skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I went to Stanford last weekend with a slight fever and sore throat and was tested and had results in about 16 hours. You could go right now and get tested there if you have symptoms. It’s an anecdote, sure, but the idea that people can’t get tested isn’t completely true.
AirBnB started out as a great service for travelers. The quality of the lodging and the prices were, in the beginning, lower than hotels, and had nicer amenities. Over the years it has gotten worse, to the point hotels are almost always a better bet in most locales if you value cleanliness or convenience. Not to mention the negative effects AirBnB has had on the local economies it operates in.

I'm sure they were already in a tight situation financially and this is the nail in the coffin. Personally, I'd be happy to see them go. Seems like an experiment that isn't worth continuing to me.
Location: Sydney, Australia

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: 50%+ travel time

Technologies: Tech Exec, CFO, Corporate Finance

Résumé/CV: www.linkedin.com/in/phillipinberg/

Email: pi {at} empiricalpi.com
Ask HN: How many unused domain names do you have?
I received an e-mail that one of my domains was set to expire. When I logged in to my registrar to see which one, I was shocked to see just how many great ideas I never executed in the form of parked domain names. I have 22 domains. One for family email, a couple of my kids' names, but the rest are just collecting annual fees. Anyone else have a similar problem?
Here it's: "did anyone hear those gunshots last night?!?" (in reference to fireworks).
The formatter that set the expectation of standard formatting was that for Go (gofmt), which applies a very light touch: it never removes newlines and rarely inserts them, so you still have latitude to arrange the code in a way that respects its meaning.

By contrast, the Java formatter we use at Google is an example of the totalitarian instincts unleashed by this new technology: it insists on reflowing everything, including the contents of comments so that they always use the full 100 columns. Madness.
Ask HN: Would an app to split proceeds be useful for zoom users?
I started building a web app a couple months back and put it on hold. https://www.korabo.io

It allows users to split proceeds on a per payment basis among many collaborators.

e.g. if a number of individuals collaborating from home over zoom want to split proceeds per payment for a service, this would work.

If it can benefit others, I will just open-source the code base in hopes the community can make it into something useful for the world as still needs work.
DIY Ventilators? Not Unless There’s a Zombie Apocalypse
A lot of great books are already mentioned.

I also enjoyed "Masterminds of Programming: Conversations With The Creators Of Major Programming Languages" [0]

It's a collection of interviews with creators of languages (FORTH, C++, Python, Haskell, and many more) You learn a lot about language design decisions and their pitfalls.

And a shameless plug: I shared MapFilterFold as a Show HN earlier, a project that collects recommendations from Ask HN threads. Browsing the books tagged computer science might yield some interesting results[1]

[0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596515170/

[1] https://mapfilterfold.com/books/?genre=computer%20science
I'm not sure exactly what those quotes are referring to, but many reports of European settlers to the New World, while technically true, were greatly misleading.

Prior to arrival of the Europeans, the continent was full of Native Americans who lived in an ecological balance with wildlife.

When the Europeans arrived, the diseases they brought wiped out 90+% of the indigenous population, according to some estimates. By the time they explored the continent, the population was mainly gone, far in advance.

So there's a strong theory that the incredible over-abundance of wildlife the Europeans saw was actually a huge ecological imbalance, as many animals had lost their natural (human) predators.

And that phenomena such as millions of passenger pigeons blocking out the sun overhead weren't "natural" at all, but actually severe ecological imbalance.

(This isn't to say, of course, that now we haven't swung way too far in the other direction. But just that the tales of abundance aren't necessarily a naturally balanced state either.)
I use my iPad for Zoom. One of the few times I'm glad the App Store and sandbox exist.

Even their iOS/iPadOS app is annoying, because the first time you open it and sign in, it pops 3 (!) permission dialogs (Calendar, Notifications, and TouchID/FaceID). Way too aggressive IMO.

