skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, when you say any kind of masks works, you will get someone comes in and say:

WHO says masks are not effective. Also, do you have source that says masks work?

I actually don't know how to reply to that.

Fortunately, Cambridge published a research about DIY mask against influenza.

Then, that person will say that's not covid. They aren't the same thing.

Science wins, I guess.

We cant say masks work without scientific research backing it up.
In the EU the broken speedometer would be the least of this vehicle's problems.

First off, check out the front bumper. Bull bars like that were banned in the UK and throughout Europe on grounds of safety. This wasn't a recent ban either. The bull bar says a lot about what the driver thinks of other people and, in this case, through the lens of a EU citizen, it is not friendly.

Then there is the general safety aspect of the design of this vehicle. It is the worst hotch-potch of compromised design you could come up with. It is in Homer Simpson territory. The problem was the rollover test, so they lowered the tyre pressures and thinned out the material in the roof to give it a lower centre of gravity. So if you did go round a corner (like they have in European roads) then you could end up crushed to death. But let's not be self-centred, due to the bulk of the vehicle you could also crush the occupants of another vehicle to death. Not a good look.

The eventuality of this is rare, but more likely if the speedometer has been mangled into some Raspberry Pi screen. Try explaining that to the police, insurance company and grieving family members.

The low tyre pressures and the general obesity of the vehicle meant that fuel economy was worst-in-class. This vehicle is therefore the worst type of gas-guzzler, the poster-child-SUV for global warming. They sold these excuses for vehicles as 'trucks' rather than 'cars' as it was a tax fiddle that, combined with the 'Chicken Tax', meant that lousy design was permitted. So much for the 'free market' and 'competition'.

I would say the hacky Raspberry Pi speedometer is well suited to the general hackiness of the vehicle's botched and very American engineering. It is in character, a quick and dirty solution that certainly would not meet EU standards for safety.

A proper mechanic would rip this hacky solution out and put in the correct cable/sensor in minutes. Sometimes you have got to respect the skills people have and wonder why it is they do it properly rather than go for abominable hacks. But this vehicle isn't worthy of a mechanic's time, it needs to be taken out to the scrapyard and replaced with something practical like a planet-friendly bicycle.
There already seems to be seccomp filters in place.
This can have implications for skill and knowledge acquisition. Imagine if a different smell is released for every new branch of activity you perform on a computer or digital device (memorizing an anatomy text, playing a new keyboard concerto, learning to code Python, watching finance lectures). At night, you wear an EEG headband connected to a scent machine which releases scents connected with the activities of the day. The more important the task, the more you are exposed to the corresponding scent (kind of like spaced repetition but with smell).

Here are some questions I have in light of the study, assuming it can be replicated:

- Is this technique biased towards certain types of knowledge, such as tangible, locational knowledge as opposed to abstract skill acquisition?

- Can a certain smell be over-saturated with knowledge, such that it becomes less effective for knowledge reinforcement? If so, can the “saturation point” be predicted using measurable variables?

- Does this technique only work for many discrete pieces of knowledge, or does it also work for branches of knowledge? (in the example of the finance lecture, there might be 30 major discrete facts throughout the lecture, but they can be bucketed into three major concepts - it might only be practical to use three scents).

- Are more recent associations with a scent significantly more salient to the brain than older ones, or do we subconsciously cycle through the old associations with roughly equal weight?

- Can we synthesize related knowledge sets by broadcasting multiple scents simultaneously?

I am fascinated by the possibilities here. We are advanced primates after all. Our brains are “designed” for more basic things than most of what we do. Paradoxically, it seems possible to supercharge the abstract by engaging the primordial. Brb, I’m buying wallflowers at Bed Bath and Beyond.
JSON5 supports comments. NET Core has been working with comments inside .json appsettings files for a very long time now.
I mean, there are ways to get rid of them…
Aren't you saying it's possible to make a perfect language with no tradeoff, and all that in just 6 months?
Sounds like you started small* and stayed small :-)

* in the niche sense
8 strains of the coronavirus are circling the globe
> SELinux is maintained by NSA, it is secure.

