skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you read the introductory information at the top of the site (pasted below), I totally agree with that the amount of testing is VERY important.

It's why I show the daily testing numbers and also calculate the RATE of testing for each state, so there's at least a reference for how states are doing comparatively.

----
Why is having accurate stats on the number of tests so important?

By definition, a confirmed case is one confirmed by a positive test for COVID-19. If your state isn't doing much testing, then you won't have many confirmed cases. However, there could still be a high number of people with coronavirus in your state, they just haven't been counted yet.
My point is that monitoring != storage and there are plenty of great storage systems to use so there's not much reason to create another one. For some reason developers love to create home-made (time-series) databases.
Ah, I see, so new lines are like invisible operators (with low precedence) that ends a statement unless preceded by another operator. Right, that makes sense.
There's no such rule. I've written about this here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844

and in lots of previous places:

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

If anyone has a question that I haven't addressed in there, let me know and I'll be happy to answer.
Thanks for this! Can you recommend some simple concise instructions on growing tomatoes?

I’ve explored a little in the past, but always seemed to run into fairly impenetrable instructions. A basic list of what to buy (in non-gardeners’ terminology) and some simple instructions would be great.
Martial Law Declared
Why wasn't more effort put into 2to3? That is the real failure.
We can't. It's not just a number of beds. It's also how long people stay there (which really depends on healthcare system). E.g. in countries with poor healthcare level people tend to stay in bed longer than in countries with good healthcare. Plus the average "normal" level of ICU occupation might be different (e.g. one country has 70% threshold, while another one 40%).
The 75-year-old restaurant says goodbye
This farm labour shortage would have happened in the UK no matter what - once Brexit had been finished if the UK followed through on the immigration promises they made to restrict inflows from EU. Don't know how representative it was but most of the "stealing our jobs" crowd was people who don't work from a sampling of interviews they showed on the BBC.
> If your codebase is not usable anymore because your language evolved. That's a failure.

> I can still compile the C's from the 80's today if I want to. Same for Fortran, Same with C++.

I couldn't disagree more. It's a cute trick but not useful that code from 80's is still compilable with a compiler from 40 years later.

There's so many better ways to handle legacy like that, like just freezing the toolchain. Which you've almost certainly long since done if you're actually working with code that old, as the platform it runs on is also frozen.

You can't actually run code from 80's out of the box today (16-bit legacy support has long since stopped being a thing), so why does it matter if it still compiles? And, critically, why does it matter if it compiles with the latest toolchain?

There needs to be a supported sliding window of a generously long time, but it doesn't need to be ~infinite support. That's entirely unreasonable & unnecessary. We don't expect that of any OS, library, etc... so why should we expect it from a compiler & language?
In Washington state, this is only permitted in rural counties. The public utility district is allowed to lay fiber, but not to sell access to it directly to consumers. The law requires them to provide common access to the infrastructure at a rate that reflects their operational costs, but only to ISP companies. Someone wrote about their experience here (https://loomcom.com/blog/0098_fiber_optic_bliss.html).

Meanwhile, public utility districts in more populated counties (King, Snohomish, etc) are forbidden to offer network infrastructure at all. Tacoma has some weird public private partnership that seems somewhat dysfunctional and may predate these laws.

Note that I haven't checked in a few years, so the above could potentially be out of date.
finally someone actually speaking about anonymization

https://covid-watch.org/article#heatmapTitle
> If your codebase is not usable anymore because your language evolved. That's a failure.

Only if it claimed to be eternally BW compatible. Some languages never made that claim.

To me a language is a dependency like any API, just with a much bigger surface touching my code. I'd say it's the hardest API to replace in any code. "BW compatibility" is just as much a feature as "breaking BW compatibility", I just like languages (or any API really) to be upfront about it's policy toward BW compatibility.

And I've observed a lot of langs change their attitude towards it over time. Especially considering pre-1.0 times, I find a lot of langs happily break BW compatibility in their early days.
At some point enough harvests will be missed because of lockdown that famines become inevitable. The choice to risk it will probably me made too late.

Not sure why I'm getting downvoted. Food takes months to grow and needs to be harvested within a short window. By the time people realize there's a famine coming it will be too late. Just look at how we could have prepared in January for this virus if people weren't so shortsighted.
I have friends who are locomotive engineers, none of them have been called out for 3 weeks. Everything is stopping.

I think the US is going to learn why it’s dangerous to centralize food supply. Most of the local farmers in my region (upstate ny) are bankrupt, and much of our production or processing of food is from far away. The half and half from my grocer is processed in Virginia.
>It kills everything the size of a virus because of its size, not some magical attributes the virus may or may not have.

