skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A question to people who might pay more attention to the functioning of Congress than me: Is much of their day-to-day business actually secret? If Congress is about to pass a bill which will benefit company X, can't we all go on to the House or Senate web sites and read the drafts of those bills and have the same "insider information" that they do? Are we just mad that they're paying more attention to what they themselves are doing and how it will benefit certain companies' stocks than normal people who have better things to do with their lives than track what Congress is debating from day to day?
Yes, but in this case the criticism comes from the majority position. Not in a harsh way, but still.

Regarding your other comment about the 15%. You might have a point. But I'm not into this topic deep enough for any kind of judgement.
Isn't 50W that is max allowed power on UHF (432MHz) for amateur radio ?

de R9LAJ
I coded COBOL and RPGII programs back in the late 70's, and I'd flip burgers before writing another line.
it would cause massive inflation

You seem to be saying that excess money would lead to demand-driven inflation. That is clearly impossible at a time when 16 million people lost their jobs in 3 weeks, and the downturn is global, so there is no growth area, somewhere else in the world, to use up resources.

One could make an argument that the withdrawal of labor from the market (last month, this month, and for several months) is a supply-side shock (slightly similar to the OPEC oil crisis in 1973) and therefore can generate some inflation via the supply-side losses. But that kind of supply-side shock is likely to be highly transient, considering how much labor is eager to get back to work, as soon as they are allowed to do so.
Coughvid claims to detect Covid-19 by listening to your coughs
When I tried it last year it was a pretty horrible experience because it installed client and server on Windows and macOS when I just wanted the client. I had to go in and kill some services for the server part. Having to do stuff like that for security reasons is a bit of a turn off.

The actual performance of NX was good, so I'll give them that. I think other people having licencing concerns, but I'm fine with it.
I don't think it's fair to assume weaknesses from 6 years ago still persist.

* I just tried to login with the first 8 characters of my password and it was not successful.
* Also this password is autogenerated and contains plenty of special characters.
* Their 2FA system no longer depends on the concatenation of password + token.

Also this reminds me of another HN discussion[1], which basically boiled down to the question of "Do you really think the only thing the bank does to log people on is to check the username and password?" I certainly hope not.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20998548
Sometimes the only winning move is not to play :-)

At some point it becomes irrational to keep holding USTs. I'm well aware it seems right now there aren't any other good options, but that can definitely change quickly.
> FOMO

I don't understand this aspect. In Slack/Mattermost/IRC I might regularly check the #dev channel, or I might not. In Braid I might regularly check conversations with the #dev tag, or I might not. Why do you think the UI encourages or discourages this behavior?
They've released their open-source version of the app, OpenTrace

https://github.com/opentrace-community/

Interesting in the Android version they request ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION (i.e., access to GPS) instead of ACCESS_COURSE_LOCATION (i.e., access to BLE). They have also include Firebase analytics (which captures city-level location data) into the app as well.
Buybacks are returning money to investors, same as dividends. When companies make profits that's literally what they're supposed to do. Look up the Accumulated Earnings Tax -- the IRS will actually tax companies to penalize them from holding onto profits. They're not supposed to hold on to profits, and no company is expected to set aside a year's worth of revenue in case of a global pandemic. That money is the shareholders', which is why buybacks return it to them as soon as it's made.

And you can't buy pandemic insurance generally, because no insurance company can cover "Acts of God" at a scale that will bankrupt the insurance company.

It is absolutely dumb and counterproductive policy to let companies, no matter if they employ 10,000 people or 10, to go bankrupt because of a global pandemic no business could or should reasonably foresee.

"Moral hazard" is a very specific term you are using incorrectly here. It refers to exceptionally and intentionally risky behavior by banks (usually) that the government deems "too big to fail". But airlines and other companies did not take overly risky behavior. So there's no moral hazard in this case.

