skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A couple decades ago, we owned an 18th century house in the northeastern US, with some 19th century additions. The mortgage and taxes totaled ~$2.5K per month, and oil heating cost peaked at $500 per month in the winter. It had an historic designation, and insulating it properly would have been impossibly expensive.
You can generate an ETHEREUM address for any existing Bitcoin-address
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

"Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That destroys the curiosity this site exists for."
> Except the horrible "trap" is not something many people care much about.

Yes unfortunately. Mouses would be better off caring for mouse traps.

> That is why it is successful.

Successful for them but not for us as a community in the long run.
Based on hospitalization rates of 7.5%-10%. Latest from the New Rochelle, NY, hotspot puts it at 1%. Factor of 10 lower if I am reading this right.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/27/nyregion/new-rochelle-cor...
The genius of TCL/Tk, and the reason I believe Tk was so incredibly successful despite the flaws and shortcomings of TCL, is that toolkits like Motif, based on the X Toolkit Intrinsics, that aren't written AROUND an existing extension language, end up getting fucked by Greenspun's Tenth Rule:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule

>"Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp." -Philip Greenspun's Tenth Rule

The X Toolkit ends up needing to do all of these dynamic-scripting-language-like things, like resolving names and paths, binding events to handlers, calculating expressions, and instantiating objects based on resource data. So if it doesn't already start out with a standardized scripting language to use for that, it has to duplicate all that dynamic almost-but-not-quite-entirely-unlike-half-of-Common-Lisp stuff itself.

Case in point: Motif's infamous UIL (because X resource files weren't half-assed enough).

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/unix-haters/hpox/uil...

And then when you do get around to plugging that toolkit into some other scripting language (the way WINTERP plugged Motif/Xt into XLisp, or GTK/GObject plugs into Python for that matter), now you have two or more fat bloated complex buggy poorly documented incompatible impedance-mismatched half-assed competing layers of middleware and object models tripping over each other's feet and spraying each other with seltzer bottles like the Three Stooges.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VO9RP4QEZKU

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22610342

>Speaking of the plague, does it support UIL? ;)

>Neils Mayer described WINTERP (XLisp + Motif) as: You might think of such functionality as "client-side NeWS without the postscript imaging model".

http://nielsmayer.com/winterp/

>Don Hopkins wrote to a comp.human-factors discussion about "Info on UIL (User Interface Language)" on January 22, 1993:

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.human-factors/R3wfh90HM...

>Here are some classic messages about UIL. Avoid it like the plague.

[...]
How Namgoong's House Was Designed From Scratch as a Set in “Parasite”
Are you joking? This test could be done in less than the time it took me to take off my belt, my shoes, half my clothes, then empty my pockets, then pose for the body scanner, then get the wand, then the pat down, then recover my belongings and re-dress. That was my last experience at the airport.

You're complaining that a 15 minute covid test is just too much?
China’s controversial mission to reinvent the internet
What do we mean by “equal” – Pierre Deligne
Some excerpts:

> The New IP presentation paints a picture of a digital world in 2030 where virtual reality, holographic communication and remote surgery are ubiquitous — and for which our current network is unfit. Traditional IP protocol is described as “unstable” and “vastly insufficient”, with “lots of security, reliability and configuration problems”.

> The documents suggest a new network should instead have a “top-to-bottom design” and promote data-sharing schemes across governments “thereby serving AI, Big Data and all kinds of other applications”. Many experts fear that under New IP, internet service providers, usually state-owned, would have control and oversight of every device connected to the network and be able to monitor and gate individual access.
No, you’d need to jailbreak or modify the application for that.
In case anyone missed the reference, the "boit diabloique" (devils box) is a reference to the TV show "Look around you". The show presents itself as educational programming while slowly desending into madness. In the episode on music we are informed to never press the forbidden keys on the piano (the ones that are locked in the boit diabloique next to the normal keys). A presenter calmly demonstrates pressing one of these keys and promptly starts bleeding from the ear. While he is casually having his brain leak out we are instructed on screen to "write that down in your copy book now".
(please don't interrupt the protagonists of history...)
True, Samsung has started the megapixel wars again with their 108 megapixel ISOCELL sensor[1] which are being used by couple of manufacturers already & it would be interesting to how Sony responds to it.

[1]https://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/image-sensor/mobile-im...
I think where you are going with pre-flight testing. Even if we get numbers way down by containment measures like a complete shut down, the virus will still be there and we will need to very actively test and trace (see below article). For that to work, fast test will be invaluable. Testing everyone who is traveling or going to large events or even better just going to a grocery store would really help to get back to something that's somewhat normal without having to shut everything down again periodically or losing millions of people in the process.

https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-the-hammer-and-th...
Have you not been in public before? Most people are complete idiots and would do more damage than good vs staying home. If people would take this serious and just stay home that would be great.
> Getting mad at Zoom for using the Facebook SDK is missing the point. They and a million others are always going to be doing this. Get mad at Apple for not letting you wireshark your own iPhone.

