skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I thought I had the answer at hand but (for once) decided to check my facts BEFORE I wrote. Wikipedia has a really interesting article about this, well worth a (very short) read:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bison_hunting#Native_American_...
Yes, and I guess it could also be ran into a VM with Windows 95-98 or that other open source clone, can't remember the name now and still be useful.
Now (or in the next few months) might be a good moment to enter the stock market, while all stocks are down.

I don't think it's easy (nor ethical) to monetise the crisis directly, but some forms of income are resilient to it. Some products and services are needed at all times, and you can earn a commission for promoting those.

For instance, people still go through my website to understand various aspects of German bureaucracy. They open bank accounts, get health insurance, get liability insurance and so on. They get help free help, and I get paid to provide it. It's a nice business model.

Many freelancers have lost their income because of the pandemic. I plan to write a comprehensive overview of their options. It might lead some of them to get things they genuinely need: disability insurance, private pensions and so on. This benefits both my readers and me.

Software development is also largely unaffected by this crisis (although the companies that employ them are). I wanted to finish this contract in May and ride into the sunset on my motorcycle, but with Europe shutting down, I'll keep working for as long as I'm needed.

I also use the shutdown to save money. I have nowhere to spend it anyway. I don't commute anymore, so I always eat at home. I use the 2 hours a day I just saved to work on my motorcycle. It's much cheaper than paying someone else to do it.
Probably need to stockpile some more fiber if this is an option you are looking for!
I have timed Virginia and Ohio and Ohio is 20 ms faster.

I discovered this earlier when I was playing Titanfall and noticed a much lower ping to their Azure data center in Ohio. I confirmed it by setting up my own host in Azure.

I was thinking of switching to Azure but pretty soon AWS opened us-east-2 and I moved my stuff there.
Passing Awaited Tasks
Pat Hanrahan Wins Turing Award
> Suppression of the press is unfortunately very effective in the short term. Historians may eventually uncover the truth but it will be far too late.

As Frank Herbert said: "History is written by historians"
Ask HN: Are you expecting layoffs soon?
We could also nationalize the airline industry. We've already seen how capitalism alone is a poor predictor of future demand.

And while we're at it, let's make the internet a utility.
Your analogy is slightly wrong, as more ASICs won't increase the Bitcoin supply.

(Technically it will a little until the network difficulty adjusts.)
4 sheets crumpled up gives much greater surface area, as well as perpendicular folds, with which to grab the target material. Wiping with a flat surface makes no sense at all, and likely requires multiple wipes to achieve the desired result.

I wish there were statistics on the commonality of various wiping techniques.
I am surviving with a 2012 MacBook Pro that I have upgraded the RAM (16GB) and put a SATA3 SSD in. Just as fast as my late 2016 MacBook Pro, with better battery life despite being on the original battery (that I can replace) and a real escape key, proper function keys and a better lit keyboard than the new models.

The only "issue" it has is the low res (I drive an external monitor for higher resolutions) and the plastic under the back of the screen being cracked in one place. Other than that, just like new.

An old MacBook Pro will work fine, as long as it has an SSD and some sensible quantity of RAM.

No need to buy new.
Nice idea, but I don't think gamification works in this context. https://mental.jmir.org/2019/6/e13717/
guaranteed this will be somewhere in between subpar to garbage
> Specs like JSON-LD are included but do not meaningfully change the numbers.

JSON-LD was a simple example that I just used b.c. it was on the front page. That JSON-LD doesn't meaningfully change the numbers doesn't change the fact that the catalogue is a dump of things related to the web, which is probably different from each spec (POSIX, C, C++, etc...) which has a narrow scope. For example, the link dump has 104 links that mentions CSS in the slug: it probably makes sense to make a comprehensive CSS spec (which would probably reduce the size since it will remove a lot of repetitive parts), but the web standards don't work like that.

> This doesn't seem right at all. How do you figure that POSIX is less specified than the web? Have you read either standard?