There is zero evidence that companies like airlines, hotels or cruise ships were not "properly functioning". I don't know why you think they were improper or deserve to be punished. But there's no basis for it.
With https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron in my hands i stand my grounds and refuse to be disciplined into mindless tribalism.
Vim-iced – Vim8 / Neovim plugin for Clojure interactive development environment
The First Amendment can be abridged under the same conditions as the others: when it serves a compelling governmental interest. This is subject to the strict scrutiny which comes with abridging Constitutional rights; it must be done via the least restrictive means possible, through a rule narrowly tailored to achieve this interest. (In the case of the first amendment specifically, it must also be a viewpoint-neutral rule.)

This is a high bar to clear. It's not clear that all lockdowns clear it. (It's also not clear that, should they fail to clear it, there will be any effective remedy in the courts, because of qualified immunity.)
> ... it will be spread to an even smaller group of people...

Last time, the package was given to mostly big banks and GM. This time most qualified Americans are getting a check and small businesses are getting sizable support as well. In what way is the base of support smaller than in 2008?
> Then, and only then, you can change the constitution

You can also just suspend parts at will during a pandemic.
https://www.reddit.com/r/supplychain/ has a daily update. It starts with general Covid news, scroll down for the supplychain specific ones like air cargo, shipping lines, habours.
That might be your experience; I have no reason to doubt you. Mine is that no-one I know personally ever expressed any dissatisfaction with the speed of Firefox before anyway, and the only time people complain about the performance of pre-e10s Firefox is when they're trying to justify all the broken useful functionality that was caused by the change.
I can't stand it when adults do that.
There’s nothing in her linked in that would lead me to believe she has any idea of what she’s talking about. She was an engineer until a year ago.
He's saying that because this technology will exist, the possibility will exist. Plus this will no doubt not be the last emerging virus.

To answer your Q, Op: yes. Provided Apple/Google doesn't remove the functionality in a later software update.
I agree that the phone should be encrypted (in conjunction with aind), but people are likely to set weak passcode like "1234" (or finger pattern) because they want to open email/phone/twitter/maps/payment apps in a few seconds.

aind is expected to be used only for sensitive apps, with more strong passcode.
My father programmed in COBOL, but he never talked me about this. Anyone mind to share his experience? What would be to do this today? is it hard to learn?
Interesting. A good family friend of ours is a maintenance supervisor in the RAAF. Last time he invited me down to the hangar to let me see the F/A-18s up close, he was lamenting how the first batch that the RAAF purchased (which I assume are among the ones this guy bought) were getting really fatigued and increasingly difficult to maintain. He mentioned that instead of the routine 4 hours maintenance required for each hour of flying time, they were requiring upwards of 10+ hours maintenance per flying hour.

Sounds like these beasts will be expensive money pits to operate nowadays.
I give ENT a pass because it my mind it works as "humanity halfway from now to TNG-era UFP". Taking baby steps both outwards and inwards. It was dark, particularly across the Xindi angle, but not that dark relative to everything else.

I mean, it's like TNG was #EEE, ENT went down to #AAA, but everyone else (including post-ENT Trek) seems to be made at #555 or below. There's a gap, and I'd love if someone was making more idealistic shows these days.

> where you see the Federation portrayed as a true utopia, I don't.

I used to, then I rewatched the whole series as an adult and it changed my mind a bit. But then, I probably used the wrong word. I don't see the Federation as a perfect, flawless utopia. Just a vision of a world as close to utopian as you can get without breaking your suspension of disbelief. A world that works much better than the real one, and not just because of matter replicators and near-infinite energy availability. A word where the baseline for humans is much higher than it is now. And maybe it's unrealistic, it's too out-there, but every time I watch it I feel inspired to do better, be better. It's not something I usually get from other shows; they're all too focused on.