There’s plenty of anger to go around. Get mad all all three: Facebook for making an SDK that tracks you, Zoom for integrating it, and Apple for letting it through unencumbered.
This looks like it's an adaptation of the company's existing "ID NOW" equipment that was previously approved for rapid influenza detection. That test amplifies viral RNA, like the existing RT-PCR tests also do, but using a different method that is supposed to be faster but still accurate. Their influenza-test materials describe ID NOW as "isothermal nucleic acid amplification technology" [1]. According to one paper [2], it's a form of nicking enzyme amplification reaction (NEAR) [3].

[1] https://www.alere.com/en/home/product-details/id-now-influen...

[2] https://jcm.asm.org/content/58/3/e01611-19

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicking_enzyme_amplification_r...
Design Patterns for Humans(2019)
That’s debatable. The Art line is really good from a technical perspective, but some people feel they don’t have “soul.” I think a bigger problem is that they have no concern for weight. For instance, their 105mm 1.4 is over 3 and a half pounds, and Nikons equivalent lens is a a little over 2 pounds.

That might not seem like a big deal but it certainly is when it’s hanging off of you for a full 12 hour wedding.

That said I still have a Sigma 35mm and 20mm in my kit.
Hamming's 'Art of Doing Science nad Engineering' is absolutely worth reading.
> I suppose you could argue that's negligent, but if that's the case, then pretty much every company that has an app with login functionality is probably in that boat.

I think every company that does this is negligent. Audit your dependencies, people!
Ask HN: Why imitating Apple is so hard for overall industry
why imitating Apple product, mindset and culture is so hard. I am seeing normal capability engineering folks doing normal product engineering development but the product quality is exceptionally high.
I understand that they make their own hardware and software and have better overall design thinking ,but it seems there is lot more than these individual pieces.
please share insights on same.
"Officials in Spain said testing kits it bought from a Chinese company had only a 30 percent accuracy rate, rather than the 80 percent rate they had expected."

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/27/business/china-coronaviru...

"Spanish medical experts, who have examined the 9,000 kits delivered last week, said they have only a 30 percent probability of detecting the virus."

https://www.voanews.com/science-health/coronavirus-outbreak/...

"The news comes following complaints from Spain that about 70 percent of the kits it purchased were too inaccurate to be used to diagnose patients who were sick and stuck in emergency rooms."

https://www.foxnews.com/world/china-launches-investigation-i...

"Up to 80 percent of the 150,000 portable, quick coronavirus test kits China delivered to the Czech Republic earlier this month were faulty, according to local Czech news site Expats.cz."

https://news.yahoo.com/china-supplied-faulty-coronavirus-tes...
Ask HN: SARS-CoV-2 cases by US metro area
Anyone else taken a deep look at the numbers across all major US metro areas?

The Hopkins map:

https://tinyurl.com/sarscov2map

Take a look at:

Louisville - KY; Savannah, Atlanta - GA; Jacksonville, Tampa, Orlando, Gainseville, Tallahassee - FL; Montgomery, Birmingham - AL; Jackson - MS; Charleston- SC; Charlotte - NC; Richmond - VA; Wash DC & Baltimore; Dover - DE.

Virginia has 600 cases, 83 hospitalizations and 14 deaths with 8.5m people. Look at Virginia Beach and Norfolk.

Houston, Austin, San Antonio, El Paso, Dallas - TX; Las Vegas, Reno - NV; Tucson, Phoenix - AZ; Boise - ID; Oklahoma City - OK.

This list goes on. Take the area cases and deaths, look up their metro area populations, compare.

The Houston metro has more people than Belgium, with only a few hundred cases and a few deaths (Belgium has 289 deaths).

The Atlanta metro area has 6m people (more than Denmark). It might have 600 cases and ~14 deaths.

The Phoenix metro area has 5m people. It has a few hundred cases and only a few deaths.

The case counts are incorrect, they're undercounted. The deaths and hospitalizations are most interesting, those are hard to ignore or not count at this point (and the US has ramped testing). You can go on state sites and get their hospitalizations. The ICUs in these areas are not being overloaded, there is zero evidence of the US broadly being flooded with Covid - and it's not going to be.

If they broadcast this information on CNN, comprehensively, the US public would not react well.

All areas are not equally susceptible to SARS-CoV-2, based on climate. It's becoming more clear by the day. And I suspect that's about the last thing they want to tell the public.