I’m not sure I see a correlation.
:) Enjoyed the potshots at all framework "gurus" and euro conferences, but they exist not just because of their masters in philosophy and their social media engagement skills.

They exist because Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Oracle etc are filled with a corporate robot class programmed/selected from birth, to be paranoid about each other and to play empire defense.

The framework builders and kludge suppliers of the world are first or second order effects of that reality.

As long as imagination handicapped empire defenders exist, and equate maintaining empire with control of a stack, or subversion of their rivals stack, obstacles to true multi platform code will keep getting created.
Catalina is not annoying by my standards, at all.
You can’t keep the reference Turing machine fixed in light of the linear speed up theorem.

Hence the argument for compression.

A Turing machine with a better language is faster.

It compresses time.
the example I was directly thinking of was Italy's IRI from 1933[0] which was a conglomerate directly aimed at restructuring failing public companies through nationalization, it kept doing it for decades. AFAIK other countries had similar national behemoths.

The US set up the Home Owners' Loan Corporation[1] during the great depression to refinance loans saving a lot of banks from disaster (tho helping common folks too), and there were also the savings and loan bailout in the '80s and '90s[2]. Chrysler was bailed out in 1979[3] and Lockheed in 1971.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istituto_per_la_Ricostruzione_...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Owners'_Loan_Corporation

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savings_and_loan_crisis

[3] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/economics/chrysler-bai...
Just because the state are idiots doesn't mean fax isn't obsolete.
>I find it difficult to blame the governor of a state with a $26 billion budget deficit in 2011 for cutting this.

Getting rid of funding for pandemic preparedness in favor of funding a high speed rail system to nowhere does seem particularly short sighted in retrospect.
I saw a really cool demonstration at an old Kiwicon event.

The presenter had a tool that would find similar social graphs across multiple bulletin boards and other social sites.

Eg: You'd feed in the profile of your user-of-interest on one bulletin board, and it would map their social graph on that site, then it would search for similar profiles from the entire graph on other boards. Reconstruct the graphs on the new boards, attempting to match dissimilar accounts for the same underlying persons across sites.
"Wearing a face mask was a protective factor against influenza infection."

The key word there is influenza.
Well, you're right that JS JITs can only infer type information via heroic efforts, but AFAIK the Java compiler throws away any type information from the source code, which means that the JVM JIT needs to inver type information again from the byte code.

Still, the JVM JIT is faster than JS due to reasons explained in the sibling comment of the parent one.
I tried fitting a third order polynomial for JHU Covid data, just as a way to kill time. For all countries, the 95% confidence interval of the second derivatice overlapped zero (i.e. it can't be estimated very well). We only have about three weeks of data from the 10th death, for most countries, you can't fit a very good curve with that.
The high level point that is of great importance is that if one wants a computer program to function in a reliable way one needs simple and understandable algorithms/components. Nowadays even the processor is no longer simple and assembly has become a high level language and it got us 'nice' things like spectre. For the practical day to day work the KISS principle that has been the corner stone of effective programming for half a century is now more important than ever. Yes, there is a nice library available to do such and such and maybe you need it, but are you also thinking about the dangers that any additional moving part may increase unpredictability? Let me give one very stupid example that I ran into this very week. The agreed-upon answer according to https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/29608/why-is-it-bet... is that it is better to do #!/usr/bin/env bash than #!/usr/bin/bash. I say: absolutely not! You have just increased the number of moving parts involved by one for an immeasurably small benefit. And if you are worrying about bash versions then just stop using any bash features that are less than a decade old. I also say that unless it is necessary for the core problem that you are trying to solve stay away from any features of anything that are less than 5 years old. And if you actually need the new and fancy stuff, and maybe you do, expect to pay a hefty price for it. Every new tool that you introduce has its own peculiarities that you will spend hours of debug time on and one should err on the side of just saying no.
> or some other code causing your function to get deoptimized