> than to take them as a stepping-off point for a discussion of how utopian ideals are no less susceptible to failure in practice than any other sort of absolutism, and how, while idealism is certainly not lacking in value, it cannot alone serve as the foundation for a mature sense of morality

That's fair, but again - while I love talking about this, I think our media culture spends too much time talking about all the ways ideals fail and high standards don't work, and too little time about what good ideals or values could be and how to make them work.

There's a certain positivity about TNG-era Star Trek that I feel, that I try to refer to, but continuously fail to express in words.

EDIT:

And I forgot one thing: the curiosity of space, the exploration angle. I know that a lot of astronomy in Star Trek is bunk, and a lot of what was accurate at the time of filming didn't age well, but there was a way in which TOS and TNG made people curious about space. I got similar vibes from a few StarGate: SG-1 episodes as well. I don't see any of that in modern shows - just as if familiarity with real and sci-fi astronomy was table stakes these days. It works for me, but I wonder how the young audience, not exposed to TOS/TNG, responds to modern shows.
This is a misunderstanding of the problem. It’s not the fact that it’s COBOL, per se, that’s the problem. The issue is with making changes to an entire system. A program written in COBOL may be at the center of that system, but that program is only one part of it.
Shades of Boris Artzybasheff.

https://i0.wp.com/farm4.static.flickr.com/3314/4554374811_dc...
The negativity here is rooted in disappointment from lack of progress and high pricing, not skepticism of the future.

Most of us have been dreaming of mounting an affordable A3-sized e-ink display on our walls.
Look forward to 5G :)
I can. Make a big splash with amazing ANC at launch, hope news media picks up stories about how awesome it is, then nerf it before that same media starts picking up stories about the crappy battery life.
Systems need to be robust against uncontrollable failures, like a cosmic ray destroying an image as it travels over the internet, because we can never prevent those.

But systems should quickly and reliably surface bugs, which are controllable failures.

A layer of suffering on top of that simple story is that it's not always clear what is and what is not a controllable failure. Is a logic error in a dependency of some infrastructure tooling somewhere in your stack controllable or not? Somebody somewhere could have avoided making that mistake, but it's not clear that you could.

An additional layer of suffering is that we have a habit of allowing this complexity to creep or flood into our work and telling ourselves that it's inevitable. The author writes:

> Once your system is spread across multiple nodes, we face the possibility of one node failing but not another, or the network itself dropping, reordering, and delaying messages between nodes. The vast majority of complexity in distributed systems arises from this simple possibility.

But somehow, the conclusion isn't "so we shouldn't spread the system across multiple nodes". Yo Martin, can we get the First Law of Distributed Object Design a bit louder for the people at the back?

https://www.drdobbs.com/errant-architectures/184414966

And let us never forget to ask ourselves this question:

https://www.whoownsmyavailability.com/
Whatever the truth may be it is certainly interesting how 20 million people can lose their jobs simply as a result of their employer reducing or stopping its operations for a few weeks. Regardless of the previous unemployement figures it raises the question of how secure were these "jobs". Is job security worth measuring.
Ok this is really awesome. Now if you would just go ahead and create an API for this, so I can set my TD Ameritrade to trigger trades off of this information, that would be great.../s
This is the best news I’ve heard all week.

I had thought that Apple and Google are in the best position to distribute contact tracing widely [1] but couldn’t figure out if they were working on it. It turns out they were.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22704460

Big tech can do good and we should applaud their efforts when they do it right.
That explains the stock's behavior. It doesn't explain the suspiciously fortunate timing of these transactions.
I was blown away by some reporting systems in COBOL that were surprisingly understandable and simple.
I have no idea who the OP is but a lot of the stuff is not accurate (I saw the previous post that was linked here). It is a slightly less factual ZeroHedge.

For all it's faults, ZeroHedge actually gets the mechanics roughly correct (although often doesn't get the interpretation right leading to odd conclusions).

But a lot of the OP is just...not correct (as an example, the OP says that countries were on the gold standard in the 1920/30s and devalued as a response to the crisis...wrong, they were on the gold exchange standard and devaluation wasn't the response, it was suspension of convertibility) and vague (all these posts are very wordy, poorly written, and seem intended to reach a conclusion that was arrived at before any evidence was examined).