Cuomo said NY was getting slammed while California isn't, because NY is more welcoming. NYC is getting slammed because they're susceptible in the same way Milan, Paris, London, and Wuhan are.
Huh?

https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#search/2001:

I see 377 starting with 2001:.
The “bug” where it would basically act like persistent malware, or the bug where it would act like persistent malware but also allow attackers remote access to your machine?
Calling Bullshit – Case Studies
Quint, the old shark hunter from the movie Jaws was said to have survived the USS Indianapolis (the character not the actor)
> On recent versions of iOS, in-app browsers do not share data with the Safari browser.

Specifically, SFSafariViewController does not share cookies or other data with Safari anymore. Some bad actors got caught with their hands in the cookie jar, literally, and out that sharing went.
This is literally the best thing ever. I love the fact that you have everything I could ever want - colors, refresh the screen right away, and different designs too.

Bonus points for keeping everything offline because if I use this I would be afraid you would be keeping track of my keystrokes as I type in all of my personal information into the form. < - Please don't ever do this, anyone who may read this comment.
There’s an added benefit - shorter flange distance/ larger mount diameter. Nikon especially went with a large mount. A larger mount = potential for faster glass.

But also think about it from a marketing perspective - even now most people buying cameras aren’t professionals. A big bulky camera right next to a svelte one in a store will look dated. That said Sony went too far with it, in my opinion. A nice grip is important for professionals.
I have not much more to add, but FWIW the people espousing the "boring is better" and "don't reinvent the wheel" mantras were experienced SV devs, 15 and 30 years experience. They said there is a business justification and it's one of risk, namely that the more home-grown or nonstandard solutions you have, the less likely other people on the team will know what's going on when one of them breaks. There's also the maturity value of an existing codebase in that it has been proven to do the thing it sets out to, whereas a new endeavor may encounter roadblocks that require a rewrite partway through, and also lack documentation and good error messages, don't have the same years of bugfixes, etc.
I do not like you using the Facebook SDK for the “free analytics” and consider this to be a big deal.
Except for when they make the code harder to read, as black does with a decent chunk of pandas idioms.
To start with, calm down!

I am not complaining. I'm speculating on the usefulness of thi s given that there is already a fair bit of overhead with boarding a plane in 2020 as opposed to say getting on a train.

There are a LOT of flights that happen each day, If you add up all the time combined, this would actually add a bit of overhead to an already rather long airport check-in process.

Not to mention the obvious which is that, if flights are still running at full pace, well you still have a lot of potentially infected people gathering in a rather confined area (airport), which is not really a good idea anyway.

This is obviously useful for something like triaging at a hospital, will wee see it at a check-in gate or at a bus stop? I doubt it.

Also that's clearly a lie it will take less time than for you to take off your belt, it clearly says it takes up to 15 minutes for a result. Don't talk nonsense.
NYU dean sends REM dance video as part of response to call for tuition refund
What, we can't talk about JavaScript?! At least I didn't mention Brendan Eich's deep and tragic mistaken misunderstanding of equality.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
Who do you have in charge of your dignity?
IIRC Fuji uses Sony sensors.
https://github.com/project-alice-assistant/ProjectAlice#proj...
A big factor is also the last decade was the gold rush days for many new digital platforms. Without going as far as claiming "everything that can be invented has already been invented", at least back then new app stores and web had lots of low hanging fruits with disruption capabilities and everything new naturally became cool and easy to talk positively about. Now the low hanging fruit have been plucked and what's left is either clones of existing services or exploiting your existing user base by harvesting whatever last bit left of their privacy. It's honestly harder to be impressed, and easier to be skeptical nowadays.

With that said, there are still many new super cool technologies, markets, articles, events and other insights on todays front page. Don't loose hope people.
Computer Architecture: Concepts and Evolution by Fred Brooks, Etc is a comprehensive look into the evolution of computer architecture.
covid will shift the overton window on privacy

centralized location tracking in an infectious crisis (either mandatory or mass voluntary) will normalize to 'good'

sleazy third-party phone home from apps considered key to surviving under lockdown, apparently not ok now! good

the bad news is we'll normalize some bad practices, but the good news is we'll make pragmatic compromises using actual information -- with covid taking up moral panic cycles, privacy is a place we can be rational

also no business feels totally secure RN and people will do anything to win & keep business -- even zoom
Before Instacart, these gig employees had even worse jobs or else they wouldn’t be working for instacart.
Honestly just extra capacity is valuable? Regardless of whether it's also faster.
Do you mean you wouldn’t have named it “this”? Because if `this` weren’t set by the means of calling in ES5 and earlier, it would have no point at all.
It turns out there is no where you can go in the United States that is more than 20 miles from a paved road.
Maybe it's because police unions form a sizable chunk of those unions...
While I think one shouldn't read too much into PR statements like those, I don't think it's useless to call them out either, especially when they use very strong words like "extremely seriously" and "incredibly important".

