skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Even so, the quotas on H1B visas are highly restrictive. In the tech sector, at least, there is widespread agreement that the part of the US immigration system that deals with legal immigration of high-skill professionals is in badly in need of reform.

Is this widely considered the case? I work for a big ol tech company and I've been on teams where I am literally the only natural born U.S. citizen. I know I'm working in a somewhat unique case but is it so different elsewhere?
There are vast areas of the US that are not generally affected by tornados. It’s a big country.
since the criticisms of the Chinese numbers tend to be wild derivations from urns or anonymously sourced US propaganda, yes I am inclined to believe the numbers.

If you are seeing these articles "pop up" then you read fake news btw
> The thing is, the USA is the country with most tornadoes in the world. A solid house with thick walls is tornado-resistant. Yet, you lose thousands of plywood homes per year due to tornadoes, while the rest of the world builds real houses with stone walls just because they are more beautiful. What it seems to me is that you have a weird, unhealthy fetish for paper-thin houses.

It seems this fetish is spreading. My family is from a fairly small island in the Mediterranean where all the houses are constructed of solid reinforced concrete and foreigners who are buying property for vacation homes have been putting up little timber boxes which are the subject of local gossip.
That’s where .net (if you use windows) is super useful. You can create a wpf app with a video player and some shortcuts to fast forward or mark timestamps in a few lines of code. I did that to solve a similar problem (and use ffmpeg to execute the editing too - extract segments and remerge them).
Aircraft Carrier Has a Revolutionary Video System with 360 View
Which would further imply that circumstances must change to get that manageable rate as long as group immunity is not proven and a vaccine is still lacking. The circumstances pre-lockdown allowed the virus to easily travel beyond China. Both measures and mindset in many Western countries are still incredibly lax. The symptoms mimicking those of cold, flu, etc. also don't help. People value their current freedom, privacy and hyper-mobility way too much for a manageable rate to come to fruition without locking down.

Otherwise you'll just end up with a new trend of locking down things for 2 months, then opening up, only for a new patient 0 to lock down everything 2 months later.
I'm not sure this is "ordinary practice", especially as `nan` often refers to "not a number" as an error category.

Typing full words doesn't take that much longer than acronyms, and results in more readable code (although this is well enough established at this point that I don't think I need to go over it).
The area under the flat curve is dramatically smaller. The theory is not that the same number of people get it.
In Florida, almost anything you send to any level of state or local government is public. If you're a customer of GRU, it's very likely that I could request your last year of bills, your address (if I know your name), etc. There are definitely some drawbacks of the very broad public records laws here.
Obligatory mention of emacs+org. I've tried everything and anything, and it seems to be a common pattern that people with a streak of perfectionism go through a long journey of dissatisfaction with tools, a journey which seems to settle in emacs+org-mode for many.

I really, really like the combination of Joplin, the Joplin extension and Pocket. The export tools offered by the Joplin extension combine well with the readability processing/formatting that Pocket applies. You can save a markdown-version, save URLs only, the complete HTML of a page, or just some text you've selected.

I have some boilerplate HTML that adds spoilers and a couple other bits to make my rendered notes look nicer and help me study, along with a couple of templates for embedding YouTube videos, Spotify and Github Gists. Most of this is on the Joplin forums, I encourage you to take a look if that sounds appealing to you.

There's a mobile app, and Joplin exposes a REST API the extension uses - I have a few hacky scripts to help me use Joplin as a CMS for a website (still a messy WIP, might show this & the templates to HN soon).

I'm exploring Emacs & Org-mode right now since it pairs well with Haskell, which I'm learning during this whole lockdown thing - even with all my Joplin-based stuff I can see why people accept the trade-offs and buy into it completely. Now might be a good time to try emacs+org out, for those lucky ones just riding lockdown out at home.
Tracking Stripe Payments with Slack and Faasd
Have their system type out the secret token in dial tones before each call that has a fake number. Any phone could do that. They have to already be doing something special to tell it which fake phone number to use. This can't be a more strenuous ask than that is.
Seems like a good use of the media to me. That one dumb supervisor could cost someone's life. Raising that to someone in the NHS that can fix it is worthwhile.

The official responses are bland and non-committal, so the public shaming seems needed.
You're correct. You can see them both in the source code here:

https://github.com/alphagov/notifications-api/tree/master/ap...
Parachute use to prevent death jumping from aircraft: random controlled trial (2018)
Fair, but ftr, parent meant "installment" to mean financing not "improvement", and my 1980s edition has the lowest value properties colored purple. And if anyone can parse "Get the two brown ones first anyhow and with any kind of trade, and then for anything, if you are feeling stuck, offer to slash the rent," then color me a buffoon indeed.
Left-leaning Americans do the same thing. “Why don’t we just tax the rich, like they do in Europe, so that the government can provide services!” which doesn’t recognize that the problem is actually different and more complicated.