It wouldn't cause a tiny iron sphere to disintegrate. It's not true that everything the size of a coronavirus can be "messed up" by UV light.
I'm confused: Are you using the Bill & Ted Sarcastic Postfix NOT or not?
As I understand, it's actually more or less the rule that same glyphs that are semantically different - e.g. letters in different alphabets - are represented by different codepoints. One exception was made for CJK, and that because they were trying to fit everything into the 16-bit space that Unicode had at the time. And that exception was itself extremely controversial.
How is this not just marketing material for Supermicro, pointing out the niche they fill?

I've used and enjoyed their products, but this seems a bit too close to being an ad.
That was sort of my point, that an OEM can't really do minimal.
Excerpts:

"So where is the spark gap in this unit? It turns out to be the ceramic cylinder. I opened up the cylinder and found a stack of eight metal disks with (maybe) carbon electrodes in the center. The disks are separated by mica washers to leave 0.33 mm gaps between each pair. This forms a series of 7 tiny spark gaps.

This type of spark gap is known as a "quenched spark gap". Spark gap transmitters were the first form of radio transmitter, used from 1887 to 1920. They used a spark to transmit Morse code via radio waves (details). The quenched spark gap was one type of spark gap used in these transmitters, as shown in the diagram below.

By combining multiple small gaps, the quenched spark gap could cool off efficiently."

[...]

"Spark gaps generate radio waves across a wide spectrum; inventor David Hughes first noticed this interference in 1878."
I don't think that could happen, if an opposing king shares a square with another piece, you would choose to take the king to win the game.
Market Wizards by Jack Schwager
I didn't really follow the blockchain thing - but now I'm curious - is blockchain (as tech) essentially money with built-in metadata? The whole 'proof-of-work' thing seemed a bit potlatch to me, but building publicly-accessable metadata into money seems like an interesting (although possibly scary) idea.
So how will society adapt when specific genetic variants inevitably are tied to predisposition for intelligence and behavior?

ADHD, autism, BPD, as listed in the article, are not specific conditions, but rather represent a range of behavioral and intellectual tendencies that are better described as clusters in high dimensional personality space. If there are already 300 genes mapped which influence this handful of conditions, that implies that we already know of specific genes which effectively influence behavior by shifting psychology around these clusters.

And since genes are heritable, this has consequences for groups of people and their interactions in greater society. This may be an unpleasant question but if research proceeds in this field it is one that will have to be answered.
Then that doesn't mean "0% of the negatives".
I don't think that the web is fundamentally slow! I do think Chromium in particular has become a major resource hog. Firefox, which doesn't have Safari's platform advantage, opens more quickly and takes up much less memory than Chrome (even as it still uses up battery quickly). Gnome Web, a Linux webkit-based browser for Linux, also performs quite admirably, so I'm not convinced Safari's success is simply due to its macOS integration.

There've been a couple attempts to build electron-like frameworks that use the OS's native webview, but they don't seem to have gained that much traction. Deskgap is probably the most mature of them, relatively speaking.

https://deskgap.com/

https://github.com/pojala/electrino

https://github.com/jscherer92/Quark
More competition is really important for driving down the price and improving the quality of internet supply, however there is still a case for entry level public internet access. You could easily imagine a very slow internet connection (like 1995 level speeds) being supplied by cities as a basic service to help bridge the digital divide and provide basic access to people in need.
>What I'm saying is that you don't necessarily need to make internet a public utility to improve service, just to get some real competition.

You won't get competition in sparsely populated areas. There's not a ton of business sense to expand and try to compete in these markets.

The alternative way to get build-out in the underserved areas is to have gov subsidize a few interests. Canada seems have done a good job getting cell coverage in the middle of nowhere paying Rogers and Bell/Telus to build in remote lands. The US usually gives build-out requirements for stuff like spectrum and then doesn't enforce them when a company like DISH runs a scam: https://www.forbes.com/sites/fredcampbell/2018/07/20/dish-ne...

DISH btw is in full PR mode lending all their AWS-4 spectrum to AT&T and all their 600mhz to T-Mobile, since they previously didn't do shit with it.

In the case of the landline internet providers, there's around a half-trillion USD tax scam that's been perpetuated since the 1990's: https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6c5e97/e...
That comment says

”The Elxsi 6400, built in the early 1980s could do logical operations to memory using the off the shelf drams of the day. Designer was Harold (Mac) McFarland, of PDP-11 fame.”

