skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What if you haven't got 40 people? There are towns I've been to with an entire population barely larger. They need fiber?

Also, I just don't take seriously the difference between being connected to the internet and high quality videoconferencing for people who are extremely isolated. It's being connected at all that matters. You may be video conferencing lately, but I haven't even bothered to webex, just conference calls. And I don't myself see the worth compared to instant messaging.
"Not to be rude to Ford but what makes Ford the best manufacturer of trucks?"
Biling alerts are not real time.

- Some guy
> If you instead embed the assumption that there's a single global JavaVM that could be touched from anywhere, then that adds complexity to potentially everything, and any test you write might go wrong (or silently start going wrong in the future) if the pattern of which functions use the JavaVM changes (or else you treat every single test as a JavaVM test, and have the overhead that goes with that)

Not sure I follow. If you expect any code to invoke JNI then you are still responsible for explicitly initializing the singleton within the JNI_OnLoad callback. If you don't the API I have will crash so definitely not a silent failure. There's no external calling pattern to this API that can change to break the way this thing works. As for why this is needed it has to do with the arcane properties of JNI:

1. Whatever native thread you use JNI on, the JNIEnv must be explicitly attached (Java does this automatically for you when jumping from Java->native as part of the callback signature).

2. Attaching/detaching native threads is a super expensive operation. You ideally only want to do it once.

3. If you don't detach a native thread before it exits your code will likely hang

4. If you detach prematurely you can get memory corruption accessing dangling local references.

5. It's not unreasonable to write code where you have a cross-platform layer that then invokes a function that needs JNI.

If you're avoiding all global state you only have the following options:

A. Attach/detach the thread around every set of JNI operations. This stops scaling really quick & gets super-complicated for writing error-free composable code (literally manifests as the problem you're concerned about with code flow changes resulting in silent bugs).

B. Anytime you might need to create a native thread, you need to pass the JNIEnv to attach it. If the native thread is in cross-platform code suddenly you're carrying a 2 callback function pointers + state as a magic invocation as the first thing to do on a new thread creation & the last thing to remember to do just before thread exit. Also you have to suddenly carry through that opaque state to any code that may be invoking callbacks that require JNI on that platform. This hurts readability & risks not being type-safe.

At the end of the day you're actually also lying to yourself and trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. JNI is defined to use global state implicitly throughout its API - there's defined to be 1 global JavaVM single instance. Early on in Java days JNI was in theory designed to allow multiple JVMs in 1 process but that has long been abandoned (the API was designed poorly & in practice it's difficult to properly manage multiple JVMs in 1 process correctly with weird errors manifesting). This isn't going to be resurrected. In fact, although not implemented on Android, there's a way to globally, at any point in your program, retrieve the JVM for the process.

In principle we're in agreement that singletons & globals shouldn't be undertaken lightly but there are use-cases for it. It's fine if you're not convinced.
Don’t diagnose people with mental health problems because they quite reasonably find these “jokes” trite, boorish, and predictable.
From...economics?

Profit is market inefficiency, whether due to missing information or inadequate competition. Perfect efficiency drives prices down to the marginal cost of a good or service. Micro 101 stuff.
Clicky: http://www.outbreak-simulator.com/

It was difficult to notice that in the initial configuration, every square is a person.

Note that in this model, people don't move, but have an interaction radio of 10.

So this produce a circle-like wave of infection. The peak of the infection is proportional to the length of the border of the circle, so at some point the number of infected persons change from exponential-like to linear-like. In a model where people can move more, the exponential grow continue until most of the population is infected or immune, so it is more peaky.

This model is better for other outbreaks, where the individual can't move too much. For example, the infection of rabies in wild animals. Some animals have a small territory, and don't move too much, so this model is a good approximation. Note that after some time, the population is replaced by their offspring that is not immunized, so you get a new outbreak. This create waves of rabies. I don't have a good link now, but there are a few in https://www.google.com.ar/search?q=Rabies+Waves
I use pihole for my entire home network as primary DNS and opendns for secondary (long time user of opendns, since before Cisco bought it). I also have VPN setup for remote access (esp. for mobile). I use ublock origin at the browser level.

These are layers of protection from undesired content (ads, malware, porn, etc.). If one fails, hopefully the next layer will provide desired protection.

I have kids approaching teen years. There is no magic bullet, and we still monitor and limit their screen time.

How would you improve this setup? Just curious.
You're assuming I use FaceTime on a phone. I do not. To clarify, I'm describing the experience of using the Contacts app in MacOS 10.14.6 to place phone calls.
Descriptive and Inferential Statistics
Ah, the memories! I did a spell of that, too, when a few of us launched a (short-lived) school magazine.