I don't know why people are so fascinated with the idea that their currency is worthless. In the US, I assume it is related to the fact that much of America has German roots...where this "currency crash literature" is also a fetish. But if you are worried about inflation, own gold, own inflation linkers, and own good businesses. That is it.

Also, maybe the dollar will fall in value but if you are in the US and have USD liabilities, it makes no difference to you. Stuff that cost $1 will still cost $1.
Nobody is surprised that the stock went up or down.
Hmm.. I think it can be done effectively enough.

Public will may decline/increase depending on country and political climate, but enforcement, tracking and treatment mechanisms will have improved everywhere. So a 2nd quarantine need not be as effective as the first, and overall, governments that will want to lock down will be able to do it.

The real question is whether a political/economical calculation will delay a 2nd quarantine unnecessarily in cases it is necessary.
They're in a good position as a net creditor nation. While they have a large national debt and have been undergoing QE, they have a steady income stream from treasury bills.
Roughly ~20,000 per US citizen. It’s almost their yearly income for some.
Do you have a video that shows an example of this text entry system? I'm interested in seeing this.
Show HN: Write generative fine art in Rust
Yes, this is Antibody Dependent Enhancement[1], which is also something that any vaccine will have to rule out through human trials. These sorts of immune system traps and pitfalls are why vaccine testing takes so long.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibody-dependent_enhancement
An Analysis of 35M Jobs of Travis CI
The Gaussian is good enough for a graphic, but I'm not sure how much systematic error adds when it is used to fit the data. I don't have a good intuition or theoretical knowledge about that. I use the phrase "Everything is a Gaussian" all the time in the sense of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem but I'm not sure if it produce a good fit when you have only the left tail.

The problem with Argentina is that we had the usual exponential grow, and then we started a quarantine so the grow changed to a slower exponential. The automatic fit confuses the change in the shape with the region near the top of the Gaussian, so it produces a bad result. Sometimes it is tricky to fit a function [1]

Looking at the data, they look weird. I expected something like this image: https://imgur.com/a/eO8VyQ3 But it doesn't look like the data at all. In particular I don't remember the big peaks and the zeros that are in the data, but perhaps I was not paying attention.

Best wishes for you too.

[1] Have you ever fit a oscillating function? It is a mess. I only got good results if I pick the initial point by hand.
My URL box does not expand. I'm on MacOS with FF 75. Very odd. There must be settings that affect the behavior of the new address bar
Sonorism
Add in the WHO book for children to help with dealing with covid too:

https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/09-04-2020-children-s-s...
Yes, better article for sure, thank you.
I was thinking more of the nuclear RV in the book Snowcrash. The world had become anarchy, and the wealthy owner was unconcerned with safety.
That argument is literally called out as "the biggest push-back I receive" and the largest section of the article is devoted to addressing it.
This discussion is about Dianne Feinstein, not Pelosi.
While open source software really shines when lots of contributions work together and when everyone is polite, understanding, and well-reasoned, not every project is like that.

Sometimes it's hard or even demoralizing for the developer to handle all the feature requests that do not take into account the constraints. I've seen some GitHub issues like that and it's disheartening.
It would be great if

(a) elected officials could hold only cash, bonds, and index funds, specifically bonds and index funds that are open the general public and have at least $XX assets, to prevent engineering an index fund available only one one or a few people.

