skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, I'm not convinced on this open letter to Apple and Google to relax government or institutional backing of apps categorised in heavily regulated industries. No medical professional would ever use a 'medical device or app' which isn't compliant by healthcare regulations and not vetted by doctors and researchers, especially if it were built in a hackathon to be published straight into the App stores. Just like if one was to use a 'banking app' that is not compliant towards financial regulations, in both industries it would be unsafe to use.

These regulations and rules don't kill app innovation, it increases the quality of them and ensures the user, whether if they are doctors or those seeking medical advice that they are safe to use. Would you use a medical or banking app that hasn't passed any regulations but looks nice? I certainly will not and if professionals find out that thats the case if your app becomes popular, prepare for industry scrutiny and Apple / Google will eventually pull your app down.

The authors use the KCL COVID-19 [0] and Howwefeel [1] apps as reasons for the case of a new quality globalised COVID-19 app. But there are already plenty of apps that not only do more than COVID-19 symptom tracking and are available worldwide [2][3][4], and are all registered medical devices.

I'm sorry, but I'm afraid that I would have to side with Apple and Google here.

[0] https://covid.joinzoe.com

[1] https://www.howwefeel.org

[2] https://www.khealth.ai

[3] https://ada.com

[4] https://www.babylonhealth.com
This is upside down.

It is absolutely not a landlord's job to assume the business risks of their tenants. Definitely not.

If the restaurants declare bankruptcy, yes, then there is limited ability for them to get their rent, but otherwise, the restaurants 'owe'. It may be a good idea for renters to renegotiate and for smart landlords to take heed.

But in general - contracts need to be obligated. It doesn't matter that you view the 'landlord' as 'doing nothing'. Also, in most cases, remember that land has been commoditized, it's not like the 'King' owns everything - the land was purchased for some amount, has a value, it's being 'managed' like any other asset, and if there's competition in this industry (there is a lot), the surpluses are going to be thin, just as thin as any other industry.

While there are existential issues about the 'productivity' of real estate, they don't really matter at the most local level, because the most local 'landowner' is just playing in a competitive layer of business like anyone else.

So for now - it's best to honor contracts, re-negotiate, and follow the laws.

The government may want to intervene in a 'really really smart way' but I don't see how this is perfectly possible.
Your comment repeats the common wisdom from 2 weeks ago, but does not apply today. It does not stand up to any scrutiny.
Thanks, that sounds about right, i'll take a look.
I would like a plugin for Figma, using this or a similar technique to make the strokes or fill look rough. I tend to use Figma for my SVG art, the problem is that you can’t modify the stroke just yet, at least that’s what I read in the plugin docs
Good example of where this has been used https://www.jwilber.me/permutationtest/
Frankly, the concept of not getting back to normal in a couple months is delusional. The idea that people will just stay shut up in their houses indefinitely, as the threat statistically diminishes and the overwhelmed hospitals fade into memory, is the worst kind of spherical cow theorizing.
Daggy 2.0.0 released. Serverless, remote or local data aggregation and streaming
This is a great book!

After reading it I found it much harder to enjoy movies showing bad security though (such has heists, nuclear anything, ..).

E.g. from the book I learned about the IAEA recommendations for safekeeping nuclear material [1], and it's pretty clear that smart people spent some time thinking about the various threats.

Anyway, rambling. It's a great and very entertaining book, go read it!

[1]
https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/Pub1481_web.p...
I think their best feature was speed. The internet in those days was clunky, but Google was impressively fast along with the clean interface.
I didn't realize the train coordinates were what the API was for. Were these public trains? How does google have their gps coordinates and no one else does?
If you want to try it out the fastest way is on Glitch: https://glitch.com/~datasette-csvs

Click "remix" on that page, drag-and-drop in a CSV file and you get an instant API for it.

You can try it out without even signing up for a Glitch account!
Cool we'd have a bunch of new monsters based on a super old version of nodejs instead.
I genuinely doubt they'll drop it in the foreseeable future. But every if they do, it's a mature project at this stage and I believe the community is strong enough to support it without Google back (even if that means a fork for licensing reasons).
I'm at the point where it shouldn't matter who did it, what should matter is its integrity. I'd prefer everything was anonymously posted at some level so author background didn't go into consideration regarding how it was received.

I agree with you completely, but the flip side of the coin is that experts can be blinded by assumptions that the field has. Sometimes outsiders aren't aware of these basic assumptions and so are less biased.

There's also the simple issue that sometimes expertise comes from places you least expect for reasons you might not anticipate.

For me there's as many problems in this pandemic related to appeals to authority (at least in the US) -- problems with testing related to FDA regulation and the CDC, problems with lack of healthcare providers due to long-term rent-seeking monopolies in licensing and practice scope, problems related to academic fraudulence and incentives (see: Didier Raoult) -- that I think it's dangerous to raise appeal to authority as anything but a bias.

