skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Free software doesn't come with built-in cloud networking / server capacity to multiplex everyone's video streams to each other.
Germany was hit as one the first European countries. And they aggressively went after each possible contact and tested all of them. It was hit weeks before Italy.
Their testing capacity is the highest in Europe (I'm leaving out Russia, as I don't trust their testing numbers. Maybe they do just antibody or temperature tests).

The UK was infected very very late from a tourist in Ischgl, Austria, which got it from Italy. Weeks later. Same timeline as with the other scandanavian infections.

So Germany is more than a month ahead of the UK.
The rates are increasing, because they are testing so much. (Not enough for my taste, but this Europe, not Asia).

The death rates are so low because no centres of seniors where hit yet, the age group is much younger. And the treatment in the ICU's is doing pretty well.
They have built their reserves in Gold and other currencies, that's why they don't care too much about USD reserves. Interestingly, the concerted US effort to sanction the Russian economy has made it possible for them to reduce the USD dependencies.
What a perfectly delightful post in all respects.

> I am starting to think of interesting software for the Light Box that does respond exclusively to human input.

When I think of responsive software that gives me with delight without wresting any control from me, I think of programs that magnify my input in some way.

One simple idea that would well for this is a kaleidoscope. Press a button and not only does it change, but so do corresponding mirrored or rotated buttons around the box from it. A hex grid is great for this because then you can do 3-fold or 6-fold symmetry around the center button in addition to simple reflection symmetry.
The first time I saw a Coyote was in broad daylight up on Corona Heights in San Francisco.

I'd never even seen a photo of one before, but I knew what it was straight away because its face looked like Wile E Coyote!
and RSS.

The only thing they seem to miss from the author's description is: "It has to be decentralized. The database would be hosted on many computers and each new entry would be processed using some sort of consensus algorithm."

But there's no motivation for why this is a expected property of the network
> I think the real reason is "it's just what everyone else was doing."

I can't speak for others. But for me, using Zoom is really because it worked better than everything else I'd tried (Skype, Google Hangouts, WebEx, rolling my own SIP server). That was parts: Linux software reliability (WebEx, Skype), limits on the number of people that could join meetings (Hangouts), and effort to talk my collaborators into installing new software (SIP+Jitsi). A bonus is that my employer had an institutional Zoom account. I've been happily using Zoom for 2-3 years now. I'm unhappy about these privacy issues that are being discovered/discussed now and I kinda feel like I should have looked into it. I'm sure there is a bandwagon effect happening, but there was also a real component of it working better than other solutions.
The Books That Every Programmer Should Read
Just a usage note for grammar/spelling obsessed. Is the usage of till correct? Yes it is.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/%27til
oh God, you're right! DMA Design, they were truly amazing!
Why does this need an app? Apart from a web browser, of course.
$20K is nothing for a consumer product manufacturing run.

For 9 out of 10 consumer devices, no factory will even listen to you if you are not willing to commit to put forward $1m

Only really simple, small gadgets are profitably manufacturable under <$100k
Oh god, someone posts this sort of thing every couple months. Also tends to have high correlation with crypto-folk.

Decentralized social networks are a pipe dream. I'm sorry but no one wants to join you and your 50 shady hacker friends in a forum.

People want to go where their friends and family are. People's friends and families aren't going to figure out whatever stupid, inconsistent, under-designed UX people inevitably build for these sorts of things. The bar is extremely high.

Ideology seems to come before any practical notions of how people use products.
>If you could post your real name, address, phone number, email, sexual orientation, religion, employment status, performance review, salary, hobbies, political viewpoints etc we can get started processing your revocation of privacy.

Eventually yes, I would prefer that I don't have to keep secret of all of those information but I can't because not everyone is.

>Oh and you'll start seeing ads for '5 step sobreity' now since we see you were in the local AA Zoom. Sorry about not getting that new job -- that company ticked the 'no addicts' flag in the selection matrix, and, well, the job market is kinda competitive now

If a company choose not to hire addict than its their choice, its their lost.
Yes, oil industry in the US is heavily subsidized. They pay less taxes than any other industry and receive free land and other government incentives for oil and gas exploration.
Keep in mind that these vessels do not have bathrooms.
Ultrasensitive detection of nucleic acids using deformed graphene biosensors
Absolutely - thanks Dang. We have some high level info in the FAQ: http://polymersearch.com/beta/faq_ycadvice.html and I'd love to go deeper into the process. We'll get in touch.
This is a topic of great interest to me. Somewhere around the late eighties or early nineties I began a somewhat morbid hobby of watching online communities die.

I will try to keep my personal conclusions out of it and allow you to form your own, but will at least hint at my methodology. First, you say "healthy" and I say "not dead." Having seen a lot of communities declare themselves healthy and vibrant, doing all the right things, and so forth, only for them to wither and die, statements of health are meaningless.

