skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your understanding is incomplete. Both filter virus particles with different degrees of effectiveness. Viruses are typically most present in aerosolized droplets which are much much bigger than the gap size of a surgical or n95 mask.
Very well explained, too.
Great work.
1) If Zoom can do this then it's a MacOS security bug.

2) UX matters. Users don't care about the technical details, they want a smooth experience and that can be the difference between a billion-dollar business or a failed startup. And yes the desktop version is more stable than the web-based UI.

3) Malware is defined by what it does, not how it's installed.
40% over 6 classes is way above a random baseline. This is actually pretty cool. Congratulations!
If you don't think there is corruption in the market, man I got a bridge to sell you.
Contrast with papers like "Learning to Fly via Deep Model-Based Reinforcement Learning" (https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.08876), in which a principled approach was refined over years until it could be used for a real-world task.
HN is a self-selecting population of higher=than-median IQ people with specific interests. Outside of that population, skill levels look like this:

https://www.oecd.org/skills/piaac/Country%20note%20-%20Unite...
My opinion:
Creating value is still worthwhile - no matter what is going on with the currency, it's still used for exchange. So if you're creating value you'll be fine. A friendly reminder: value is determined by the customer.

For myself, I am betting that tangible assets that provide value would be preferable to assets that just sit there. Value investing and prudent real-estate are where I'll be concentrating my efforts if I have spare money.
Isn't 128-bit AES and SHA-1 fairly weak encryption nowadays?
The ZZ language looks interesting, from a very quick skim. The blog post would have been a lot better if it swapped out the passive aggressive whining.
For websites, as opposed to webapps, this might be fine. But a webapp will pretty nearly alawys want to look the same cross platform, sort of forcing styling.

I get it, they didn't like what they looked like before, because reasons. But I wonder what percentage of sites and apps were using unstyled controls.
"Note that "N95" masks are only 95% effective against viruses (even if you did everything correctly)."

There are masks that offer greater protection than N95. Among them are N99, N100, and various others. There's a good article that discusses some of the differences here: [1]

"N95 masks are disposable. One-time use"

Some types of N95 masks are disposable, others are reusable. Also, even the disposable kind could be (and have been) reused. This is, for example, widely done in hospitals where there's a short supply of masks, on the theory that some protection (even if imperfect) is better than no protection.

[1] - https://fastlifehacks.com/n95-vs-ffp/
With true E2E encryption, could you support features like recording a video and making it available for download? If yes, does that reflect how their video recording features work now?
"The desktop" is suffering from the same complexity breakdown that AAA gaming suffers from. It's hard -- and getting harder -- to produce a cohesive properly developed and QA'd AAA game because gamers now expect something way beyond the capabilities of a surgical team of 10-50 people. To even ship a AAA title requires a team of hundreds and a budget of tens to hundreds of millions. and when you're dealing with an wndeavor that large, it's difficult to enforce quality and cohesiveness at every level throughout the development process.

Desktop environments are now reaching that threshold because users demand "modernity" and fanciness. They would be fantastically served by a desktop with the capabilities of Windows 9x, MacOS 7.x, or AmigaOS 3.x, but they demand much more than that, and the Windows and MacOS teams (and code bases!) have bloated in size to meet this demand.

These problems showed up much earlier in Linux because in order to release a desktop OS, you need someone exercising strict control over all aspects of the system from the kernel (and even lower than the kernel, like the hardware and firmware) all the way up to the shell, GUI toolkit, and other user-visible features. You need that leadership to define and prioritize work and even prioritize OS concerns. (For example, a desktop OS should handle keyboard/mouse interrupts IMMEDIATELY.) You need to enforce a single set of user concerns on everybody, and fire anyone who doesn't play ball. And with Linux and open source, good luck getting everybody on the independent kernel, libc, X, and GUI projects to cooperate this way.

Me, I've always been content with like fvwm95 (or lately, i3) and whatever independent programs I needed for desktop tasks. And if I have to say 'pm-suspend' at a command prompt to put my computer tk sleep, so be it. I can see the many hands all making the world a slightly better place, and since their work is all loosely coupled, it all sort of hangs together and is very robust. Conventional desktops are brittle to start with, and made even more so under Linux because of those issues I mentioned.
If the article is accurate, this is clearly not "end-to-end" in the way that most people believe it. If Zoom was considered "end-to-end" encrypted, then any site that uses HTTPS should be able to claim so as well.

I interpret end-to-end encrypted to mean only the participants have access to the content, the intermediary couldn't spy on my calls even if they wanted to. This appears to NOT be the case with Zoom.
Interesting this is less of blog post and more of an announcement that a blog post will not be written.
Some background info for those commenters who say that Zoom should be requiring just a web browser because web browsers already have everything needed (aka. WebRTC). TL;DR summary: they want to do their own thing, outside of what the WebRTC standard allows, that's all (and enough reason for not using WebRTC?)

