skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You just convinced me not to use a chainsaw. Thank you for making me aware of the wound thing. I have heard that the sharper the blade, the cleaner the cut. I would imagine the reason for chainsaw sepsis would be due to being all greasy and blunt, compensated by motor power?
Next: COBOL 30 day bootcamp with guaranteed job at the end.
This used to be very common in Italy, particularly near community centres, libraries, and political-party locations (in the latter case, of course, it was restricted to specific newspapers). It took a lot of maintenance (vandalism, weather, etc) and slowly disappeared with the multiplication of media channels. Still, it was a very low-tech/high-democracy way to disseminate information. You can still read newspapers for free in libraries and cafes, but obviously it’s not the same (you cannot discuss with others at a library, and cafes will typically stick to sports and local news to avoid alienating anyone).
There were many languages which had support for records. Here is an example in Turbo Pascal:

program PBook;
type
EntryRec = record
Name: string[32];
Phone: string[30];
end;
var
Entries: File of EntryRec;
Entry: EntryRec;
C: Char;
I: Longint;
begin
Assign(Entries, 'entries.dat');Reset(Entries);
repeat
Write('Phone book, what to do? (Enter, List, Modify, Quit) ');
Readln(C); C:=UpCase(C);
if C='E' then begin
Write('Name: '); Readln(Entry.Name);
Write('Phone: '); Readln(Entry.Phone);
Seek(Entries, FileSize(Entries));
Write(Entries, Entry);
end else if C='L' then begin
Seek(Entries, 0);
while not Eof(Entries) do begin
Read(Entries, Entry);
Writeln('Name:', Entry.Name:32, ' Phone:', Entry.Phone:30);
end;
end else if C='M' then begin
Write('Entry number (0..', FileSize(Entries) - 1,'): ');Readln(I);
Seek(Entries, I);
Read(Entries, Entry);
Write('Name (', Entry.Name, '): ');Readln(Entry.Name);
Write('Phone (', Entry.Phone, '): ');Readln(Entry.Phone);
Seek(Entries, i);
Write(Entries, Entry);
end;
until C='Q';
Close(Entries);
end.

Many BASIC dialects, like GW-Basic, also had support for record-based files. Though since they often didn't have explicit type support these records were defined in terms of how many fields and characters per field would fit in a record, but still you worked with what was essentially a flat-file database.

And of course there were the more high level "4GL" languages that combined a full database and a (mostly) general purpose programming language, like dBase/FoxPro/etc. These also had features like a visual form editor that allowed building data entry and manipulation applications quickly.
Yes, two of my favorite comic artists from the 90s. I was clearly in the target for this soda, although I have never been into soda. Maybe that was the error.
I'm not a doctor but it is my understanding that the traditional flu is an impractical target for this type of contact tracing due to various reasons and would not make much sense. At any rate, this is a huge measure even if the privacy impact is limited. As a German I don't particularly like tracking of any kind and am relatively certain that extending the measure beyond the scenario of a pandemic wouldn't go over well with the population where I live.
Same here. Yesterday I just had a chat with my brother-in-law who runs the emergency room in a large hospital in Lower Saxony which is depicted yellow. From what he told me yesterday they are far from exceeding their capacity even giving me some numbers.
AEC Free Software Directory
I don't have numbers, but it's mentioned that many recovered patients have low amounts of antibodies and immunity could be more a temporary affair.
I am sorry you feel like that, and, as an immigrant myself (Brazilian born, with Hungarian heritage, living in Ireland), I hope our species learns to embrace our cultural diversity.

I'm often reminded that we are just a couple hundred thousand years of human on top of many millions of years of monkey, and that we should be patient with ourselves.
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1105/
I've bought AirPods Pro in early November right after they were released. From my personal experience, the background firmware updates have had a very noticeable effect. I can attest to the perceived weakening of ANC (as opposed to the initial firmware) the article mentions.

