skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't make them sign a contract or anything. It's part of the coaching that we do with YC founders on HN (example here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22808556). Most of that is at https://news.ycombinator.com/launches. We act as the editors of those posts and work closely with the founders for quite a while beforehand. Today was different, but it's a similar relationship.

I wouldn't make a major edit without letting them know. In the present case, I just let the whole community know, because the edit was a substantial one. Had it been a trivial one, I wouldn't have bothered. The priority is interesting discussion, not punctilious bookkeeping, and you can't necessarily have both.

In the flurry of these threads, the founders are focused on responding to substantive questions. That's what they should be doing: satisfying community curiosity in their area of expertise. It's my job, not theirs, to prevent the discussion from getting derailed by things like the unfortuitous use of a buzzword which they have no clue the community has been tired of hearing for years already.

If the users weren't YC founders that we have an explicit coaching relationship with, I'd always consult with them before offering help. That would happen by email. By the way, if anyone wants this sort of coaching, we're happy to help as much as we can via hn@ycombinator.com. I give this sort of advice to startup founders, project creators, and article authors all the time, and everyone is welcome to it. Just don't worry if you don't hear back right away. The inbox has gotten to the point where it piles up regularly.
Flying electric car race series takes big step towards fruition
Microsoft to Start Blocking Emails Without Records Set Up on Domains
MLE is a fairly new title that, as best I can tell, exists primarily in those few places that have a mature enough workflow to have people who can actually dedicate their time to the ML part and have other roles take care of the rest.

Everywhere else, there is only DS, and it involves everything.

To answer your first question though, the training and testing of these models is fun because it feels like a puzzle game: did all my understanding and preparation of the data (and the business) pay off and the model does its job as expected? Is there something I’m missing? What’s the simplest model + configuration I can use that produces acceptable results and what does that say about the problem space? Can I combine models in some way to get the results? Is nothing working because it’s an ultimately fruitless exercise and our hypothesis is wrong? Or is there something we’re missing that is in turn the reason the model is missing something? Etc etc.

Then as the output you get something that ingests some data and then makes a decision with it! That’s cool to me.
yea, its def a risk play.

Lets say they can make it 12 months with cash on hand, what does the funding env look like in 12 months?

There is def someone with a big spreadsheet who has modeled this out and decided this was the best path forward.
Ridiculous. The solution isn't to call public_html bad. The solution is to encourage people who are going to run things like webmail and other sites with Javascript like that to use a specific virtualhost for webmail.
Nice! I kind have a python package that generates something similar to what your website shows (https://github.com/AaronWard/covidify)
Possible Developments in the Treatment of Acute Covid-19
To those asking how Airbnb could possible need that much money.

Wikipedia says they have 12,736 employees.

$1B works out to $78,518 per employee (before payroll taxes, health insurance, etc.).

So if you're trying not to lay people off and keep the company afloat while revenue has plummeted to next-to-nothing... it's not an absurd figure. Or even if you're laying people off, it's going to take $$$ to find and rehire and train people when revenue starts coming in again, while continuing to pay the management team and key employees that will be capable of executing on that, and keeping the lights on, and paying rent.

Granted almost 13K employees may sound like a lot... but let's say they operate in 50 countries and have a team of 100 people for each one building up the business, that's 5,000 employees already. I made those specific numbers up, but for a global-local company, it's not crazy.
Betterment's Engineering Principles
. . . kind of.

F# is OCaml minus the macro system, minus the higher-order module system, minus the OCaml object system, plus the .NET object system, plus a bunch of fun builtin features that nevertheless mostly just supply stuff that OCaml can do with macros, plus non-painful multithreading, plus a fairly different syntax.

They are both members of the ML family, but that tells you about as much about what they have in common as pointing out that C# and Objective-C are both members of the Algol family.
It is probably because travel will take a lot longer to come back than most of us expect. This is because travel is probably one of the prime ways covid-19 can start spreading again and governments will be very leery of any activity that will restart the spread.

I bet travel will be restricted till there is a vaccine yet no vaccine is in sight. Perhaps in the meantime you will be forced to take a covid-19 test before boarding and when you come back?

So you should expect AirBnB to lose virtually all its business till major tourist centers and sources of tourism have stabilized. And you should expect that it won't come close to recovering till there is a vaccine.

Then you have to add on that travel is discretionary and given the economic shock, travel will be the first to fall and last to recover.

So months to recovering some and then no full recovery till a vaccine is found (> 6 months to year(s)). One good proxy is the Olympics. It's been postponed to July of next year.

I bet their burn rate with ~12000 employees is >>1B per year.
You are not breaking the license if you pay per-seat rather than per-device.

Ask me about CALs, I can tell you all about them.
Super interesting product I'll definitely be taking a deeper look at this when I'm at work tomorrow.