Zoom doesn't want to use the stock H.264 encoder as provided by the browser for WebRTC communication. Instead, they use their own video encoders and decoders (which while still being H.264, it is presumedly better optimized for their use case). WebRTC forces you to use either the H.264 or the VP8 encoder/decoder that the browser provides.

How they do this is by having their own custom application that you have to install. Still, some users have noticed that there is a well hidden web-based version of Zoom, which works by again running their custom encoders, thanks to WebAssembly. Also it seems that their video is transmitted via DataCahnnels [0].

They are not alone. Companies want to provide additional "value" by innovating outside of what the WebRTC standard offers. That's nice and all, although it of course tends to disgregation and incompatibilities in the long run. For this reason, I've heard talks about how future revisions of the standard might explore adding WebAssembly support, in order to allow everyone embedding their own compiled components into their applications [1].

[0]: https://webrtchacks.com/zoom-avoids-using-webrtc/

[1]: https://webrtcbydralex.com/index.php/2019/11/13/webrtc-stand...
> That large number of divisors was the reason for the Babylonians to use base-60, I've always been thaught.

I believe the Babylonians actually use base 12, with the number 60 merely being a convenient multiple of 12. And I think the reason their counting system is base 12 is not because of its greater divisibility, but due instead to the way they used their fingers for counting. So, in the West, we count using each of our fingers and that’s how we arrive at a base 10 counting system. But in certain parts of the world, they use one thumb to count the separate segments of the fingers on the same hand. There are three segments in each of the 4 fingers, for a total of 12 (hence the base 12). And then the five fingers of the opposite hand are used to count how many groups of 12 have been counted. So 5 fingers on the second hand multiplied by 12 finger segments on the first hand = 60 in total.
??? In IT, E2E has always meant End-to-End, as in, nothing in between can decrypt the content. HIPAA, or brazillian telcos, or the FAA, or my local beer tasting club are fine to come up with whatever interpretation they want, but that doesn't change what it has always been the obvious meaning. No real room for ambiguity here...
I would highly recommend checking all installers on macOS through Suspicious Package. It will give you a complete picture of all the installer scripts that will be run and all the files that will be written.
I did just that for zoom and decided against installing it.
What a strangely gripping piece of text. This project is incredible.
> Basically, the overall thrust of this series has been this: C is not the hardware, it’s an abstract machine. But that machine runs on real hardware, and abstractions are leaky. If you go too far into “purely only the abstract machine,” you may not be able to accomplish your tasks. If you go too far into “C runs directly on the hardware,” you may be surprised when a compiler does something that you didn’t expect.

Seems pretty uncontroversial for “propaganda.”
What Sweden Has Done Right on Coronavirus
That's not anti-intellectualism. Most Computer Science programs are not intended to turn students into qualified software developers.
>Is wanting to read that controversial now?

No, and I never said that. I was just disappointed they're still sticking with a limited field of subjects.

>All the examples you mention are Western and widely available

I was assuming they were talking about the Western Canon, since there's no other "the canon" that's in mainstream use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_canon
>> Yes, and if it doesn't need even close to one FTE to do this for 5-10 countries, why the hell would you suddenly need 15 to do it for 100?

Because things dont scale linearly? I mean I can support JSON messages in 5min. Another five minutes and I can support XML. So I should be able to support all the historical mainframe message formats in 5 minutes each right? No...
That is not really how human beings function.
Motivation causes "hard discipline". It does not exist in a vacuum.
Create, Innovate, and Make Art with Machine Learning
What Covid-19-related trend surprised you the most as you prepared this data presentation?
Ask HN: How can a software engineer contribute fighting Coronavirus?
Not only in respect of social distancing and giving money to research and science companies, but I just wondered how I can contribute fighting against Coronavirus especially as a software engineer?

I'm work for a software company for a living, but I also like to spend spare time on open source projects which I put on GitHub. Are there some open source projects in science where people even without master degree can contribute?

What was the most challenging time in your live?

- My Grandparents: WW 1 & 2
- My Parents: Rebuilding everything from scratch which my parents lost in War.
- Me: The first two days after Pokemon Go launched I was not able to play it. And one day YouTube was not working properly in full super extra hyper resolution.

Our grandparents (probably) were the World War 1 & 2. Our parents rebuild everything which was gone in the World Wars. Since Coronavirus will probably not the last disease of its kind, it almost seems that this our designation now.
The "security community" was always clear and unambiguous, but the marketing department aren't quite so precise.
Of course the CCP would prioritize a technology that gives it even greater observatory and regulatory powers. The article even mentions changes to the protocol to prohibit “unauthorized” users from viewing transaction histories and such.
You might want to look at some of the work we're doing in "git for connectomics":
http://dvid.io

There will be a new backend released soon that should really improve our ability to transfer and backup versioned data.
What do you mean by "bundles malware"? What else is it doing besides teleconferencing?
> From what I've read in various articles WHO just says masks might not be 100% effective at protecting you and that's it.