“The US wastes massive amounts of resources for very poor levels of service, and nobody has any idea how to fix it” isn’t as nice of a sound byte.
That's no longer the case as of April 1st:

https://www.pzh.gov.pl/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/wytyczne-d...
If the available providers' services start bogging down when you try to actually do it, then it can be considered huge relative to their capacity.
> Markdown got it wrong

You're right. The problem with the statement is that there's a presumption Markdown was created for the world at large, and I think it was originally designed for one "customer", who also happened to be the creator. Which means Markdown got it right.
tornadoes effect a minority of people in the US. population dense centers like california are more likely to succumb to earthquakes, in which case your concrete home is way worse
I think you're confusing discussions about whether something is (or was) true and discussions about whether something should be true be some moral standards, the classic Hume's is/ought distinction. People in the comments here don't seem to be making any value judgements, just arguing about historical truth.
On one hands tons of countries locked down after China (relative to the number of serious cases or deaths - I understand there is a debate about Chinese numbers, but I don't find it relevant here, because Italy or France also did not test a lot and also under-reported deaths -- basically counting only cases that were tested and died in an hospital -- in the end given the dynamic of the epidemics and other uncertainties it does not change a lot rough date predictions even if there would be 3 times more deaths)

So it even could take a few more weeks to get to the same low point again. Plus China had an extremely aggressive strategy, accumulating the measures, and even Italy did not use all of them. And France does less than Italy (non essential production has not been stopped by the government in France).

On the other hand I doubt we are going to eradicate the disease (at least not in the immediate future and not only with worldwide lockdowns), so we might want to use another lifting strategy than what they did in China (if we manage to develop means to control the spread at a very low rate)

2 months is still a reasonable approximation, given all the unknowns. But I will not even be surprised if it ends up being 3, and 4 is not out of the question.
Orgmode from emacs. It is a text file, has tags, can embed photos (not sure about video). I think mobile app orgzly is there iirc.

Previously I have used textfiles for everything. Then I moved to vimwiki. Now I am currently using orgmode which I find amazing and versatile.
"We will be fighting this with social distancing until there is a vaccine."

Well, not really. We can also fight it by producing more needed medical supplies, developing better treatments and expanding hospital capacity. We aren't just trying to influence the curve, but also the line we are trying to keep the curve under. And some nations have had luck flattening the curve using testing and tracing (but the US does not seem to be interested in this approach for some reason). It's also worth considering that the level of social distancing is not fixed. There is a wide range of options between universal quarantine and business as usual.
Thank you for looking it up!
I do think something like this is likely to be an important part of relaxing quarantine restrictions.

I also suspect there'll be a roaring black market in them.
Am I the only one to have stability problems when playing h265 with VLC on Windows?
They are 2 distinct skillsets:

#1 - The administration of a database system
#2 - Being able to write code that uses said system effectively

If you don't have skillset #2, you are going to design and build bad systems and eventually a DBA will need to bail you out. The trend is that companies are reducing the number of DBAs on the payroll because of things like AWS Aurora, so you had better get skillset #2.

And why wouldn't you want it? It's like knife skills for a chef. You should know your tools inside out.
I would assume they are referring to the to the widespread [1,2,3] use of data gathered from smartphones for getting epidemiological data. Every nation is doing it.

I would say it's not a great comparison, bad actors wiping their phone is not the same as gathering of bulk data to address a pandemic.

1) https://www.technologyreview.com/s/615329/coronavirus-south-...

2) https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2020/03/14/coronavir...

3) https://www.news-medical.net/news/20200330/United-States-tra...
the thermal properties of a wood house with insulation is far better than that of a concrete one
Here's the full source code if anyone wants to take a look:

https://github.com/alphagov/notifications-api
Bill Gates had huge factor in changing life of bilions people, how's that absurd?

He changed the way almost everyone lives
How RyuJIT inlines a function (heuristics)
If we had 10x as many ventilators, and 100x as much protective equipment, this would be less dangerous.

Only up to some point, then you run out of specialized personnel who know how to properly treat each patient (including controlling said ventilators). (Re-)training personnel probably takes months to years.
The 3M 8210 N95 respirator which I referenced above doesn’t have a valve.
Interview with Chris on His Success Retaining Agency Clients During the Pandemic
Also, many european cities are build quite dense because of their age. Especially medieval town centers are build dense because building large buildings was very hard to do.

This results in many requirements for living being close together(shops, markets etc).

