skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good explanation. Another way to say it is that String Theory (if it stands for anything)represents something like 2^500 possible theories (I forget the actual exponent) and if the experiment rules out 1/2 of those theories there are still 2^499 alternatives to go, so not much of a test really.

>Now, “falsification” itself is a silly/naive cartoon-ish framework for how to do science.

Unfortunately, Popper's "theory" has become the dominant go to for epistemology of Science today. Many scientists now think science=falsifiability which is wrong. Popper over generalized a narrow method and elevated it to a global and distinguishing characteristic of the scientific method. Popper's error itself was based on the assumption that logic=Deduction (i.e. identifying a contradiction is our only means to "truth") and completely ignored Induction which is the real problem in epistemology. You can't prove something false without first knowing what is true. Knowledge or truth is not what is left over after you prove everything else false which is an impossible task anyway.
> And while appeal to authority is usually nothing to be proud of, in cryptographic issues you're generally right to be careful and try to get the opinion of a domain expert.

reminds me that cryptography is an area where subspecialty expertise has been in the professional consciousness forever
It's tough.

I think some people get sent to conferences for the wrong reasons: the company has some money for some reason so they send them.

Other people should go but they can't get the money.

Many times the companies that get booths and sponsor the conference press a lot of flesh and get a lot of business cards but no sales. Sometimes you will see a conference sponsor smiling afterwards, but often they end up spending the last day doing a seminar on some product to a bunch of tired defense contractors who flew across the country to read stuff on their laptops -- if you get in free as a speaker it is probably worth the airfare to commiserate about it with the head of marketing for the sponsor afterwards in the hotel bar.

A nearby city has been thinking about building a conference center, consultants are telling them that most conference centers don't make a profit. Many cities subsidize them because they hope that it will bring in more traffic to other businesses in the area.

However, with conferences being as expensive as they are, I wonder how it is they don't make a profit? Who does?
Ask HN: What is happening with the stock exchange in the last two days?
The stock exchange has been closing with high increases in the last two days and to me it looks completely irrational. Right now it is clear that the impact of the virus has been greatly underestimated and that it could be greater in USA with respect to Europe. Despite this incertainity the stocks exchange has been closing with high positives in the last two days. Why is it so? Did we already reach the bottom and are we stabilizing? What do you expect in the next 3 months?
Oh my god. I knew it was inserting a line break when I hit enter but I didn't realize it was a FF only issue. gdi Google.
I was going to snark back at you, perhaps they don't feel the need to cargo cult?

But I see they take your resume and PII over plain http as well. oh well, next!
Every single Google product is slower on Firefox and it’s hard to not call this malice and artificial. Many people check out Gmail and GMaps on Firefox and go back to Chrome because of their clunkiness on Firefox.
Is there anything to stop an application from touching the cache periodically (in the Unix sense of updating modification timestamps without changing values) on load?

If so, assuming the application is used more than once every 7 days, this seems like less of an issue.
> Would love a save feature, even if it was just local to each browser instance - no need for login, etc.

Fun that you say this, just as WebKit/Safari/Apple announced that they will stop making local storage useful for most use cases https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22683535
I've used restic (https://github.com/restic/restic) in the past, and it works quite well.

Other people would also recommend borg (https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/) although I've never used it so I can't say anything about it. rsync.net even has a special offer if you're using them (https://www.rsync.net/products/borg.html)

But really if you want to make it dead simple you can't go wrong with tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/). It's written and maintained by one of the biggest names in the crypto community, the guy who has spawned scrypt, among other things.
Population density would seem to be the obvious culprit.
For folks that want to back up data on remote servers, BackupPC is one of very few comprehensive backup systems I've found that can run on a server hidden in a closet somewhere and connect out to the remotes to retrieve data. Most backup systems run on the remotes and have the remotes connect into the backup server in some fashion, which I find kinda horrifying.

I've used BackupPC for a long time and I totally love it, though I get why it's never been the most popular option. The initial setup will take an experienced sysadmin a couple of hours if they're doing it for the first time.
This is a serious problem for modern web experiences.

"After seven days of Safari use without the user interacting with a webpage on website.example, all of website.example’s non-cookie website data is deleted." (https://webkit.org/blog/9521/intelligent-tracking-prevention...)

Granted, this could turn out really well if the industry adopts another standard which requires user permission, overcomes this limitation, overcomes the existing limitation of LocalStorage on iOS getting automatically cleared when a device is low on storage, and overcomes the problem of sites being able to use up a lot of storage on users' devices without their knowledge.

