skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I can't see a world where the Python Software Foundation can't get support for this, I think they have the contacts at the big companies to get it funded.

You might be surprised at how hard it is to get money donated for this sort of thing. Large companies often have their own build infrastructure and thus build things for themselves from scratch, to the point of building their own build toolchains (e.g. look at Google and bazel, Facebook and buck). So the way they handle packaging means how the overall packaging ecosystem functions does not impact them like it does individuals or smaller companies.

This is also why companies only started funding PyPI security work about two years ago; downloading source securely from PyPI is important to big companies as that's where they grab the source that they compile. But funding pip improvements only just happened in Decembe, starting with the new pip resolver work got money (https://pyfound.blogspot.com/2020/03/new-pip-resolver-to-rol...). And all that money came from Mozilla and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative; two huge non-profits, not companies.

Add on to the fact that the PSF is projected to have a $627,000 USD loss this year due to PyCon US 2020 being cancelled and it makes finding funding really hard (https://pyfound.blogspot.com/2020/03/psfs-projected-2020-fin...).

Python overall very much runs on volunteers, but the packaging system especially. The core team of Python itself might generously have a total of 3 devs/week being paid to work on CPython spread across all contributors (IOW it is nowhere near as impactful as 3 actual full-time devs who aren't context-switching constantly between "work work" and "Python work"). But for Python packaging in general? If you don't count conda I think packaging has less than even 3.

But if anyone wants to donate to try and rectify this, please go to https://psfmember.org/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id... and donate to the packaging WG!
People have been saying Clojure is dying for years, but there's plenty of people using it to great effect. I'm more productive in Clojure than in any other language, and I have access to a wide array of Clojure and JVM libraries. The power it gives me lets me spit out solutions to problems much faster than less expressive languages like Python. Perhaps you haven't really programmed enough in Lisps to really get the point of them.
I analyzed 46,601 news over the past 3 months from the major US and UK publishers (New York Times, CNN, Forbes, BBC, Guardian). It measures how often the word "coronavirus" is mentioned. The second graph shows how different countries are covered, mapped with the outbreak incidents.

It demonstrates how our attention has shifted more to the virus and jumped among different countries based on the outbreak occurrences.

I've used my project for the data source. If you like to visualize your reading, come check it out (https://kaffae.com)
Nice! How many transcendental numbers are we up to now?

(Kidding! I kid!)

What properties of Poletopole's constant make it interesting?
they appear to have already changed this to "your client connection is encrypted"
I'm pretty sure it's viral due to people sharing other people doing stupid things, not because people agree with it.
Really great documentary, can't recommend it enough.
Recently finished “Civilization: The West and the Rest” by Niall Ferguson. Ferguson argues that competition, science, the rule of law, modern medicine, consumerism, and western-Protestant work ethic allowed the West to make “advancements” while others “stagnated”. (1)

In the section on consumerism he talks about how the USSR in many ways was equal or stronger than US or other western countries but couldn’t seem to make a single decent pair of blue jeans.

The Chinese government has made some incredible strides and has taken note of the many things that the west did right and the west did wrong. I believe TikTok is one of the best ways China has been able to study western culture. It won’t be long before it will be the East and the rest. And the west gave most of it away for free.

(1) https://archive.org/details/civilizationwest00ferg
I liked the old grub, personally; it, too, felt like a system that you could actually wrap your head around. While grub2 is probably more capable and better supported in terms of hooking into the system (since it's meant to regenerate the config out of scripts every time it needs to be configured), I personally moved on to syslinux, which is very much like the old grub was, albeit more capable.
so how about this

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-01/china-con...

I don't wear a tin foil hat and I'm not a conspiracy theorist.
The errors and bias in these systems add to the ethical concerns. While it is arguably a good thing to substitute torture with brain image interrogation, there is a risk of putting too much trust in these systems, subjecting innocents to days of leading investigation, just because the computer said there is something to be found there.