For me there's multiple levels of problems to this, the first of which is the conspiracy and anti-science culture surrounding the pandemic. Above that is an appeal to medical and scientific expertise and authority that has sometimes been helpful but sometimes harmful. Above that still is an appeal to rigorous thinking and risk management, which transcends expertise boundaries.
Generally speaking how long would it take to mobilize any competent senior software developer as a COBOL developer?

And could you imagine the DPA being invoked to govern what kind of _software_ output a company produces?

I know I'm being far fetched but I'm thinking about the hypothetical of the government just saying, "Apple, you're doing government payment software now. Here's your contact. Get to work."
which source? do I have to scour all of the following on a rolling basis: city, county, state federal websites? Which departments at each level? seems a lot easier to just visit <mylocalnews>.com and get info displayed in order of (relative) importance.

edit: a word
> it is propaganda to count a company's properly profits earned in a foreign country and where proper taxes were paid in that country as somehow evading US taxes.

Is it though? US citizens and tax residents (green card holders, people on work visas) pay US taxes on their worldwide income. Doesn't matter if it's earned outside the US. Doesn't matter if the person lives outside the US and hasn't set foot on American soil in decades. Doesn't matter if the income is derived from property acquired before the person ever came to America.

At best they get credit for foreign taxes paid and if that's less than their US tax liability, they pay the difference to Uncle Sam.

Why are the rules (seemingly) different for corporations?
What’s the symptom? It should work
Redditbots drawn using equations and inequalities in Desmos
Being a part of the Dark beta (https://darklang.com) has been incredible. It makes setting up a simple backend with persistent storage a breeze.
No, it's not. These state IT systems and this habit that leads to their inevitable downfall needs to die.

They respect nothing. Scope? No, we need to fulfill every need and some. Budget? No, of course we don't have cash, and we have to be very careful, it's the taxpayers' money! Time? It's already late! (Yet they weren't able to get it done in 10+ years.)

They have no real competency, they don't even have competency to delegate this to someone competent. And they lack the competency to manage their own inconsistency regarding these issues.

The linked tweet thread is a perfect example of this. (Rampant project mismanagement; too big to fail; they introduced some Hadoop scoring system to match inconsistent records and whatnot instead of simply throwing out all the bad data and handing the rest separately - eg hiring a bunch of unemployed people to go over them.)

A state that should be at the top of any kind of project management and procurement hierarchies wasn't able to supervise an IT system project. It's so incompetent just thinking about it will lead to spontaneous combustion.
> I'd find it strange to encounter a config file with lots of internal documentation.

This is hard to believe. Go ahead and open any linux config file.
My only question is why this wasn’t published on an April 1st.
I'm writing an HTTP client + server in Elixir. I wanted to see if I could make all of the tests run in parallel using TLS. Working well so far!
The ignorance of cobol is not the blocking point.

Ignorance of the details of the NJ system is the great challenge. Its likely a huge legacy system with all of the attendant warts, histories, strange choices, and odd limitations that come with that. Given that these systems are built up through years of teams of people that come and go - it will likely take a long time to address the real issues.
Thanks for posting this. Looks like we're going to have to wait for the serosurveys before there's anything more reliable.
Whenever I visit /r/programmerhumor I get kind of sad.

I feel like 10 years ago there was a sense of pride and camaraderie among programmers. Programmers strove to understand both their code and the underlying system.

Now that programming has "gone mainstream" there's a constant meme that programmers don't understand their own code and that it's a grand mystery why it works. Furthermore, programmers get 100% of their code from stack overflow or Google or Indian YouTubers. Or that programmers just randomly mash the keyboard until the errors go away.

I get that it's just CS students commiserating with each other, but I just hate how self-deprecating it is.
We are building a product similar to Mule targeting small & medium enterprises. We are in beta and seeking for early feedback from enterprise customers. If you are interested, please drop an email to murukesh @ codeflow.co, we can work out a great licensing plan for you.
Giving the business a grant is a cost, but how are loans? The US bank bailouts turned a small profit, and there's no reason that couldn't happen again this time.
What's the betting that the alteration needed is to change 0.25 to 0.025, say, and then record hours worked instead of days ... ?

