generation of engineers who believe going straight to AWS or another expensive cloud provider is the first and or best course of action, when you have engineers scoff at building a cheaper, more efficient solution better fit for purpose. Backblaze proves it can be done, and I argue they are just as competent, if not more, than Amazon. They’ve provided a similar object storage system as S3 at a drastically lower cost.

In most scenarios, it’s not my money, and I don’t care if it’s not my money. In this case, as a taxpayer, it’s my money (our money to be specific) and I care. I intend to contact my representatives about this failure, and have already fired off a FOIA request for AWS NASA contract details.
When I was 15-16, me and a friend ordered CD-ROMs from CheapBytes and sold them in The Netherlands (with a label applied to cover the CheapBytes branding). Most people didn't have credit cards in the 90s, so this scheme worked well enough to earn us some additional 'pocket money'. The website is forever preserved by Tripod (at some point we stopped, but never removed the website):

http://linuxlop.tripod.com

We did get some complaints from people who were convinced that selling Linux distributions was illegal ;).
There is no indication that 5% of the population will die.

The Imperial College report finds that in a complete do-nothing scenario, 4 million Americans will die, which is only 1.2% of the population.

With some mitigation (isolation of the elderly, isolation of suspect cases and their families) that number is reduced to 2 million, only 0.6% of the total population. This is the approach we need to be pursuing, and it means reopening all schools and businesses right now, and directing and supporting the elderly to self-isolate. Massively ramping up our healthcare infrastructure and preparing for massive triage is also a good idea.

The alternative of complete suppression requires total shutdown for an estimated period of 18 months, until a vaccine is available. However, its worth nothing that vaccines for influenza (for reference) are only partially (50-70%) effective, and need to be renewed annually. So its likely that even in this total shutdown scenario, we are still looking at 1 million deaths - with immense and unprecedented economic and social impacts.

Keep in mind, that 2.8 million Americans die annually from all causes - 0.8%. Coronavirus might mean for example that a critically ill patient dies from cancer a week earlier than otherwise.
Infestation of mIRC on IRC deja vu.

Emojis might not work well if you use a custom theme for HN ie. custom colours or a different style via Stylus (I'm using this one [1]).

Just to make it clear: I have no issue with them, as long as they don't contain a forced colour.

[1] https://userstyles.org/styles/92693/dark-hacker-news-solariz...
Read your comment again. Clumpier than expected does not mean they didn’t test it, it means they tested it against something that was a poor substitute for the real thing.

I’m sure on earth you can find soil both softer and harder. They didn’t make it to work against any kind of soil or rock you could ever encounter on earth because that is optimizing for the wrong thing at the cost of others.
Do note that's in the context of performance optimization. Even open source complicated code is still complicated code.
Jobless Claims Explode Higher as Virus-Impact Begins to Hit Main Street
The tube is incredibly empty at the moment. I imagine it's not much of a concern
So if this virus kills people in the same demographic as you instead and you are one of the people dying, you're ok if the government just let you die?
The sky is not falling for those who read the scientific literature and act upon it promptly:

https://www.mediterranee-infection.com/wp-content/uploads/20...
The way that Mathematics and approaches this is, using the Axiomatic way.

You can view this as a game:

Let's make some assumtions / axioms, and see what we can build with it.

The most popular axiom set is Zermelo-Fraenkel-style Set Theory [1], but there are other choices which have been explored.

Note that, there a no claims about absolute truth or reality here. We just play a game in our minds.

The most fundamental question about the game, that we can ask is "Is this game consistent".
Goedel found out, somewhat unfortunately, we are not able to answer that question from within the game [2].
However, sofar no intrinsical inconsistencies (paradixies) have been found.

Now, it turns out, that the ZF-Mathematics game is a very useful game, since it allows us to model certain aspects of reality.
E.g. Newtons Mechanic, allows us to forecast how planets move in space.

The Natural Sciences (Physics, Chem., Bio) and Engineering are essentially about how to model reality with mathematics.
The way to do that is the empirical scientific method [3], where hypothesis are formed, experiments are designed and evidence is collected.

So the question of "truth" does not really arise. It's just:

(A) Mathematics is an interesting mind-game to play.