I googled for more info, but didn’t find info about that. There’s a Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elxsi) that confirms the McFarland part, and I found the system architecture (https://amaus.net/static/S100/elxsi/systems/Elxsi%20System%2...), which is interesting (instructions for multi-precision ascii addition and subtraction, for example, I would guess for supporting COBOL), but nothing about those DRAM tricks. Does anybody have more info?
I'm talking about the official "tz" database, which contains a large list of cities and geographic coordinates. So if you want to autodetect, you just need approximate lon/lat and then grab the closest tz city.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tz_database_time_zones
I’ve seen termination agreements where any severance pay is contingent upon returning hardware like computers, etc.
Can also use ozone. One of Toronto's plants uses it and treats about 20% of the city's water. Nice thing is that you don't need railcars to arrive with it.

https://www.toronto.ca/services-payments/water-environment/t...
I've found this to be true in a lot of subjects. When I started really getting into machine learning a few years ago, I did all the courses, refreshed on my college math, followed tutorials to learn things like tensor flow. But despite all that, I was totally flummoxed on my first day as an ML engineer at work. It wasn't until I started building things to solve problems and learned practical lessons by doing that (with messy data vs toy prepared datasets) that I really excelled. I wouldn't be surprised if this tactic of just starting working would help here too.

So, even though I haven't specifically built a saas business by myself, though I have a bunch of experience growing small startups to medium to large companies, I would echo this advice.
Left the East Bay a couple of years ago - I was very happy with LMI while I was there.
Thumbs up for their service and staff.
I think the CCP is hanging on by the skin of their teeth. They have to make a huge show of this to scare the people into believing the CCP is still in control. Remember, before this even happened China had to maintain ridiculous economic growth rates to quell social unrest. Well the Trump admin was hurting them and now add on a pandemic. The next few years are going to be very precarious for the CCP.
Sadly, I think this is an example of what I would maybe call the HN Dunning-Kruger approach to many problems: "just" use IT/AI/robots/etc. There are many companies who have been working in this space for a long time, there's a reason why it's still manual work — it's freaking hard. Berries are a good example of this, personally I'm intricately familiar with the strawberry industry, but I believe it applies elsewhere too.

Strawberries are very tender. If you apply too much pressure, it will mulch and one berry going bad is usually enough to get the whole box moldy. The second tricky bit is that you want to pick strawberries with the right amount of stem remaining: too little and you risk hurting the berry, too much and the stem will break other berries in the box, leading to mold again.

One final difficult problem is finding the berries: strawberries often grow fairly bushy, especially so if you grow one of the varieties that gives large berries. To find the strawberries in the bush, you usually gently move around the leaves to see if there are any. This is again a very "feel" based movement, too little movement and you miss the berry, too much and you damage the plant.

I'm not saying this won't ever be done. As mentioned before, there are companies who are actively working in this space, many of them for many years already. I do think however that the problem is considerably more difficult than what may be observed at first.
Rust doesn't have function/operator overloading yet or it won't have it at all? I am vastly for clarity and simplicity over vague, implicit stuff but doing e.g vector operations can get very unreadable very quickly without it.
Of what clinical relevance and consequence is COVID19 Testing?
I have been living in Germany for about 20 years now, I studied Biochemistry in the UK, Scientific PhD and I studied medicine in Germany later in life. I am currently working part-time mostly weekend shifts as a resident doctor in the emergency/admissions department in internal medicine in a hospital in southern Bavaria, Germany. I have also been working in various roles in the technology / healthcare/ medical sector in Germany for approximately 20 years.
Please also excuse my somewhat akward wording. I am neither a writer nor an orator, I hope that I am well placed to get the message across to you about the drastically deteriorating situation in society from a clinicians point of view.
Please respect that I am no way criticising my current employer and that these views are entirely my own. I do not want my current employer to be identified. In fact, their organising of the very real medical issues has been impeccable to date.
I am reaching out as I feel the test propagators are now in a position of massive personal and professional responsibility regarding the current testing and media situation for COVID19 in Germany and worldwide.
I for example have this news from the British broadcasting corporation BBC:
Germany's relatively low death rate was largely due to the high number of tests being carried out, said Christian Drosten, head of the Charite University Hospital's Institute of Virology in Berlin.
Show HN: SpicyPass – A free and open-source minimalist password manager
Of what clinical relevance and consequence is COVID19 Testing?
Assuming that the BBC source is accurate, on which scientific studies is this study based ? As to my own personal anecdotal clinical insight, a number of weeks ago I was documenting the travel histories of my patients in the Emergency/ Admissions department . At this time the Robert Koch Institute which is equivalent to the central health institution in Germany defined only South Tyrol as a risk area in the area closest to my hospital catchment area near the Austrian border. It was apparent to me at this time that the virus was more widespread than this, I was documenting patients presenting with mild or no symptoms with extensive eg. rail journeys throughout Europe, who had had no known contact with symptomatic persons and it was quite clear to me the definition of South Tyrol as a risk area was for clinical evaluation purposes near to meaningless. Yet only now has the Robert Koch Institute dropped this definition of a risk area as having relevance for a risk factor evaluation.
Also I would be very grateful if you could explain what is the clinical significance and what is the clinical consequence of the test? If a patient presents with any of the following symptoms; feeling generally unwell (“under the weather”), Fever (also if measured at home and at time of presenting afebrile), sniffles respiratory symptoms, either mild or severe, due to the widespread nature of the viral spread I assume that this is highly likely a COVID19 presentation regardless of their contact history or lack thereof and must therefore, if an in-patient treatment is required, be isolated as a COVID19 suspected case. Current test time due to the backlog is approx. 3-6 days this backlog of test time changes daily.
> a slightly better kernel equivalent of 'it builds, ship it' ?