Now, if only they'd make a Mac App Store version of Zoom. I'd be so happy...
Man, it's disappointing to hear this has stayed the same for so long. In the future, Apple should sandbox 'preflight' to disallow writing files, and then enforce it as a condition of notarization.
This entire site is an argumentative fallacy. There are many other factors involved in the spreading of viruses. Masks are not going to solve the problem and forcing people to start wearing masks isn't going to make people believe that it is a solution.
The Annotated Turing Machine

It tells about history of Turing Machine and explains Turing's paper.
Los Angeles traffic accidents have fallen by over 90 percent
Tangential: for me, the buzzfeed-esque GIFs make this post unpleasant to read. I couldn’t continue after a point.
Often things like this are tax related.
Clean?

I like this game.
The oldest 'Joel on Software' [0] posts are kind of a window into some of the best writing on software of that time.

[0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/
I’m not a 1980s network censor chasing after “bad words” here. You painted a nasty picture of a company and its relationship with its employees. You can express yourself without attacks.
Do not coyotes bring in ticks and all the tick-borne diseases as well? perhaps public health priority #2 is to humanely remove these animals sooner than later.
Calling out the biggest players is fine. They have the most resources to roll their own or at least shop around, should they value their users privacy.
No. The point is, COVID-19 testing kit is in extreme short supply everywhere in the world right now given most countries are locked down and the viral outbreak patients are growing at an exponential rate, the next reliable way to diagnose COVID-19 for clinicians without testing kits is to use CT (which gets results fast and inexpensive and the equipment is universally accessible in every hospital) scans and find some patterns, which is exactly what doctors in Wuhan did during the early phase of the outbreak[1].

[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32134681
I play a mind game in which the smartest code is the one that looks dumbest and is easiest to understand (of course while still working best).
The Instacart workers should encourage any scabs to instead join the strike so they can work together to demand better wages and conditions.
If it’s FOSS and easily self-hostable, that’d be even better.
> They were here long before humans were ever here and will still be here long after we are gone.

Actually, they weren't, in the PNW. Coyotes were restricted to central North America until 1700; when European settlers extirpated wolves, coyotes moved in to take their place.

See: https://urbancoyoteresearch.com/coyote-info/north-american-d...
This is really cool, but it isn't bokeh, it's just blur.
> yet at the end of the war Eastern Europe was in the hands of a worse totalitarian dictatorship, the USSR.

I was born in Hungary and I lived under the USSR occupation of Hungary. I am also the grandson of an Auschwitz survivor so I strenuously object to you painting the USSR as worse as Nazi Germany.
If the A7/A9 series are analogous to a Razer laptop, the a6000 series would be the Lenovo Yoga. Very compact and performant, if a little complicated.
It's not odd at all. If you have existing datastore(s) and APIs, and you try to add GraphQL on top of it. You're trying to retrofit it.

> add (a component or accessory) to something that did not have it when manufactured.

GraphQL doesn't magically just tie into a datastore and allow you to query it.

In most cases, adding GraphQL just add's another layer of complexity and doesn't solve any existing problem for people.

I'm not saying GraphQL is bad. It's just massively miss/over used now.
> hypothesize

Of course not! We've got half a million cases now, hundreds of thousands cases in hospitals, and hundreds of papers published in all the medical journals. So yeah, data is rich.
Look at all those offices and spacious high-walled cubicles, productivity nirvana!
Ask HN: How are you managing your money now?
Stock market recovered a bit but still down 20% or so and unclear whether we will retest lows in the coming weeks. Unemployment will tick up. Who knows what else.

How are you managing your finances during this time?
I never understand why people go to all this work of developing and even marketing major libraries or languages if you aren't going to at least give some doc examples. Jeez, just copy and paste some unit tests and put some prose explanation in. It doesn't take long.
You might like being a parent lawyer from the sound of it. It’s a great job. The hours aren’t long, pay is good. Deadlines are predictable and you often work with interesting technology and people.
I experienced the switch from Webex to Zoom in a corporate office environment and being able to see your meeting on the iPad and clicking start is a huge win. And if you’re in any room you can just connect because it knows where you are.