Israeli airport security (arguably the best in the world) deploys derivatives of these systems, that look at micro-gestures, elevation of heart rates, pupil dilation, and temperature changes, to see if passengers respond with familiarity to terrorist imagery flashed on a screen as they walk by it. If that already works in practice, imagine the same, but being strapped with hundreds of sensors.

See also the 2010 research on image reconstruction from brain activity, and extrapolate that 10 years in the future and applied to military interrogation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsjDnYxJ0bo
It works, but it burns through so much CPU your computer will be a gibbering mess. There's some pretty silly inefficiencies going on, for example; if you switch away to another window, they display a small video player while keeping the big one running the background. Each time you switch into screen sharing mode, they drag you back to the app again. If you draw on the screen, someone has screwed up their linear algebra so you end up seeing double with an extra copy of what you're drawing, in totally the wrong place.

Annoyingly it's a bit too convenient, so going out of band is a pain.
From the article it seems like Elon is mostly worried about meeting IDs leaking and letting any random connect:

> The FBI’s Boston office on Monday issued a warning about Zoom, telling users not to make meetings on the site public or share links widely after it received two reports of unidentified individuals invading school sessions, a phenomenon known as “zoombombing.”
TL:DR, The guys that did 9/11 are doing another 9/11.
Have you considered using https://github.com/funtoo/keychain?

Edit: I see it's been mentioned elsewhere here.
I consider myself an advanced user. I used to play with refitsomething loader to boot win7/10 on an older imac, I still have shivers about the dreaded LI... of my youth so I tend to stick to whatever Ubuntu installs and then make sure I can boot stea... windows easily.

Anything else is madness I don't need nor want to fiddle with.
exactly, plus when you're spaceX or a similar tech company it's much better to be safe than sorry. you don't always have the luxury to assume good intentions.
I went through both but they were both at weird transition times of my life that they basically didn't have a real effect (or at least, it all seemed normal enough for me)

dot bomb: I was 22, had worked for Red Hat since their IPO in 1999. I hadn't gone to college, and was working in developer support, then QA, when I got laid off, it was kind of like, eh, oh well, gonna move back in with my parents. We get along so it was kind of not a big deal. I had saved a ton of money from working and having no social life.

Ended up moving to California, playing a ton of EverQuest, learned to surf, learned Kung Fu, and started to take classes at a community college.

My best advice for anyone early in their career/life with a lot of flexibility and privilege is to spend that time acquiring a new skill that is unrelated to the field that you are already in. It's a great time to develop an alternative/fall back.

I decided after the dot bomb that I was going to be a luddite and not focus on computer related work, so I started studying physics.

I got my degree and ended up building and maintaining a cluster for processing satellite image data, so basically got right back into tech.

That brings me from 2003 to 2008!

I was going to get a PhD, then my advisor died, and the satellite I worked on got shut down (government defunds science in recessions!) so I got bitten by my own advice! I don't regret it, though.

At that time, I had just finished my undergrad, and had started working full time in the research group I had worked in as an undergrad. When things finally sunk in economically, I had to go back to part time temporarily, but again, and this might be a theme, I had enough saved up and enough of a personal cushion to ride it out for the six months it lasted until we got a fresh grant.

I ended up leaving academia to get back into tech, and here I am again, and I'm feeling pretty comfortable with the coming chaos, which is weird to say, and I know it's going to be a lot harder for others.

My sisters both have work that puts them at a huge risk, and are struggling with that, but tldr;

- save money

- don't panic sell if you have investments

- if you can, buy now :)

- seriously and intentionally develop a new skill, hobby, or interest

- make new friends, reach out to folks, build a more robust social network

What you can't control, and what usually is behind "how I survived X" is privilege though.

