skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That went very quickly from people bragging about being their own boss to wanting to end up working as a grocery store employee again.
You know, go volunteer at a nearby hospital, then you'll be gone and we'll be glad.
Interesting you should mention this needs, as there's something that integrates Mycroft that just came up in one of my feeds:

Plasma Bigscreen from people involved with KDE:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2020/03/26/plasm...

https://youtu.be/yylFiE4QtUE
Bokehlicious Selfies
Sorry, Fabien, if that came across harsher or more personally than intended. I was exaggerating a bit for effect. I’m a fan of your work, and have found many of your posts insightful.

You are certainly welcome to style your page how you like. Justified monospaced text is a pretty big typographical faux pas though, and I personally find it pretty hard to read.
Thus is dictatorship born.
New Abbott Coronavirus test takes 13 minutes; 50k tests/day capacity next week
UK: The public will be able to conduct coronavirus tests at home within days
That's the message many Republicans/Libertarians want people to spread. Never been substantiated by facts but who cares about facts nowadays?
There is something to it, I just don't know why nobody is talking about it much. It's pretty painfully obvious if you start digging into the data, researching the outbreak map, and looking at the temps & humidity levels in the areas. SARS-CoV-2 appears to more or less be obeying what influenza does when it comes to seasons, temps, and humidity (along with perhaps sunsine / vitamin D as a factor).

NYC should be cranking humidifiers, pushing humidity up to 50% in every space where people exist (except hospitals). It'll dramatically slow the infectiousness of SARS-CoV-2 imo. Super low human space humidity is the best friend of a respiratory virus.

Why aren't San Antonio and Houston buried in cases? Same reason Mexico and Los Angeles are not (relatively speaking, and especially compared to eg NYC).

Las Vegas should be buried in cases, they have tons of international traffic, a zillion opportunities for the virus to be transited around, spread to casino workers and everywhere. Their ICUs should be overflowing to an epic degree. Las Vegas has an inverted humidity map, peak humidity there is November to March, and avg high temps stay up near 55 to 60 degrees (influenza at least hates temps over ~60-65+ F).

How about Santa Fe or Phoenix? Super low case loads, as with Houston and Austin and other similar locations.

Florida isn't seeing a particularly bad outbreak in its cities.

Albuquerque and Phoenix have inverted humidity seasons, their peak humidity times are roughly October/Nov to March.

Wuhan's low sunshine season is November to March. Temps are often well below 50 degrees during that period (and essentially never get to 65+), not high enough to interfere much with influenza or probably SARS-CoV-2. It gets cold enough during flu season there to require persistent indoor heating, which dries everything out, lowering indoor humidity levels dramatically, amplifying potential infectiousness.
There has been informal labor organizing going on behind the scenes at most of these companies for years and many gig workers do work for more than one platform. The org may be new, but the unrest isn’t.
Yeah I suppose they are different modes, I see comments exclusively nitpicking things without any other discussion, and I see other comments not doing any nitpicking. The balance is most likely nitpick only after you've addressed the main points, just like in real life. You wouldn't talk to someone and only comment on their grammar for example, without discussion the content of what they're talking about.
Dot.con by John Cassidy: https://www.amazon.com/Dot-America-Lost-Money-Internet-ebook...
Where did Zoom suddenly come from? I never even heard of it until this quarantine stuff, then all of the sudden everyone is talking about videochat on Zoom.

It's like WTF, another contender for this throne? Sigh.
> he only explanation for what you’re observing, is that all of the other atoms in your world, including the atmosphere, sun and stars, are indeed exerting some meaningful pull upon the water to resist its relocation.

Note that this is not the mainstream explanation. For more details read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach%27s_principle
I don't think the answer is that simple. I would rather see a measure and act strategy. Like South Korea did.

Shutting down the entire country of 300 million people for 2-3 months puts a lot people at the risk of losing their jobs, homes and not even having enough to eat. With a country where guns are legal, and 20% having no health insurance, there will be some who have nothing to lose and cause civil unrest. Bill Gates is a Billionare, he probably doesn't feel the pain of someone working to make ends meet. I know neighbors and friends who are rock bottom right now.

I would rather see an approach of locking out the known hot spot areas. Stop all travel from hotspots unless someone tests negative. Running millions of tests periodically to see where hotspots are and managing them in an organized fashion. Meanwhile the rest of country practices strict hand washing and social distancing where possible.

Ideally when the virus was causing havoc in China, our airports and borders should have stopped all non-essential travel immediately. Every person that comes in should have been tested and put in a 2 week monitored quarantine.

We were just too late to get the testing ramped up, with enough protective gear for those who need it.