Webex addresses are stupid by comparison.

I don’t like this Facebook crap but otherwise Zoom is pretty slick.
I cringe when I come across the aftermath of decisions that sorely needed a reality check from a "just starting to code reflex" prototype or POC. Unchecked by the compiler or the need to actually work, complex design documents tend to derail into fantasy worlds.

I want to read about what you ended up having to do after making contact with the real world, not what you thought you were going to do at the whiteboard stage.
The part about the DIY ventilator being just as likely to kill the patient as the virus is what really makes the entire idea somewhat suspect.

What would actually work would be to force medical companies to (temporarily?) give up any patents they have in ventilators, or going all the way and forcing them to open-source their designs, so that anyone can see what we need, how we need to build it, and who would be able to do it, and when. But let's talk about DIY ventilators instead, eh?
It's a matter priority.

If it's a real problem, go sue them. Do you need a Havard op ed to tell you?
Thank god I don't live in a society where people get fired for unionising.

I don't understand how such a thing happens in any democratic society.

Do workers really not like the idea of collective bargaining, or are there more business owners than workers in your state/country?
> It's not practical to disallow standalone function calls

If your language structurally differentiated procedures (i.e., void-returning functions) from (other) functions, it would be practical to disallow standalone functions (not procedures), though you might have a modifier to explicitly discard the result of a function that allows it to be standalone.
I mean half the video is talking about the (proven) effectiveness of homemade cloth masks of various materials vs N95 and surgical masks, so you certainly can't accuse them of not understanding the difference.

You are making quite a strong claim. Do you have any evidence for that? Why would getting some coronavirus on your hands when you take the mask off be worse than inhaling it? Of course many healthcare workers are being issued only one respirator per day, and they are exposed to drastically more coronavirus. It's not exactly difficult to simply wash a cloth mask like any other piece of clothing, and a surgical mask isn't very difficult to sanitize either.

Moreover if you are sick and don't know it a mask protects everyone else from the primary infection route.
That's a good idea. Some friend also suggested a air purifier.
Come and help us source centrifugal compressors from Chinese factories on openvent.org ($50 ventilator project. Yes.). Need to call up factories and ask about their production capabilities and to send out samples. Very interesting group of people have gathered around the project and you will get some good contacts.
> I said that due to recent policy decisions, the government has incentivized workers not to work.

That's one way to look at it.

An arguably more accurate interpretation is that few workers laid off due to Covid-19 are likely to find remote work. And that means testing wouldn't be worth the expense.

There is increased demand for delivery drivers and truckers, I admit. So I agree that these policies may increase wage rates for such categories. But that's not so horrible.
Sometimes I really wonder who is on hackernews that stuff like this gets downvoted. Apparently a healthy dose of (scientific) skepticism means one is being ‘rude’ in SV circles. I guess the intellectual-property-rentier industrial complex that is Silicon Valley doesn’t like people looking behind the curtains.
In a normal free market economy

Which does not obtain during a demand shock. I really wish people would pay more attention to the fine print.
Question- are you just worried about not having a job or are you at a point where money is tight. If it’s the former I suggest taking a deep breath and reminding yourself that things will get better. If you need money now I would bet there is a less than ideal job available now. From the small amount of text you have written I can deduce you seem motivated and at intelligent. I have been in the position to hire people in several previous roles. One red flag I always shied away from is desperation. It’s not an automatic no, but I wonder what is going on if someone is recently out of work and upset about not having the next gig lined up. Again you have limited space to plead your case so if I misread the situation then please accept my apology. My perspective on things is that yep this sucks and I will tighten up my belt but it’s not Armageddon just yet. If we all look for (even virtual) community things will work out.
SF's early restrictions may be helping hospitals avoid Covid-19 overload so far
Ask HN: Devpost Covid Hackathon
I am looking for teammates for the Devpost COVID-19 Hackathon - https://covid-global-hackathon.devpost.com/. If you are interested or also looking for a teammate please email me: address is on profile.

