skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I used to work in videoconferencing, and Zoom seemingly came out of nowhere and everybody loved it, because people overwhelmingly said it really is the best.

In terms of actual reliable video/audio experience. When evaluating platforms, other videoconferencing solutions simply suffered quality issues more -- taking longer to start, glitches, latency, pausing, echo, and so on.

Also, the hard part isn't building 1-1 video chat. It's having it work with 20 or 200 separate participants.

I have no idea why they're better except that building reliable audio-video at scale turns out to be a really hard problem, and they seemed to focus their engineering on that specifically.

Kind of like file sync was really unreliable until Dropbox decided to focus on building a sync tool that actually "just worked". Same philosophy. Zoom is the Dropbox of videoconferencing.
Cryptocurrency can facilitate crime just like cash, but with scale come new and unknown implications. Same with information security, surveillance, and more: physical vulnerability in a door lock vs. remotely exploitable vulnerability in Wi-Fi router firmware; standalone CCTV vs. a connected network of cameras with centralized storage that allows tracking the movements of a given person throughout the day—the latter cases inevitably create potential for less obvious, more insidious exploitation not restricted by physical barriers.
What do these words even mean in every day life?
Can you expand on the "forbidden technologies"? What else was on the list, what were the penalties for entering forbidden territory? Could you use it on your own machine for research?
> This is in part because they were obviously too good for WebRTC native audio and instead gutted ffmpeg and compiled it to WebAssembly (I wish I was kidding but I'm not: https://webrtchacks.com/zoom-avoids-using-webrtc/).

Not a Zoom apologist I—I am also deeply creeped out by the fetish for covert data exfiltration in a platform that is so widely used in these quarantine days—but, as far as the tech goes, the story you linked seems to say that they do use WebRTC as of September 2019.
In a sense. They're highly specialized organisms with relatively inefficient metabolisms. They do great in an environment filled with just them and their food. But in an environment filled with other organic material (like their own bodies) they get outcompeted pretty badly by more conventional microbes.
Would you be willing to attempt to disprove any one of these in a comment-reply?
Cryptocurrencies answer the need to move money fast and free, the same way the emails free us from using post offices to send letters.
All international flights to Russia halted as of today
Civilised countries already do this!
Free software licenses are considered open source, yet they contains some restrictions. Commons clause licenses have some restrictions, but there is no reason they should be excluded from the open source definition, especially when we consider why they exists and which companies they target.
I tried this and was not happy with the results

The mask deformed, got wet, and I do not believe the mask got hot enough - it was cool, including the metal parts.
A while ago I remembered reading that a typical video conferencing/streaming setup on AWS has astronomical costs. I don't remember exactly which AWS services were used in the estimate but it seemed very prohibitive for startups.
My experience installing Ruby 2.3.6 (old Ruby) on Gitpod Cloud IDE
...huh. When I was trying it yesterday, it told me I couldn't use my computer's microphone "in this browser" and would have to either download the app or join by phone. It did let me use my webcam though, which seemed a bit bizarre.
> Try it when you want breakout groups and to determine who is in which group, and after a set time for the groups to return to the main space.

> or giving a ... seminar.

Zoom is good for large, hugely interactive, video conferencing and meeting.

I am unaffiliated, just a user who has used most of what is out there.
> I'm using a cryptocurrency for feeless, instant microtransactions in a browser based game. It happens to be a near ideal solution. That, said I won't force it upon anyone. It is a purely voluntary proposition.