I notice all your comparisons are with floating point and integer types. I was recently looking at SIMD as a possible way to speed up some of our calculations. But we create financial software and most data is typically stored as decimals not floating points to avoid problems with binary floating point precision during calculations.

Does quest handle decimals, just without the SIMD speed up?

Is this just a dead end? Are there any SIMD implementations that deal with decimal numbers? I considered Hacky workarounds like using integer based types internally and then treating them as as fixed point decimals for display but that doesn't give enough range for my purposes.
Yes and I think you typically want to use this whole recommended list of deny-ips.
Maybe that should be the default for coturn.

But running coturn in its default-config isn't a good idea anyway.
I believe that Scrolloway is saying that the "strongest plausible interpretation" of this statement from the OP:

> Our initial data show no false-positives and no false-negatives out of all specimens assayed.

Is:

> the false result rate [of the test] is low

While you originally responded to the statement from the OP with:

> [You're saying that] your test is perfect? Color me skeptical.
if only they can get into quarantining as a service.
It's very simple to just put up a full shield between the clerk and the customers, you don't need to strap the shield to people's faces when there's a static point of contact.
These don't look like 'normal' face shields that you'd find in a woodworking shop. They're just splash guards, won't stop anything remotely solid that's flying.
Cheap acquisitions
Probably too loud and legal issues. Flying drones above trivial weights at low altitude is very illegal pretty much everywhere, in ways that are slow to change.
This is something I've struggled with as well conceptually. The company has 12000+ employees and is essentially an online marketplace.

I mean at what point will people stop valuing a business like that like a tech company and start valuing it like a rental company? Because the defining feature of technology is essentially low marginal cost at scale, and these companies just seem to keep growing in their human labour.

This seems generally true for a lot of companies in the "sharing economy" space.
I'm not sure why there is a recommendation to wear cloth masks in other countries (not discounting it, I just haven't looked). However, I believe that the primary rationale for the CDC switching their recommendation that everyone should wear masks has to do with the great numbers of asymptomatic carriers. In this scenario, wearing a mask is not designed to protect the wearer from others. Wearing an ill-fitting mask is not protective to the individual. Instead, wearing a mask is designed to protect others from the wearer. Because people are carriers before they exhibit symptoms (if they ever have symptoms), you can't know if you are infected or not. If you are wearing a mask, you are limiting the potential spread of virus from you. This way, you are keeping any potential virus closer to you so that others are more protected. This goes hand in hand with social distancing. If you use a mask and don't distance yourself, you aren't helping at all. I'm looking for a CDC reference, but this was also the rationale presented in local media reports.

If you're really curious, Ars Technica has a really good writeup of all of the relevant studies.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/04/should-you-wear-a-fa...

Most of the research above assumed either surgical or N95-style masks. There was one study that looked at use of cloth (non-medical, non N95) masks, and this was the key finding (from Ars, not the paper):

Wearing cloth masks resulted in significantly higher rates of infection, the authors found. They also noted that in their test, the cloth masks were only 3 percent effective at blocking particles.

Regarding everyone wearing (surgical) masks to protect others:

In a study published April 3, 2020 in Nature Medicine, researchers found that surgical masks reduced the detection of respiratory viruses in aerosols generated by infected people breathing or coughing in a breath-collecting machine.
Isn't this (operating at a loss until you steal enough market share from competitors to beat them) illegal?
Why the coronavirus lockdown is making the internet stronger than ever
> The virus might have multiple modes of transmission. Closing 2 of them reliably a great deal.

Sounds reasonable, but how is a face shield a reliable way to close a mode of transmission if people aren’t spitting liquid in your face?
Even if they do work, they aren't too loud, and there aren't any legal issues... are they really worth it? Do they make any sense?
Thanks for the question! The goal of skipping RNA extraction is to decrease the amount of labor necessary for processing samples and also to eliminate a dependency on RNA extraction reagents that have recently become difficult to find. The FDA is very strict about the specific brand and model of kit you use, so showing that you can swap out one RNA kit for another is actually very useful because you will have alleviated some of the supply chain strain (although I agree at high enough load both supply chains will then become limiting).

The way currently available COVID-19 testing works is by detection of viral RNA. Since the amount of viral RNA in a patient sample is too low to detect directly, we first need to amplify it by PCR. However, this viral RNA is packaged within all sorts of proteins and lipids that could make it inaccessible to amplification unless they are first purified away. Furthermore, the sample is shipped in "viral transport medium", which is essentially a cocktail of chemicals designed to preserve the virus. Unfortunately, these preservatives often have the side effect of interfering with PCR amplification, so these too need to be purified from the sample.