I'd be very welcoming of such a standard. These could be good future replacements if the industry can adopt them:

https://chromestatus.com/feature/6428344899862528

https://wicg.github.io/kv-storage/

https://chromestatus.com/feature/5715811364765696

https://storage.spec.whatwg.org/
It is rarely an options. Additionally defects are introduced into features that have been supported for quite a while.
"Because immediately after joining The Younglings bags of money will fall out of the sky! Okay.. maybe not quite.. BUT if you want to transform your good business into an extraordinary sales machine, then join us!"

It's an exotic hybrid consultancy-lifestyle business decorated with mock SV hype.

https://www.younglingfeynman.com/apply

I don't know why this is on the front page, but, hey, probably a lot of YC alumni who want to DOUBLE THEIR REVENUE here.
I log this for coarse statistics about what our user base is running, but that is about it.

The good news: IE use is down over the last year to only about 40%.

The bad news: the growth elsewhere is all Chrome, with less than 1% Firefox or Safari. There’s a tiny sprinkling of Edge, as well, but I forget the numbers on that.

Our users are state and county offices and medical facilities, rather than private individuals, so the users are somewhat captive to whatever their organization mandates.

The only browser detection we do is in client side scripting to detect if the browser can directly display a PDF inline (or not, in the case of IE11)
Fine. Not garlic. But that's not my point.
Hi Mike! I really like what you've done with D3. I've been hesitant to include D3 in my personal projects though just because of how complex both DOM manipulation and async data binding through APIs can get.

Most tutorials focus on D3 itself, but I haven't been able to find much on how to properly integrate D3 into a complete web application (e.g. a REST API build on Express/Koa serving data to a React/Vue frontend). Is this an area where you think there is a lack of tooling, or perhaps simply a lack of information? Given how many companies use D3 I feel like I must be missing something!
Thank you for laying that out clearly!

I pointed out the irony of not giving an example|intended use in a technical document because if a line or two like that was in the HTML 4.01 specification I probably would have written more-correct HTML since sometime in the early-mid ~2000s. I guess I'm glad my reading comprehension has improved but it also shows pretty clearly why it's the old spec.
What I would like is something similar but for my local zfs/btrfs disks. Copy snapshots to an external drive, but the issue I have more often than not would be deleted/overwrittem files rather than damaged disks which regular snapshots would resolve. I don't always have access to my NAS.
It’s really a lot less complicated than the author makes it. NY is testing more than 3x the number of people with < 1/2 the population. On top of that, more than 50% of the cases are in one city, and iirc another 25% are in Westchester, the county next door to NYC. It’s all concentrated in one incredibly dense part of the state.

NYC is almost twice as dense population-wise as SF. One day earlier of shelter in place helps I’m sure but the geography helps much more.
Micromobility and COVID19
New proposed syntax adds even more noise:

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64)
AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko)
Chrome/71.1.2222.33 Safari/537.36
Sec-CH-UA: "Chrome"; v="74"
Sec-CH-UA-Full-Version: "74.0.3424.124"
Sec-CH-UA-Platform: "macOS"
Sec-CH-UA-Arch: "ARM64"

Why not getting rid of the `User-Agent` completely?

It's already bad infrastructure design to have the server do different renderings depending on `User-Agent` value.
Interesting. Is there a reason someone would prefer D3 versus say R's ggplot2 or Python's seaborn for a non-interactive graph?
>While I’m not particularly interested in pandemics, I do find it an interesting and unique opportunity to observe human behavior.

I too am also a robot who's so logical that I'm above any form of human bias or irrationality. I observe these covid-19 events around the world and find it interesting because I'm too analytical. That's my main problem, I'm so analytical that I like to pretend I'm better than humans and pretend I find human behavior "interesting" when really I'm just being a dumb human myself in pretending.
A Swiss Doctor on Covid-19
Oh, you're not familiar with startup marketing growth hacker / the world's latest COVID-19 expert, RJ Youngling?

https://i.imgur.com/VwgIQJZ.png

This is pretty clearly content marketing.
These people know what they're doing
Awesome work here - so crucial in times like these!
Even South Korea is reporting such low numbers, even Japan.
I used Logitech C920 HD Pro for a couple years with Ubuntu. It worked pretty well. I cannot vouch for the issue you're mentioning though.
Some advice about ReCaptcha, the audio test is way easier and usually only makes you do it once or twice (as opposed to the 5-10 times you usually have to do when you have disabled tracking). Sometimes it will say you aren't eligible or something, just refresh the page and it will let you try again.
> If you're doing some sort of if statement on the server to deliver content based on screen size you're probably doing it wrong. Obviously I can't speak for every mobile user, but for myself, it's infuriating to have a completely different set of functionality on mobile.