That's based on some @chubot's oilshell blog posts[0][1][2][3] about shell.
Excerpts from blog post:

> POSIX Uses Brute Force: In theoretical terms, a language is described by a grammar, and a grammar accepts or rejects strings of infinite length. But POSIX apparently specifies no such thing. Only the "unspecified" cases are allowed to use a grammar!

> Over the last few years of implementing shell, I've found many times that a careful reading of the POSIX spec isn't sufficient.

> The POSIX shell spec says that shell arithmetic is C arithmetic, So it's natural to wonder what the creators of C used. They didn't use grammars to specify their language. The code came first and grammars came later.

> Discovery: all shells are highly POSIX compliant, for the areas of the language that POSIX specifies. But POSIX only covers a small portion of say dash, let alone bash.

There are probably much more posts about this, but I think this is sufficient enough to explain that POSIX is underspecified.

> Can you make a website with confidence which works on all browsers?

I can make a website that reasonably works well on all browsers with confidence.
At least on the level where one can develop a full SPA based on one browser and then try & test it on others.
Most browser-specific issues don't exist and when they do, it's usually a one-liner.

> When was the last time you found a browser-specific issue? Mine was three days ago.

That's interesting, what was it? (Genuinely interested in that one.)
In my experience, it doesn't surface that much unless you're trying to use WASM or some new/non-standard APIs.

[0] https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2017/08/31.html#posix-uses-bru...

[1] https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2020/01/alias-and-prompt.html#...

[2] https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2017/04/22.html

[3] https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2019/01/18.html#criteria-for-t...
Don't forget:

Helm - Personal email/calendar/file/photo server

https://gethelm.com

(FWIW, I love mine)
> I didn't really see he benefit over dealing with Windows

What possible nightmare bugs could macOS have that would lead you to this claim? I'm really curious. They'd have to be big ones because I've been developing on Lin/Win/Mac for 6 years and nothing comes close to the pain of developing on Windows.
Ask HN: Germans and Spaniards – Why the dramatic difference in death rates?
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html

Germany and Spain have roughly the same number of cases. Yet deaths in Germany are at 25 and in Spain they are 20x that 600. What is the difference?
I wonder how you'd compute/reason about/define the axis point dividing the complexity of remembering to move random items around and the complexity of just doing the vacuuming yourself.
Why we moved from Slack to Discord?
If you are running something computationally intensive isn't a desktop more suitable?

45W will get your laptop pretty warm and noisy and will drain your battery.
TurbineLabs – Free Cleaned and Curated Corona News, Daily Mailing
I hope so!

Edit: could have picked better examples too imo... Id have used 1 + 0 = 1 and 2 × 1 = 2... basically you add 1s for free when multiplying, 0s for free when adding, and trues for free when "Alling".
I think you underestimate the psycho-social effects of having millions of deaths.
With the interest fading so much, I think Microsoft probably just wants to nix the project as something official. While it's not expensive for them to maintain, I imagine they don't want to be tied to a dying product like that. They probably want to actively discourage development of VB because VB does not fit into their vision of the .NET ecosystem anymore. I think that's the point the author is missing here.
A photo of that would probably be mildly popular
I worked for a shop that was heavily invested in Visual FoxPro, after that time had come and gone. I spent a few years switching most stuff to Python and PostgreSQL, then moved to another city. When I checked in with some friends from there to say hi, I found out that they'd replaced all my "weird Python stuff" with good, standard VB.Net (starting in 2013). I didn't know whether to laugh or cry (with strong leanings toward the latter). It's too bad. I love that company and the people there, but I'd like to smack the person who convinced them to go for that particular rewrite, or at least make fun of them in public.
For comparison, the death rate across all age groups of flu is 0.1%. Extrapolating out, a failure to contain the virus will still mean tens of thousands of young healthy people dying in every country. That's why governments are finally admitting "Herd Immunity/Flatten the Curve" without total containment is not an option.
Physical servers in Vultr right? I believe your geo regions are the same.
Gasping for Air in the Time of Covid-19
I posted this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22601270 as an Ask HN couple days ago but since this thread has more traction, I wonder if I can get your input here. The text:

Ask HN: My mom is a pediatrician. Best temporary remote consultation ideas?

