skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, yes. More, but shorter. That's why people are calling it a "gamble".

According to the article, ICU capacity is currently at a quarter. They could probably "afford" a higher rate, and be done with it faster.

Insisting on minimizing that number at all costs is insane. First, only if you could contain it or a vaccine becomes available, would you be actually mitigating it, else you're just shifting around a set amount of deaths over a larger timespan. Second, if you apply that logic consistently across every aspect of life, you'd have to ban cars too, they're far too dangerous and deadly. And smoking. And drinking. And the list just goes on. There are some who'd say yes to all three, but... oh boy, you must be fun at parties.

Look at the numbers in the US. No matter how it develops or has developed (we don't know the true infection ratio of the population, which is undoubtedly higher), there's no more containing it on a global scale. Our globalized and, at least for the privileged, largely open world with open borders would cease to exist, for there would be countries that insist on containing it, thus quarantining anyone entering, and therefore killing off all non-essential travel, like e.g. tourism. So, to keep that, you need to be immune... or a vaccine has to exist. But, it's also a gamble to be counting on a vaccine.
I'm learning how to keep my employees interested.

We are a small IT consultancy, 20 years books and always had three months loot in the bank just in case. I could never have predicted this thing but I've always wanted to sleep at night so insisted on a war chest. Damn I'm boring but as it turns out boring is quite handy now. We have furloughed (UK) a few troops. We top up the extra 20%.

The calls on the helpdesk are decreasing but at some point I will need to find more work for the kids. I see a major programme of updates in the near future. BIOS, switches etc etc etc ad nauseam. If it fails to move it will be updated. We do rather a lot of that anyway but to ensure that contracts are fulfilled, we need to be seen to be doing something.

Any other employers here like to pitch in (be careful for obvious reasons)?
From being an enterprise programmer, I'm try to learn how to scale back and deploy single-author websites to prod. At work we do modern stuff, but I've got this 12-year-old LAMP website, a collaborative creative writing site, that I'm deploying to prod just by logging in to the linode and doing git fetch / git pull. It feels so wrong but it's so easy. Still too paranoid to make the site public though, for now it's just me and my friends.
> Writing this all out makes me sound like a crazy person. What the hell am I doing with my life? Or, more importantly, what could I have been doing instead of doing all that?

That's why your book is so good! Singular focus on one subject like this either causes insanity or genius.

Examples: redis, Linux, sqlite, dwarf fortress, etc. I (believe, not sure) all were started by a single person who was insane by any measure to start those projects, but they became something that people love.

If this is insanity, please keep going insane!
Has anyone here tried OpenXava.org? I am considering looking into it, but don't want to waste my time.
Much of brick and mortar retail is just going to be unnecessary after this. Once everyone has online ordering set up, there will be a lot less demand. Really, who wants to go to Safeway? Buy AMZN? Maybe.

Same for office space. Work from home will be the new normal for people who work in offices. People who go to work in person will do something other than use a keyboard and screen. I've been wondering for some time when we'd hit "peak office". It just happened.

It's going to be a year or two before bars, restaurants, nightclubs, and sports get back to normal. Not until there's a vaccine and almost everyone has had it.[1] Or, the hard way, repeated smaller waves of epidemics until about 60% of the population has had it and the disease dies out for lack of new victims. After lockdown, we're still stuck with "social distancing" for many months.

Life will go on fine. There are going to be screams from commercial real estate owners. You want to see entitlement? Talk to a landlord. Manufacturing will be fine. Services will do great. Office space and retail space will hurt. That's OK. We survived the death of malls.

[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/health/article/What-Bay-Area-res...
Morse code. Started today by learning the alphabet in half an hour using a Google creative project[0] and quickly realized the challenge will be thinking in the sound/rhythm of the letters (instantly hearing/deciphering them) so I found a video[1] and then watched another video[1] which confirmed my hunch that it's better to focus on the sound than the notation.

Now I have GBoard w/ morse as my default keyboard on the mobile. Works well enough for short messages (and typing in URLs with autocomplete).

Edit: And I've been learning Spanish for months already so that's still active.

[0] https://morse.withgoogle.com/learn/

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_qQZ92onhU

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8tPkb98Fkk
AI Framework for Data-Driven Prediction of Coronavirus Clinical Severity
Frameworks that encourage convention over configuration provide a better tradeoff.

If you are willing to accept the defaults you aren't required to write any configuration.
I am learning that I couldn't cut it as a stay at home parent.
I'm curious, how could someone find a PhD/researcher on Discord, esp. for this kind of purpose?
That's actually fine though. You don't regard consumable supplies as possessions any more than you count the food you're about to eat as a possession. Minimalism is very compatible with waste - indeed I'd say it's probably more wasteful than not.
I'll give the paths that I saw available to someone with a usual CS background. Not hard rules, but the distinction between developer (support) & trader (revenue generation) will be harder to overcome the later on in a career that it happens. Trading/research roles are typically compensated as a direct function of the money you generate, which is where the real upside is.