If the defense is the practice being common then there isn't anything special about Zoom regarding user privacy, is it.
You're not flat out wrong, but it takes a great spirit to rise above it all in that fashion.

This is probably a pointless pissing contest, not an argument you can win.
Apple uses a lot of historical legacy NS prefixes too, but in their case it stands for NeXT Step! ;)

I used to call the browser Netscapé, which rhymes with Nescafé, back in the 90's when it was the world's leading distributer of Java.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nescaf%C3%A9

>Nescafé is a brand of coffee made by Nestlé. It comes in many different forms. The name is a portmanteau of the words "Nestlé" and "café". Nestlé first introduced their flagship coffee brand in Switzerland on 1 April 1938.
Some U.S. Cities Could Have Coronavirus Outbreaks Worse Than Wuhan’s
I live south of San Jose up against the mountains and our neighbors will post pictures once in a while of mountain lions drinking out of the swimming pools in their back yards. It’s more common in bad drought years.
Definitely not common.
It's all custom for now. A mix of tries and graphs.
I'd use either this https://www.mini-box.com/picoPSU-80 and repurpose a spare 12V brick for it, or get something for powering LED strips. There are gazillions of them rated 5V 15A at about 30 bucks.
There is cognitive load associated with remembering a simple function that is only used once, versus seeing it is usage. Arrow functions can be effectively self documenting.
Thank you.

I've been experimenting lately with multi-architecture distributed computing (ARM <---> x86_64) with frameworks such as dask, ray and although there were quirks in getting them running on ARM; I was able to make it work [1].

I was thinking of checking out Julia's distributed computing capabilities next, but their insistence on same OS, path etc. (last time I checked) didn't inspire confidence in me for my purpose.

Would Chapel be a good alternative for multi-architecture distributed computing? My goals are simple, to explore what it takes to distribute & compute something across different architectures in parallel.

[1]https://gist.github.com/heavyinfo/aa0bf2feb02aedb3b38eef203b...
> The Soul of a New Machine

There's a software-industry version of that book about the startup Ask Computer Software killing it in the MRP business software space with a product called MANMAN. Maybe somebody remembers the title?

It's like reading a long version of one of Paul Graham's essays.

Some of the things it covers:

- Ask's actual relationships with customers. One of them interviews all other existing clients before buying (like 200 companies.)

- the software team dynamics. One "rockstar" polyfills over all the weird OS bugs at the time, so the others can work on the actual application.

Ask eventually acquired Ingres.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASK_Group
Tell that to the grant boards and agencies who spent over a decade refusing to fund any Alzheimer’s research unrelated to the amyloid hypothesis.
Oxford Covid-19 vaccine programme opens for clinical trial recruitment
I've recently ramped up work on something along these lines aimed specifically at personal finances (see my profile if interested... won't spam this thread). It's a spending journal which helps folks gain insight into their own spending habits and make better spending decisions. I've been using it as my own personal tool for years, and have recently (after being laid off) made it available for more folks.

What I found from my (currently) small circle of users, is that ease of use to enter the decisions was key. The SMS input has been key, and I'd recommend you consider it as a way to appeal to folks who would resist installing "yet another app with who knows what kind of data/privacy practices."
SASM – simple crossplatform IDE for NASM, MASM, GAS and FASM assembly languages
What's hard to document is why there is any need for non-arrow functions.

In the original language design I mean, since non-arrow functions with dynamic "this" only make sense in the context of having been mistakenly baked into the language from day one (or so). If JavaScript started out with only fat arrow functions, and had a simpler way of passing the current object like Python's or CLOS's or Dylan's or ScriptX's explicit "self" parameter, there would have been no confusion or automatic nuclear foot guns or need for two subtly semantically and syntactically different kinds of functions.

Any JavaScript programmer who doesn't clearly understand the difference between non-arrow and arrow functions, and the nuances of dynamically bound "this", and when to use each type of function, is dangerous and libel to write subtly buggy code. Because there should only be one type of function!

There was no reason to design the language and function syntax and semantics in such a mistakenly complex fragile way, that eventually spawned millions of blog posts explaining the nuances and dangers of "this". Because you know that behind every one of those helpful blog posts is a well intentioned programmer who got screwed by "this", and wanted to help other people avoid their mistakes.

I've been programming JavaScript for years, and I STILL get screwed by "this". Whenever something goes inexplicable wrong and I find myself pounding my head up against a cinderblock in frustration because I can't figure it out, I take a step back and search my recent changes for "this", and in most cases, I've just accidentally used a function instead of a fat arrow.

There were plenty of other languages that could have served as examples of the right way to do it, like Smalltalk or Python or Common Lisp CLOS or Dylan, but they were ignored when JavaScript was designed.