TY and Be Well,
- A
Most of the anti-Motif comments are by jwz.
> In a normal free market economy

Free market economies are an analytical fiction, not a normal thing at all.

> Now there’s no reason to look for another job, if your rent is guaranteed and the government checks come in every month for four months on top of unemployment.

Both the base and supplemental unemployment still require you to be actively seeking work and to not reject offered work to continue to receive the checks, so there is, in fact, a very good reason to look for work.
This looks nice. I’d prefer that the app clearly states upfront that the numbers are in minutes, instead of someone having to guess what it is. It’d also be nice to start at one minute and have one minute increments for the first 10 minutes. Sometimes one just needs a short break. The current minimum length of 10 minutes seems too long for that.
Treatment of 5 Critically Ill Patients with Covid-19 with Convalescent Plasma
Thanks for the insight.

> In VR people will stick their heads everywhere.

Particularly when players have any level of knowledge about what kind of complexities or edge cases are likely involved (eg. any software developer or QA, even if not part of the gaming industry). Or... hell, maybe it's even worse when you have ignorant players who expect the VR environment to mimic real life so perfectly that they get frustrated and can't understand why certain actions aren't supported/working.

The first VR game I got to experience was one of the haunted house horror games, and you're damn right I bent down and tried to shoved my head into an open cupboard just to see if the collision detection stopped at the outer box of the model, or whether my head would be allowed to enter the space. Then repeatedly leaned/shoved my head against VR walls at various angles to see if I could get the camera to clip or bounce/reposition jarringly. Poor, poor developers who have to try and nail all that logic perfectly. It must be so rewarding to see final results when everything works out well, though. :P
Actually it is. The labor market on its own cannot ensure a dignified existence—if the supply is to big people will stoop. Banning jobs doesn't help much yes, but that doesn't mean the market on its own is good.

The action that does help is shrinking the supply. UBI so less need to work, or need to work as much.
Well, right now, we have a serious problem with cash flow—that is, there isn't much cash flowing through the economy, because people are staying in their homes.

So people who are still employed, but can't (or shouldn't) leave their homes still have some money, probably more than usual.

But the primary answer to that question is the same as it's been for the past couple decades: the people with the money are, well, the people hoarding all the money. The owners, the (big) employers, the people at the top.

As has been reported various places, just as an example, the airline industry spent the last decade spending something like 80-90% of every dollar they made buying back stock to enrich their executives. That's why they don't have anything saved for a crisis like this, and that's who has all the money now.
Oh, wow! For anyone that can't see the picture - the historical range shows grizzly bears past Texas and well into Mexico
One of the first things I learnt in English 101 is that "I think" is redundant.

Your writing something automatically implies that it's what you think.

Unless you explicitly say something is a "fact" or quote a 3rd party.
I quickly hacked a website together last weekend based on the COVID Tracking Project data because I wanted to see how much testing was being done and where. It's the only source that I found that has testing information, which at this point is very important I think.

The site's not great on mobile, but I'll be working on that this weekend.

http://VirusTracking.net
No need to be wasteful, explore the exciting world of scooter hacking with a clear conscience.
https://hackaday.com/2018/12/07/liberating-birds-for-a-cheap...
How do they find these new workers? Wait for them out at the grocery stores?
Same guy. 100% different project. He required the NetNewsWire name well after the start of this new open source RSS reader.
Why do so few of these small programming language projects have a "why x?" section? How do they expect to gain marketshare if they aren't frontloading their value? This is a fairly old project and yet they've never taken the time to put a sales pitch on their website. In the past 12 years they've added 15 links to their press page [0]. This is a fairly mature project and I have no idea why I should investigate it. I guess it's fine if they never want users, but as someone who's worked in the startup world this sort of thing really gets under my skin.