(B) Mathematics has been used very successfully to model and predict our preceived reality.

That's all you can ask for.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zermelo–Fraenkel_set_theory
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel%27s_incompleteness_theor...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empirical_evidence
You clearly haven't used Eclipse (and I say this as someone who chooses to use Eclipse).
Yeah, I've the problem that I can afford what ever I want, though I think I've done a pretty good of keeping the majority of it painted. Probably got about 20,000 points of Age of Sigmar painted. Oddly I think my time spent painting has gone down since I started working from home a year and a half ago. Probably because I now work at the same desk where I hobby, so I don't want to sit there after work.
I couldn't help posting this neural knee jerk:

https://youtu.be/bifOI4MbHVU
You have to manually download them, but I find the licensing and scope of https://iconmonstr.com/ to be great.
The reason that the unknown ages were excluded from Figure 2 is because the hospitalization status is also unknown. You assumed that 0 of the unknown cases were hospitalized. Instead, you could also assume that hospitalization rates for the unknown cases are roughly the same as for the known cases. If you do that you actually get the higher of the 2 numbers in Figure 2's range. So for the 20-44 age group, that's 20.3%. If you instead assume that people with a known age, but an unknown hospitalization status were not hospitalized, then you get he lower number in the range, 14.3%.

It's a very fair point that any of these assumptions could be inflating the rates. There are a whole bunch of other factors around asymptomatic, what the eventual outcome will be in the cases that are early-stage and who gets the limited number of tests in the USA that makes it currently impossible to know the true infection fatality rate or infection hospitalization rate.
> unemployed with expiring healthcare

That's why people have to vote for things in their interests before problems arise. You shouldn't lose your healthcare when you lose your job.
> Will you be ok with that?

I am sorely tempted to answer this honestly.
> but two AGIs truly meeting may

Interesting indeed
Australia might be a better place to be in another 6 months.
Firefox Addon: Blur Covid-19 posts on Google and social media
only if you adjust manually. Given a universal time and a location, you can determine time of (solar) day just like you can determine the day name (mon,tues etc).
> no-one should be surprised to see no contributions from Apple to the Linux kernel anyway

Why not? I know Apple is generally looked as a closed down company, but I'm still surprised that a company with their caliber, capital, resources and engineers can't find the time to help out the community that is helping them.
Completely agree. Cut it if your file is 10GB of logs because it requires an extra stream copy, but otherwise, it is the best way to interactively drill down into data and write the pipeline as you go. It is almost never a valid criticism, and when it is, calling it Useless UOC (reads as an insult to the author!) was the worst way to communicate that to the masses.
How can blood type matter? What’s the mechanism of action?
I live in San Francisco on an E3 visa (Australian), but got caught out by the Schengen/UK bans and am currently in the UK where I am fortunately also a citizen. I can't go home to SF right now, and my visa expires in June. It remains to be seen whether I'll be able to renew it before then, or if travel restrictions will be lifted.

Residents on non-immigrant visas are getting a raw deal. The world has got bigger problems but this really sucks.
Mask vs. Respirator Video (3M Worker Health and Safety)
A Programmers Guide to Working from Home
For someone already in USA on H1B, I expect there won't be much impact other than added delay, as the processing of H1B within USA is done over mail and not involve interviews.
>In 3 weeks I assume they re-assess and could very well leave restrictions in place

I had assumed that as well. No reason things will look better by then, and the preventative measures taken in that time probably won't sufficient enough to otherwise resume normal life either.

Also, the cynic in me says that the government class wants to get people used to the idea of a shelter in place piecemeal, because it might not go over as well if they said 1 month straight out of the gate.
Please don't include personal attacks in your comments.
The fact that they’ve “tidied up” their command-line release (somewhat) raises my hopes by a marginal amount.
It's a very difficult problem. Here is a paper outlining the cost in lives of your proposal.

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/s...
Why 99% People Never Learned How to Learn and How to Become That 1% (I)
I'm not affiliated, just someone who recently started using it daily, but another "always on" video conference alternative is https://tandem.chat/ . It integrates well with Slack, and keeping it open while working with colleagues feels very natural.