But, hey they might end up paying someone more than a pittance, and that would never do, eh.
I'm a younger engineer, so I say this with a degree of humility, but is trying to modify these monstrous legacy systems on the fly during a worldwide catastrophe really the most responsible or intelligent solution? Is there no way to authorize some kind of emergency system built with modern tooling to offload the system burden and then process it later through the system of record? If I were trying to deal with this problem, my approach would be the following:

- Organize the legislature(s) to pass some kind of emergency act that gives protection around PCI compliance and that sort of thing to new engineering teams

- Hire business and technical experts, fast

- Build a system on AWS that can handle massive scale and start offloading the most important business functionality to that system (things like registering for aid, fraud prevention)

- when things begin to return to normal, start processing requests through the original system, deal with problems, whatever

I know all of this is not easy. Legal and compliance stuff is tough, and I know the domain itself must not exactly be simple. But this is an emergency, and it calls for emergency measures. Trying to hack your way through an ancient code base on the fly seems like it might be doomed to failure.
Wow, I started to read that and couldn't understand a word and kept reading and by the end I could understand most of it. Language is so cool!
I wasn't aware of that context.

Though evancz now works at NoRedInk.
https://www.noredink.com/about/team
That's the culture. The SV innovation is that startups have gestalt views of things not a "management made it like this so I am unable to operate". The bureaucracy and the machinery that supports it is the government culture. People who don't understand this, often don't understand the natural offshoots that come from it: blameless post-mortems, prioritizing falsification, unlimited paid vacation, etc. These all work because the people participating have the culture.

The SV startup culture is a full-spectrum ownership thing. If your executive team isn't aiming at the right direction, you tell them that, and if you lose faith in the future as a result you go elsewhere. The executive team always relinquishes its power over you in order to maximize your effectiveness because that's the only thing that matters.

Government culture is different. It optimizes in a different constraint space. There has to be visibly equitable hiring, the needs of political expediency require things like "heads to roll", regression is more dangerous than lack of progression, etc. Because of this, government organizations operate differently. They're not inefficient. They're just optimizing to different constraints and they're incredible at doing so. I would hypothesize that you cannot retain SV startup culture at the government for any appreciable amount of time because of the constraint space - much of which is the result of natural law.
Power is how "strong" a signal is. I think it's the easiest one to understand, that's why everybody's talking about dbm!

In all electric circuits to change the power a component will consume you either change the voltage you apply to it or change its resistance, based on the P=VI & R=V/I equations.
From what I gather, it's an issue of floating point precision. See more here: https://medium.com/@bellmar/is-cobol-holding-you-hostage-wit....
We're building an open source code generator for developers. Used to call it low-code, but that's not such a popular term with devs

https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof
The medic in TFC was really an offensive assault class, MUCH more analogous to TF2s scout than TF2s medic.

The scout class itself was actually rarely used because the medic was significantly more dangerous!
Some context:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona

Tiki Pona is a constructed language with a vocabulary of about 125 root words, and 14 phonemes (allowing a very economical keyboard, from the looks of it).

So presumably, we could read the page with a couple afternoons of practice? I'm curious how long it takes to pick up the language, if anyone can chime in. If it's something you can matter in less than a month it could be amazing...
Reading: The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money by Keynes.

Studying: The Molecular Biology of the Cell by Alberts et al and Advanced Macroeconomics by Romer.
the Toki Pona conlang uses only 14 letters, and has a philosophy of simplicity/minimalism, so this is a tiny computer with a reduced keyboard specifically for the language

it's more or less an art piece, yes
Emergency Hotel Needed registry launched in response to Coronavirus
Hi, maybe this is offtopic, but I felt this way when anime studio KyoAni was arsoned and many of its employees died in a horrific way, and the news got to the front page of HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20468395

Even though the people there weren't necessarily violating the site guidelines per se, the commentary that some people were making (e.g. discussion about IP stemming from the murderer's unsubstantiated accusation of plagiarism, or discussion about Japan's culture) felt insensitive and hurt me as someone who was greatly impacted by KyoAni's work. I didn't understand how to express my feelings about this, but the way you describe it ("generic dross") explains it perfectly.
I think that the article which supports its definition of the problem with the article written by an author who "obtained a bachelor's degree in physics" and then "left graduate school during the first year in order to pursue a career in science journalism, and "has never looked back"" (1) should just not exist.

In my perception, even that article is such a "popularization" of the topics on which physicists work that it stopped "being even true." The Wikipedia article just continues in that direction.

The "problem" that exists should not even be present as a Wikipedia entry under that specific name. As far as I see it, even the name is wrong.

---

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natalie_Wolchover
me too! If you haven't already I highly recommend gophercises https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVEltXlEeWglGINo25GxV... lots of useable examples
And concjumping maps from TFC! Those were a ton of fun.
Have you used it? I usually don't use proprietary software but I've been thinking of giving it a go. Supposedly bitwig has a language as well but I haven't used it either
That’s why my personal preference is to keep the config file as code but to keep it as close to a static config as possible. The Turing completeness of the environment is there merely as an escape hatch, for the one branch you need to make.