They say there is not enough evidence to back up the idea that the general population wearing masks has a benefit to everyone.

> There is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit.
That’s not the point. If it’s not truly E2E, they shouldn’t market it as such.
The only effective resistance is being in control of information dissemination to the masses.

Otherwise you will be marginalized and the masses will be "educated" by the mass media about how evil and troublesome "you people are."

Ensuring diversity in information dissemination is absolutely key to shooting down these proposals which harm personal freedom.
Thanks for explaining your take but this sounds very reductive. When it comes down to it every problem is solved by tuning for that problem specifically.

While Never Give Up (NGU) is not fundamentally new, it is an important step in computers learning. You need to be able to generalize solutions to problems where you don't have contextual information. Imagine if you were a caveman and asked to operate an iPhone. You're not stupid if you don't know how, but if I tell you, "never give up", and put you in a room for 5 years I'd expect some results from a sentient being. This is an important process too.

We would be much closer to good AI if it can figure things out by itself instead of being constantly fed "clean" data.
I do wonder if it will cause any shift in the current fashion for urban living among certain demographics. After all, it doesn't need to be a huge change percentage-wise at the margin to have a big effect. After all, the current urbanization trend is relatively small in terms of the overall numbers.

And there are lot of places--even though not really in the Bay Area--where you can get to at least semi-rural places while still being within an hour or so of a major city. (And really in the country within 2 or 3 hours.)
The heart problems are from short term use in combination with azithromycin.

Here's some guidance from the American College of Cardiology:

https://www.acc.org/latest-in-cardiology/articles/2020/03/27...

• Safety considerations for inpatient and outpatient use of hydroxychloroquine-azithromycin in clinical practice are outlined below. Additional sources of expert guidance are also available here.

• The intensity of QT and arrhythmia monitoring should be considered in the context of risk level, resource availability and quarantine considerations.

• Hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine therapy should occur in the context of a clinical trial or registry, until sufficient evidence is available for use in clinical practice.

• IRB-approved protocols should guide use of hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine for pandemic research; suggestions for researchers are outlined below.

• Hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine use outside of a clinical trial should occur at the direction of an infectious disease or COVID-19 expert, with cardiology input regarding QT monitoring.
Does North America have that many pollinator insects in terms of population? We have some butterflies and some solitary bees. We don't have the honey bee. What would normally be pollinating these plants, all I see is honey bees and some butterflies.
Well, I still think 4 guys in a basement could have come up with a better framework to build off of even without the regulatory compliance part.

It's like the company Simplifile - small company in Utah. They have only a handful of developers that build actual website front/backend infrastructure, and then they have a team of specialists whose job it is to become expert in all of the county laws across the USA and create requirements out of them.
I've read both The Jungle and Nickel and Dimed, but not Atlas Shrugged. To this day I have never hired anyone to clean my house or fetch and carry for me, it's a direct influence of that book. One day when I'm old and infirm, maybe. On my last 20-ish visits to Wholefoods, I saw more and more gig shoppers. In the beginning I didn't think much of it, but as the number of gig shoppers approach regular shoppers, I have become convinced that we are living in Brave New World, there's a whole class of people who we will never come in contact with, other than through these arms-length service exchange. I hazard to think that this stratification of tasks will shape us, shape me in how I think of my place in the world. And this is the stuff I do see, I hate to think what I'm blind to.

Is our world now more like 1984 or Brave New World?

https://www.intelligencesquared.com/events/brave-new-world-v...

Edited: I've just re-watched that Intelligence Squared debate and, my God, it is bang on and more relevant now than ever!
The counterpoint to that is that there is a lot of prior art, and prior mistakes to learn from, for something begun in 2008. So the assumption that it will take the same length of time, and the same learning and development process, to reach parity with other softwares has a flaw.
macOS Catalina 10.15.4
And yet a content-free post is gobbled up on Hacker News.
You have to look at real rates, not nominal rates. The only markets that have negative nominal rates are battling deflation (which the US is not) or have serious liquidity concerns at the moment. The Fed is unlikely to go negative as they face a very different beast.