Look for multiple measures. You know it is dead when they pull the plug, but what about the withering before that? What does that look like? Identifying that is going to be key to determine what health looks like, because it looks like "not dying."

User turnover. Moderator turnover. Account creation. Account retention. Rate of comments per user. Is the "old guard" still present? (This sound subjective but can be worked on)

Less objective are incidents of "purity spirals." These are a great way for a community to die. Find incidents and examine them. Look for commonalities that can be abstracted into numerics.
Bit of a dead horse here, but they could have done a sovereign wealth fund, Norway-style. Would have helped with the secession plans too, back when those were being taken seriously.

Armchair quarterbacking I know, but the trouble seems to be that when Alberta has any money at all, oil is the most profitable thing to invest in so that's where the money goes. Investing in uncorrelated assets would level out some of those crazy swings.

Then again, most Albertans I worked with kind of liked the crazy swings. As I'm a bluenoser that was during a boom time of course, so I've no idea how they feel about it during the lows.
I just Ctrl+F'd Google Meet and no one seems to be really talking about it. We've been using it for our meetings for a long time and it works really well. I'm wondering why it doesn't have widespread adoption. You can call-in via phone, can log the minutes of the meeting and seems to "just work" too
Do Zoom have their own infrastructure or do they run on aws/azure/gcloud?

I think it's amazing how zoom became so popular recently. It's even been approved to be used for Passover Seder dinner by some Rabbis :)

It also very popular in academia and reminds me of Dropbox. When I was a student everyone around me used Dropbox. They developed a great product which competes with Google and other giants. But those were all unpaid users and eventually Dropbox moved their focus to Enterprise. Zoom will soon be in a similar situation.
Thanks for the interest, and being so thorough. I do hope to share my result here, so that this can be part of an on-going conversation. I'm not sure about how subscribing works on HN, but I'm currently considering making results available through an edit to the original post of this AskHN. Hope that works!

Here are other thoughts and questions I have for your points:

2 - your point about rituals needed to shape an offline community is fascinating, do you find that there are any adjacent rituals for online communities?

3 - I hadn't realized that quality degrading for links, but not comments would be a pattern that arrives but would love to hear more about this if you're willing to offer more details!

5 - can you say more about the 'stay below a threshold to continue to attract users who have more to offer' bit?
Yelp to stop auto-creating fundraisers after outrage from business owners
I can't help but object to statements that begin with "The point of a job interview is..."

It seems like we tend to lose the basic reality of gatekeeping and social ritual in these discussions.

It's never going to be empirical. It's how you strike the balance between the empirical part and the social ritual part, and no one ever wants to discuss that.

But I've certainly sat across the table from hiring managers who I knew weren't going to choose me based on a cursory glance, or just seemed like deeply frightened people.
Confluent actually has released "tiered storage" which appears to be a similar feature to what Pulsar has. https://www.confluent.io/blog/infinite-kafka-storage-in-conf...

It's still up in the air as to whether this feature will make its way into the open-source Kafka though.
Is this reflective of HN, or the times?
> And to be frank, if this virus was in fact generated by the markets in Wuhan (like so many other flu viruses over the years?) then maybe they should own it.

The US currently has the worst infection curve and the most cases, despite months to prepare. Should it be called the American virus because of our fuckups here?

(No.)
https://tracetogether.zendesk.com/hc/en-sg/articles/36004373...

https://www.tracetogether.gov.sg/common/privacystatement

What data is collected? Are you able to see my personal data?

The only data that we collect is your mobile number, so that MOH can contact you more quickly if you were in close proximity to a COVID-19 case.

With your consent, TraceTogether exchanges Bluetooth proximity data with nearby phones running the same app. However, this data is anonymised and encrypted, and does not reveal your identity or the other person's identity. Also, this data is stored only on the user’s phone. Should MOH need the data for contact tracing, they will seek your consent to share it with them.
While social media has been more critical depending on the source, the mainstream media has definitely been carrying the water for China.

https://twitter.com/KenDilanianNBC/status/124324375891486310...

I think it's been interesting wave. When the cases first started, China got blasted. As it hit the US, Administration political opponents have criticized the US response, but many have gone to the point of praising China's response and forgetting about China's actions in December/January.
Being a sceptic is premiered amongst the hn crowd and tbh that's why I visit everyday. If I wanted optimistic half-truths I would keep consuming ad-run media.
may it make sense when a pandemic starts next time to preemptively infect and quarantine large group of healthy people in order to have the antibody plasma ready in sufficient quantity by the time when it starts to hit the fan?
More than the west gets from Toronto.
Yeah, I used to see them out there in that area too, they love it up there.
I saw one in GGP when I was running there a few months ago. Scared the hell out of this East Coaster!
Coyotes have already done an excellent job of coexisting with humans. They are one of the most successful species at adapting to human civilization. Pigeons, rats, roaches, etc. also quite successful.
> Is enterprise auth (e.g. LDAP) on your radar as a future thing you just haven't been able to get to yet

Yes it is

> Is there a capability in the product to disable specific components? [...] we don't need the Slack-like functions

Yes, there's an admin area "Features" tab, with a checkbox for disabling the chat.