there's not a "right" and a "wrong" here; it's about trade-offs.

you're either stripping things down to the lowest common denominator (and leaving nothing but empty space on desktop) or you're wasting a ton of mobile bandwidth by serving both versions on initial load (the most critical first impression).

you frequently cannot simply squeeze all desktop functionality from a 1920px+ screen onto a 320px screen - unless you have very little functionality to begin with. Amazon (or any e-commerce/marketplace site) is a great example where client-side responsiveness alone is far from sufficient.

https://www.walmart.com/ does it okay, but you can see how much their desktop site strips down to use the same codebase for desktop and mobile.
I was surprised to find that it is, especially if the data is clustered. What ends up happening is the elements near the top of the bracket get cached so they can usually be accessed quickly.

Note that if your data is uniformly randomly distributed the caching will hurt and it will be slower than quicksort, as this is quicksort's optimal use case.
I'll leave this here https://www.mendeley.com/
What this article means by "experimental test" is "whether or not string theory can incorporate inflation". Which is not an experimental test at all--if it's any kind of "test", it's a theoretical test.
> If anything, it should be on Apple and the browser vendors to make local storage more useful by default, not less useful.

Not if the features allow for increased web tracking.
Autosleep app on the Apple Watch is perfect for me. Completely automatic and accurate to ~5 mins plus info on deep sleep and heart rate. It only requires the presence of mind to charge your watch another time rather than overnight.
Your passage on Bern feels like if it were from the "Invisible Cities" by Italo Calvino. As far as I remember, it would fit in the "Cities & Signs" or "Cities & Eyes" line.
USENIX SRECon has been a great conference for a few years. They've postponed it right now, but I expect it will still happen.
i like the 'no deletion' attitude. so much can go wrong when writing custom code to delete stuff. as deletion here is trivial to do yourself using whatever preferred method and policy (like moving stuff to trash) you have to delete stuff, i do appreciate the decision to stay away from that.

for the env vars, i hope there are defaults that make even setting the env vars optional and not needed unless i want to change the defaults.
What would really solve the problem of food tracking and diet apps is a QR code containing all nutritional values on the package of every food product. I really can't believe this is not implemented yet. It's law to put all nutritional values on the package (in Europe at least), so why not go a step further and make it machine readable?
It's Time for an Alternative to Spreadsheets
Hmm. My Fitbit (Alta HR) considers masturbation exercise.

Though, it has recorded that I was in deep sleep while I was awake.
Spotify’s New Podcast API: From Design to Launch
Seconded, Autosleep works fantastically well
The last phone I bought was a one plus 6 and the next phone I buy will be a one plus. I don't plan on looking at anything else. Everything is fast and solid. Fast UI, good screen, fast charging, minimal bloat. Decent cameras decent speakers, usb C. No mobile processors stand up to apple's killer custom chips, but without bloated software android phones can get close enough.
Isn’t this more about replication / mirroring then than about decentralization?
Nice to hear! Background check is a little more understandable - thanks for letting me know
Yes, that was a mistake at our end and fixed now.

All: if you see a banned user that shouldn't be banned, please let us know at hn@ycombinator.com. We try not to get this wrong, but we (and/or software) sometimes do. It's a big contribution to your fellow users to let us know so we can fix it.
if you rotate it 180 deg Z axis, it's like she's watching you
Some of the underlying idea is true (most businesses don't feel confident that remote workers are as efficient as those they can directly supervise), though it was unnecessarily snarky and dramatic. I don't like the idea put forth that employers have a motivation driven by emotion; how you manage your employees is mostly driven by efficiency and profit.
What Do These Low Interest Rates and the Crazy Stock Market Mean for Me?
So happy to see this up here, I look forward to more folks joining to make this site even better.
Cooking Proteins Fast, Reducing Effort
Othering the Virus
These types of apps are great in my experience... unless you use a white noise maker or a fan.
Why would a dermatologist intubate you?
> If you are ok with one but not the other, what would be a good line distinguishing them and guiding principle?

Because celebrity by definition requires trading privacy for fame, and is almost always a decision.

We need a new legal classification for "public, but not accessible by everyone in the world for the rest of time" information, which is what most regular people assume or desire for themselves.
It seems Odd that you state how important collaboration is, then your conclusion is that you should use a tool that is extremely Bad at collaboration! It seems like the value of collaborating with each other in the moment is much much much more valuable than whether I can review my 10-year old designs.