1) Quant Developer: Trading infrastructure, working on research platforms, taking algorithms created by researchers & deploying into production. Wouldn't want to do this at a bank, but at a hedge fund or proprietary trading firm it'd be fun. Compensation is good, lower variability, but somewhat more limited upside. DE Shaw, 2 sigma, Jane Street, etc.

2) Quant Researcher: A high quality quant masters degree at a minimum (think Baruch MFE), but often a PhD. Working on systematic trading research, market making algorithms, optimal hedging for large books of derivatives, etc. Usually a decent salary, but total compensation varies wildly based on performance.

3) Trader: More and more similar to #2 these days, but more focus on execution of strategies and real-time action rather than research, and more directly responsible for PnL. Optiver, IMC, SIG, etc. A quant masters degree probably isn't required to get a foot in the door, but I think it would help in the long term (e.g. helps build more rigorous understandings of why what you're doing might be working).
I built kfchess.com (https://github.com/paladin8/kfchess), which might be a helpful reference. It's by no means amazing code (I hacked it together quickly in my spare time), but it uses https://github.com/socketio/socket.io for real-time client-server communication. It's a relatively simple library to build on top of.

As for the backend, I would recommend whatever you're most familiar with. It doesn't make that much of a difference and you'll be way more productive in a language you know.

Love the idea of a Shogi site by the way!
There aren't syntactic differences, syntactically starlark is a strict subset. But there are some semantic differences/weirdnessess.

`load` does magic, so that `load('//path', 'name')` puts `name` into the file scope, which is possible in pure python but ewww.

Containers are immutable, so they can go in default values, which is good since a lot of bzl and BUILD relies on default arguments for brevity.
Golang!

More specifically, trying to build a static site that has all the indexes of my programming books indexed and searchable using Bleve.

Edit: If anyone has tips on how to extract text from indexes of books that'd be great. Currently thinking of using OpenCV as I'm comfortable with it.
I think there's more nuance to that. Not all truths are as easily proven as 2+2=4. Usually an echo chamber is only considered as such when the people parroting a "fact" do so with confidence that far exceeds any proof that they can provide. The mask issue GP brings up is a great example. Before the COVID-19 outbreak most people generally regarded the practice of wearing face masks in Asia with scorn. If you asked them about it they would invariably bring up the same fact that "virii are too small and will pass through the mask". However, very few would be able to cite sources, and even fewer then would have an accurate enough understanding of how virii spread to know that most of the time the virus is a part of a much larger particle[1][2] that masks are effective at preventing to some extant[3].

It's not surprising that most people wouldn't have a perfect understanding of epidemiology, but it does become suspicious when a large group of people all become overconfidently wrong in exactly the same way. This is what I would consider to be an echo chamber.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prepare/transmissi... This source confirms that coronavirus spreads via droplet.

[2] https://www.who.int/csr/resources/publications/drugresist/WH... This source defines "droplet as being particles greater than μm in diameter on page 44.

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2440799/#!po=35... This article measures a protection factor of ~4 for a surgical mask when measuring with a detector that detects particles ranging from 0.02 to 1㎛.
I think machine for making stone is a 3D printer? I guess toki pona doesn’t have a word for that.
Optical sensors are a potential goldmine, I agree! The electronics are relatively straightforward to implement and the upside is potentially enormous. All you have to do then is find someone who needs your sensor tech! (Admittedly easier said than done. XD)
I think this depends on how it is maintained over time. If there are a collection of Java microservices maintained by dedicated team. And over time they upgrade from JDK 11 to JDK 13. Add features, fix bugs. Rewrite some services in Go. Then rewrite some in whatever the hot language is after Go. Then port to ARM. Then migrate from AWS to the next thing. And so on. If that is what they do, I think they will be fine. A dedicated team, constantly maintaining and evolving the system.

On the other hand, if they write the Java microservices now, running on JDK 11, on Intel x86-64, and then never touch it for 40 years. That will be like some COBOL+mainframe setup that no one knows how to fix, change, upgrade, redeploy, etc.

The tech companies using microservices generally have teams that constantly evolve their products, and over time they end up completely replacing services with new services, underlying infrastructure with new infrastructure, and so on. They will be fine with their Java microservices.