Surely, "it runs, ship it"? That seems quite a bit better.
> Not sure how true this is since our world population has increased significantly.

I don't think it's true historically, but it may well be true in the modern age. Agricultural productivity has far outpaced population growth, and our crops are much more resilient to weather and pest issues than in the past.

However, distribution is extremely inefficient, especially over large geographical distances. This is how we get significant percentages of all food thrown away, while at the same time having hundreds of millions of starving people or near-starving all over the world.
I don't think China can afford to lift quarantines and restrictions if the epidemic isn't under control.

There may be more than they admit but they must think it is controlled and controllable enough since they are indeed easing restrictions.
I think we will see most client devices natively implement something like WebAuthn with their onboard TPMs. Enrolling new devices for a service would then by a matter of approving the attempt from an already-enrolled device, iCloud style.
Everyone’s experience is different. I’ve run networks with millions of servers with single NICs and networks with thousands of servers with dual NICs. The dual NICs are a cost and complexity and outage inducing nightmare that’s totally unjustifiable at any large scale. Yes it can be warranted for smaller and specialized use cases, particularly with older software. But you can’t push that kind of complexity into the network at very large scale and have it pay off. One day your rack will fail and your software will need to deal with it gracefully enough. IMO solve it at the application level don’t make the network try to do it for you.
"Mainlined", not "maintained".
Radio-Astronomical Imaging: FPGAs vs. GPUs (2019) [pdf]
XP: A Common Lisp Pretty Printing System

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.18.4...
I don’t think English people want to do this kind of work ...
I own brandroid.com and am open to giving it a good home. If you're interested, my contact information is publicly accessible via whois.
The big innovation here is the data compression. The lack of metric type for the standard remote storage interface is a good note.

Wouldn't adding that let you switch back to the main project and lower the local storage buffer to as small as possible?
Make something people love and try not to get sued
It depends if they're melting down or not.
> Would making internet a public utility just mean giving a government granted monopoly to one provider per region and forbidding anyone else from selling internet service?

Quite the opposite, generally. Many places legislate common access to the infrastructure, so a single provider runs the cables but any number of ISPs can compete to sell service on it.

This removes the primary barrier to entry for ISPs (last mile infrastructure) which allows for actual competition to take place.
Most people are already vulnerable to this because they use the same password everywhere. The fewer service providers there are holding a copy, the lower the risk of compromise.
Which subreddits are you referring to?
For starters, NeXT wasn't even considering giving anything back to GCC.
Then I end up with a driver that conforms to emulated hardware and not it’s real counterpart
https://pippinbarr.github.io/chesses/

(doesn't have Pauli Chess, but does have some fun variants)
Yes, you’re certainly right about that. I often find that the gallery view in Zoom is the best possible interface. And the limitations of real life might not be better on a screen. But I’m still left wondering...isn’t something more creative possible here?
And the last recorded duel in France dates back to 1967, between two MPs/Representatives. One had insulted the other in the House.
That approach is a really good point in the design space IMO. It is also the tradeoff that people have to make when designing type systems. Many programs are correct but rejected by their language's type system, but if the language is well designed it was probably a really weird and unintuitive program to begin with, so it's okay to reject it anyway.
Empty comments saying nothing more than "yay side" or "boo side" are unsubstantive regardless of how good and right their cause might be. On HN, we're trying to optimize for intellectual curiosity, which is definitely not served when people repeat talking points.

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

It's not possible to have a site both for curiosity and for battle. In battle, repetition is critical: you have to hammer the same points over and over until you win. That affects curiosity the way that
a tank battalion affects a park. Since we can't have both, we have to pick one; the one we pick here is curiosity. This implies nothing about any specific battle. It's simply the type of forum this is.
I’d love to hear more about your work.
Works great for some use cases, not as great for others.
Really good points.

You’re right. Individually, files stored in Figma probably are a lot safer than on a hard drive that’s never been backed up. Organisations should probably think hard though.

Sketch files are basically a bundle of zipped JSON files and image assets, lending themselves quite nicely to version control.

Abstract, for example, is a nice UI layer over Git and neatly adds versioning, collaboration, and developer hand off to Sketch.
Who needs electricity when we have candles?