skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Singapore is very dense but it is also very authoritarian. They can take measures that would be both legally and socially unthinkable in the United States.
How+to+be+More+Productive+and+Focus+(++Free+Schedule+Maker)
South Korea is basically an island, conducted serendipitous did large scale pandemic drill in December, has a compliant population with mandatory civil service and memory of recent authoritarian government, can mobilize techno-authoritarian surveillance.

My question is, what is happening in Japan? Except wide spread mask usage, they have systemic undertesting at 1/6 capacity, no social distance measures, nothing shutdown, old population like Italy. Their hospitals should have been overwhelmed with dead by now. Are they just leaving the old to die at home? France and Italy aren't counting deaths at home as part of statistics. Maybe something similar? Which loops back to S.Korea, why so eager to trust their numbers. Their politics is fairly corrupt.
A game engine only needs very little interaction with the underlying OS windowing/event APIs, usually just open a window and handle a minimal number of input- or change-events. That code can easily be isolated into a very small module doing a minimal amount of "per frame work". My guess is they do window creation and window system event handling on "some" thread, maybe the same where main() lives, maybe a different one, but the amount of work this thread does each frame is so minimal (compared to all the other stuff) that it doesn't "deserve" a special designation.

I think what the tweet actually implies is that they don't have a main thread in a sense of a "main system controller thread" which invokes several systems in sequence (e.g. AI, physics, rendering), and those systems are parallelizing their work internally, but instead define the "per frame work" as one big dependency graph of small jobs/tasks without high-level syncpoints between systems. Speculation on my part though.

PS: I wonder how well traditional debugging works in such a highly granular system.
I refer to that overall development experience too, they aren't any easier to use (Qt Creator and C++ Builder use Clang which is basically as easy as GCC) nor any faster and AFAIK VC++ compiler messages aren't even as good as those in GCC and Clang.

Note that i refer to the compilers specifically, but even the IDEs you mentioned aren't that great. Visual C++ has went mostly downhill since VC6, becoming slower and even removing features (e.g. last time i tried it i couldn't use a bitmap font) or obfuscating them (installing a library "system-wide" is trivial in older versions of VS, but after 2008 or 2010 i think that feature was removed). C++ Builder's UI/IDE also went downhill after they got rid of the Delphi 7 interface and tried to become Eclipse and it also has became too unstable and slow. It does have a few niceties (i like that when you save your project it automatically updates the header file includes at the top), but nothing that makes it worth the negatives (though TBH i haven't spent much time with it because i refuse to rely on anything with DRM so i might be missing some gem covered under that bloat). Qt Creator is neat, but i could never get used to its interface (also it is free, so i'm not sure why you included it in a list of paid products).

Also IMO all the above do not hold a candle to the older Borland C++ Builder when it came to development experience. I do not think there is any C++ development environment that comes close nor i think it is possible to make one by stitching together a frankenstein of a product out of otherwise independent bits and pieces that are oblivious about each other (in other words anyone who thinks that something "based on" Clang or GCC or whatever, stitched together with LLDB, GDB or whatever and some GUI framework thrown in - usually Qt - would fit the bill is totally missing the point).
Show HN: Some non-trivial Covid-19 charts
I think you are too self-centered as of now. You need to de-focus.

To do that, the best advice I can give you is Travel (obviously once the corona thing is taken care of). Travel a lot and do travel on shoestring budget. This gives you the opportunity to meet new people, new geographies and help you cultivate new ideas and slowly form a picture of your life on your own.

This also helps you in start to focus on others instead of your own self at all times.
I couldn't find some essential charts about the coronavirus, so I made my own.

More charts are in the works.

No ads, no collecting of personal data (sans GA), just charts.

Let me know, if you'd like to see some other representations there.
>a) there is a weird social effect in much of the West where people get panicky, and somehow view someone else wearing a mask as increasing the odds, or at least the reality, that they instead will get sick

Definitely experienced the stigma of wearing one in public. Have had reactions ranging from stares to hurriedly moving away from me.

> We need to discard with that bullshit. We know with overwhelming evidence that masks work

To add, why else would NY ask older folks to wear masks when going outside?

Also, this NIH study adds to support that masks are effective.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22485453
It's not the first surprise from Zoom. They run or at least ran a webserver that was vulnerable to remote attacker, even after uninstalling it: https://lifehacker.com/remove-zoom-from-your-mac-right-now-1... (2019)
> There is still something so cool about MiniDisc though

Agree. I really wanted one for years, I even had some blank discs to fidget with, but when I could finally afford one the iPod had come out and I bought that instead. Part of me still wants to buy a MiniDisc player and some discs, but I try to keep the amount of stuff I own down to the essentials, and vintage electronic doesn't really make the cut.