Why doesn't the optimizer generate different compiled implementations of a function for different pieces of code?
Yeah, this is unacceptable bullshit.

http://archive.is/wXQaO to the rescue.
Krugman, leave that body !
That tweak I made was to make it click-baity and obvious to manipulate, similar to the VPN one posted here. Did you read my entire post?
> if you think that whatever the official government official says must be true

This is something I definitely said.
https://github.com/aatishb/covidtrends (linked at bottom of page)
MIT Develops Cheap, Open Source Ventilator for Coronavirus Treatment – ExtremeTe
Hate to be tin foil, what was that thing about an app "if you have symptoms" or something. Seemed ridiculous to have a full app for something that sounds like a form/questionnaire. Anyway probably can just look at your search history.
Here's a recent article on the topic

https://www.npr.org/2020/03/28/823292062/who-reviews-availab...
Looks like Plotly for the chart and Vue.js for the slider.
Switch the view so it shows reported deaths (drop down in top right). Those numbers should be more reliable comparable.
The link to the course:

https://www.coursera.org/learn/the-science-of-well-being
What keeps annoying me is the number of times I come across situations where people refuse scans but accept faxes. As if a fax they receive from me won't be a scanned document passed to something like efax. Yet they cling to the illusion that a fax is more authentic.

Another fun one I've come across is refusing to accept a photo of a document but accepting a scan or faxed copy.
> It says a lot that all the performance-sensitive parts of widely deployed JITs are themselves implemented with AOT compilation.

…not really? Managed languages with a substantial runtime tend to make for poor ergonomics when writing JITs.
The case against inspiratory muscle training in COPD
Taiwan has only 77 coronavirus cases
> you might have a modifier to explicitly discard the result of a function that allows it to be standalone.

ocaml does this and i find it very annoying, even though i know it's theoretically saving me from accidentally not consuming a return value.
I agree WRT china something stinks. My guess is it is just realpolitik. A lot of useful info was coming out of china (as well as lies) and maybe the WHO needed to bite its tongue to keep that channel open (China being... odd in its reactions to criticism).

I'll accept your point about no P2P transmission claim as I remember it too, and I suspect that was just parroted back from China early on - but they've not said that for a while.

The ACE stuff from your links just says 'we suspect'.

The WHO has indeed spoken on this recently (https://mobile.twitter.com/WHO/status/1240409217997189128):

"WHO is aware of concerns on the use of #ibuprofen for the treatment of fever for people with #COVID19. We are consulting with physicians treating the patients & are not aware of reports of any negative effects, beyond the usual ones that limit its use in certain populations"

You're being unfair here, they have spoken and it's clear they don't feel enough to recommend for or against at this point. Getting clean yes/no info out of a filthy cloud of murk like this covid situation - I'm glad I'm not them.

Nonetheless, thank you for a civil and informative reply
Yeah, all the links are wrong now. I'll fix them!
I’m not sure what the situation is elsewhere, but I don’t trust the death statistics here in Poland.

Authorities here will be quick to remove a person from the death toll if they can attribute the death to something else than COVID-19, even when the person in question was tested positive [1].

People who have died in quarantine, having had symptoms but never tested, are also not included [2]. For that matter, testing patients with full-developed symptoms is officially outright discouraged [3].