One firmware update has even rendered one of my AirPods Pro practically unusable due to a strange clicking noise that would occur whenever I was walking/running with ANC enabled, likely due to accelerations acting upon it. I was convinced it was a hardware fault and was ready to return them until another firmware update fixed the problem (until now at least).
Thanks for the info and for offering help. I will definitely reach out to you in case I need more info on your setup.

Wishing you best for your app.
You laugh, but surely there is a case for standard of static html+css these days to do 95% of what pdf does.

I don't think anyone is motivated enough to make that standard, however.
Every human has a history, a universe of itself, of utmost importance to close friends and relatives. Which fades as time goes by. Maybe it is all stored in the fabric of matter and time and can be retrieved by some future technology. Which can be a solacing thought for those that have friends and relatives buried in anonymous graves, but until such time; this is a heartening project.

Something for other graveyards to pick up? Even those named tombstones say little about those buried there.
If /dev/zero is an infinite source of zeros, then why doesn't the minor device number specify which byte to use? Then you could make character special file /dev/seven that was an infinite source of beeps! There have been so many times I needed that.
They should enlist dragonflies. A few years ago I was chased by this type of hornet in rural Japan and was saved by a dragonfly that intercepted it in a dramatic takedown.
I’m not sure about this. Define your “erroneous” state as “halt”. Now the question becomes, for a systems that halts, find out how it reached this state. The mathematical answer to this is simply the description of the Turing machine that produced this state. Whether you can understand this description or not isn’t relevant.
I would have thought that more blogs were on dev.to than these technology analytics suggest.

Their stack is Rails+Preact.
The thing is that stuff like exact versions, super outdated software (especially browsers), changing passwords every N days and making it unique is a part of being allowed to pass some kind of security audits.

If you combine paranoid-level security with non-technical and often lazy users, and add cost-cutting all around, you get something like described here.

I know that from my father working in the IT department of a large corporation.
Link to the raw file is broken - Try this http://dannysalzman.com/files/hn-blogs.csv
> I strongly disagree with the statement, that we have "too few sick" here in Germany.

We want to be close to maximum capacity (but just under) though, and we're not. If "the curve" is too flat, it gets drawn out much more than necessary, and nobody should fool themselves into thinking that this can be a permanent setup. You'll need martial law if you want to confine everyone to their homes for 12+ months.
UK cycle shops in top gear to handle coronavirus rush
In my experience clients make business decisions that trade-off reliability, robustness, high-avaibility, etc. all the time. Because they can.

Just look at the F31, recently they opted to "test in prod" for a lot of components. And not because of the engineers/developers.

Were it a nuclear reactor control software they wouldn't have decided that way. (Hopefully.)
This is "special offer" for home usage (in Europe for 249€ excluding VAT). Also "Comes with a FREE 30-day Joan Home plan trial" that I can't find anywhere on they page how much it cost or what is providing. Does it even work without this plan?

Jean-6 that's the same device plus front light cost 549€ (without VAT) and monthly premium plans.

https://getjoan.com/shop/joan-6-1/

https://getjoan.com/pricing-plans/
De-paywalled: https://archive.is/R5FRP
I read Gleick's biography, and it says:

"The divorce had a fleeting life in the national press--not because Feynman was a celebrity, but because columnists and cartoonists could not overlook the nature of the extreme cruelty: Prof Plays Bongos, Does Calculus In Bed. "The drums made terrific noise," his wife had testified. And: "He begins working on calculus problems in his head as soon as he awakens . . . He did calculus while driving his car, while sitting in the living room and while lying in bed at night.""

As far as I can tell they went through that route so they could get a quick divorce and not have to go through a cooling-off period.
No, the only issue with the CoC is that it seems unable to resolve the situation. They have a CoC board but apparently it won’t act in this case.
Hyper localized association. Like, for example, a dissident organizing a local chapter of some organization who disperses information via in person hand offs of handwritten papers every. In this example, their hand off point, in a small town of tens of thousands, is the Saturday farmers' market that runs from 8 until 5 or so. They and their conspirators all went to the farmers' market regularly before so it's completely natural for them to appear within 5-10 meters of each other a few Saturdays a month (usually because the three most popular food trucks have long lines right next to each other). Except now "evil" can roll up the ringleader and see a pattern of who passed within an arm's reach every time the ringleader got a message from the head organization without actually spending the resources to surveil anyone in person.