TechMoan on Youtube have a few videos about the MiniDisc format for anyone interested.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kU3BceoMuaA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sabtaoTCSKQ
Yes, due the lockdowns and quarantines.
(disclaimer MS employee but nothing to do with this product)

You could check out the Azure Forms Recognizer. It's designed to do exactly this and make even training a custom model pretty easy. It's also pretty cheap (free up to 500 pages) so you can always do a quick experiment and see if it does what you need it to

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cognitive-services/fo...
Made the same move in '18, and noped right back to Austin late last year. HEB was way up there on our list of things we just had to have back. You have my sympathies.

Agreed. Dallas is a shithole.
Can you please attest to the correctness of the news about the Czech government stealing a shipment of masks that was meant to be delivered to Italy [1] ?

If so, is there something the "outsiders" are missing (e.g. some political bs between the two countries) ? Or is it just plain old theft ?

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-czech-...
Love this blog. The only slightly negative thing I could possibly say about it is I wish the screenshot comparisons used <label for=""> instead of making me precisely click the radio buttons. Still more than worth it :)
Non-Atomic Refactoring and Software Sustainability [pdf]
Then WHY ARE SO MANY EXPERTS TELLING US WHAT I QUOTED?

What you say (and others too) makes sense to me and I could well believe it true, but I'm NOT claiming that masks are useless unless you are infected, I'M ASKING IF ANYBODY KNOWS WHY EXPERTS ARE SAYING OTHERWISE (or whether I just heard an unluckily skewed sample)

Plus, I also asked for a citation to back up the poster's position, not common-sense arguments (which are a good starting point but not evidence in themselves).
How to set field level security in salesforce
This uses libretroshare: https://elrepo.io/

"We are developing a decentralized repository of culture that allows the publishing and sharing of content in an organized way, suitable for audio, video, text and other formats. The system is built on top of mature technologies that leverage the capacities of distributed Community Networks. It will allow communities to share culture in a lasting way, priorizing local exchange without losing the ability to reach a global audience."

elRepo has received NLnet funding.
Yeah, I would argue exactly the opposite of that person. It's better to do good you don't truly believe in than to do evil that you don't truly believe in.

Of course it's best if someone believes in doing good and then does it, but ultimately, results you're getting matter more than intentions you're betraying.
Working After the Coronavirus
New Business Directory for Your Site
What are some good text books or resources on streaming and queues?
I have never used Kafka or had to maintain queues with more than a hundred jobs per hour. Most of the jobs queues I've had to maintain are doing simple things like sending emails or updating a third party API.

I've always resorted to simpler distributed redis based job queues such as kue [0], bull [1], celery [2] or resque [3].

I would like to learn more about distributed queues and architectures from first principles. Where is a good place to go?

[0] https://github.com/Automattic/kue
[1] https://github.com/OptimalBits/bull
[2] http://www.celeryproject.org/
[3] https://github.com/resque/resque
Opinion: Why Is America Choosing Mass Unemployment?
I'm not American, so I'm not sure the relevance of case law here, but legality is not the same thing as morality. The idea of natural rights upon which the US constitution was built is that these are not granted by the state or some document, they are inherent to being human; "inalienable rights". Now if you're an at risk category you could argue that somebody coming near you and potentially infecting you is a violation of your rights similarly to how somebody punching you is, and that seems reasonable to me. But I think it'd be too much of a stretch to argue "those people spending time together at a bar might increase my chance of being infected, so they shouldn't be allowed to congregate", especially when this very directly violates their rights of movement and association.

Similarly for the argument about not having enough hospital beds due to other people getting infected: the classical idea of rights was as "negative rights", not "positive rights". A negative right means you have the right that somebody else will not do something to you, whereas a positive right means that you have the right for somebody else to do something to you (or, somebody else has the obligation to do something for you). Positive rights necessarily impinge on negative rights. Since requiring hospital care is a positive right, not a negative right, approaching it from a system of negative rights one wouldn't have any right to restrict other peoples behaviour under the justification that it would improve your access to hospital care.
$ curl -L git.io/getnami | bash && exec -l $SHELL

When will this crap end? I can't understand how can people still do that. Everyone knows it's dangerous to pipe random scripts to bash, especially from unsecured websites, and people still suggest it as recommended way to install software...
The SIR Model of Epidemics
Maybe Apple could offer a compromise and allow users to sideload apps, but restrict non-App Store apps from accessing the file system or any kind of personal identification (like location etc.)

And improve their documentation to lower the barriers to native development.
Ava Lemert Concert Online March 27
Interesting theory. I suspect China will continue to do what they’ve been doing, and build out their own country.

The United States was built on the foundation of transportation (roads and highways), automobiles, mortgages, and travel. These industries built up the middle class, by providing jobs for home, and profits from exports to abroad. Then came tech and the massive windfall from that.