If your tooling requires static configs, but you really need dynamism, you’re stuck with dynamically generated static configs, which are even worse than a dynamic config.
I have never really worried about whether a company was going to “take care of me”. when choosing jobs. Companies are out for themselves first and foremost. Don’t ever drink the Kool-Aid. The only person who is going to take care of you is you. Someone once told me early in my career to “always keep your running shoes around your neck”.

I haven’t seen any evidence that the company I work for isn’t ethical or as employee focus as they can be. But things happen, management changes, companies get acquired, the market changes etc.
Stellarium - https://stellarium.org/
SQL.

I'm writing a compiler for SQL that parses DDL (CREATE TABLE, etc.) and queries and outputs type-safe Go. It currently supports PostgreSQL, but the plan is to support more engines and more output programming languages.

https://github.com/kyleconroy/sqlc
Does someone have a good tutorial to learn this and emacs? I'd like to try (I tried roam research online but couldn't connect, and I'd like to learn also about emacs).
I don't mean to sound snarky, but aren't those two problems related?
FTP used URG too, but then, FTP is itself a deprecated monstrosity.
To the missing features...

Add syntax highlighting and GTM

Also real deployment previews and sharing between sites

Switched to Netlify, much happier
You could use the Maven approach: for whatever the declarative configuration isn't powerful enough to specify, you write a plugin. That plugin can then be developed and managed just like any other software project, rather than having to bring those tools into the configuration realm.
I think that the security issue needs more attention than the author gives it. Config files are often shared and not rigorously checked, especially if they are very long. Arbitrary code execution is a real security risk that should not be minimized.

For example, years ago I was a frequent user of the chemical kinetics code called Cantera. It calculates the dynamics of combustion reactions, with the big application being for jet engines. One of the files that it needs to load is a mechanism file (called the CTI file). This contains all of the information about the gas properties and chemical reactions. Different situations might require different mechanisms (propane mechanism versus JP8 mechanism). Anyhow, Cantera's mechanism file format is literally a Python script. See the link below for the most commonly used mechanism file that comes with Cantera:

https://github.com/Cantera/cantera/blob/master/data/inputs/g...

This file is 2000 lines long, and many mechanism files are even longer. I told my colleagues that it is possible to execute arbitrary Python code using the files but I was unable to convince them that it was a security risk. I think that these kind of config files are a big security risk for engineering firms, because they make it much easier to conduct industrial espionage. All that a bad actor has to do is put a few lines in one and get an engineer to run it once. Then they could steal designs, analyses, business plans, financial data, and many other things. It's a serious threat that should not be minimized.
Google May Be Forced to Reveal Its Search Algorithm to an SEO
"Chaos is a ladder" though it didn't turn out so well for that fictional character, his assessment wasn't wrong.
Nope. I just don’t live in the tenderloin. Unfortunately that’s where all the hotels are. So I’m not surprised that visitors (and twitterati) get a certain sense.
Someone went really nuts with flagging and downvoting these comments.
Reducing the LVT would have been effectively a grant, a real cost to the government that needed to covered by all taxpayers. Issuing them secured loans to carry them through this would not.
I'm idly wondering how today's "modern" Java* micro-service buzzword driven setups will look to someone who has to maintain it 40+ years later.

Maybe COBOL and mainframe wasn't that bad after all.
Stanford's CS143 Compilers course: https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:StanfordOnline+SOE...

I've always been interested in making things that make other things, and compilers definitely fall into that category.

In the middle of the second assignment, the parser. It's a lot to consume, but I feel like the theory isn't particularly difficult, about half my learning has been getting to know the tools (so far: flex, bison). I've also spent an annoying amount of time on updating and configuring the VM, I guess that's a bonus lesson in Linux sysadmin-ing. It's also my first experience with C++, which seems useful to know.

I also started this course on web security: https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs253/. The first assignment was a lot of fun, the material is fresh, and it definitely seems like very useful information for anyone in the web stack.

I'm also learning a bunch of new cooking recipes, but who isn't nowadays.
If you're wanting to learn about fly fishing
I'll say that I've been using org-mode and it's agenda to manage todos and take notes for a long time, and Roam is whole other animal. The problem I've had with Rifle is that words can mean different things in different contexts. Rifle finds every time I used the word "depression" regardless of how I used it. Roam gives you any easy way to add just a little extra symantics to your notes that dramatically increases the signal in the backlinks, and astronomically improves the graph view.
As expected, we're approaching a web browser monoculture. When you have an open platform where only one company controls it, it fails to be open any more. I'm sincerely worried about an ad company controlling the largest source of information on Earth.
I am learning Vue.

I built a basic tool to help my wife track how much time she spends on Telehealth calls, you can see it here:

https://telehealth-tracker.onrender.com

She is a family medicine doctor and now virtually 100% of her time now doing phone calls instead of clinic visits. She wants to do a QI project and needed to be able to track the amount of time her and her colleagues spend on various parts of the Telehealth visit.