It's the closest I've seen to recreate a coworking environment -- we even have a #lunch channel where we "eat together" at noon (that was a bit depressing to write... we're doing what we can to keep up the illusion of normalcy).
Create a generative model that makes more covid-19 papers. Bonus points if it's possible to manipulate the model into creating papers that tell us how to create a cure or vaccine /s.
Chrome Extension: Blur Covid-19 on Google and Social Media
Eh... people say this, and in theory it should be true.

If you actually use Typescript with a lot of dynamic/unsafe types, in practice you will very quickly end up with a lot of code littered with `any` casts, and those unsafe code blocks will end up (for lack of a better word) infecting the rest of your code and making the compile-time errors much less useful.

For whatever it's worth, my advice is in the instances where you decide Typescript is right for you, commit to it. For the most part, use interfaces, and use strict types that don't get recast a whole bunch.

You don't want Typescript to be guessing too much about your code, because some of those intuitions are fragile and can turn into bugs later if you assume Typescript just knows what you mean. I've had code that works until it gets refactored and Typescript stops being able to intuit what a type is. At that point, going back and retroactively trying to make things more explicit becomes a lot harder and a lot more error prone. The temptation there is to just shortcut the entire process and force Typescript to accept that a type is what you say it is -- and that can lead to very subtle bugs that are hard to track down.

The best Typescript code I've seen is code that embraces the rigidness. When I see a Typescript project with a lot of `any` casts, I start to get kind of nervous.
The recipe in China was social distancing, masks and hand sanitizing. Somehow in China politicians understood the concept that germs coming out of your mouth and nose can be most effectively stopped right there - they even advocated makeshift masks while ramping up production of surgical and n95 masks.

I am currently in France and the only measure is social distancing. Police dont wear masks, no hand sanitizer at supermarket entrance. It is simply not available although it is mostly just 70% alcohol. I have masks and I wear them when I go out but people (strangers) even tell me on the street that they are useless. I think Louis Pasteur is agitatedly turning in his grave.

It looks like we'll have to wait until China can supply us with enough masks. Until then pressing "unpause" will start the epidemic all over again - if the confinement is going to halt it.
I would definitely not call Spain heavily religious, or specifically Northern Italy. And definitely not France.

Eg. Italy is at 72%, Spain at 49%, USA at 69%, France at 30% on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Importance_of_religion_by_coun...

I would consider them countries where social gatherings are the norm, and I always related that to climate, rather than religion.
Humid and high temps suppress Corona Virus
How did you realize that?
If there's a marginal cost for each copy of the data that's transferred to a user, I don't think asking the user to cover that cost conflicts with a requirement to "give away the data".

(If they distributed their science data in printed form, surely they'd be allowed to charge people for the cost of printing & mailing the paper copies; that's quite different from charging for the data itself.)
On the other hand China is giving us free money/stuff when they sell it below cost.
From that linked report...

"In addition, ESDIS has yet to determine which data sets will transition to the cloud nor has it developed cost models with the benefit
of operational experience and metrics for usage and egress."

That sounds fairly close to the headline.
Shameless plug. Just wrote a paper about this:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.06561

Containing a survey of the most popular Latency Aggregation methods used in the industry (Prometheus Histograms, t-digest, HDR-Histogram, DD-sketch/histogram).
This tarball seems to include the original kernel sources: http://ftp.funet.fi/pub/linux/kernel/Historic/linux-0.01.tar...

The release notes for 0.01 are here: http://ftp.funet.fi/pub/linux/kernel/Historic/old-versions/R...
Using the median in lieu of the average isn't always a good idea either. A service could completely fail to respond almost 50% of the time and you'd still get a low median. Same holds for perc95, but to a lesser extent.

The main problem is that people try to summarize their data too early. What you want is a measure for how good or bad a single datum is and only then can you summarize the end result. And usually averages aren't a bad choice at that stage.