"Evil" usually doesn't care enough about most people to spend significant resources surveiling them. The danger in dropping that threshold is that "evil" invents new ways to exploit any efficiency.
The Politics of Traffic Engineering
Trust me, you are getting chipped, it's just a matter of when. Your government and healthcare system might have been neglected, but surveillance capitalism has a plan.
There is a more detailed interactive map of critical care bed capacity created by researchers at Konstantz University.

Visualization: https://coronavis.dbvis.de/en/

Press release (English): https://www.campus.uni-konstanz.de/en/science/university-of-...
I don’t understand why the problematic individual is not named. I guess most people in the pytest community know who it is, but other communities need to be warned too, in case s/he moves on to some other project.
When is that "not so long ago", exactly? Corruption in republics is as old as republics themselves, and US was no exception.
C++ or Java seem like great alternatives. And I don't get the reference to VB6-- in 2005, it would still have been Java, and in 2015.
Many old games used vector art to compress things. I'm guessing that would also work for many app icons.
I had to solve this problem a few years ago. My solution was as follows:

1. Convert PDF -> multiple individual SVG files. (I probably used Cairo)

2. Use Inkscape to set your fields and name them like Django template variables.

3. Store these prepared SVGs in the file system of your app.

4. Call them when needed and fill them in with the Django Template rendering engine.

4a. Works with including images too if you convert them to base64 encoded PNG, then insert them into the SVG.

5. Convert individual SVGs -> individual PDFs. (Cairo)

6. Merge individual PDFs into a single combined PDF. (Cairo)

7. Deliver finished merged PDF.

After the initial step of preparing your SVG, which can take a bit of time to get right, it only takes about 2-3s to produce a fully compiled PDF and gives you all of the necessary functionality out of them - sans all of these chaotic intervening libraries.

I can't tell you how many months it took me to figure that out. It was a while though. When the system was operational, we were sending 10,000 multipage PDFs per day on a single Django instance on a T2 medium AWS instance.
One spoon can lose 13 kg
Whatever is reported to government agencies ends up in these graphs (Gesundheitsbehörde).
Amazon RDS Proxy for PostgreSQL in Preview
Is it possibly not a management problem at the core? I mean, I know exactly what you mean about suits like to ignore the future, but I've worked with a few 'wizards' who, once they've got the job under their belt, use it to keep other people out.

They'll not comment, help, document or whatever, and once they're doing that, they are uncontrollable. They can't be sacked because they're the only ones keeping the system running, and they won't help others train up. That seems a very difficult situation for the suits to deal with, even if they want to.
Can you explain what that's supposed to mean?

An intentional nuclear explosion is air exploding because it's heated by a nuclear reaction. Chernobyl was water exploding because it was heated by a nuclear reaction. It's the same thing, but it's also a steam explosion. Is that paper saying "Chernobyl was not an ordinary boiler failure"? Of course it wasn't.
I completely agree. I work with a large APL codebase and the main problem is not the language but the culture. Overly long expressions, one-letter variable names, gotos etc. make the code obfuscated.
Google Meet supports two million new users each day
Sort of . . .

I think it helps to go back and think of money as a physical object. I have some cash which I deposit at a bank. The bank holds the cash in a vault and gives me a statement telling me what I have. If I want to pay someone using the same bank as me, the bank can simply debit my account and credit the payee. The cash just stays sitting in the vault.

Now, I tell the bank that I want to pay someone at another bank using a wire instruction. My bank debits my account and tells the payee's bank to credit his account. However, my bank now has too much cash in the vault and the payee's bank, not enough. To settle the transaction, my bank must physically transfer the cash to the recipient's bank. The banks have large numbers of customers and handle large numbers of transactions, so they can net it all out and only transfer the difference.