I think you just made the point of my article again for me, thanks ;)

The volatility of crypto just don't provide a real alternative to regular currencies though.
"Detrimental to society" isn't very defensible, he should have gone with "dysfunctional, practically useless technology" instead:

* "Anonymous" transactions which are actually on a public, immutable ledger

* Power structure moved away from banks/Fed, and instead to various Chinese mining cartels, shady exchange owners, and early adopters

* Incredible power/resource usage, given the functionality

* Complete lack of fraud protection, insurance, and basic consumer/legal controls (which adopters will claim is a feature)

* Wild, constant price swings based on speculation/gambling/front-running/malfeasance

* Various forks and community squabbling, even 10 years after release
Location: Central NY, USA

Remote: Preferably

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies:

- Vue.js/Nuxt.js
- Node.js
- Express.js
- ES6+
- CSS/SCSS/Stylus (incl. Tailwind, Bootstrap, and Bulma frameworks)
- HTML
- SQL/NoSQL
- PHP
- JAM stack
- LAMP/LEMP stack
- Serverless microservices
- Git-based deployments
- API design
- CMS frameworks incl. Strapi, Ghost, & WordPress
- Web hosts incl. Zeit, AWS, & Digital Ocean
- Docker/Dokku
- Adobe Creative Suite
- Sketch

Resume: https://danielsieradski.com

Gitlab: https://gitlab.com/selfagency

Email: daniel at self dot agency

I have twenty years in the field. I started out as a graphic designer and moved into web design but when the social media craze took off, I got heavily involved in digital strategy and wound up working in that arena for many years, chiefly for nonprofits, which included managing staff, budgets, timelines, etc. I pivoted back to web dev about five years ago, upgraded all my skills, and was working for a magazine with 3M readers running their entire web stack singlehandedly from my home office until I got laid off when they sold the company last year. I would characterize myself as a mid-level full-stack dev and a junior dev ops and site reliability engineer. I'm pretty much a jack-of-all-trades who understands the ins-and-outs of a lot of different aspects of the industry, has a great deal of experience with a wide variety of clients and types of projects, and has been a product owner, launching many of my own projects over the years (some more successful than others). I'm looking for a full-time remote opportunity that makes the best use of my skills, challenges me to keep learning and growing, and which has a mission or product I can truly believe in.
Would like to see Apple utilize their ultrawideband chip for decentralized contact tracing.
How to Understand the Nightmare Chart
A bit outside of the "work" domain, but I've found BigBlueButton to be a really powerful tool for hosting webinars and online teaching
[1]: https://bigbluebutton.org/
Tried it literally 2 hours ago. Didn't work, had to switch to chrome.

(Windows 10, if it matters. IIRC I had the same experience on linux)
I just downloaded a whole album, 1h:09m long via Youtube-Notube->m4a. Uploaded the m4a via https://stefano.brilli.me/webminidisc/. Works perfectly... Thanks again
> I will be left with a nonsensical patch

This is the current state of things, though. Heuristic diff algorithms generate nonsensical patches all the time. They may be technically correct but completely obscure the meaning of the diff.

The simplicity of the diff algorithm does not help me understand a bad diff. And these diff algorithms are already not that simple. A machine learning approach could still guarantee technical correctness of the diff, but give patches that make sense more often.
Hum... Yes.

Not exactly equivalent, but monad-based DSLs have almost the same power as Lisp macros.

You can't escape the syntax restrictions, the same way you can't escape Lisp's syntax restrictions. And it's a bonus for Lisp (in power) that its syntax is much more flexible. But in semantics they are equivalent.
Identifying asymptomatic people helped eliminate virus in Italian village
Haskell is not opinionated. All in all, it's probably easier (but misses much of the point of Haskell) to just write "IO" and "do/return" on every function in your program than to use IO in a disciplined way.
Haskell even supports this with special do-syntax (and the fortuitously-named "return") to make monadic code look more imperative!

Paying that IO/do/return syntax tax (sin-tax? syn-tax?) is still cheaper than the signature/return boilerplate in competing compiled languages like C and Java. Haskell invites you avoud that syn-tax by writing principled IO.