However, since RNA extraction is usually the most laborious part of the assay, there has been a lot of interest in optimizing the amplification so that it is resilient to all of these impurities. The preprint referenced in our manuscript (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.20.001008v1) gave us the initial idea that this could be possible, and much of it comes down to the choice of amplification method (e.g. choice of enzymes and buffers) that you choose.

However, even when you choose a "good" enzyme and buffer, you will still suffer an amplification penalty, and this will cause you to return a false-negative on some affected samples because there was so little virus in the sample to begin with. The innovation we have is to spike-in a correspondingly low level of DNA to the reaction mixture. That way, if you see the low level of DNA without seeing any viral signal, you can be assured that the amplification still worked and that there truly is no virus in the sample.
For Bob to trust Alice not to do something dumb like installing something and never updating it is another matter though.
>Trump can't compete, intellectually, with any of the Top-20 candidates on the left.

He couldn't with any of his own fellow candidates either, and it doesn't matter. Mental fitness is, as you say, entirely partisan - only ever mentioned when discrediting an opponent, but not actually relevant. Americans hate intellectuals almost as much as they hate politicians, they associate intellect with effete globalists and cultural Marxism, and scum of the earth "experts." Trump was the only candidate willing to joke about the size of his dick and call people petty names, so he was a shoe in.

It's not as if Trump was a brilliant orator, noble statesman and Rhodes scholar until at some point during his term he degraded to the state he's in today. He's exactly the person he was when he won, nothing new is known about his personality, beliefs or qualifications.

The Republicans were very successful at poisoning the well around Hillary Clinton and the Democrats didn't help by picking an establishment candidate in an anti-establishment election. But then, there were conspiracy theories around the Clintons going back to Bill's tenure, so intimations that maybe there was evidence of treason and felony crimes in those leaked email and something something satanic pedo cult and maybe she did some murders already had a receptive audience. Joe Biden doesn't have the kind of heat, though.

The only question to me is whether or not Democratic voters stay home in droves again - I assume most Republicans who vote will vote for Trump either out of party loyalty or actual fealty. Biden probably can't win many of them, so to me his job is to manage attrition from his own side, particularly from voters who wanted Bernie or someone more radical.
"Microsoft buys corp.com so the other bad guys can’t"
No, "theory" is simply a provable "hypothesis". Doesn't have to be proven, just provable.

The thing is, a theory can never be completely proven. We can never completely discount the possibility of making a new observation or experiment that disproves the theory (hence "falsifiability").

That's why, for example, the "germ theory" is a correct term, even though its probability of being correct is so close to 100% that we could just call it the "truth".
How to to Build a Worst-Case Scenario Using a SaaS Financial Model
Cool. I see you're doing a regular (not compensated) horizontal sum in a loop. Horizontal sums are slow, but I'm guessing you wanted to have exactly the same result as if the sum was calculated sequentially (for doubles)? Do you know if any databases use more accurate summation methods (compensated summation)?
My point that you quote is about dependencies. If A depends on B, they are not independent, by definition.
I don't know if apple came up with the simple design, but it seems that you could make that with any plastic bottle and a lace.
Yeah I'm surprised no one else questioned this. If I'm being blunt, when I hear "this person is sending me secret messages when they talk" the first thing I think of is paranoid schizophrenia. Also "my device is bugged and someone is listening" sounds quite paranoid. I'm not saying the OP is wrong, but the vibes are there, and I would recommend they talk to a medical professional.
Trump Threatens World Health Organization Funding
Roche 6600/8800 instruments are state-of-the-art automated RT-qPCR machines. We need them as well as other COVID-19 testing instruments.

That said, it is easier to ship the test kits than scale the instrumentation. Both Roche and Abbott still need to build hundreds of their instruments before the kits that they are shipping out this week can be used on the daily rate that they are trying to get to. I am not sure with Roche, but Abbott estimates the end of June to have enough machines shipped to achieve 50K per day capacity on their instruments.

Another potential problem with new instrumentation is that reimbursement for COVID-19 tests is very low ($30-$50), so it becomes financially difficult for hospitals and laboratories to buy very expensive instruments and also pay for test kits that cost $30-$50 per test, on par with reimbursement.

We try to avoid both issues by utilizing a currently unused Sanger install base and low-cost reagents.
There's also TVeon

https://tveon.com
Pandemic Dashboard: 3
I recently made a career transition from SWE to DevOps/SRE role. The big difference is tooling - IaC tools like terraform/ansible/chef is a must because automation is key. Those are also like scripting languages (declarative/procedural) instead of OO.

Generally requires a different thinking too - when you develop code on localhost you can ignore all the networking constraints, monitoring, logging etc.

In a production system those components are critical, so the focus becomes more on understanding how the full system functions, rather than just the business logic of the code.