They essentially have the population of 4 United States, that they can essentially just compete internally among themselves, while still producing products for export to abroad.

They can just follow the same playbook here.

* Infrastructure, check, they have highways, airports, and also, high speed trains.

* Automobiles, check, they have the largest car market in the world. And they are continually working with, and learning from, their European partners. Eventually, they’ll get good enough to not need external partnerships.

* Mortgages, check, lots of high rises, since that’s the only way to house so many people.

* Travel, in progress, they’re working really hard to make a commercial airliner. This will take another 20 years, but Boeing messed up with their 737 Max fiasco, which may give them an opening sooner. But most of the parts to this airplane comes from American companies, so if Trump wants, then he can really crush their airplane independence dreams, at least for 10 years.

* Technology, in progress, they have mostly web companies, and application companies, but not yet core technology companies. They still don’t quite have CPU and memory chip companies yet, and they outsourced manufacturing to Taiwan. This is where Trump can really crush them, but again, at a heavy price, and only for 10 years.

In the end, anything is possible, but I highly doubt they are interested in squeezing the US by the balls anyways. They are finding it more profitable to maintain friendly terms with the US, and sell them cheaper trinkets, than taking a confrontational approach, and getting into a hot war, where nobody wins, except Lockheed.
Mobile CPUs and the Performance Inequality Gap
What does active refer to?
Our website has just been built, thus your site can be the first in your sub-directory. The directory is for USA-located and USA-targeted websites only.
I have a feeling that if any of those planes were going Mach 30 they would feel a little differently about it.
This advice is completely contrary to anything that happens inside a hospital. Nurses and doctors are wearing surgical masks (and N95 masks plus face shield if performing actions that may generate aerosols) to protect themselves from getting sick while treating patients.

The problem is that you can have COVID19 and be contagious without showing symptoms. Mandating everybody to wear some sort of mask should reduce transmissions because it should reduce the viral load in the air. By how much? It is not clear, but it's not worth waiting for results from a randomized double blind clinical trial during a global pandemic. I would put money that the effect of putting on a mask will be at least as effective as washing hands.

The danger to be careful of is if wearing mask can make you more sick, but the current actions from healthcare workers around the world suggests it is not the case.

Another point some people argue is that wearing a mask in public means one less mask for health care workers. This is false on two fronts, one because mask supplies will soon flood the market and there are DIY solutions to masks that can reduce transmissibility; two because what's best for health care workers is not to get sick at all.
In Earth's largest extinction, land die-offs began long before ocean turnover
Improving Remote Meetings and Presentations
That's what is posted in our local media. I'm not sure if it comes from local gov agencies or WHO or something else.

FFP2 / N95 respirators - 90-something percent, medical "blue" masks - 80 percent, home-made piece-of-cloth style ~ 50%.

Wearing sunglasses is encouraged too. Both to stop the load if someone sneezes at you and discourage from touching your eyes.
> literally any function that has an IO action taints the value returned from that function, causing it to be an IO value, and trying to pass that IO value into another function makes the return type of that function IO, too. Parametric polymorphism is the default, too, so it also shepherds you into writing general purpose code. Haskell is full of these little decisions where it just won't let you do something because it's not "correct" code, and they kind of don't care if that makes coding in it a fight against the compiler.

From a Haskell perspective, and a correctness perspective, and also Rust with its pointer tracking, all this makes sense. It's very helpful for correctness.

Yet, the IO monad "virality" reminds me of Java checked exceptions. Checked exceptions mean every function type signature includes the set of exceptions that function might throw.

When that was introduced, it was thought to be a good idea because it's part of the type-safety of Java and will ensure programmers write code that deals with exceptions correctly, one way or another.

But some years later, people started to argue that listing exceptions in the type signature is causing more software engineering problems than it solves (and C# designers took the decision to not include checked exceptions). Googling "checked exceptions harmful" yields plenty of essays on this.

For checked exceptions, there are people arguing both sides of it. Yet they are pretty much all fans of static typing for the rest of the language; it isn't an argument between people who favour static vs. dynamic typing.

So why are checked exceptions considered harmful by some? On the face of it, there's an argument against verbosity. But the deeper one is about software engineering. What I call "type brittleness".

When you have a large codebase, beautifully and carefully annotated with exact, detailed checked-exception signatures, then one day you have to add a trivial little something to one little function that might throw an exception not already in that function's signature... You may have to go through the large codebase, updating signatures on hundreds or thousands of functions which use the first little function indirectly.

And that's if you have the source. When you have libaries you can't change, you have to wrap and unwrap exceptions all over the place to allow them to propagate via libraries which call back to your own code. Sometimes there is no exception type explicitly allowed by the libaries, so you wrap and unwrap using Java's RuntimeException, the one which all functions allow.