Still, the banks don't really want to be transferring large amounts of physical currency everyday, so they deposit some of their currency with the federal reserve (think of it like the bank's bank). Then, instead of transferring physical cash, they can tell the federal reserve to transfer the money from one bank's account to another while the physical cash sits in the vault at the Fed (or more likely doesn't exist at all because the Fed is the source of truth).

This can all get several levels deep. If I wire money to a supplier in China, the Chinese bank receiving the money doesn't want to transport cash across the Pacific, so almost certainly, they have an account at a "correspondent" bank in the US which, in turn, holds an account at the federal reserve. Meanwhile, in order to facilitate foreign currency exchanges, the US bank likely also has an account at a correspondent Chinese bank . . . and I can't say anything about how the Chinese banking system works, but I'm sure it is analogous.
Agreed. However, I assume there are other ways to compile parts of the system so you can test parts of it, to make it bearable. But yeah, compile times like that would send me off a cliff.
"AEC Free Software directory" include free software related to the AEC (Architecture, Engineering & Construction) industry.

Here is "AEC Free Software directory" discussion thread[0] on OSArch Community[1]

[0] https://community.osarch.org/discussion/7/aec-free-software-...

[1] https://community.osarch.org/discussion/6/welcome-to-the-osa...
> the language is done, you can expect no breaking changes

Well ... I don't use Elm in production. But, I'm sure there are people out there who got gaslighted because of this ill-conceived move, and they can better explain about 'production readiness' story that was weaved around Elm.

> Hence the fact that it is v0.19

I also don't understand how can a minor version 0.18 -> 0.19 completly break backwards compatibility even if it is not stable. Well may be it's just Elm. They should have atleast thrown a `deprecated` warning and maintain backwards compatibilty till the next major version.
while most of us are aware that we are monitored as we live various aspects of our respective lives, the surveillance is often either cartoonishly obvious or very well hidden.

This explains how call centers work by closely attending voice affect (or whatever the software detects as affect)--It is informative and creepy as hell.
Ask HN: Do you wear a Neutrino-hat?
Neutrino-hats protect you from getting neuronal damage which could be done by Neutrinos hitting your brain. Especially people working for Secret-services often wear Neutrino-hats.
Do you own one?
I don't feel like I'm contradicting myself there. Yes, the scenario of pranks would be in scope for the overall system or framework, sure. Pointing it out as a leakage / flaw of the proposal by Apple and Google is counterproductive though in my mind since a) it can be easily tackled in those other parts of the framework and b) we don't even have a specific single framework to talk about on that particular matter so it makes little sense to spread FUD about it.

> But it very much sounds like this is also a very important part of the protocol then.

That might be arguing semantics honestly, the protocol as published suggests restrictions that are beneficial to the end user's privacy, sure. It otherwise does not dictate any particular government, country, or region where the keys are supposed go in case of a positive test results or how they should be verified / handled. That in my mind would again fall into the category of the overall framework that we do not have. What we have is a manual system that is ineffective and hard to scale. What this adds is a privacy aware method to tackle a tiny part of a digital supplement to this manual system.

That's why I'm so insistent on the in scope / out of scope, sorry if that comes across harsh but I don't feel it's particularly productive to construct hypothetical overall threat models based on this very limited technical proposal. Scenarios such as malicious distributions of tests are much better looked at in the context of a full framework proposal. I can come up with dozens of threat models that include unrelated things, that doesn't mean it's particularly responsible to share those imho. We're the technical audience that can grasp this, pointing out potential shortcomings is fine but they should be grounded in reality.
MIT 6.824: Distributed Systems, Spring 2020
At UMD, Chris Torek hacked ^T support to the 4.2 BSD tty driver, inspired by TOPS-10/TWENEX's interrupt character that displayed the system load, current running job, etc.

But the first version didn't have any de-bouncing, and would process each and every ^T it got immediately (each of which had a lot of overhead), so on a hardwired terminal you could hold the keys down and it would autorepeat really fast, bringing the entire system to its knees, while you could even watch the load go up and up and up!