A lot depends on experience but I think in general it's better to move from Dev -> DevOps than from Ops -> DevOps. Especially now that IaC is the primary tool that you would use.
Work is still happening on them, at least as recently as last fall. A co-worker headed back to Amazon to go work on that team.
The cute little emulator, which was linked in the article: https://github.com/bordplate/js86. I am curious how they came up with the ABI for variadics, though…
I think the question is what are they going to do with $1B though? Like why would they ever need that much money? I have the same question about a bunch of unicorns like Lyft and Uber. Their core offering hasn't changed all that much in years. My only guess is that it's like Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy where they have spend 10% of operations and 90% on running their complaint department.
You have any idea how difficult it is to fly drones in some automated fashion in an urban environment? That's an NP hard problem not solved until we have general AI.
https://ejstembler.com

I've had a blog since 1998, though my posting frequency has waxed and waned over the years. I use it as a partial résumé and also as outlet for my interests. Mainly, Software Engineering, Machine Learning, Data Science, Electronics, Robotics, Cooking, DIY, Cars, Travel.

Last year I had a falling out with my blog host, GoDaddy. They convinced me to upgrade up a level ($3xx). Though when their site transfer service didn't work they said they'd have to charge me another $150 to get the back-up. That's when I cancelled all of my accounts with them. I didn't like WordPress/PHP anyhow. In my haste to cancel GoDaddy, I forgot to export my content from WordPress. That's when I slowly starting writing my blog from scratch using Crystal, Kemal, and Bulma. Some of my content I was able to retrieve via scraping the Internet Archive, and some I was able to extract from Mars Edit by parsing the Content.plist files.

I'm very happy with the blog code and utilities I wrote, it was a fun exercise. Now I need to dedicate more time to writing...
Hi, I would like to use docker-compose without using docker. Specifically, I’d like to run devil box (php development environment) on fedora using pod man and docker-compose. Is that possible now?
AirBnB being in trouble is great news for a lot of people in SF. I look forward to seeing one bedroom apartments back under $500k.
You can take risks on the job and learn as you go. If you have a good manager they will take your career goals into mind when deciding what you are doing on a per-sprint basis.

A great manager will allocate sprint points to you exploring a new area of technology as long as you can somehow realize value for the business as a result of that exploration.
Who said anything about Trump?

Geez, talking about people with "singular issues."
Those systems process up to 384 or 1056 samples in ~8 hours. The proposed method should support a similar volume (even a bit higher) than the Roche 8800, but with a different large installed instrument base. So this should add a lot of capacity to that qPCR.
Hi and thank you for the efforts of your team.
What can I do to have my country becoming ready for your solution when and if this will be available?
you could fix this pretty effectively with the Content-Security-Policy: sandbox header, which would just deny all same origin policy access
Google suggests Marriot has 176,000 employees, and Hilton 169,000. So AirBnB is massively smaller, still.

Underestimating employee counts is a phenomenon similar to underestimating software rewrite costs/time. The happy path seems simple... but then there's thousands of marginal features or requirements that have come up over the years that make the thing more viable that all take more people and more time.
They have 13000 employees. That's a lot of money in salary alone
All of the above and more. Cost too much, don't work in most areas.
> generally shouldn't raise debt, what are you going to pay the interest with, your negative profits? You should be raising equity.

And that's the reason why the SBA loans that are part of the stimulus package are not going to save the small businesses they are supposed to be saving.

Anyways, I can relate. I raised money through convertible notes instead of equity, because reasons. Then when we didn't do a valued round soon enough (2 years expiration), one of the investors called his note, sued, forced us into bankruptcy, bought the assets at auction, and is now suing me and my cofounder personally to repay his note.

So, never doing that again. Debt is not a very good financing tool for small businesses that are exposed to a lot of risk (almost all of them right now).
>But in terms of career progression and job safety, the risk is just way too high, at least for me personally. I save the highly mathematical stuff for a hobby.

I think the sad truth is that this is the reality of work no matter if you are a Data Scientist or not. What you thought you would be doing to show your worth and climb the ladder gets blurred in with KPIs you didn't set, politics you didn't create, goals and deadlines you had no input into, etc. One of the unique challenges you can face as a Data Scientist is that you may interface with people in many different groups, all of which have different goals which may be in conflict with each other. Compare this to other roles where you ultimately only follow the goals of the organization you report into.
Thank you for your kind comment! We would consider offloading to a GPU when the time is right. It feels right to fully utilise CPU capabilities before jumping to GPU.
Large single record seems to work fine testing from BIND via Windows nslookup as long as you obey the 255 character per line rule i.e. split strings "like" "this" at least every 255 characters.
Exact two books I recommend people (only in reverse order).
Currently, all three.
Couldn’t this actually be useful in countries that block Wikipedia?