Due to coronavirus my mom wants to avoid kids and their parents coming to her office. The current situation is hopefully temporary, so I don't want to commit to a long term product. Her consultations are usually 20 minutes, sometimes longer.
She obviously won't be able to diagnose a lot of conditions without being close and in contact with her patients, but I believe a lot can still be done remotely. For some children, she might have to give prescriptions, which she currently does on a piece of paper only.

She has a secretary that can help juggling the video conferences.

Any ideas how she can handle her daily work?

Here's my current approach:

- 2 links that open distinct Zoom calls

- Secretary calls patient, somehow asks them to load a webpage (a short url service or sms or email)

- Patient joins one of the links, consultation starts

- Meanwhile, secretary calls next patient, asks them to load second link and wait

- Once the first consultation is over, my mom joins the second link one, and secretary is calling for the next patient in line

- Prescriptions are written and either mailed or parents can pick up at her office (maybe on a plastic bag?)

I use Zoom at work but I know how to setup things. Her clients would probably rely on their mobile apps. If it matters, she's from Brazil and we need clients localized to pt-BR.

Thanks for any insights!
What does the VT100-compatible mean to you? Does it mean colour? Actual VT100s were monochrome. Does it mean function keys?

* https://invisible-island.net/xterm/xterm.faq.html#what_is_vt...

You've gone overboard. A console is a well-defined I/O abstraction in Win32, and has been for about 30 years.
Tesla factory operating normally despite county virus lockdown order: Witnesses
So much naysaying here. The Mac Minis are excellent for certain use cases (like a home server) and they last forever. Great that Apple is updating them regularly.
U.S. Devs Are Sleeping on Flutter
I don't spend much time covering the virus itself. My main concern is to keep people updated about closures, financial support and other things that directly affect them.
Assuming PHP you just described "a text editor and remote servers"
This is in fact the logically meaningful thing to do. All must be monotone decreasing in set inclusion.

Other similar definitions are that min of an empty set is infinity and max of an empty set is minus infinity. Min is monotone decreasing over set inclusion hence min of empty set must be the maximum possible value. Max is montone increasing in ser inclusion hence max of empty set must be the smallest possible value.
How would you accurately attribute that to the risk of the disease being overestimated, rather than the measures taken being effective?
I see what you mean.

I suppose if the iPad can't download other binaries to load in the background (like the C# or C++ dependencies), VSCode is never going to come to it.

It's still just a consumption / Etch-A-Sketch device despite all the marketing about how wonderful it is for creation. It's good for making basic music/practicing guitar for me, but other than that my iPad is just for reading/browsing.
Congrats! I can see a lot of use cases for picking just a small subset of cities/regions and skipping Google/Amazon/Azure altogether.
"This is very much possible while also increasing quality of life."

I don't disagree. It's in part a framing issue. For decades the message has been "you should feel guilty for wanting things, and to save the world everyone needs to de-industrialize and return to the lifestyle of a medieval peasant." (I'm exaggerating just a little bit, but not much.)

The mainstream response has been similar to how people respond to other moral shaming campaigns: pretend to play along and engage in a lot of token signaling gestures (like banning plastic straws or recycled disposable cups) but otherwise ignore it. Actual behavior does not change, but you get this gloss of fake ineffective feel-good junk.

The developing world's response has been a bit more pointed: "fuck you, we're poor." They're not going to listen to a bunch of rich westerners tell them they need to stay poor to save the planet.
Given the parameters as you laid it out there, I'd say "no" or at least "not necessarily" because not all value is monetary.

That is, the value you get from your job may be more than just your paycheck. This won't necessarily apply to everybody, but I'm pretty sure some people receive value simply from the work itself and the sense of accomplishment they get from doing what they do.
What distribution and desktop environment are you running?