Press sources in Polish:

[1]: https://mobile.twitter.com/MZ_GOV_PL/status/1243090118270947...
[2]: https://poznan.wyborcza.pl/poznan/7,36001,25818730,koronawir...
[3]: https://dentonet.pl/wytyczne-gis-nie-wystarcza/#gref
Wait, what kinda of acid and how much? $400,000 seems like a lot.
Traduttore, traditore and never so much as with verse.
Easy, in a pandemic like this only listen to medical professionals. Like I said, the time for amateur to examine and draw conclusions is after the pandemic is over.
Love the app and approach to privacy.
Contagion Cast (Matt Damon, et al.) Covid-19 videos
It's interesting as Java developer went through the same things 15 years ago because Java Strings are immutable and had the same behaviour back then (I was bitten by this back then too).
But a good signalling and liquidity mechanism, and the very nature you decry (poor store of value) is an incentive to invest in productive assets.
I might have been surprised, but I still optimize for the modern hardware. :-)

Yes, REP MOVSB is fast at least on Intel CPUs nowadays.
They’d still have angular momentum; it just wouldn’t be immediately apparent.
Walkable,neighbourhoods designed for people rather than having them designed for cars first.
What are the British thinking? Do they think they'll get a better deal from China than the US? Or is their intention to use this as a bargaining chip against the US?
China is indeed very divise for our global powerstructures.

This Video shows a WHO official battling with this(if you want to look kindly upon him): https://twitter.com/nathanlawkc/status/1243889673207832577

What bugs me is that I'm really unsure if I should post anything critical of China, it's scary what that could mean for my family 30 years down the road.
On asymptomatic spread:

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2001468
A woman from Shanghai traveled to Germany for a business trip between January 19 and January 22. She had no symptoms of coronavirus during this time and only became sick on her flight back to China. She was diagnosed with COVID-19 on January 26. But on January 24, a businessman who met with the woman on January 20 and 21 developed symptoms of coronavirus. He went back to work on January 27 and later tested positive for COVID-19. “We discovered that shedding of potentially infectious virus may occur in persons who have no fever and no signs or only minor signs of infection,” the report’s authors concluded.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2001899
two individuals who had recently returned to Germany from Wuhan, China, appeared to be asymptomatic, but tested positive for COVID-19 when they were given a throat swab.
"We discovered that shedding of potentially infectious virus may occur in persons who have no fever and no signs or only minor signs of infection,"

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/03/13/scie...
A majority of cases in China were transmitted by “undocumented infections” in the period before the country placed travel restrictions on Hubei province on January 23.
“This high proportion of undocumented infections, many of whom were likely not severely symptomatic, appears to have facilitated the rapid spread of the virus throughout China"

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.05.20031815v...
a significant number of infections can be attributed to people who had not yet developed symptoms

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2003762
Bill Gates
"COVID-19 is transmitted quite efficiently," he wrote. "There is also strong evidence that it can be transmitted by people who are just mildly ill or even pre-symptomatic. That means COVID-19 will be much harder to contain than the Middle East respiratory syndrome or severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which were spread much less efficiently and only by symptomatic people."
There is very similar product on sale - "Imgur clone - Image sharing social network" - https://freelancercv.com/item/1/imguri-v2-image-social-netwo...
Scott Alexander thinks it's because the WHO uses the phrase "not effective" to say masks haven't been scientifically proven to protect against COVID-19 specifically and beyond any reasonable doubt, while the media interprets this to mean that they're "not effective" as in there's evidence against the effectiveness of masks.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/23/face-masks-much-more-t...
This one of the last time a duel could replace a proper trial. Somehow, in case an dispute between two nobles could not be resolved in a trial (no witnesses is the first thing that came to mind), they could re-enact thes kind of trial.
I think one of the last duel en France was as late as the 1960, between two french politicians, so yes, not the last.
No I'm saying it's easy to make a language better than Python in six months.
> After all, the GDP per capita difference between the UK and Poland is close to 3x.

That's a shame it is still the case, as the promise of entering the EU was for wages to normalise across the Union. I guess it will take further integration for that to happen.
Python 3 promotes the most likely scenario: you are on a modern system with normal looking filenames.

It would be unwise to design an API that promotes a niche need like dealing with a legacy file system with corrupted file names. This is what Python 3 fixed, making the easy things easy, and the complicated things possible, not the other way around.