And of course whenever the system got slow, everybody would naturally start typing ^T at once to see what was going on, making it even worse.

That was a Heisenbug, where the act of measuring affects what's being measured, with an exacerbating positive feedback loop. He fixed the problem by rate-limiting it to once a second.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heisenbug

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_feedback
Processing URL Session Data Task Results with Combine
Would be awesome if this could be integrated into gallery software as a 3D Ken Burns effect. The artificial camera would not have to move that much so that the inevitable artifacts would be much less visible.
Nah, it was a full cashier system including a bar code scanner attached through that big printer port.

I believe Circle K still uses pretty much the same UI, because that mouse-less keyboard interface can be used efficiently with one hand.

Not everything needs to be pretty to work well.
Not quite following this argument. The distance between the microphone and speaker is fixed (and small compared to the wavelengths of interest) because they are part of the AirPod.
Serious question, why do you use COBOL and "looking for a new challenge" in the same post? I found it a trivial language with a syntax that goes on for pages. It's entirely uninteresting. The only challenge is understanding any business requirements, and that's not a language thing.
Shouldn't that yield the inverse effect?
> I don't think the measures will be softened before May, but according to the authorities, the ICU capacity will not be overburdened. Stressed to the maximum, yes, but not (or not much) over capacity.

Yes, sounds like Germany nailed it

> Another issue is that with an R0 this low there will be a much lower rate of immunity. Which in turn means the restrictions can't be lifted because then the whole mess starts up again.

Literally no way to avoid this if you want to avoid overrunning the hospitals
“the most over-paid workers are often the least key”.

The ONLY reason that social distancing is an effective option is because so much is possible online and that all that infrastructure is good enough to handle the surge in traffic that they are currently experiencing. Imagine an alternate world in which these services were not as competent.
Looks pretty neatsf!
Recent Sony phones (1-2 years old) come with an app that does this with _really good_ results. AFAIK it only uses standard camera image + some AI magic.

https://3d-creator.sonymobile.com/

Fun fact: the team behind sonys algorithm were also behind apple maps 3d buildings.

Edit: the app itself, not sure if it works well with non-sony phones

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sonymobile...
Computer Vision on BeagleBone AI
There has been a long discussion on what the BB AI can and cannot do.
I plan to use it for running YOLO v2-tiny models on it, but owing to the poorly documented TIDL, there seems no proper method to leverage the on-board DSPs and EVEs co-processors.
Has anyone tried getting better performance on these boards using these accelerators or through inference optimisation using some acceleration library like NCNN (by Tencent) ?
Any advice ?
I have spent many hours reading your blogposts - I think it’s special, I mean somehow it stands out from ‘the rest’ can’t relly define why, it just appeals perfectly to me.
Please continue !!!
I read somewhere that they have difficulties getting medication and might running out of sedatives in the next weeks to take out people who have to be ventilated.

Edit: found the Article:
https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/corona-krise-lieferengpass...
Or any time a state of emergency is declared. Which, according to the Supreme Court, is pretty much whenever the executive wants it to be.
Thanks for sharing in your past experience, really good response you have there sir
There are definitely ways each approach can approximate the benefits of the other:

- Microservices can be deployed as processes on the same machine and communicate over the loopback interface or domain sockets without much network-related risk. This is still more complicated than function calls, and I wouldn't quite call it a monolith.

- Monoliths can have traffic for different endpoints partitioned over different deployment groups. So the behavior of one endpoint can be changed independent of the others. But a module deep in the stack, potentially consumed by many endpoints, cannot be deployed on its own in a way that affects all its consumers. So I wouldn't quite call this microservices.
Interesting to see the high numbers for GA. A bit of ‘do as I say, not as I do’ going on?
Wouldn't infrared be acceptable for data transmission?
What the decentralized web can learn from Wikipedia
Ask HN: Those of you working for Secret-services, what is it like?
Wirte a highlevel to COBOL Compiler