Governments that fund a project once and never touch it again, their technology will always be hard to maintain in 20+ years.
I mean has there been any evidence? How could evidence of this even be covered up? The masks have to be somewhere. I mean 3M already criticised the US government for cutting mask exports so why would they suddenly lie and say they don't think anything has been seized? If anything I think they are trying to be diplomatic here by not directly saying that the whole thing isn't true.
I think Elixir would be an excellent choice. Once you have a sip, you’ll never want to go back. Might I recommend this book: https://pragprog.com/book/lhelph/functional-web-development-... there might be some overlap with your Shogi game idea to get you started.
Best we can tell, Bloomberg's Chinese Big Hack story was completly made up, but it doesn't appear anyone involved suffered any consequences.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/10/04/editorial-a-year-...
A party app to fight the virus. https://ba.net/screen-share-party
Holy smokes. I thought I couldn’t love your output anymore than I already did, but this is something else. This little behind the scenes is... enlightening? inspiring? overwhelming?

Thank you for everything you’ve been through to provide this wonderful gift to our community.
Can't believe that Sun SPOTs made it to Hacker News after all this time. I run the mirror site mentioned here, and still have a few drawers full of SPOTs (as well as a couple of complete kits in the boxes.

I was just talking to someone the other day about resurrecting the Squawk VM and porting it to the Cortex Mx architecture. It really was ahead of its time.
> I and perhaps many other people think the media should inform people; that is a statement of its purpose, and it appears that the collective actions of people in society have redesigned it to eliminate most of the informing.

Your expectation that the media should inform people is reasonable but unrealistic. The original designers had fairly specific design goals in mind and it did not explicitly include “to inform”, this can only be tacked on.

Today we have newspapers, radio, TV and of course the Internet as tools of (mass) media.

If you were among the original designers of the newspaper[0], which was the first tool of mass media for centuries, but your preference to inform was out-weighed by competing interests (aka politics), then of course you are well within your rights to be outraged — you are entitled to criticize the design for falling short of your expectations.

In other words, unless you were personally part of the design team, you can’t really speak about what the design should be or should have been, since you are in no position to influence the system’s purpose before it was built.

You can only deal with the consequences of the designers’ creation, which includes working around the limitations of the system as designed, or building a new system from scratch.

A new system that addresses those limitations would not only be expensive to build from scratch, it would also have to compete for attention and funding to be sustainable — the market has to decide if they truly care about being better informed or not.

Facebook, which is perhaps the most modern type of media, is as vulnerable as the others when it comes to ability to misinform.

[0] ”News was highly selective and often propagandistic. Readers were eager for sensationalism, such as accounts of magic, public executions and disasters; this material did not pose a threat to the state, because it did not pose criticism of the state.” culled from Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_newspaper_publishin...
The concept of partial specialization can be useful in many ways. I could see the concept of applying a process to one process and getting a new process for creating processes as somewhat applicable to business analysis, process engineering, analysis and design of government, etc.

I know Wikipedia isn't supposed to be a textbook, but I'd argue that having a more accessible first paragraph or summary section on every topic could help all uses:

- Specialists would more easily be able to refresh their memories of topics they use infrequently before diving into the details.

- People in neighboring specialties can more easily branch out.

- Informed laypeople (e.g. experts in other industries) could more easily find new ideas for cross-pollination into their own field.

As one random example I have recently found application for an algorithm mainly reserved for use in geophysics and cartography to audio signal processing, but learning and applying it took way more research than it really should have.
Cool story.

I use Swift. It does not have default switch fallthrough. After a couple of versions, I learned about the fallthrough statement.

I remember being frustrated by it, at first, but, like so many Swift oddities, it rapidly became second nature; thus, proving out that one of the goals of Swift is to train developers to write code properly.
Volatility: VIX, GEX, DIX [pdf]
I'm studying for the USMLE, so just general medicine.
Senior WHO official dodges questions about Taiwan’s WHO membership;praises China
Go easy on the sauce and simply listen.
That's not an issue unless you think of leadership as a homogeneous blob. Of course they don't like the portion of the media pushing the other guy's cognitive structures; and ultimately that's what they mean when they complain about the media.

The way you can particularly see this is in the suppression of news that doesn't ultimately help out _any_ of the current leaders with it's dissemination, only the populace.
Game development with the unreal engine in combination with 3D modelling in blender. I'd also like to learn some c++ when I'm more familiar with UE. While using blender I discovered that you can script there with python which was also on my long todo list.
It's a bit slow since so much at once after work but still a lot of fun. I began to learn this because some friends and I wanted to make a car racing game.
Ask HN: Looking to setup my own email server – should I do it or not bother?
Hi,

I'm running my email on a custom domain through a 3rd party for a couple of years now. Initially, things were pretty good but their service has been slowly deteriorating.

I have a bunch of domains and mailboxes and do not want to spend a fortune paying for each mailbox that I own and am looking at setting up my own email server.

I was looking at mailinabox and it looked pretty good. However, I do understand that managing an email server is no joke and my emails could all land up in no man's land.