Also, you're using macOS which is extremely callous as to keeping old versions of programs running - do you really think that a 10-year old version of Sketch or any other macOS program will run on any modern OS? macOS fully deprecates and breaks programs aggressively every release.
Things Wealthy People Do to Get Richer
> if certain models happen to be falsified by observational/experimental constraints, then the framework provides ways to construct other models circumventing the constraints

But the string theory framework has not produced any testable models.

> string theory is the only example we’ve managed, on that front

Huh? String theory hasn't produced any testable models, so it has not done anything towards satisfying all of the constraints of known experimental results.
While I know there are many devs out there who confuse & conflate "Git" and "Github" and don't really know the difference between the two, I don't think bringing the conflation into "informed" discussion is particularly helpful.

Conceptually, Github is not different for the local ".git" folder sitting on my machine. I can do `git clone '../some/local/dir/.git" just as easily as I can with any SSH or HTTPS link: the underlying protocol used for the transaction changes but the concept does not. So I think defining a "remote" as something inherently centralised by definition just because Github et al are popular isn't helpful: it simply persists the misconception.

Basically: I'm still actually struggling to really fully understand what dgit is.

git-ssb is a protocol for accessing git repos stored in an ssb-db (which is a distributed db). git-ssb-web is a web UI for exposing git repositories stored in an ssb-db.

Can you explain dgit in those terms?
It’s unlikely that the patent office part is critical.
"SKYNET CREATED"! Finally! It only too me 2 hours and fastmode. Such a great game!
MUR – Minimal Universal Respirator
>And if we hope to blunt the impact of others like it, let’s not forget, again, that all of our lives are, together, embedded in highly complex systems.

Isn't that the reason for the end of systemic thinking? If it is highly complex, what good is it to focus on managing the system? Why not manage the perception and let evolution run its course?
The pathological case for skylinesort is the optimal case for quicksort: uniformly randomly distributed data. In this case skylinesort is 3-4x slower than quicksort. It's still not like the pathological case of quicksort, which takes quadratic time: it's an effectively log-linear worst case.

My advice is to use skylinesort when you have or can have tons of empty memory and have clustered data. Clustered means there's repetition of data points or they are in some ranges more than others. But in practice whenever your data isn't uniformly randomly distributed, skylinesort is better.
> There's been this notion that "Japan has handled the outbreak well" or, among the conspiratoricals, "the government is hiding the real numbers" where my take is that the data is just not there to make any kind of conclusion either way yet.

Because they aren't testing broadly in the population, which is a way of "hiding the real numbers" without it looking so nefarious... you just don't get real numbers and then there's nothing to hide. As a political tool it's a nice bit of sleight-of-hand, but as a public policy decision it's disastrous.
That’s a fantastic resource, thanks a ton. Will link to their download pages instead of trying to make my own files.

I’m looking more at reading online directly, having the book read to you, choosing your own fonts etc, and ultimately helping people write their own books.
Cortex-M MCU Emulation with Renode
That's indeed fascinating. Any such line will always have an element of arbitrariness. I.e. Pick duration Y. Then why not Y+1 or Y-1.

That being said. Pandemics are highly predictable and where I live (Europe) we had the benefit of seeing different approaches being used by different countries with varying degrees of success (Taiwan v. Italy).

There are measures (such as air travel restriction) where we know they're not that effective (although they do buy you some time). There are measures (such as social distancing and being early and aggressive in closing schools and other facilities) that are known to be more effective.

I think the line can be drawn where one has sufficient information to act quickly and still refuses to do so.

In government's (limited) defense. Exponentials are highly counterintuitive, so it's understandable the right thing feels strange.

The right time to implement measures is precisely when everything 'feels fine'. That, coupled with political blowback and economical impact serves as a constraint to quick action IMO. [1]

I'm by no means an expert in this field. I merely study human behavior in the context of business. So with a little luck, an epidemiologist will chime in.

[1] I suspect that there's 1 other bias that plays a role. Namely, what doesn't occur is harder to quantify than that which does. E.g. The FDA might pull a drug and save lives as a result. On the flip side, the lives that are lost because certain drugs take years and years to market are hard to measure. There are virtually no consequences for The FDA regarding the lives that are lost by being slow. There are massive consequences for the lives that are lost by approving a bad drug. Now imagine that the harder to quantify lives lost due to slowness exceeds those due to bad drugs. That would mean The FDA had a negative net-effect yet it would feel positive due to this bias.
I'm on the fence about purchasing the book. How do you find it?
Machine learning is both over-hyped and world-changing