I switched to Manjaro with XFCE almost 2 years ago and it's been a joy to setup and use coming from Mac/Windows. As a matter of fact - setting up a Manjaro workstation is actually way less hassle than I've ever had with Mac or Windows. I don't have to fight against the OS to do what I need to.
Aaah, then everything is clear
why does apple not publish the Intel CPU generation information. ? Dell , Lenovo etc. publish information like "8th gen Intel Core i7" for all their laptops. With Apple , its a information is not that obvious.
Don’t buy the Blue Apron hype
"Chronic suffering" seems a wee bit hyperbolic, especially in the current apocalyptic climate. Perspective, please.

OT I remember when VB.Net first came out and some VB6 devs were rather sniffily referring to it as "Visual Fred" due to the lack of resemblance wth VB beyond keywords.

It was obvious from the get go VB was now a second class citizen, and c# was the future...
So far only Packet, but we'll be expanding soon

edit: those regions are the same because it's the easiest set of cities to roll this out in :)
Weirdly I feel like the fact that you are profitable and have large customers could be as important a part of your customer pitch as it is your investor pitch - even if the tech is awesome that trust in the organization to stick around is super important (just look at the trouble around stadia haha). It's like those fintech companies that have "but how do we make money?" To make sure customers know "ok they can make money without screwing me over or ending up having to shut down"
6 months of operating expenses would be a good start. Apparently they only put aside a few weeks worth.
That was totally my thinking as well. It's fine for me, but if my girlfriend is staying with me I should expect a 4X increase in need.
There is some overlap with CloudFlare Workers. The big, practical difference is that you can put apps on fly.io that abuse CPUs, write to disk, accept TCP traffic, etc.

Most people we've worked with want to run run apps they've already written (or open source like https://github.com/h2non/imaginary).
This is great @mrkurt

Any plans to launch any Datacenters in India?
could not find any here - https://fly.io/docs/regions/#welcome-message
And like, in this case, it's not even a violation of capitalistic principals: if you need money from investors, you sell shares and ownership to investors, and in this case the investor is the people as represented by the government. If you make risk public, then profits should be public too.
Last fresh Windows install I did came pre-loaded with a bunch of loot box style gaming crap, Candy Crush, Xbox stuff, Netflix, Amazon Prime, loads of other foistware that should not exist on a fresh install.

A new Windows install requires at least an hour of de-cluttering and shit removal, while for a new Mac full setup to my liking takes about 5-10 minutes and I generally don't have to uninstall much of anything. The only thing I sometimes remove are apps I never personally use like Garage Band to save a bit of disk space, and that takes like ten seconds.

Then there's the almost Android level of obviously spyware telemetry going on. Yes I know Apple has telemetry but I trust them quite a bit more than Microsoft both not to do anything deliberately sketchy with my data and to be competent with their security. They also do a lot less and a lot less invasive telemetry. Redirecting local search, sending file list dumps, etc. to the mothership is unforgivable unless I have explicitly opted into that kind of behavior e.g. for tech support or debugging. That's the kind of stuff I associate with borderline malware, not an OS by a supposedly reputable company that I paid for.

Microsoft's recent behavior is pegging them in the low end of the market and ceding the high end of the market to Apple. Then of course there's Linux. If Apple did something barking stupid that forced me to ditch the platform that's where I'd go. I'd miss the Apple degree of trouble-free operation but at least I'd keep my privacy and security and lack of foistware.
I gave up on Lenove when they sold the company, maybe that was a mistake. Dell seems to be one of the best companies considering quality and support.

On the other hand, I've never tried System76, and never heard of Tuxedo, thank you for mentioning!
Ask HN: What's the end game for Covid-19?
When we first started taking precautions against the virus, I figured the goal was to halt its spread. However, the more recent consensus seems to be that we are doing this to "flatten the curve". Ie, we know that the virus cannot be contained, but we can slow down its spread, so that our hospitals do not get overwhelmed.