Has anyone successfully started using their own email server in the past few years?
A conlang designed to be minimal and thus super easy to learn.

Why on Earth would one then make a unique character/glyph set? Any conlang that does not fit neatly into 8859-1 is a nonstarter for wide adoption.

The “you can write it in latin or in hieroglyphics” aspect of TP seems insane and contradictory to me. That’s the opposite of minimalism.
These articles always omit the most interesting part:

> Montell and lead author Nicole Leung, who recently completed her predoctoral studies at UC Santa Barbara, suspected opsin molecules might be at work in detecting subtle chemical signals as well, via a signal amplification process.

Yeah, but why did that formulate that hypothesis? What was the line of reasoning?
Japanese. I took a year of Japanese in college 10 years ago, but never really followed up on it (other than watching anime). I started up again about 6 months ago and have been impressed by the number of online resources that are available now to the extent that self-study is easy (motivation aside).
> Additionally, I would be careful about correcting others that something is "technically" called something else as programming language researchers often use many names for the same concept.

My point had nothing to do with programming language research (in fact, my academic background is logic/metalogic). And by the way, this is not a rule:

A B
----- (→c)
C

It's a derivation (also known as a proof) -- technical terms are important when doing logic. The rule is →c -- so I know what you're doing by including the →c there. Why the →c is necessary (and, again, I've seen it in every lambda calculus/type theory book I've taken a gander at) is because there are many rules[1] (including several kinds of elimination, so things can get complicated and it's important to keep our ducks in a row).

[1] https://www.irif.fr/~mellies/mpri/mpri-ens/biblio/Selinger-L...
I am not sure about the policy about Taiwan in hacker news. Are we allowed post this or will it get flagged?
Or even if the data are reasonably tidy, they might expose more when juxtaposed with another dataset.
Venezuelan naval boat rams passenger cruise liner, damages itself, sinks
Case in point is my ham radio station.

I have an active magnetic loop for HF RX. This allows me to null out near field interference (a few dB from the transformer in the back yard) and provides very broad bandwidth (VLF thru HF). It is 75 feet from the house, away from that near field interference.

TX is an inverted L, up the side of the house, with a tuner at the base. I don’t have electrical length, but I do have power, so I can trade off efficiency for a power amp, and the bandwidth with the tuner. Interference is irrelevant, but I can see some 60 Hz cross modulation on a monitoring receiver, due to coupling to the house wiring.
I am reading A Graduate Course in Applied Cryptography [1]
by Dan Boneh and Victor Shoup, it's a work-in-progress theory and math heavy book. However it gives a deep understanding of what's going on and what can be assembled together. Unlike other crypto books, it isn't just glorifying DES, AES, and RSA.

[1] https://crypto.stanford.edu/~dabo/cryptobook/BonehShoup_0_4....
Growing a lot of food and practicing my marksmanship skills.
There's always Second Life
Your comment will likely get killed so let me throw you a life-line

1. It's likely you're getting downvotes because it's an easily google-able question: https://leetcode.com/

2. " It's not anything real since today is the first time it's been mentioned here". easily proven to be untrue: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=site%3A...

3. You immediately responded to the downvotes with anger and insults, ensuring that no one will bother to engage. You're probably having a bad day but don't forget other people also are having shitty days and no one is helped by your behavior.

3. You've been here for long enough to know the rules. Keep things civil and assume positive intent wherever possible.

Hope your day gets better ( call a friend, hotline, play a game, draw, whatever it is that you use as a healthy form of therapy)
Dude, a Google search would have eliminated the need for you to have a fit, you're not even close to correct, look it up.
https://www.google.com/search?q=leetcode
I got a bit nerdsniped by this so here's a simple reproduction of the original issue (which I still don't fully understand tbh) https://codepen.io/jvns-css-fun/pen/zYGVLXj
Stopping unsolicited mail, phone calls and emails
The problem is also in the change of how the demand can manifest. For example, I would never buy a clickbait newspaper. But sometimes I click on clickbait articles online. In both cases, there is a part of me that is interested, and a part of me that knows better. If it only requires a mouse click, the interested part sometimes wins. If it requires taking out my purse, the interested part loses this fight.

The horrible thing about online advertising is that it allows people to make profit from making you look at something, even if it immediately makes you disappointed. From that moment, the need to write non-disappointing articles has decreased significantly.
The Johns Hopkins data includes reports from countries other than the USA: https://covid-19.datasettes.com/covid/johns_hopkins_csse_dai...
Journalists and their publications don't give a crap about scientific truth. They care about maximizing clicks and traffic. If a group of scientists give them the truth and another group gives them a more sensational story, they'll print the latter. Scientists will never win this battle.