But Python 3 is absolutely up to the task of handling legacy file systems with random encoding mixed in, you just need to tell it explicitly you are doing so.

Let's create a file with a completely garbage name, made of random bytes, which is allowed on Unix:

>>> import os, sys
>>> sys.version_info
sys.version_info(major=3, minor=7, micro=5, releaselevel='final', serial=0)
>>> with open(os.urandom(32), 'wb') as f:
... f.write(os.urandom(200))

If you pass bytes to any file system function, it will return file names as bytes:

>>> filename = os.listdir(b'.')[0]
>>> type(filename)
<class 'bytes'>
>>> filename[:10]
b'\xf8-U\xa5\x1dq\xad?\xbf\xa2'

And you can just open that:

>>> data = open(filename, 'rb').read()
>>> data[:10]
b'E\x05\xce*M \xf5\xfeK\x18'
>>> type(data)
<class 'bytes'>

You do exactly the same as what you did with Python 2, and treat the files as raw bytes entirely, without thinking about the content.

Some API in Python require text. If you want to pass the file names to those API, you can use surrogate escape, which let you convert back and forth between arbitrary bytes and utf8 text, without loosing information:

>>> as_text = filename.decode('utf8', errors='surrogateescape')
>>> as_text[:10]
'\udcf8-U\udca5\x1dq\udcad?\udcbf\udca2'
>>> type(as_text)
<class 'str'>
>>> as_text.encode('utf8', errors='surrogateescape') == filename
True

This is a good thing, it forces the dev to be explicit about the places in your code where you are dealing with a specific scenario. It also makes you pay the price of doing so opt in, not opt out.

If you have to do a robust version of this with Python 2, you will have to do that anyway: at some point mixed encoding will bite you if you don't have a neutral representation for them. Python 2 gave you the illusion of robustness, because it said "yes" to most operations.

I remember quite well that a lot of Python 2 programs didn't work in Europe because your user directory would contain your name, which could be non ascii. Python 2 programs are opt in to deal with it. It's the opposite philosophy, and caused so many crashes.
Having a budget surplus platform is not at all the same thing as having a budget surplus.
Bat gene pool discovery, insights into the origin of SARS coronavirus (2017)
Rust is fantastically expressive for a low level language.

And modern C++ is not 15 years old C++. You have auto, lambda, etc. I just think it's silly to try to pretend to be more expressive than scripting languages.

It's like Schwarzenegger trying to pretend it's as flexible as gymnast. What for? The guy is amazing at what he does.
Saying China is "the first country to encounter the virus" is an incredibly generous way of putting it. People don't eat bats and pangolins because they want to - they eat them because they're poor. The CCP is the architect of the widespread poverty which created the disease in the first place.
I sometimes think that you should be be able to hint the compiler that this is a smallish string, this one can be big, this list should be mostly under 1000 elements so that it handles the correct version of an algorithm (bonus point to let me provide several algorithms with different use cases)
I'm I the only one who notices a strong pattern of "China is failing, based on this sketchy evidence we got" type articles in American media.

I say this as someone who is neither Chinese or American. But I just notice the eagerness of western media to portray chinas doom and incompetence.

Don't get me wrong, China's attacks on free speech and persecution of muslims is a terrible terrible thing, but I get the feeling that they are managing the outbreak and the economy far more effectively than their western counterparts.
Yes I understand some verbosity is structural and won't change anything, for example

SomeClass x = new SomeClass();

won't make anything slower (ignoring auto for now)

Now, I read Java code and I can't help but wonder how things are harder

For example, setters and getters, what would be a simple memory write becomes a function call. Not complaining when you actually need it.

Reading the examples here (and those are not too bad) https://developer.android.com/reference/java/net/HttpURLConn... it seems you have to actually fight the API to get anything done

Why do you need to cast the return of a url.openConnection() to a HttpURLConnection? (I mean, how many connection types exist?)