One of the major complains of Haskell is that it is so expressive and powerful that there are so many incompatible ways of architecting modules. (see the incompatibilities in implementations of Monad Transformers / Effects, Lens, etc)

Rails is perhaps the original "opionated" system.
https://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html
A shrimp vendor at the Wuhan seafood market reported symptoms starting Dec. 10, so unless someone finds earlier cases elsewhere, I think that's as good a place as any to call the starting point.

https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/health-problems/cor...
Fiat Currencies are Detrimental To Society

How would you explain the inner workings of fiat currency to someone in simple, understandable terms?

"Imagine if the person in your neighborhood with the biggest house ran a printer in his garage that printed off paper that said "1 Buck" on it, and instead of giving the pizza delivery guy silver coins in exchange for their service, gave them bucks. Also he demands you pay him "$1 Buck" a week or else he'll take a buck worth of your stuff every week and if you can't pay he'll break your legs. And if you started printing your own "1 Buck" notes, he will come and lock you in a cage."

This explanation seems perfect to me because it illustrates the absolute insanity of all fiat currencies in one simple sentence.

It captures the unimaginable unfairness of maintaining fiat currencies. And it also captures the dark side of fiat currencies: perpetuation of a system of sovereign violence.

At this point fiat currency enthusiasts are rolling their eyes and sigh. This point has been made many times over. I know, I'm definitely not the first to criticise fiat currencies this way.

I do have a simple challenge though:

Can you please show me the benefit to society of fiat currencies?
Yeah, in a new york minute. This is already built into iOS in their newer Find My Phone. The carriers also know who and where we are just need to add in covid testing data. The problem is that even if it is decentralized and OSS, then the average user can't/won't install it. If it is simple and easy (centralized), then it becomes a honey pot for the government.
>They let a 17 year old die because they didn't have enough money?

They referred the parents to a facility that could actually provide treatmeint. Urgent Care /= ER/A&E. They are for non-life threatening illnesses.

For some sort of comparison it would be like taking your car that has smoke pouring from underneath the hood to the place on the corner that only sells car parts and has very limited diagnostic tools to try and help you figure out what the issue is.
I worked at a company with a similar issue. The server is used to get patched and rebooted every month. Then the company decided to lay off huge chunks of operations staff. The software held up remarkably well, but we eventually discovered that software that was never designed to stay up for more than a month will leak memory like crazy if you leave it up for a long enough.
Use case: Mediation

Zoom is the only easy to use videoconferencing tool I have found that can do breakout rooms. Mediation is, by law, a confidential process.

From the ConsumerReports article:
"Videos aren't off-limits, according to the document, and neither are transcripts that can be generated automatically, the documents you share on your screen, or the names of everyone on a call."

In recommending that my clients use Zoom, am I violating my ethical and legal requirements? Is Zoom breaking the law?
I am hopeful that the US public may warm up to masks in public in the future. It seems likely this would cut down on the spread of seasonal flu and common colds.
Is this the watershed moment for esports? interview with esports.com CEO
Interesting stuff, would love to hear more intuition about why this is difficult. Is it just that we haven't found an economical pathway for metabolizing plastics, or is there a fundamental reason why one should not exist?

Hydrocarbons have an energy density 2-3x higher than glucose, so naively it seems like there should be a profitable metabolic pathway!
They didn't turn him out on the street: they sent him to the emergency room and he died en-route. Urgent care clinics are not hospitals, they don't even like writing prescriptions for anything other than antibiotics. At best they could have called him an ambulance.
Why Rails succeeded and why microservices fail from DHH
49.7 days? I wish I could get more than 7 out of my MacOS Catalina laptops before I get a gray screen.
Instead of a reaction to scripting languages, or maybe in addition to, I think the current trends of shepherding languages are reacting to the flexibility of C and, even more so C++. C++ in particular is such a mind-boggling huge language. It presents so many choices that designing anything new involves searching a massive solution space. A task better left to experts.

Newbies (speaking from experience) need a framework to lean on. Something that provides a starting point for solving problems. Opinionated languages provide that out of the box.
isn't that the default behaviour when you're muted? pushing the spacebar unmutes until you let go. Is the option for turning that feature OFF?
Completely agree, yet I think this should be reflected in the article.