We had two options to create the stencil: there was a special machine that used some kind of electrical process (I don't remember details) to scan a printed sheet and "burn" a stencil from it, so you could copy arbitrary originals; or you could cut the stencil directly on a typewriter (with no ribbon), which gave a sharper result -- but you really didn't want to make too many typing errors, there's only so much you can do with stencil correcting fluid.
On touchscreens, there is an off by one bug in the date selector. Switching between data and table mode takes a second or two on the COVID page.
> GPL + classpath exception

This seems only useful if you want to use the VM, not if you want to embed it into your own application.

But the whole classpath exception clause is confusing to me (and from what I see I'm not the only one). I just want to write code, as opposed to interpreting licenses ... I.e., exactly why I would avoid this project, regardless of any good intentions from the side of the project team.
I had a neighbor who was a veteran from this era. Did some of the MTV stuff, some eighties news globes. Once I found the sculpture that this is based on just lying around in the hallway:
https://img.discogs.com/2YTnJ0ck1qdsZWJJ7R-xs8kKgew=/fit-in/...

He was always asking me for some help with getting into digital 3D, but was hung up on building a server farm for rendering first. I could never convince him that he should take the time to learn Blender or Autodesk first and worry about hardware later...
Currently running in Python 2.
I'm planning to build a visual interface that would allow users to preview individual scenes. Meanwhile, if the main video build is too long because you have lots of scenes and want to check out how one would look with different parameters, just create a different script file with that scene only and build it. that's the beauty of text file editing, you can easily copy and paste and experiment.
This seems to be handling asynchronous loading very poorly. In the COVID-19 demo, trying to interact with things while it was still loading rapidly broke the VDOM and messed the entire app’s state up so that it was pretty much completely broken until I reloaded the page. In the RealWorld demo, interacting with things faster than it’s getting stuff from the network didn’t crash anything, but it made it do the wrong thing in the UI fairly regularly. Also it was disconcerting when clicking on links and such seemed to do nothing for a while—no indication that it’s actually trying to do anything. The end result was that everything felt extremely sluggish, and also history entries weren’t being added and the Back button was fairly consistently doing the wrong thing.

All up, I’m afraid I found it decidedly unpleasant to interact with.
From a technology point of view, this is really cool.

From the view of someone that occasionally watches videos on YouTube, I am trying to figure out a nice way to say... I hate it. Or more specifically, I hate that it generates the voice, and basically enables video content spam.

What we don't need more of is cheap, easy to automatically generate videos that are basically spam and/or clickbait, trying to get views. The problem with auto-generated voices in videos like this is as a viewer I can't distinguish between work that someone put deliberate production time into, and something churned out by a content farm. The demo video even tricked me at first, I didn't realize it was a generated voice until a couple sentences in, at which point I had a visceral negative reaction, the same as when I accidently click on a content farm-generated video.

It seems a major feature is automatically syncing the narration to the slides. Perhaps a way to enhance this while avoiding spam generation is to use the generated voice only for internal timing, and generated a karaoke-like display for a narrator (human) to read? As a paid service, you could even provide professional voice-offers as an add-on.
> it looks distasteful to me to go around begging for donations.

Where do you think the money comes from to run the organization? They don't monetize their users. Asking for donations is a significant part of Sal Khan's job.
We had a suspicious surprise death in the family 2w ago that the German hospital did not test (early outbreak + sudden death) nor autopsy and we suspect real chance COVID was a secondary factor that merited at least a check. Internal medicine md phd in our family, so no joke. Ok they didn't test, but we were surprised they did not autospy. Sad way to confirm SOP.

For others: In the US, you can ~always request an autopsy.
It did, but it was temporary:

> The goal of the ACA’s temporary reinsurance program was to stabilize individual market premiums during the early years of new market reforms (e.g. guaranteed issue). The temporary program is in place from 2014 through 2016. The program transfers funds to individual market insurance plans with higher-cost enrollees in order to reduce the incentive for insurers to charge higher premiums due to new market reforms that guarantee the availability of coverage regardless of health status.

https://www.kff.org/health-reform/issue-brief/explaining-hea...
> Most of us get paid to write software other people have requested in order to solve their problems. ... The problem is already solved. ... You are literally payed to solve the problems of translating flexible human activities into code.

OK then, I think the confusion is that your experience (and definition) of software development doesn't align with mine.

> You should be being paid three salaries - one as a business executive, one as a business analyst, and one as a software engineer. ... Don't give away work responsibilities for free because of culture hero points.