Also, the automobile made it possible to create large suburbs in america. In many european cities the focus on the car didn't happen because spending money on a car was not a reality for many people. (americans own considerable more cars then most europeans, and have so for decades, even compared to western european countries).
It's a play on words, "snap" also meaning, "to take a photograph."
On suburbs: "You will not take leisurely strolls to admire the scenery, for there is neither admirable scenery nor anywhere to stroll."
What’s interesting is the wage gap. Many (most) of the shut off jobs are the lower paying ones. Waiters and factory workers. Obviously some weird exceptions (pro athletes).

Many of our nations higher paying jobs are either essential (doctors, nurses), or remote friendly (developers , to some extent lawyers and real estate agents).

Even if 25% of our economy is not working, we can make near 90% of our GDP.

Which isn’t ideal but it makes the lockdown perhaps less dire than it appears for the economy.
A past client of mine was using one of these relatively obscure frameworks. It's fine when it works (though I feel like the developer experience is much worse than let's say Django REST Framework) but when it breaks good luck figuring it out.

My recommendation is to just go with Django until the performance becomes a problem and it can't be solved by a "boring" solution such as throwing more hardware at it. Even after that, you can still squeeze out extra performance by using Serpy serialisers instead of the built-in DRF ones. Finally, if performance is still a problem then you could potentially use one of these frameworks. In most cases though, your underlying data store will be the bottleneck.

In my client's case, we were looking at a couple requests per second maximum, so they unnecessarily spent extra time learning and using an obscure framework without actually benefiting from it in any way.
A second for pluto.tv
The legacy of the old soviet systems of tenant housing also should not be understated.

Many people of former soviet nations simply own their appartments/houses and do not have a mortage. Usually these appartments are inhereted
They didn't fail after a year or so, they failed when dust particles got in there because it was physically impossible to make that design not do that. They reworked it and reworked it but it just couldn't be done. Finally they admitted it was a mistake to require that level of thinness from a design standpoint.
8 million people might be a small number compared to the deaths caused by a 24 month lockdown. There would be virtually no economy to support healthcare, and ‘deaths of despair’ would skyrocket to a point that makes the virus look like child’s play.
I'm glad that they improved their delivery, but one thing I find frustrating about our industry is how often we all seem to be reinventing the wheel. I mean, there are tons of well-described load balancing algorithms with various pros/cons. From the article it sounds like they just figured out their load balancing algorithm through trial and error, rather than researching load balancing algorithms first, then tweaking them based on real world performance.
Yes, both are great.

For team.video it's a small thing, but the game while you wait for the meeting to start -- has actually gotten people to show up early for stand up, so we get to start on time. Which is a little bit of a miracle after nothing else seemed to really be able to make that happen
Man, I'd hate to get the placebo.
I think it is sufficient to spend some (considerable) time nearly anywhere outside the USA.

EDIT to add: Though to understand some points (eg that despite widespread poverty, nearly every household owns an apartment or house), living in a CIS (ex USSR) state would help.
Typically, you first test the blood to see if there are any antibodies in that blood of interest. E.g., collect blood sample, harvest serum from blood by coagulation and centrifugation, apply serum to surface coated with COVID protein(s), wash away unbound material, detect whether antibodies to serum have bound to surface coated with COVID proteins. If yes, then this is a blood sample of interest. You could also test for neutralizing antibodies in parallel/before/after/instead in a viral replication assay. Once you have identified the blood as containing what you want, you then harvest more and collect mature B cells. Mature B cells each produce one antibody. You isolate the B cells by limiting dilution and/or immortalize them by fusion with a special type of cell to make a hybridoma to isolate clonal populations of single cells that are maintainable. Then you test each clonal population for whether it produces the antibody of interest, isolate the nucleic acid that encodes that antibody and put it into a cell type suitable for manufacturing. There are other ways to do it, but the above is fairly standard. It is laborious and easy to mess up and takes time (1 to 2 months) to do correctly. Any step can go wrong and require starting over.
Do people on HN really have no friends/connections in China? People post comments like this as if it's some mysterious information black hole where we can never know what's really happening.

I communicate pretty often with people living in China and with family and living in China. Things, even close to Wuhan, are returning to normal. People are going out, eating out, socializing more.

From all of the everyday people reporting there is no obvious or visible things not being reported. By and large people in China are primarily worried about America right now.

It wouldn't shock me if there was some important information not being reported, but this conspiratorial "If real information where to leak out" is nonsense since you can very easy interact and talk with actual people living in China.
Ask HN: Need something to occupy my time in lockdown
Not shows to watch, but skills outside of CS that I can sink some into and feel good about having learned them.

Sorry if a thread like this already exists, I couldn't find one.
Thanks!
Way to have an argument with things I didn't assert.

Categorically, in many countries (UK, Italy), the figures released represent people who tested positive for covid 19 before or after death. Those figures, without any question, do not offer an opinion on how, if at all, it had any effect on the death. Further to that in the UK official death (released monthly) stats only count mentions of covid19 on a report. It doesn't indicate anything

In some countries, the only demographic where you are guaranteed to be tested is if you die, and in a hospital.