From the limited exposure I had with children on the spectrum, I didn’t see many that could actually wear a google glass to use it as described in the article. I also don’t understand the benefit of the device itself.
It’s not designed for autism, the interventions seem simplicstic ,battery life is highly limited, it‘s very fragile ... if it’s for short interactions and games (like they describe in the papers) I wonder what the advantage of the head mounted display is compared to other setups. they don’t do any comparisons.
Ask HN: How to raise money for a Covid 19 WhatsApp Chatbot?
I'm currently trying to build a Whatsapp based chatbot to provide food and basic necessities to the people under quarantine in Kerala, India.

Most people in Kerala who owns a smartphone has access to Whatsapp so a bot to provide authentic news, and to request food and ambulace would be of paramount importance.

Raising money from the government for a bot is really hard, so is there any way to raise the necessary funds for this project ?

All ideas, links to grants are all welcome.
> Why is Zoom being singled out?

There is no conspiracy here, calm down. Zoom is popular, therefore people talk about it.
Russia closed their border with China in January, which probably helped delay the onset of their cases.
Buy the book and then send a PayPal donation using the link at the top of their website.
Journalist who wrote about grass-eating dalits in Varanasi served notice
I got a digital toaster over to try this at home, but the lowest temp I can set is 200 degrees F. Can I still use it (with a shorter period)?
You should pay a native English speaker to rewrite your copy. It's intelligible, but very broken and would not give me any confidence in paying for your product.
Because they are still building it dude.

These are significantly difficult game theory problems to wrestle with.

There are one or two I follow that are getting very close.
Oh, I think it's completely fine to play with the data and talk about it with friends.

But SEOd medium posts have different reach potential than a facebook comment/phone call with friends/family. That's kind of the whole point of them.
Likewise you are affecting others too by telling people to install other app. Lets not kid ourselves not everyone value privacy the same.
Looks promising! Are there any docs coming on a production ready setup? Reading below it looks like you're working on high availability, but even in the single machine scenario, do you have recommendations for persistence, fault tolerance etc?
Economic and financial warfare that the US is waging on Russia clearly shows that a country has got to choose between self-reliance and obedience.
If you are going to require students/employees to use a tool like Zoom (and choosing it for lectures is definitely making it a requirement) then you are obligated to, at the very least, seek informed consent from students/staff as to what privacy they are giving up. And if someone doesn't consent (voluntarily), you have to seek alternatives and mitigations.

If you're a Comp Sci or Engineering prof you really have an obligation to try harder. You have the capability to explain mitigation techniques (virtual machines, sandboxing, using temporary email addresses, VPNs).

Longer term I think we will see a host of Zoom competitors, because really there is nothing special in the client. Hangouts in particular could easily eclipse it with some work.

Also, I think the grid of faces approach is just awful. Many people have been working on VR meeting systems which have significant advantages for multiperson communication (i.e. discussion vs broadcast). Lecture/theatre VTC (which provides an aggregated feedback signal to the presenter) is completely unmet by Zoom. So once we're past the hump the field will broaden, and at that point the privacy requirements have to be enforced rigourously.
>Cryptocurrencies have existed for eleven years, they should have something to show for right now.

IMO this argument is pretty seriously flawed. We tend to think of revolutionary technologies as "overnight successes" but that's rarely the case.

If we had abandoned the smartphone 11 years after the first attempt at, we would never have the iPhone. If we had abandoned combustion engines 11 years after their first attempt, we never would have had the automobile. New technology is hard and requires a lot of tinkering.

I also think the author fails to capture what people look to as the potential of crypto. While there is a definite subculture of neo-Austrian economics, a lot of us are also interested about the ability to structure new forms of digital markets, make money programmatic, and increase the structural privacy of the internet.
Where did this researcher get the anonymized mobile phone location data points from ?

Also, I think it's important to clarify that:

"Every cell phone user has to be tracked so the cell network knows how to route their calls ..."