I don't know what culture hero points are. Anyway, while I agree those are three different roles, I don't think because the "BA" role exists the "Soft Dev" role should just ignore req gathering and demand a fully completely spec that they then in no way question: that feels like waterfall from the 2000s. In the same way I think that a BA should understand how software works to a point and use that knowledge to direct their design, a software dev should understand the problem and design and contribute to that solution. The roles are not rigid black and white barriers where you throw things over the wall to the next person, they are just places where you concentrate.
For most developers "productivity" is a measure of lines of code written per month.

Instead of number of problems solved MINUS the number of lines of code written.
Researchers Develop Faster Way to Replace Bad Data with Accurate Information
To be fair, that's a horrible idea for an April fool's prank. Ideally, they shouldn't do any actual real harm. Like actually having that button work as they described was just stupid. Maybe if it didn't actually let you press the button or did something different but still sent your email...but to actually make it do that...someone should have realized something bad was going to happen.
Are you trying to shield your teenage kids from seeing porn by accident or actively seeking it out? If it's the later you've already lost - presumably they have 4G.
Thanks for the pointer! I sent a note on Nextdoor. I'm not opposed to spending money on infrastructure, but so far I haven't found a viable avenue for actually doing so.

I've also reached out to Common and Sail to see if they'd be willing to try to make something out of my commanding line-of-sight. Historically that has not been the case.

I think the nearest AT&T fiber node is a few minutes' walk away and I'd love to pay to cut a trench to it. But I haven't been able to find anyone there willing to entertain the idea.

I'm also trying to find a business within my line-of-sight that will let me pay them for roof and utility access so that I can beam something to myself.
Motivating Yourself When You Are Stuck on Something for Days
$800k is an experienced engineer's salary where Khan Academy is based.
A brief introduction to open source licenses
Yeah, definitely a season to forget, but TBH the conditions in Jan/Feb were surprisingly good (when it wasn't raining!).
That's a great question that I've wondered myself - a part of it (in the U.S.) I think is the belief that a huge part of the value of a bachelors degree is growth you get living alone, in dorms, learning how to be an adult, etc. that aren't really part of a curriculum and would be hard or impossible to do online. In addition, I know that a massive number of people who take online courses (just the individual ones from Coursera and the like) tend to drop out, so maybe they colleges think that if they had an entire 4yr degree online almost no one would actually graduate (which may hurt their rankings or they dislike for some other reason that doesn't bother for profit colleges).
You can use auto scaling groups with a load balancer to terminate instances when not in use and spin them up as required.
Even in urban districts getting all students online is a huge undertaking. Watched part of a school board meeting a couple days ago and the local district was planning on buying 10k-ish Chromebooks and getting 3 months of internet service donated by the cable company to cover the portion of families without computers+internet at home.

My grandmother lives in a rural area and it's economically collapsed (30% poverty rate), with no realistic way to get everyone internet access, so doing something more old fashioned will probably be necessary.

What I think is sad is that stopping school for two months as a replacement for summer break and then finishing the school year and immediately starting the next without a break should be the simplest thing to do. But nobody can do it for a bunch of reasons that are more pathetic than compelling.
I think the message is that we're all as smart as Gauss.
Deploys at Slack
Seems like circuit breakers should be a standard safety feature for automatically infinitely scaling computers.

I would rather my whole system shut down and be unusable while I investigate vs. auto-scale and charge me a bill I can't cover.

However, searching around it seems like I can only get alerts when a $$$ threshold is passed, but AWS won't take any action to stop computing or anything. Please prove me wrong.
> It has been an enormous benefit to travelers of all kinds. It has made a huge variety of properties available for short-term rental, and because these rentals are often less expensive than alternatives, it has made travel possible for many who previously couldn't afford it.

At the expense of the local populations, especially the working-class and lower socioeconomic classes. Not to mention they've basically become hotels without any regulations. I wouldn't call this a good thing, and certainly don't think travellers should benefit over locals.
I strongly distrust any figures from pretty much any country without a complete and transparent testing regimen - (Hi South Korea, you know what you're doing!). The wide variance of testing protocols, even within countries - is going to kill our ability to really do much with these numbers.

I'd be far more interested in _death_ rates. I.e., what was the normal death rate, and what is it now? It's not sexy, it needs to be seasonally adjusted, and it's subject to noise, but it's a much better heuristic than "covid case", because the base number isn't as gameable.
The 2nd amendment doesn't force gun owners to be open 24/7/365 to fulfill your right to guns.

Universal healthcare wouldn't force doctors to work overtime for free.
The paper Modeling and Analysis of Conflicting Information Propagation in a Finite Time Horizon: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9046791
Ubuntu Touch Supported Devices
Yeah - done some of that too.
Love this idea, and the images generated are great ... how to save them, tho? I click a finished image and press the down arrow, but nothing happens...
What kind of retard is downvoting me ? It's not like there's enough supply right now to distribute them to everyone
We are the good guys so when we are using the same tech we are caring and progressive.
> At the Union Hospital, Wei was told her sickness was "ruthless" and that many from Huanan Market had visited the hospital with matching symptoms.