Somewhat paradoxically, the more successful we are at flattening the curve, the longer we will need to be in a state of shutdown. The estimates I've been hearing from experts is that 20-60% of Americans will eventually get infected. And that if we're successful in "flattening the curve", it will take 12-18 months before the virus plateaus off. Which is roughly when a vaccine will be ready for mass-use as well.

Assuming that the current shutdown measures are successful and we flatten the curve over a 12-18 month period, what exactly is our end game here? Are we going to sustain our current lockdowns for the entire upcoming year?

As a tech worker who is happily working from home, I don't mind at all. But what about all the people working retail, dining, entertainment, tourism, and similar industries? Are we willing to accept putting them out of work for an entire year? The shutdown has barely been in place for 2 weeks, and people are already suffering under the financial burden. The $1000 payout being considered will certainly help... but only temporarily. Can we really handle extending the status quo for an entire year?
Maybe it works for some but 256GB of storage is just insulting to me. I also don’t appreciate this focus Apple has had over the past decade to make it easier for me to shop or to identify my fingerprints, voice or face while they screw the usability.

That said I like the new thunderbolt 3 port.
I've had courses and classes which make sure that the students have everything installed that they need. And sometimes they also provide some sort of web interface to enter code.

Overall I completely understand where the author is coming from. It used to be that you could easily pick up programming in Basic, since it was installed by default. Now, not so much.
Ask HN: How are teams whiteboarding while working remote?
We've all just been thrust into working remotely and one of the challenges our team is facing is how do we do whiteboard collaboration? Our team space features a wall that's a whiteboard where we brainstorm architectures and designs. Once we've settled on an approach we capture that result more formally but we use whiteboards to do our brainstorming. How are you doing this while working remotely?
One is good (gas prices), but I'm skeptical that the other is even a black swan. Global pandemics have happened before (Spanish Flu), and airplanes have been grounded for a week in recent history followed by weak demand (9/11), but last I checked, planes have still been flying.
How to run a virtual happy hour
I meant by that Blink forked out of webkit which is Safari's engine. Gecko is a different code base.
I'm not a doctor. I just write software.

Not doing unneeded tests has parallels to not doing unneeded logging. The costs may be low, but they're not zero.

Sure -- if you have a problem, it might have been nice to have screened for it earlier, or to have logged more data for that flow; but if a problem is rare, the costs for doing all the tests or all the logs adds up.

In medicine specifically, we often read about interventions that turn out to have not been the greatest idea. Avoiding or postponing interventions in the absence of symptoms seems more prudent than seeking out more interventions in general. There are some things where widespread screening makes sense, and you shouldn't ignore symptoms or family history, of course.
Questioning the Clampdown
Here's an easy tip for trying to understand a claim that you can't justify. Read the article.

"As Taiwan and the U.S. step up their cooperation on the development of drugs and vaccines to battle the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19), Taiwan has pledged to donate 100,000 face masks per week to the U.S., while the U.S. is reserving 300,000 hazmat suits for Taiwan."

That's literally the first sentence.
This is an awesome idea and it looks like you guys are executing on it beautifully. Congratulations!

Out of curiosity, what kind of customers/teams are asking you for gRPC support? Is this coming from your enterprise customers or from smaller teams?
Ubisoft announced Assassin’s Creed Odyssey will be free for the entire weekend
Can we agree that your imagined non-reckless, bounded alternative must be able to render the content of a document, where the content of a document includes both wrapping text and a button-triggered DOS version of Prince of Persia?

https://archive.org/details/msdos_Prince_of_Persia_1990

If we agree on that then I'm very interested to hear about non-reckless alternatives to our current bloat web.

If we don't agree, then I am not at all interested in hearing about Amish web.
Interesting that there is another Paxos variant that was published to arxiv around february called BipartisanPaxos https://mwhittaker.github.io/publications/bipartisan_paxos.p.... It too aims at removing bottlenecks.
This is from 2015? Why are two submissions of the same link from two different users both on the front page? Is it currently being referenced somewhere else?