... would be more accurate if we said:

"Every cell phone has to be tracked ..."

Many pieces of the cellular network have no idea who the handset (or other device) is assigned to, or who is using it - they just know that that SIM card is up on the network, and needs to be routed appropriately ...
I also find their UI to be frustrating, especially the chat part of it. I have yet to find a way to make the chat more dense, every message seems to have an excess of white space. Also, at least with the company that I use it with, there's no obvious way to search message history.
Soon we will hand over the keys mate, tech is the solve.
>This study was done in vitro. If I recall the counterindication of aspirin in C19 patients was accelerating pneumonia or something. So it's possible aspirin does both.

Relavent: https://xkcd.com/1217/
Completely agree with this, banks care. They don't always care in the best of ways, usually it's just about ticking a box in a spreadsheet, but at least they ask.
Of all things, lack of trust and transparency from a video platform is pretty scary. Hard to justify using Zoom any longer. Lifesize is a good alternative that a lot of people don't know about (I have no stake in them, but have used it before).
The Scientific Sorcery of Radiocarbon Dating
Thank you for sharing this. This is a much more thoughtful overview of the topic.
People in general are detrimental to society, regardless of what currency we are using. Your argument is pretty weak considering conventional currency has been used for illegal and immoral activities since it was a thing, and even before that there were illegal trade in goods and services. All your examples in your arguments have been around long before cryptocurrency, with the exception of ransomware, which still was around prior to bitcoin, but i will grant you is much easier now. Nothing new really except a new payment method. It all comes down to the fact that there is a percentage of people out there that are not "good" people, with the definition of "good" relative to your perception of the situation. this will always be the case, regardless of technology. Cryptocurrency problems, are just a symptom of a greater problem which is human nature...which you cannot change.
What about mozilla? https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech
Could it be that very dangerous viruses emerge more often, but only when they fall on "(very) fertile ground", that they then spread? The WW1-circumstances (a lot of men together on small space and harsh conditions) have contributed a lot, that the "spanish flu" spread, while others did not spread and so never became known to us ?
It's possible that all the data scientists you know are not a representative sample.

I've met smart data scientists and engineers who've gone to a bootcamp. People who are good and bad at their jobs come from a huge variety of backgrounds, and it's not helpful to look down on folks whose background is different than your own.
To be clear, surgical masks and N95 masks are different things. Both are in short supply in the US.
But no answer to my question. Damn.
The strong sense of the critique isn't quite fair. It wouldn't be right to call every political activist an elitist, even though they often think people are being intellectually manipulated and always think that democracy needs their special helping hand.
Ask HN: Why are articles critical of cryptocurrencies being flagged?
This article was on the front page just now: https://louwrentius.com/cryptocurrencies-are-detrimental-to-society.html

but got flagged for some unknown reason. I can only guess because it is strongly critical of cryptocurrencies.

Is flagging just community driven? As in, if an article gets flagged enough is it automatically taken down? Or does a mod have to step in?

If a mod has to step in, then why are they censoring articles critical of cryptocurrencies?
Debug.Trace doesn't launch missiles or delete clusters or send money.
It might run you out of disk space, but so can safe IO.
I spent 5 years doing QA on synthetic oligos/genes used by just about everyone in synthetic biology. In my experience, edits are easy to detect if you know where to look--methylation patterns, unusually large numbers of start codons, and relatively few areas of high GC content.

But I'm also a Chinese agent, so take that with a grain of salt.
Show HN: I compiled lists of book recommendations from people we look up to
I'm really starting to think there might be something to this. In the US, I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop in places like California, Texas and Florida and the days keep going by and we are not seeing anything like the death toll New York is having. California had some of the very first cases in the US and took in at least one cruise ship of infected people. Florida's governor has been openly defiant against shutting the state down and they only have 29 deaths so far. If ever there was a place in the US where virtually every single inhabitant is vitamin D deficient it is New York City, even in the summer time.