The "viral effect" of so much effort for sometimes tiny changes is a brittleness issue. It leads people to resort to "catch and discard all" try-blocks, to confine the virality Sometimes it's "temporary", but you know how it is with temporary things. Sometimes it isn't temporary because the programmer can't find another clean way to do it while not modifying things they shouldn't or can't.
This. Asian countries that have ostensibly contained it well has wearing masks in common (except Singapore but it's still at 20%). Their other responses vary in scope and strictness. That said, most of them are islands or small countries.

But then you have Vietnam, also pervasive mask usage. Shares landborder with China which is leaky at best. They were also very proactive like the other countries but have a fraction of the resources. I don't think it's an answer for containment, many that cracked down early are seeing record case levels now, but I wonder if it's enough to reduce spread and severity.

But the rationale that made sense to me is that covid19 spread via respiratory particles, and mask reduce the viral load over time, which reduces risk of infection and severity since your body will have more time to recognize the infection and ramp up antibody production much earlier in the virus’s exponential growth cycle. Reduces R0 when ubiquitous. Maybe it spreads the curve and crushes it at the same time by reducing severe cases.

Seems like a cheap experiment short experiment to run honestly. Give one group of essential workers masks vs control. Test in 7 days and collage symptom severeness etc. Giving everyone surgical or home made masks is cheaper and less damaging than what's happening now. The HK SARS tsar who was also part of the Wuhan investigation team endorse public mask usage.
Longer lives not dependent on increased energy use
We all should know about the Sustainable Development Goals
In other news, does anyone know whether there is an initiative now for a PS2 emulator on the Raspberry Pi 4? When the new Pi came out one of the most interesting things to me was that PS2 emulation should (maybe) now be possible.
https://www.radio.cz/en/section/curraffrs/why-chinese-masks-...

Czech authorities during a customs raid last Tuesday mistakenly seized 101,600 facemasks gifted by a branch of the Red Cross in eastern China to a Chinese community in Italy. Although Czech officials apologized for the mix-up, the Italian newspaper La Repubblica on Sunday published a bogus article claiming the Czech state had “stolen” that shipment – and much more.

Czechs would send 110,000 facemasks to Italy on Monday (March 23), dispatched along with an evacuation bus of 43 Italian nationals heading home, as agreed with the Italian Embassy in Prague.

---
My comment is that our goverment officials or those policemans are probably stupid...
A quick scan and search does not use the word 'mask' or 'protection' anywhere I can see.

> why else would NY ask older folks to wear masks when going outside?

I don't know. Is there any evidence that significant proportion of experts are recommending this practice, and why BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT I'M ASKING FOR.
>The activists for this cause had long since burnt out and lost their enthusiasm, but they liked the salary and job security of these office positions, and so they remained with the NGO for decades.

that's just word games with 'activist' at that point. They were salary-people who worked for an NGO; Activists can work for NGOs, but that doesn't make one an activist -- personal ethos and actions produces an activist.
'Worse' pandemic on horizon unless world deals with wildlife markets
Confirmed cases - (deaths + recovered cases)
I like how I found out about this here and not through an email. Tons of customer reports from our site of being logged out randomly (we use Firebase) and we had no idea why.
3D Printed Case brings DIY NAS building to the next level
Your original argument was essentially asserting that the OP was placing too-low a monetary value on human lives. You accused him of valuing his own leisure more than human lives, but then implied it's okay to value economic factors more than lives if the lives lost are sufficiently small (you implied this by suggesting that preventing car accidents is much less important cos it saves fewer lives). You hence implied some ratio between human lives and convenience/the economy; I was exploring that ratio.
The Mind of Leonardo Da Vinci
Some people agree with you. For example https://scattered-thoughts.net/writing/local-state-is-harmfu...
Why does he have to? You can do your research on internet nowadays and be just as well informed as him.
Only a beginner can teach a beginner. First you struggle. Then you think you know it all. Then you forget what was so hard. Then you master it. And then you realize you know very little.
Listing this on their webpage doesn’t solve the spying problem.

“Well, at least they told us about it” is absolutely no solution to “so many of our tools are spying on us”.
My opinion about this is that many apps and websites don't have a real product offering. FB, Dropbox, Twitter and others are more of a service offering than a product offering and hence everything is rooted around services and tracking services and, finally, just plain old tracking.
The github readme is content free. I personally have no interest in porting concurrent hashmap in a world where thread based models are going the way of the DODO.

The synchronization wars are over and we all lost.
Indeed, macOS supports something similar. The notification center has a World Clock widget. I've got friends in Illinois, India and Australia, and it's incredibly useful to have a couple of clocks right there.
Autonomous Vehicles: Transforming Agriculture