Here's a quick example. Let's say you're in a deflationary environment: in 1 year, your money actually buys you more than it did last year, let's say for instance, 2% more. Under this weird environment, you would actually be willing to pay someone to hold your money for a year, because you know in a years time, it will buy you 2% more (effectively a 2% return). So, since you don't want to store that money under your mattress, how much will you pay someone? Let's say you pay your bank 0.5% for holding your money (i.e. negative rate). So in a years time, you get 99.5% of your money back from the bank, but it buys you 2% more "stuff" so really, compared to today, you're getting 101.5% (roughly) of your money back, which is the same as a 1.5% interest rate. This is called the "real" interest rate, and it's the only one that matters.
Actually I look forward for enough momentum to be created in the community, to allow new C standards to change the way undefined behaviors are conceived, and make them as specified as possible, and even when they cannot in reasonable unique ways, to provide reference possible behaviors to select in order to have the least unexpected outcome for the programmer. Especially now that low level programming is abstracting away, exactly but not only because of Rust itself, we need a C that is more C than what it became in recent years. After all we don't really need to change the language, but just the new specifications and the compilers implementations of UB.
Its really not about scale. I can process 1 or 1million JSON messages with the same effort. Now also support 25 other message formats? Doesnt scale the same way.

I can support a trillion of US/Canadian/European transactions with mostly the same effort.
As someone who's never used or seen Zoom in action, what's pulling people into Zoom that's not already available in other tools (Hangouts Meet, MS Teams) and even works without installing anything (such as Jitsi)?

Based on what I've seen, there's just so much hostile behaviour by the company (including lying about meeting HIPAA e2e requirements!) and the fact that their _official client_ had parts removed by the macOS malware removal tool that I just don't get why people still consider it as an option. If it were the only "just works" tool out there I'd understand, but there's plenty of competition in this space.

I've personally began using the Jitsi server the local student network association has set up and it's been working like a dream. You can even share a window to others (which I didn't even know browsers had support for) for presentations and such.
Yeah my proposal differs a bit from the tau proposal, although there are some similarities.
I'm going to oversimplify here, but negative interest rates effectively mean you pay the bank to store your money. So on top of inflation, you're losing real money. For someone who saves, negative interest rates mean savers end up with less money at the end of each year, and since OP indicated their preference to saving, that puts them at a disadvantage.

Negative interest rates also that you get paid for taking out debt, which is a tremendous opportunity to buy something that costs $100 for less than $100, but because OP indicated their aversion to taking on debt, this puts them at a disadvantage.
I'd suggest https://foldingathome.org/ If you have a good GPU your PC can run mathematical calculations to help beat COVID-19. There is more on their website
I'm not a financial planner or financial services professional of any kind, so take anything I say with a grain of salt.

1) should I stop saving?

No. negative interest rates won't go that negative. Even if your bank is earning -1% interest, it still makes sense to be saving.

2) Should I put my savings elsewhere?

Probably. ETFs or index funds with wide stock market exposure are a good idea (good examples are SPY, VOO, VO, VFINX... and many others). You make money by buying stocks when the market is low and selling when the market is high. Long term, it will probably go up as it always has. That said, it's very hard to time the market, so the best strategy is to put your money in over time. One good way to do this is to take a set amount of money from each paycheck and invest it every pay period, regardless of what the market is at. If you have a bunch of money sitting in savings right now, maybe divide it into 52 parts (or 104 or 156 or even 208 depending on your risk tolerance and/or thoughts on how long this market decline will last) and invest that amount each week.

3) Should I take out loans to buy up assets?

Probably not. No one is gonna give you an unsecured loan at a good enough rate that will make this worthwhile. And a secured loan will be against something like a house, which you probably don't want to risk losing. This is almost never a good idea.

One big exception might be buying a home. When the dust settles, the real estate market might take a big hit in which case taking out a loan (i.e. a mortgage) to buy a home might be a good idea.

4) Should I build businesses and raise venture capital for them?

Depends on the business. Venture capital money is going to tighten up a lot. People just aren't going to be throwing around money during a recession in the way that they did 6 months ago. But if you can stomach it, this is probably as good a time as ever to build a business that can get to profitability quickly. The only caveat is that it might be a risky time to quit a job with a stable income. Typically, it's easy to take for granted that if your business fails you can just get a job. Right now, that seems less certain.
Those cases cannot be conclusively linked to a failure of the masks to filter. Ergo, I'm not wrong yet.
There's the computer, and then there's the computer, and then there's the computer and then there's the computer:

The computer is the thing that has the web browser running on it.

The computer is the thing that has the code editor running on it.

The computer is the thing that has the compiler running on it.

The computer is the thing that provides a virtual hardware interface for running programs.

The computer is the thing that the virtual hardware interface interacts with.

The computer is the thing inside the hard drive/graphics card/other component that the computer talks to.

The computer is the thing inside the processor that pre-processes, jits, or otherwise transforms commands from the computer for the computer so the computer ... ... ...

https://xkcd.com/722/
Maybe calling it a 'turn' instead.