Are those facts with which you have an issue?
The worst part of this to me is that we could have used the time that China bought with their lockdown to mobilize ourselves. Instead, we didn't.

Also, the US's lockdown seems liable to be more porous than China's.
Why? What's the point? At the moment there is no data confirming that you develop immunity once you recover.
Given the number of times the Chinese government has been shown to lie and actively try to hide dissenting people/information when it tells a story they don't want told... I think it's fair to start from a point of distrust. Sure, it doesn't mean they're lying about the numbers here, but they started out this whole thing by lying about it, by throwing someone (a doctor?) that did speak out in jail.
What this fails to capture is the original motivation behind the design of Markdown. It was based on things people were already doing to add "markup" to plaintext things like emails. It was designed to just werk to convert your normal email-esque writing style into HTML. This article considers Markdown from the opposite perspective for which it was designed.

In other words, Markdown is not designed to be a simplified markup language for HTML. It's designed to make HTML a frontend for plaintext. The numbered lists with *., for example, would be totally unreadable in plaintext without context.
1. Wash hands thoroughly.

2. Take off mask.

3. Wash hands thoroughly.

The main point is to wash your hands in between each hand touching things of different contamination levels (eg mask body and back of head).

One's implementation may not be perfect, but it's much better to attempt, practice, and slowly get better - rather than succumbing to do-nothing disinformation being pushed by western governments caught without the will to stockpile and procure enough PPE.
Yes, and that AD LDAP interface is riddled with MS specific deviations that require complying with MS’s way of doing LDAP.
‘Itching to get back in’: Medical students graduate early to join the fight
"It's coming from the top!" - middle management is one of the worst side-effects of Capitalism. Please note that I'm not against Capitalism, it's just fascinating that people don't want to see the workers' faces when they hear of their decision, but keep making those decisions.
> Why pray tell would Apple want to “stifle” competition for FaceTime? It’s not like Apple makes money from it.

FaceTime and Messages (blue bubbles) are the only strong lock-in Apple has beyond brand effect. People don't buy iPhones over Android for Maps or Mail: they do it for the camera, FaceTime, and the blue bubbles. See the comparative market irrelevance of iPads, Macs, and other Apple products.

> And then they are stifling competition for their app - by “forcing” you to create an app that integrates with dialer and your call history?

They force developers to choose / balance resources between iOS and the web. Because the desirable users are on iOS, resources must be wasted on proprietary native apps instead of cross-platform web apps that would theoretically work on any device/OS.

They specifically want to funnel apps through the App Store, so that they can gouge developers for 30%.

> Maybe your startup was “impacted” by not having the expertise or funding to create a native app like at least a dozen companies have done?

My case isn't representative: we did have the expertise and the funding, we built the native app, we found product-market-channel-model fit, and after I stepped away, they've expanded internationally and closed a Series A this year. For us, the impact was diverting tens of thousands of dollars to Swift development. At the time we saw this as merely technical reality: we also built an Android app for performance reasons.

That was years ago. By now, there should be many competitive video conferencing web apps that work across devices, and there aren't.

At this point Apple's anti-competitiveness has become undeniable. It looks like the Justice Dept is setting up to slam them for bundling/tying Safari to iOS as they did Microsoft with IE/Windows (the ruling that popped the dot com bubble).
The ASPLOS 2020 Online Conference Experience
That's not how I understand it. "Flattening the curve" refers to reducing the peak. In the models I've seen, at the end of the epidemic, the %of population who have been infected is roughly the same with and without intervention. The point is that there were fewer infected at the same time.
> In Russia and in Kazakhstan everyone builds house with thick (70-150 cm) walls with bricks and with good foundation. Even poor people don't build houses from plywood. But in America it seems that everyone, poor and rich builds extremely fragile houses.

Not everyone. In the more rural areas there are a lot of farm houses build very solidly.

These are usually build according to traditional techniques stemming from the European guilds of carpenters and masons.
Actually, it's unclear how much benefit ventilators are -- https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/04/02/8261052...
Safari didn't support WebRTC until 2017. iOS doesn't support third-party browser engines, and third-party browser apps (i.e. embedded web views) have issues because... they haven't figured out the UI yet.

Safari also doesn't support service workers or the fullscreen API.
JS got an upswing with Node.JS. But was then EEE:ed.
Right, my point is that a single lockdown is not enough. You have to have good monitoring and intermittent lockdowns in different areas based on that monitoring
With ffmpeg, if you use -ss in input mode (ie before the -i), it looks for the nearest keyframe before but it doesn’t scan the full video so running it multiple time for each segment shouldn’t take much more time than a one pass software (and gives you the opportunity to do the segments in parallel if you can afford the I/O).
And then ban was lifted shortly afterwards.