(Someone else also wanted to disable it; they were using Slack already.)

Thanks you too for the questions
There are only negative sides of decentralization for most of users. It's a very naive idea on its own.
> a more anti-capitalist, pro-government, collectivism oriented outlook

As someone who meets that description and has been here for ~8 years, I've always felt that there's been an absolute dearth of anti-capitalists (communists, socialists, anarchists, etc) on HN. Could you point me to some examples (posts and/or members) who meet that description?

:-)
While I did share the link, I personally think this a bad list of books

For example, I dont think every programmer should learn about the inner working of operating systems, many programmers sure why not, but not EVERY programmer, that being said I would recommend "Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective" to any or every programmer, its a systems book not an OS book

The list includes a lot of "please ignore the references to specific programming languages", which is inexcusable, languages influence design, this is why we have OO Languages, and Functional languages and DSLs and Scripting languages etc .. because languages influence design

Anyway, I do believe in reading and reading a lot, I do think that the average programmer should have a broad knowledge about programming outside of his domain, but I think this a poor list for that purpose
I believe that's how it must have worked. It still happens in Detroit today.
Let's keep the party going. My 401k is in tatters...
A job of mine involved building prototypes for Wear OS. Based on that I'd guess that the idea is at least explorable.

Smartwatches do have the needed sensors, I think. The watch is in a specific position when you touch your face. That should be detectable.

There is an API to read them, https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/sensors/sensors_m.... You can run apps in the foreground basically infinitely, as long as the Android was not hacked to death by the vendor (and every new Android update might end that in the name of battery efficiency).

One thing to keep in mind is that not every watch has every sensor. Not sure which ones you would need here, but gyroscope and distance should be needed. https://www.mobvoi.com/ge/pages/ticwatchse has both and would be a cheap starting point.

Then this is "just" about creating a model that detects when the watch is in the target position. That might be impossible if I'm wrong about what the sensors return, or complicated if you need to create a complex model where in space the watch is at all time, or it might be rather easy - fully depends on what the sensor data give you and how far Android already interprets them.
Better article: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3074991/coro...

But website has a touch of ad cancer.
Every positive comment is pretty much the same, but every negative comment is negative in its own way.

There is no point in positive comments. You know what they’re going to say and they rarely add anything that the article didn’t already express. Negative comments are more intellectually satisfying to unpack.
I think China is mostly telling the truth.

Firstly, exports are hard to lie about. Order something from alibaba yourself, or here’s some graphs: https://www.plex.com/blogs/china-potential-model-for-post-co...

Secondly, Trump would break that news if it were fact. Hiding 10’s of thousands of deaths and 100’s of thousands of very ill is extremely difficult in the modern world when relatives live overseas.

Thirdly, I believe that China can effectively enforce social barriers, restricting the spread of Covid19. It seems reasonable to believe they can control it, even though freer countries struggle.

Of course you can always come up with some conspirational theory, and I keep my eyes open for lies, but common sense says that China is doing OK.
There is no benefit when prices crash and the US has to bail out these companies. It would be much smarter to reduce dependence on oil with investments in clean energy, instead of making the economy dependent on that same polluting industry.
Sometimes I wish there was a rule that you had to reply to a comment before you can downvote it.

I see people say things, and their comment starts going grey, and from that I can infer that more than one person found what they said disagreeable, but no replies – none of those people have explained why they disagree. The commenter (and observers such as myself) just have to guess why.

(Often, when I see a comment going grey for unclear reasons, I'll give it a compensatory upvote. I'm sure I'm not the only person who does this.)
Here's probably why: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/27/coronavirus-te...
We're using web+sms only solutions to circumvent that.
Currently $23.6T: https://www.usdebtclock.org/
In a bigger environment you'll have more than one person handling payments, contracts, commitments, ...
Too little, too late. Corporations cannot be trusted with software.
Are you volunteering to be one of the unlucky 2%?
I don't think you can ethically intentionally infect people, even volunteers, with a potentially fatal disease. Even some small percentage of young and healthy people are dying from COVID-19.
I wonder how many peoples cats are missing right now.
Something like Disklabs' Faraday Bag ought to solve that problem.
Hey! I do know what the issue is I think and it is something that will be resolved with v4 releasing later this year.