I have a colleague who is kind of a "prepper" but in the last downturn, he used that as a way to feed himself and his wife for six months (boat rations, rice & beans, etc...!) and volunteered at a mechanic shop so he could learn to fix/build cars (he offered them SEO in trade). Now as a hobby he sometimes buys cars, soups them up, and sells them.
It's all about capacity, not will. The PyPA as a whole knows what is lacking, but when you're all just a bunch of volunteers it's hard to tackle massive projects that take potentially years to complete and then even longer to see gain traction in the community when you are doing it all in your spare time. And that's if you don't burn out before you finish (e.g. calling projects "garbage" is not motivating to the few people volunteering their time to try and fix the situation while keeping what is there afloat and running).
This is how I teach middle school and high school students basic controls. They implement and tune a proportional controller, then the derivative part, and then I give them a feedforward model for the plant (usually a brushed DC motor.) The PD controller and feedforward is very easy to write and is quite approachable once you see how simple it is, and it can be very exciting to see a motor “do as you command” before your eyes.

I avoid integral control because it’s less effective and much harder to deal with than good feedforward. Most of the mechanisms we use (in the FIRST Robotics context) have a feedforward model and good system-identification tools so this works out well.
> Zoom is a solid piece of software, and the developers are responsive and seem to care.

I get the exact opposite impression. Not just due to these bugs, but also the hidden webserver thing [1] a while back.

Recurring theme in this (the webserver and the installer issue) seems to be an unhealthy obsession with reducing the number of clicks the user needs to perform. They deliberately chose dubious, hacky solutions over doing things the right way due to this. It makes you wonder what other bad decisions they made in the client or server code.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/10/20689644/apple-zoom-web-s...
If you are using a compiled, systems programming language like Rust, you do care about performance to begin with.

Specially in things like parsing or a network protocol!
Yep, same here. Went from zero to a fairly professional streaming experience in a few hours. I had a couple Logitech C920 webcams, and a Presonus Audiobox lying around. Combined with an older iMac, I was able to set up a pretty "fire and forget" rig.
Classic case of a really simple concept being obfuscated by jargon. If you've done any sort of game development and implemented smooth movement and animations, you've probably accidentally implemented a PID controller.
Claiming they have end to end encryption when they don't.
WakaTime is awesome, assuming you only need to keep track of how how long you're working on code.

Shameless plug follows:

timelyapp.com is similar to WakaTime, except it keeps track of _all_ the programs you use on the desktop, and for how long (MacOS/Windows only). Timely also tracks when you leave/arrive at work/home/other locations (GPS, requires mobile app). We can't claim offline mode, but all tracked "memories" are 100% your-eyes-only.

Timely is a time tracker specifically built for people who are bad at remembering what they worked on/don't log hours frequently. Sice Timely's "memories" are recorded to-the-minute, you can easily log accurate timesheets, even if you only do so once a month.

(Disclaimer: I work on Timely)
Forward | Software, Hardware, IT | Full-time | SF

Forward is building a preventative, data-driven healthcare system from first principles, combining hardware, software, and doctors under one roof.

Eng Roles: https://jobs.lever.co/goforward?department=Engineering

Website: https://goforward.com/

Take a Virtual Tour: https://youtu.be/dnJEsoGmh-8

Forward joins the Fight Against COVID-19: https://blog.goforward.com/forward-joins-the-fight-against-c...
Was curious to look at what tech y'all are using and FYI that the Agave link doesn't just work for me. It asks to sync all of my emails and stuff, which I'm obviously not going to do for clicking a random link. Just a heads up!
My wife and I have ~10 month old twins here. No help in the house these past weeks and my wife and I are both still working (full-time, if anything the volume of work has increased instead of decreased) remotely. Adding another layer of complexity to the situation, she's pumping for both of them and we're both stressed out about keeping her supply up through this ordeal (which means we need to continue eating healthy and staying stress free... yeah, right).