How can she have been patient zero if other people before her had matching symptoms?

EDIT: It does actually say later in the article she might not really be patient zero. Which means they haven't found patient zero at all yet, just 27 people who got it really early.
In Walt Disney's opinion, you could bury the streets, too. Utility corridors (or "utilidors" — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_utilidor_system) are essentially the road equivalent to a subway systems' rails.

There are some existing pedestrian-only underground city corridor systems, such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PATH_(Toronto); and there are many vehicle-only road tunnel networks underlaying modern "walkable" cities, mostly in Europe. There are even a few cities that already have both (e.g. Dubai), although they just have separate pedestrian and road-tunnel networks that don't connect.

Disney's vision was to marry the two—to treat them as an interconnected network, as we do today with the road network (which spans everything from walking trails in parks, to residential streets with bike lanes, to grade-separated freeways.)

We haven't done it yet, but there's not much stopping a city planner (especially of a new city, e.g. a charter city) from doing it. We really could have a "roadless" and even "streetless" surface, with only buildings and parks visible.

(IMHO, it'd be very good to try this first in an area that gets really hot, like Arizona, since you'd get the dual benefits of 1. keeping people cool on their way between air-conditioned buildings by relying on the natural thermal buffering of the earth; and 2. greatly decreasing surface albedo compared to cities that have tons of blacktop. Maybe make a city ordnance that all buildings—and especially rooves—have to be light colors, to boost that effect.)
https://www.coronatracker.com/about

>Heroes behind CoronaTracker

No further comment needed.
I’m surprised this has managed to avoid a DDOS from China with their new policy of shifting the blame to Italy or the US.
There is a difference between getting a few virus particles on the street from another person or getting bucket loads full while operating in that environment.
In the former case your body gets some time to respond, in the latter case the reproduction speed of the virus will surprise the defense mechanism of the body.
Medical workers from low too high are the real heroes at this moment in this pandemic.
I don't think that we can perfectly know what the best use of a resource is. However, I think that we can often perform better than price does. For example, it would generally be better to allocate a unit of food to people who are starving than to people who already have excess food.

Note that in some cases that won't be the optimal way to distribute the food. For example perhaps the starving person is actively hurting society while the person with excess food wanted to use the food to perform research that promotes greater food production in the future.

However, taken as a whole, allocating at least some food based on need is going to perform better than allocating all food based on price.
From the article: Though identified as ''patient zero'', Wei may not be the first person to have contracted coronavirus in China, the report said. A study in Lancet medical journal claims the first person diagnosed with COVID-19 was identified on December 1.

https://medicaldialogues.in/medicine/news/wuhan-shrimp-selle...
How is it supposed to be harder to hack? I thought the main point is to have the blocking enabled in the whole network, including devices like smartphones.
Of course compatibility matters but as you noted (twice!) it's not perfect and doesn't need to be. Minor modifications are necessary to keep up. That's all that's being proposed by the paper.

So now we're just debating the size of ongoing breakages instead of just their existence.

And no good C is not close to immortal. Good luck compiling K&R C with modern compilers, for example.
> It’s a textbook tragedy of the commons example.

It's not tragedy of the commons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

This is an example of an inefficient system with powerful stakeholders working to preserve the gravy train that's developed around it.
Interana was YC W13
I think it's a reaction to programmers' particular tendency to focus on things that aren't best serving the goal of solving the problem at hand. Programmers often have a "pet" focus that relates to what they enjoy: performance optimizations, writing "clean" code, using some particular pattern or technology they like or want to try out, etc. None of those things are bad as long as they don't take precedent over solving the problem at hand.
Because it is extremely hard to work with it?

Same reason why we do not put programs in a single source file.
"Are you saying there's no reason to study the relationship between behavior and genes because there's too much noise"

No, I'm trying really hard to express the idea that the question of whether there is/is not too much noise is a completely meaningless, wrongheaded question to ask.

If you did the analysis on a computer game that sucked, maybe you find that GPU related code was correlated? Does that mean less GPU code = less suckage?

You didn't respond to the THERAC-25 comment, which may have been the most targeted one to what I'm trying to communicate.

What do you think is "proven wrong"?
That isn’t true though. Switzerland has a much better predecessor version of the ACA: everyone is required to buy insurance (with subsidies for those that can’t). They got rid of the group market so everyone is in the same risk pool, which is an improvement over our system. However, Switzerland has the second highest healthcare costs when comparing developed countries in a per capita basis.