It's an atomic architecture specific thing.
Broader reach, Apple has this as the top story when you tap on the App Store. Plus a smoother/more consistent UI on their own platform. The website works fine on mobile but the app is way better.
Neither of those examples are working well - not even close.

They "work" in the sense that they have a checklist of features that I'm sure function as intended.

But the product/network as a whole is far from "working".
I don't see a linux-style effort producing any usable software anyway.
I'm doing remote work for decades, so nothing changed but the lunch menu. Now I have to cook by myself.
I always worked via laptop, and only for massive tests need to use the big machines. Most of them locally, as being independent is far superior. Most stuff is open source, do I can use public CI's and trackers.

Working remotely is also far more productive as there are zero interruptions to your workflow. I would say twice as much. Unfortunately you'll also do more hours, because it's so much more productive, so beware to stop. Time to think and reflect is important, and you might forget that. Turn off slack, irc and similar notifications. Check email only twice a day, it's a huge timesink.
The flip side is, if HN genuinely approves of your creation you can be confident you’ve done a great job.
Aren’t there already like 5 or 6?
Your time will be much better spend studying the definition of "sealioning" that I referred you to, and reflecting about how that word exactly describes your behavior, that writing two more walls of text and asides and digressions about how you will get around to answering my questions later, and pontificating about other unrelated discussions you've only quickly skimmed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning

http://wondermark.com/1k62/

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sea-lioning

If you were capable of self reflection and actually interested in legitimate discussion, you would have addressed my point about the glaring contradictions in your belief systems that I pointed out, that you're purposefully ignoring and trying to divert attention away from by talking about everything but what I wrote. And you would have told me exactly what it was that Biden did that offended you so much more than all that Trump's done, which I have asked you about several times, but to which you've repeatedly failed to respond. So I can only assume you have no answer to that question, because I gave you so many chances to respond.

The fact that you're not responding to or acknowledging what I wrote further supports the theory that you're just sealioning and wasting everyone's time on purpose. Because your stated goal in life to "maximize happiness" directly contradicts your unjustifiable tolerance and support of a racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, incompetent, pathological liar.

If you can't see that huge glaring obvious important contradiction, then you're simply not capable of or interested in self reflection or self improvement or meaningful discussion, and you're just purposefully wasting everyone's time, which is the very definition of "sealioning", a form of trolling, which is rightfully and justifiably prohibited here. Banning trolls who do things like that is something makes this such a wonderful, healthy, supportive community. And that's yet another perfectly valid and justifiable reason for decent people to be angry with you.

One more time:

If you say your goal in life is "I would like to maximize happiness for all humans beings on earth", yet you don't consider sexism, misogyny, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, pathological lying, science denial, white supremacy, etc, totally unacceptable and absolutely disqualifying, then you don't really mean what you say. That's a perfectly valid and justifiable reason for decent people to be angry with you.

Please don't bother responding by continuing to sealion. It will only serve to prove my point and embarrass yourself and continue to make people angry with you, and might even get you banned.
Suggesting masks are ineffective protection was a bad start.
Thanks, this looks like it will work.
Just deviation towards the mean.
Because after we use iron, aluminum, and NaCl, they are still iron, aluminum, and NaCl. our using them doesn't prevent future generations from using them.

Peak concrete is also sound economics, it just gets less air time because there are more alternatives and fewer affected industries.
You have not set up video conferencing in academia then. Or have the WebEx or high-five meeting falter when a hundred people join. Zoom is definitely the most seamless video conferencing system out there, and there's a reason more and more corporations are switching over to them. It sucks that they're skeezy as well, but perhaps it's because they know they have the technical advantage
Or more directly into valuations: govt bond yields are a component of equity discount rates (discount rate = risk free rate + equity risk premium). Of course low bond yields should also mean a slow economy, and thus lower future cash flows. After all the risk free rate is approximately the nominal GDP growth. So I'm not sure how far should this argument go ...
> But the product/network as a whole is far from "working".

In what way?
> There is no benefit when prices crash

Prices are crashing because OPEC wants to harm the shale oil industry.

Look, we can either make oil or rely upon foreign oil. Those are the two choices (or some combination of the two).

The more oil the US makes, the more we are harmed by low prices. The less oil the US makes, the more we are harmed by high prices. Obviously balance is the key, but notice that opponent (OPEC) is intelligent and has a large degree of choice in the matter. Whatever the US does, OPEC will adapt and push our weak point.

And yes, I recognize that moving off of oil entirely is a 3rd, independent solution. But that can be done independently of our production of oil. For now, we're a grossly oil-consuming nation, so we have to make due with the present reality of our country.
Please donot feed them.
Thanks for sharing. I'm a complete etymology nerd and myself had no idea.
I hope so. I would extend this to vegetation. I would much rather have more big beautiful trees around than another golf course or parking lot.
Death Trial