It's really an unreasonable and unhealthy amount of work for 2 people. We split the day into AM/PM shifts, we both have to help during each others shifts, and I need to help out when she's pumping. I normally cook all of our food, anyway, but with all of this additional overhead it's really wearing me the hell out. We pick work back up after we finish getting the twins to bed and eat dinner. I feel like I'm a walking corpse half of every day.
I'd love to see a study done on developers - how their first job has influenced their zealotry for programming languages / technologies
There are a lot of things that aren't part of the usual computer science curriculum, control theory being one of them. Many topics would be interesting to have some minimal exposure to, such as signal processing, operations research, etc.
Evolution of Halo [Beta Pre-Xbox] 1999 Version and 2000 Demo
Zoom is the deluge du jour (literally—today has been the day of Zoom deluge complaints), but Occam called and wanted to let us know that we don't need any sinister explanations. It's obviously (or at least, explicable) as an effect of the covid crisis.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22754135

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22751116
Hold on a second.There are no less than a few billion people on this planet who still believe they'll go to heaven if they behave well in this world.They believe that some mystical person looks onto us from above.In fact,they believe it so bad,that some countries even have these ludicrous ideas interwoven with governments,laws and education... This is exactly the same...
which means fuck all.
The Military Knew Years Ago That a Coronavirus Was Coming
It works great for 1:1 and small group conversations, but its max meeting size (15 people I think) is an immediate disqualifier. We regularly have hundreds of people on Zoom calls with no issues.
Had I considered that title I would have discarded it for that reason.
Webex also has a large engineering team in China too.

The senior people are all in the US though.
CPAPs aerosolize on exhale, they aren't closed loop like hospital ventilators. It's not about cleaning just the machine but decontaminating the whole room.
Guys, I'm starting to think this company isn't worth a P/E ratio of 1600.
I wish there was a unreddit undelete so I could read your rant. I had this elite headhunter who LinkedIn messaged me but he doesn't do phone calls. So I go to his office on my one half day. It looked like Met Art. He had the perfect job for me and 10 more if it didn't work out.

Did he ghost me? No, I just forgot about him and he forgot about me. No followup. Then this February he LinkedIn messages me for a totally inappropriate VP role and the text of the intro was the same message. This millionaire is just C + P spamming. I insisted on a five minute phone call before meeting him for the first time. We spoke on the phone and I tore him a new asshole.
Surely a great achievement. Although I feel a little bad for the team. I assume Silver didn't write all the code or design the entire algorithm single-handedly. But the recognition and the reward accrues to him alone. Ah, unjust hierarchical society.

I guess the other members of the team are being compensated well enough at DeepMind that $250k would be more icing than cake, but it still feels weird to see that Silver is the only person named in the article when a number of other world class researchers worked with him on this problem.
Most of the stuff in userland isn't GNU. What GNU brings to the table pales in comparison to the technical complexity of the kernel or the GUI stack. While the kernel has grown up over the years from a janky hobby project to be a sophisticated base for smartphones and supercomputers, GNU still provides a bunch of common Unix utilities from the 80s and a C standard library. Maybe it's time to recognize that they aren't pulling their weight to get top billing here.
Okay, I'll bite: How are you running Classic Mac OS on an iPad?
Any book purporting to explain why the west was so successful without including the practices of colonialism is just utterly without merit, sorry. Enormous transfer of wealth and resources from the rest of the world are very handy.
Focusing on growth first and security later is right out of Microsoft's playbook.
>The Linux ecosystem needs a standard and unified API or SDK for its desktop endeavour

In my opinion, this is incredibly unlikely to happen any time soon. The closest existing thing to that is building web apps targeting Chrome and Chrome OS. If that's not your thing, then I would advise against operating on the assumption that there will ever be a unified SDK. At least for me it's gotten easier to understand and work with the open source world after internalizing that. There are both upsides and downsides to it.