I really hope there is an effective Vaccine soon. Or someway to figure out who will have very mild symptoms and induce the virus to them in a controlled fashion such that millions of us develop immunity to it and are certified as "covid-19 safe workers". Herd immunity is not a bad idea, we just don't know why some people have a mild reaction and others need ICU.
Should just submit the venable.com link as a new submission, it's a much more directly relevant overview of the immediate news on this type of loan.
There are benefits to unambiguously marking the end of each statement with a semicolon rather than just using a newline. Is there a good algorithm for determining whether or not a newline actually represents the end of a statement?

JavaScript gets this wrong in both directions, sometimes unexpectedly ending a statement (e.g. in `return \n 0`) and sometimes unexpectedly not ending one (e.g. when a new line begins with an open-parenthesis).

Python's method (newline always ends a statement unless it's inside (), [] or {}) is straightforward, but makes the language syntax strictly line-based. This matches Python's significant indentation, but can it work in a language without it?

Another option I've seen is for all newlines to end statements, unless they follow a token that cannot end a statement. Unfortunately that means that the following two assignments have different behavior:

foo = bar +
baz

foo = bar
+ baz

The first is a sum, the second only assigns `bar`, followed by a standalone unary `+` expression. Go works this way, but considers the second form to be an error ("+baz evaluated but not used"). Python considers both of these to be errors.
Online Services to Keep Your Game Night Rolling: Coronavirus Live Updates
This is a quick proof of concept of an idea. This won't work for every use-case but it worked surprisingly well for a use-case I had in mind. Happy to answer any questions.
Reposted in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22708199

Let's keep the discussion there.
And it got posted here too:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22693172
(which has a more authoritative link than my original one)
The first paragraph of the article states the code is "Microsoft-approved, largely Samsung-authored". The code is open source and missing features, if any, could be added. Microsoft has explicitly endorsed its usage in the kernel [0] and its architecture is fully documented [1]. What more do you want?

[0] https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2019/08/28/exfat...

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/exfat-...
Berlin is full of them. They roam the parks and streets at night, but are generally harmless (back away if they have piglets with them) and most annoyingly will dig over gardens if the fence is insufficient.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/nov/30/berlin-h...
If I lived in an apartment building and for whatever reason couldn't take a videoconference in my home, I'd be interested in borrowing a neighbor's clean and quiet living room for the duration of the meeting. A micro-Airbnb or a nano-WeWork. With proper precautions, this could probably be done without risking infection.
I'm Asian and travelling in UK around mid Feb. I'm wearing a surgical mask and everyone is giving me a weird look, there's even a male driver who take picture of me as I cross the traffic light.
I will read it, to defend my non-DeepLearning choices for supervised ML .. so many on the bandwagon for unsupervised CNN with their GPUs
> In a normal free market economy

What exactly leads you to believe that we’re currently in a situation for the free market to prevail while millions of Americans can’t leave their houses and the infection rate of COVID continues to double every three days?

The last time we saw labor contraction like this was during the Great Depression, when millions starved and the economy took years to recover. What are people supposed to do when there are no jobs for them and they can’t leave the house? If there’s no work to be done for the next three months and no income coming in, what do these millions of workers do, starve?
The best interview I've ever had was I was asked how I might design a real user feature for their company and review a sloppy PR with errors. For the first I came up with two options and weighed the best reason for each and which I might go with depending on the circumstances of the project. For the second I wrote PR comments I would leave any developer with suggestions for improvements, concerns, and praise for good work. That was representative of my actual job as a software engineer.

The normal is taking some sort of tricky pop quiz styled questionnaire, which in my opinion was not representative of anything about me beyond I know how to use a for loop efficiently. Yet this is what I find these companies offer. They tout them as a quick fix cause its easy to standardize, analyze, and hard to do therefore good, and last but not least waste the candidates time but not the companies. Their the metrics are moot. Not only have they been proven to be ineffective by the big companies that spawned them, but I also find them demoralizing and a turn off.

It seems like the industry is heading towards a self imposed SAT style quiz where the lucky winner of this startup war holds all the power and provides little benefit to either side of this process.
As, I expect, is the Venn diagram of those that use NetNewswire on macOS and those that use it on iOS.
Other sectors aren’t available for labor reallocation. People are losing jobs in all the sectors that will take them and those sectors are forced to be closed or limited for the foreseeable future.
The most simple face mask (not a gas mask) does not protect you from environment, it protects other people from you. Hoarding prevention is also a very important task in the midst of a crisis. Hence WHO recommendation is justified.
Moreso a mask can be a cause for reinfection with virus, since you are breathing back in what you exhale.
Best wishes and good health.
Zoom’s Use of Facebook’s SDK in iOS Client
Unless booking at a special rate, almost every hotel I've ever been at allows no-fee cancellations (typically up to 24 hours before). I typically stick to one or two hotel brands so maybe that's why?
There's no good way to lay anybody off. But there are worse and better ways. A one-on-one video call is much more respectful and humane than playing a recording.
Brave holds the funds temporarily and returns them to the original user who donated after sometime.
Coronavirus deaths in New York break 500
Have you actually looked at how much you make on unemployment? I'm in Florida and you get $275/week. The federal govt is giving an extra $600/week for 4 months. So you'd be making $3500/month for 4 months before it drops to $1100/month. Also consider that you have additional expenses like health insurance if you're not employed. It's basically buying people a little bit of time to find another job before they go back to regular unemployment wages which I consider below poverty line.
Yes. With HN's character limit, I didn't have space to mention everything. In addition to the steps I mentioned above, lately I've been applying to positions in technical writing and customer success/support engineering. I think you're right that TW could be a good fit for me.
thanks so much for being so thorough, I'll offer my own impressions of 'success' and 'health' below the following questions to your response:

can you tell me more about whether, when you say 'it would make for a healthier community by being as transparent as possible' - you're referring to transparency of the platform, transparency of the culture, transparency of the membership?

when you describe yourself as 'just here to listen learn from smart people' and go on to say that you were 'a lurker' for a relatively long period of time, would you say that there's a connection between two? As in, members who feel certain role relations (i.e. just here to learn) to the HN community end up sustaining certain behaviors (i.e. lurking).

I'm not sure I know enough about 'identity politics' as you're using it here, but fascinated by this distinction between 'caliber of content' and 'who it's coming from' - what do you think or see as sustaining this 'high/low' emphasis the most?

Personally, and provisionally, I consider 'success' and 'health' to be as much about the ability of a community to sustain itself through a transition - shift in purpose, direction of vision, change in norms, etc - as much as the capabilities of its members to bring about these types of transitions.
There is actually a technical term of art (two actually) for the process of removing XP/COM interfaces from Mozilla: "decomification" and "decomtamination", and another related term "outparamdelling".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20266627

>It certainly had a lot of problems and limitations, and OLE/ActiveX/DCOM/DirectX/etc took it way too far, then Mozilla XP/COM cloned it and also took it way too far (and then back again: see "decomification" and "decomtamination"), but it really was a pretty elegant and successful solution to the problems it was designed to address at the time.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Gecko:DeCOMtamination

http://taras.glek.net/blog/categories/decomtamination/

https://blog.mozilla.org/tglek/category/decomtamination/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12968830

>Mozilla underwent a process of "DeCOMification", because they went too far with XP/COM, and wanted to dial it way back.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?query_format=specif...

>Can someone link to a synopsis describing what "COM" is? It's hard to search for. (e.g. microsoft com visual studio)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12975257

>Glad you asked! One of my favorite topics. ;)

[...]

>And Mozilla came up with XP/COM [14], for implementing components in Mozilla/Firefox/XULRunner/etc, enabling programmers to implement and consume XP/COM components in C++ or JavaScript. Of course it has its own IDL and tooling, and suffers from many of the same problems that COM did.

>Mozilla didn't go nearly as far down the rabbit hole as Microsoft did, and later backtracked in their valiant "deCOMification" aka "deCOMtamination" and "outparamdelling" efforts [15].

An example of outparamdelling:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=455943
Agree. Masks in the other hand...we’d be able to save more VA patients if we could somehow convince them (and all of us) to wear masks, and have enough masks to freely give to everyone.
It's part of SOX. It actually requires the data be unencrypted, immutable, and available offline. Most corporations (large and small) do not follow this for email, messaging, wikis and many other services.
You really believe money is the only reason people work?

(If you need a hint here, look at all the medical workers working crazy shifts now. You think they're getting overtime and danger pay commensurate with the risk?)
Reminds me of a quote from Charles Eisenstein. He cites The Once and Future World and then channels Steve Nicholls in Paradise Found:

"Atlantic salmon runs so abundant no one is able to sleep for their noise. Islands “as full of birds as a meadow is full of grass.” Whales so numerous they were a hazard to shipping, their spouts filling the entire sea with foam. Oysters more than a foot wide. An island covered by so many egrets that the bushes appeared pure white. Swans so plentiful the shores appear to be dressed in white drapery. Colonies of Eskimo curlews so thick it looked like the land was smoking. White pines two hundred feet high. Spruce trees twenty feet in circumference. Black oaks thirty feet in girth. Hollowed-out sycamores able to shelter thirty men in a storm. Cod weighing two hundred pounds (today they weigh perhaps ten). Cod fisheries where “the number of the cod seems equal that of the grains of sand.” A man who reported “more than six hundred fish could be taken with a single cast of the net, and one fish was so big that twelve colonists could dine on it and still have some left.”