(b) pay them better to make up for the loss of gravy. Sure, the pay raise would not be sufficient to make up for the lost income, but it should be high enough that none of them could complain they can't live on the salary. Paying the senate majority leader under $200K / year is not enough, considering they often have living expenses in Washington and their home state. Lower ranking members get paid less. Pay the leader $1M/year and everyone else $500K/year and then prohibit anything but vanilla investments.
To be honest my thought is "what the fuck is this? It's probably 0-14, with steps of 1, but I have no idea what i would cahange to get steps of 0.1.
Just made it a little more mobile friendly!
Correlation doesn't imply causation. This was around the onset of mass production, electrification, and the first time that cheap credit was a thing.
I'm surprised that there isn't more discussion of leveraging the extensive location data that Google already routinely collects via Android and Google Maps mobile apps.

I'd love any feedback on this simple proposal for a way to enable individuals to contribute their Google location history data to health care organizations: http://covidcontacttracing.com.

This uses public Google APIs and Google Takeout to get raw gps data and inferred semantic locations from Google to COVID-19 response organizations. I've got a prototype that's essentially ready to deploy if anyone has suggestions for potential partners.

I think the Google/Apple proposal is very promising, but I don't see any reason not to also put existing data to work on this problem.
I thought IBM handles this by making VMs so old things can run on the new(er) things? Isn't it turtles all the way down? I worked for a company that specialized in distribution and circulation software for all the big papers at one point in time or another and it was all COBOL with some of the code bases as old as I was (a handful of engineers remained which laid down a few of them were still on staff, pretty cool resources since they've solved pretty much everything). I bagged a bunch of AS400 operating manuals which were on their way to the trash. I've got one on my shelf I wish I could share with you. Anyway to complete the anecdote one of the younger engineers found their way to greener pastures by creating a screen scraper of sorts for the AS400 to expose it to another API. My mind was blown at the time but it makes sense since these were the webforms of their day.
> The first is that it overlooks the negative impacts on consumer sentiment and spending, which are likely to persist for many months, if not years.

I sense a kind of broken-window fallacy here. If consumers want to spend less on things they don't essentially need, then why is that a problem? Isn't that a net-win for everybody (since what people don't want doesn't need to be produced) and the planet (for obvious reasons)?
Can we all agree that even though the freedom of assembly is constitutionally protected right, it is a stupid idea to exercise it during a pandemic?
> If you aren't educated on the topic, how can you tell if there is good analysis or not?

Even people who are educated are systematically unable to determine if a macroeconomic analysis is actually good, which is why you have multiple groups of extremely smart economists who completely disagree on what represents a sound basis for macroeconomic theory.

Economics as a field is generally unable to test these theories against reality, probably because any predictive failure can be, and is, written off as “there were confounding variables, but the fundamentals of the theory are still good”.
Arq Backup 6
COBOL programmers rise!
FIR filter alone cannot do this, but combined with special coding like Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DSSS) does it pretty well. For example, CDMA and GNSS benefit from using DSSS.
The timescales that matter are:

2010 - Root zone signed
2012 - Base DANE specification
2013 - First DANE SMTP draft, Snowden
2015 - SMTP DANE TLS RFC
2015 - DANE live at udmedia.de, mailbox.org, posteo.de, xs4all.nl, comcast.net, debian.org, freebsd.org, ...
2016 - DANE live at web.de, gmx.de, transip.nl, domeneshop.no, ...
2018 - one.com, ...

Along the way, support for DANE in SMTP for Postfix, Exim, Halon, PowerMTA, MailChannels, ... Also OpenSSL and GnuTLS and now 1.88 million domains with DANE MX hosts. It has taken me seven years to get real momentum behind DANE for SMTP, and will likely take another seven to see how it plays out...

You may not have the patience, but I am prepared to play the tortoise racing the sleeping hare.
To be fair HN is probably not LinkedIn's typical audience :P

I say this as a techie who embraced the Dark Side and started using LI a few years ago...
They can have services and still respect social distancing just like the supermarkets. Let's not get crazy here with the authoritarianism.
What are the worse long-term implications than people dying?
Coronavirus disease: Harms of exaggerated info and non-evidence-based measures
Suppose I have a religion where we perform a human sacrifice of a random passerby every year on Easter. Can the state stop this religious practice?