Ubuntu is a funny example because they were ready to drop both X and Wayland for a while. They came very close to shipping their own incompatible display server called Mir.
Many claims. Not enough sources.
The related story was discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22738592
“The Stand” by Stephen King
The whole system is GNU with Linux added? There are more non-GNU packages installed on my system than GNU ones. Really the only GNU components that most people use are glibc and coreutils. And you can replace both of them if you really want to. The init system isn't GNU, the window server isn't GNU, the window manager doesn't have to be GNU, the compiler doesn't have to be GNU.

Essentially, every single GNU package on a Linux system has a reasonable non-GNU alternative. The Linux kernel, on the other hand, doesn't exactly have a simple drop-in replacement. Moreover, it's obvious that the kernel is the most sophisticated and non-commodity software part because the GNU people never managed to deliver a working kernel.

As such, it's probably better to consider the system Linux with a little bit of GNU thrown in if you want it. And if you count android or embedded systems, a lot of Linux systems actually have absolutely no GNU software whatsoever.

Free software is good, but RMS has been a pretty terrible advocate for it. His unwelcoming, aggressive, and pedantic behavior has really hamstring GNU tools. It's no surprise to me that GNU software is being phased out (see: GCC, bash) by developers and that the GPL has largely failed as a license.
Similar arguments made by Paul Kennedy in his seminal work Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1987):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_the_Great...
Decisions like this have less to do with "what are you doing now" and "what was your intention", and more to do with "is there a pattern" which is an externally surfaced signal that something deeper is going on with their engineering organization, long term business plans etc.

Zoom has a pattern of abusing users' trust. Ok, maybe its not intentional, but increasingly, that doesn't matter in security discussions. The fact that it was unintentional is a concern itself. Maybe they lack discipline, or leadership, or something; I'm not asserting to know. But, its no longer good enough to simply say "we're sorry, it was an accident".
No there is absolutely dangerous information.

There are people today, even President Trump, touting unproven drugs as a cure for COVID-19. People based on this information then do stupid things like (a) die from ingesting pool chemicals with a similar name or (b) hoarding large quantities for profit. Or look at the irrationality around toilet paper.

Most people in this situation aren't stupid. They are ignorant. And as such they rely on authorities and experts to provide accurate and safe information.
Worth pointing out: I thought it was just the SIMD that made it fast when I first got involved. It turns out that while it helps, it's just a tool that helps to achieve the real gain: eliminating branches (if statements) that make the processor stumble and fall in its attempts to sprint ahead (speculative execution). simdjson's first stage pushes this capability really far towards its limit, achieving 4 instructions per cycle by not branching. And yes, 1 cycle is the smallest amount of time a single instruction can take. Turns out a single thread is running multiple instructions in parallel at any given time, as long as you don't trip it up!

Parsing is notoriously serial and branchy, which is what makes simdjson so out of the ordinary. It's using a sort of "microparallel algorithm," running a small parallel parse on a SIMD-sized chunk of JSON (16-32 bytes depending on architecture), and then moving to the next.

And yeah, you have to go back over a decade to find CPUs that don't have SIMD. simdjson runs on those too, just obviously doesn't use SIMD instructions :)
I quoted like 10% of it, that's hardly cherry picking.

It's fine if we don't react the same to the tone, but that's what I responded to, and I sort of react to your "this month is a good time to..." in the same way. Lot's of people aren't on a nice vacation this month, for lots of different reasons.
Why would a potential customer want to invest time into learning a product that’s just a temporary research project?
tl;dr of your comment is "I don't care about privacy, if the product works".

But privacy is not about those privileged enough to where privacy doesn't matter.

I don't care that you don't care. Privacy matters.
People would love to see that happen, but it requires time and effort from people to build such a solution. Some people are trying, e.g. https://pyoxidizer.readthedocs.io/ and https://briefcase.readthedocs.io/ as well as stalwarts like PyInstaller and such.

But as I said, it takes time and effort and there's only so much of that when it's being done by volunteers in their evenings and weekends.

And as an aside, I would suggest teaching them `python -m pip` over `pip3`: https://snarky.ca/why-you-should-use-python-m-pip/.