I used the word “incredible” advisedly when I introduced these images. Incredible means something like “impossible to believe”; indeed, incredulity is a common response when we are confronted with evidence that things were once vastly different than they are now."

(I posted the MacKinnon section here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22064787)
He’s going to spend it on himself and his children.
here some videos so you can judge: https://vimeo.com/user42939049
This guarantees that a large percentage of people are going to learn about it through other employees rather than from their managers though.
Apple Plans to Add Touch ID to Apple Watch
> For example, clang-format at $day_job doesn't understand semantically that I want my 4x4 matrix constant to be formatted as 4 rows with 4 numbers each

Comments can be a low-key forced line break:

int matrix[16] = {
0x0, 0x1, 0x2, 0x3, //
0x4, 0x5, 0x6, 0x7, //
0x8, 0x9, 0xA, 0xB, //
0xC, 0xD, 0xE, 0xF, //
};
One good result of the Coronavirus pandemic is its cleansing effect on unprofitable and unsustainable garbage like this company.
I bootstrapped a React codebase generator to $2k monthly revenue
Let's suppose you're right, and that 100% (or even 50%) of those getting unemployment for the next 4 months will sit around since getting a job might end up meaning less money.

Genuinely curious what you would want to do instead? Are you thinking UBI, so that even if they get a job they still receive the other benefits. I could get behind that. Is that what you're thinking though?
It might not be a legal requirement, but it may be ethically wrong, and university staff who act unethically can face consequences. Student organizations are hopefully not totally powerless, though they are no doubt using Zoom for meetings too.
Very nice, but does not load well for me, some boxes just loop.
Having more implementations of GraphQL APIs for various backends is tremendously useful for data integration using schema stitching / federation / remote schemas. And even without that it provides a uniform way to address many types of data stores.

Also the term 'retrofit' is a bit odd for an API, as there is no canonical backend, so there are only retrofits in that sense.
Given that affordable health insurance is often tied to employment, I don’t really see how you can assume people have “no reason to look for another job”. Nevermind the long term damage that employment gaps can do to your career prospects.
We buried it because the article was hard-paywalled, i.e. paywalled without workarounds. That's the policy on HN: paywalls with workarounds are ok, those without are not [1, 2, 3].

I emailed The Information to ask if they'd unlock it for HN readers, like they've done in the past [4]. They were nice enough to do so. I changed the HN link to the unlocked URL, posted about it in the thread [5], and unburied the submission.

In the future, can you please follow the site guidelines [6], which ask you to email us questions like this instead of posting submissions about them? There's nearly always a simple explanation. But if you post about it on HN, the thread will fill up with complex (often sinister) speculation that doesn't inform anybody, is off-topic, and takes time to properly reply to. Also, we often have no idea that the post exists. I only found out about this one because someone emailed to ask if we were planning to reply.

By the way: that article, though a good piece of reporting, is not a good HN submission. The fact that a company is making cutbacks is not an "interesting new phenomenon" right now [6], it's a dog-bites-man story. Since there's nothing intellectually interesting, the thread is guaranteed to be just another generic discussion [7] about Airbnb and/or the covid crisis. Normally, we'd downweight such an article off the front page, because when there is a flood of stories about a major ongoing topic (like this crisis), we prioritize the ones with significant new information [8]. But if we applied normal moderation in this case, people would accuse us of burying the story because it is about Airbnb. So a different rule takes precedence: we moderate HN less, not more, when YC or its startups are involved [9]. That's why we left the thread on the front page. Doing that makes HN less interesting, but the integrity of the site is more important, and this is one way we try to protect it.

If, after reading all this, anyone has a question I haven't answered, let me know and I'll be happy to address it.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22708065

[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[7] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

[8] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22527396

[9] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Microsoft Files Patent for New Cryptocurrency and Mining System
That mask uses UVA which doesn't kill germs. Only the horrifyingly dangerous UVC kills germs. Don't even think about making a DIY UVC device. You could blind yourself in seconds.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200327-can-you-kill-cor...
I agree that an EIN would probably be necessary for a bar.

Just an added clarification is that the EIN is a federal identification, and a liquor license is usually issued by the city. So a city wouldn't need an EIN in order to issue a liquor license. But unless all your bartenders are 1099, you would need an EIN.

As an alternative theory, it could be that there is a store manager for the bar who doesn't have access to the EIN, if the actual owner was absentee. This happened to me at a company I used to work at. I was the office manager, so I was in charge and responsible for everything and handled 99.9% of it, but once a year or so, I would need the EIN and it was the one time I would have to escalate it to the absentee owner who I didn't see very often.
Not sure if it will really cleanse us of companies like this. We've been through terrible depressions before, and sociopath companies seem to always make a comeback.

Based on other countries, it looks like the real way to cleanse us of these companies would involve moving our country towards more progressive policies.