[0] https://chapel-lang.org/press.html
We have a few thousand conference rooms around the world wired from Zoom. Much of it is probably commodity hardware that could be reconfigured for another platform, but it would still be a massive undertaking.
What would you have done? Saved $45B in cash in case a virus like this causes the world economy to stop?

There is no world where an airline/hotel or any business could have possibly saved enough cash to fight a 90%+ drop in revenue for months and still remain competitive in the market.
I don't think he's saying you should write excessively before doing anything, just that enough context should be given to understand the decision at that point in time. At which point someone should start coding, and after real world experience changes the plan, that too could be added to the decision journal.
If I remember correctly, this work was an end of semester advanced OS/Networking class presentation. I picked Pipes, others picked the filesystem, device drivers, CUDA, process scheduling etc. For the master’s thesis, my work was on active indoor localization and tracking (early work before indoor Google maps was launched).

Re: your second question, I guess you’re referring to identifying a FIFO on the filesystem - that’s a simple ls -la - FIFOs show up as regular files with the p attribute. For procfs or sysfs - just ls /proc or ls /sys

Man page: http://nersp.nerdc.ufl.edu/~dicke3/nerspcs/ls.html

You should see the p attribute for FIFOs on the filesystem. Sysfs and procfs map onto internal (in-memory) kernel data structures, so those might just show up as regular files in the “virtual” filesystem. So cat, grep etc. on these files will be just reads/writes from/to the appropriate memory space in the kernel or for read only files, they may be “code generated output” that allows for inspection of some internal state in the kernel.
Ask HN: Interesting scaling challenges for HN itself during Covid?
I’m wondering if HN is experiencing massive continuous surge of traffic with COVID... and if so, what it looks like infrastructure wise to support that :-)
It would be nice if there was some more information about where the mask comes from. We want a segmentation map for people, so this technique basically takes the layer activation map for the "person" class - which is id 0 in COCO - and you can threshold that to get foreground/background. If you changed the mask index, this would respond to other object types (so as written this code will only work for humans).

--

By the way, Google does some absolutely nuts stuff with this on the Pixel 3 and 4 - they actually calculate a stereo depth map using the two autofocus sites in individual pixels. Essentially some modern CMOS sensors use a technology called dual pixel autofocus (DPAF), by measuring the response from two photodiodes in the same pixel, you adjust focus until each pixel has the same intensity (more or less). If the camera is out of focus, the two photodiodes will have different intensities.

However what this gives you is two separate images with an extremely small (but detectable) parallax which can be used to give coarse 3D reconstruction, and you can segment foreground and background. It's nice because you get a strong physical prior, rather than having to worry about using a convnet to identify fore/background regions. (They of course apply a convnet anyway to refine the result).

https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/11/learning-to-predict-depth-...

https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/12/improvements-to-portrait-m...
Viral loads also decreased and *became negative* within 12 days

How does viral load become negative? Do they subtract antibody count from virus count?
Read what EPA actually said. It's not unreasonable.

https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2020-03/documents...
Every single major hotel brand (Hilton/Marriott/Hyatt/IHG/choice/Wyndham/Accor) and online travel agent (Priceline/Expedia) has waived cancellation penalties and non refundable deposits.
Awesome! Computational photography is fascinating. A while back, I wrote some OpenGL shaders to do the same thing, and got stuck when I wanted variable bokeh based on scene depth. This is easy when you have the depth map (say, in a renderer). I recall reading about how Apple achieved this using stereo disparity mapping, which is great if you have the hardware. I hadn't considered a neural net approach like yours for auto-generating a depth map, although I now that I look into it, Facebook recently published research on just that!

https://ai.facebook.com/blog/-powered-by-ai-turning-any-2d-p...
I've generally liked his technical rants and writings. These don't really land with me though. Maybe he was frustrated with some deadlines or something.