Averages have some particularly nice properties when dealing with dependent variables, sums of variables, and when you want to minimize the distance between your estimate and the actual value. However to take advantage of that your measure actually needs to make sense. For companies the holy grail is if you can directly express how much money you make / lose because of that single datum, but failing that you'll need to find something that's at least somewhat proportional to it.
This is kinda bad press for AWS. If I were NASA I'd be shitty about the relationship manager not hinting and trying to help architect for lowest cost.
I panicked for a moment because I thought it's about Visa not US visa and it made no sense.
Isn't requestor pays just like I pay for gas to drive to my local library, when I can't bike because I want to borrow so many books, but the books are free to loan.
The country has been in lockdown for, what, one week? And already you're talking about letting people die so you can keep your job, or committing suicide?

Show a little fortitude, we will get through this.
Thanks. I think Futurism's web design is the worst I've ever seen used by a seemingly serious outlet.
Making slack simpler and easier for everyone could be accomplished by.. removing features. Which in turn would boost performance and reduce memory usage. I'd actually really like if that was the case, instead of them leaning into more bad UI practices ala the broken WYSIWYG editor of doom.
I love SQL. I'll write CTEs and window functions until the cows come home with a smile on my face. But not everyone needs to know SQL. There are many other worthy pursuits.

REST suffers from the N+1 problem and overfetching. Most ORMs do as well. "Oh! You want order info AND product reviews? (At least) 2 more REST calls for you. Oh! You don't need the person's shipping and billing addresses in this case? So sorry, take them anyway, otherwise we would have to make another REST endpoint just for you."

Also affects versioning. In REST you commonly see URLS like "/v1/foo/54321" because if you try to remove or rename ANY PART of the JSON payload coming back, you break a contract. With GraphQL, you make the new name available and mark the old name with a directive like @deprecated. Over time you watch the logs to see if any clients are still using the old name. If so, keep it around and write another blog post asking folks not to use it anymore. If not, just remove it. You're done. No broken contracts. No differently versioned URLs.

GraphQL handles N different clients with a single schema. Mobile app clients, desktop clients, B2B clients, et al get exactly the data they need—no more and no less. REST either shoehorns them all into one or two access models or explodes into an unmaintainable mess of hundreds or thousands of often redundant endpoints.

The biggest difference, the one that GraphQL was really originally built to solve at Facebook, was to allow the CLIENT to determine what data they needed at any given time rather than REST which may be driven by client requests but ultimately is what servers THINK clients will need, and is much harder to change as needs change (and they will change).
> I think True follows the principle of least surprise.

Me too. I was just quoting the best argument (I found so far) for a different position.

> I'm not sure how that python code is supposed to be especially simple or elucidating. I think the following Haskell code is reasonably elucidating, since it elides any need to manually define a special case or base case:

The Python code wasn't for comparison to any Haskell implementation. If you can read Haskell, you'll likely prefer the Haskell version. But that's not the point.

The point is that amongst all imperative attempts, the most straightforward ones also naturally suggest what to do about the empty list.

Btw, in Haskell notation most normal people's mental model of how 'all' works is probably closer to:

all = foldl1 (&&)

Most normal people don't think about neutral elements of operations, and that they suggest a natural answer for folds over empty collections.
I honestly think most teams would be better off measuring max on the latency curve. It at least isn’t subject to the many transform errors introduced by most metric pipelines & it is easy to explain to people without getting into why 95 vs 99 vs 99.9.
Right. But there are double blind studies now in progress on the effectiveness of various treatments.
100% agreed. Fellow democratic Ohioan, and I am extremely proud of the way DeWine is handling this situation. It really helps me and my family breathe a sigh of relief to know our state government puts our health interests first.
They could use swatch time, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
I estimated that about 1 out of 100 would review and or rate my apps. Except for paid then it was more like 1 out of 25 but that might be an exception.
This is what I always answer whenever somebody asks me why I stick to Mathematica rather than using some convoluted collection of SAGE/R/NumPy/SymPy.
I'm not sure there's any reality involved here?

But when you are building arbitrary systems, some design choices give you simpler and more applicable systems than others.
It's not just the elderly who will die if the system is overwhelmed. Nearly 40% of those that are sick enough to require hospital care are between the ages of 20 and 64[1]. If everyone is getting it at the same time and there's not enough health care to go around, those 20-64 year olds will be dying too. I'm guessing you yourself may fall into that age cohort.

[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/18/health/coronavirus-young-...