skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you sequence a virus and it has no genes that are found in any living organism, then it's hard to say that they're related... since all our definitions of relatedness come down to sequence similarity.

We haven't found nucleic acids, as such, in extraterrestrial environments, but we also haven't been looking very hard. Nucelobases, but nothing that seems to encode information.
However, most conventional explanations for the origin of life include spontaneous formation of genetic information, driven by environmental conditions. If genetic information alone can be spontaneously formed, why couldn't the simplest viruses be generated by the same principle?
The hard part is exactly all those legacy APIs that are often Windows-specific. This is just a custom implementation of the CLR; it doesn't do anything about the libraries, so far as I can tell.
> This would be fraud.

I think 'fraud' has a specific technical definition - it requires 'intentional deception' or 'misrepresentation' or something similar depending where in the world you are.

If they decide to cancel your flight for business reasons and genuinely weren't planning to when they sold you your ticket you can argue that you should get your money back under consumer rights about paying for services provided and maybe contracts I don't know, but it doesn't really make any sense to claim it's 'fraud' - there isn't the deception or misrepresentation required.
CashApp is still quite useful. Although with people indoors there may be a decline of its usage in that there will be no reason to transfer money between people.
Your reasoning looks right if your employees actually are at 100% utilization. If they’re not, however, the marginal cost to the shop of labor is 0. (1) Thus, it’s better to prefer the option that lets you charge more labor hours when you’re light on jobs.

For most brick-and-mortar shops, it sustainability, not scalability, that dominates. If you’re tooled up assuming the market will stay hot, you’ll struggle when the inevitable downturn comes. On the other hand, if you can stay break even at 50% of normal volume, you’ve got a chance to ride through a recession with your business intact.

The comparison to software breaks down when you’re talking about products, because the shop is a reseller; there’s a pretty hard limit to the amount of retail markup the market will bear before competitors crop up.

(1) As it turns out, this isn’t completely true; see the other reply.
Why don't they have savings to get them through unexpected financial problems? Oh right: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-16/u-s-airli...

We can't be held responsible for their own financial mismanagement - likewise they should not be eligible for any bailout funds - or they can sell their stock on the market to raise funds.
It is! It's also why people are very much on the fence about them being alive.
Microsoft is the "bad guy".
>I just find it difficult to believe that an ICT3 role at Apple of all companies would be about programming language trivia

Fully agreed, but I don't think it is like that across Apple at all. It was like that just for that specific team OP was interviewing with, and it makes sense in the context of that whole team being Wipro converts. This is definitely unusual to have a team like that in the first place, so OP just simply got unlucky.

Given a company of Apple size, no matter how pleasant and competent an average team is, there will always be a few outlier teams that are just whack and awful to work with.

I can confidently say the same about my workplace. I like my team and org a ton (in terms of competency, how the responsibilities are assigned, etc.), and I believe that an average team in the company is very competent and high quality. However, I would be lying if I said that I haven't encountered at least a couple of teams in other orgs at the company that I would never want to work on due to similar issues.
For what it's worth, this design has been vetted by health care professionals and provides better coverage, as well as being faster and easier to print.

https://github.com/aon3d/covid-face-shield

Full disclosure: I work for Aon3d.
stock buybacks are rarely perfectly neutral for all shareholders. it's essentially a forced reinvestment in the same company, which is good for shareholders who believe the company is undervalued and already hold stock. dividends allow you to diversify right away, but have greater tax implications.

the repurchased stock can also be held or destroyed on buyback, which affects the timing of the benefits.

and lastly, buybacks are primarily useful to executives for their signaling value (e.g., luring less sophisticated investors into buying).

the benefits are not uniform to every shareholder, especially through time.
If you have some time, read a few books about how huge debt crises get resolved. It's fascinating. My friend Drew is a huge "bankruptcy geek" and eats this shit up.

A good starter book: "This Time It's Different", often referred to as "Rheinhart and Rogoff" by the authors names. https://www.amazon.com/This-Time-Different-Centuries-Financi... - great overview of how many nation-state debt crises got resolved. In general, most parties end up taking a haircut (not a total loss) and everyone gets on with their life.

Sears and Radio Shack are interesting cases from the corporate (not government) world. There are entire specialist law firms and financing companies that deal just with distressed debt.

What's crazy to me is how much this stuff repeats. Argentina has been a basket case almost nonstop for the last 20 years and yet, people still lend to them. Why anyone would continue to do this over and over befuddles, but just goes to show how crazy things can be.
kind of important almost title-edit-worthy to note this is an exploit and research that went on late-2017 until about mid-2018 no? Not that this is some current thing
Task Automation in Vanilla JavaScript
> lot of software we write is ephemeral and will one day either be retired or stop working.

You're giving me a lot of credit by implying the software I write works to begin with! Can we hurry up and get to the day with software like Facebook and Twitter stop working?
Of course - I'm not denying that 'stock buybacks' have a strategic impetus, of course they do.

Every financial decision does.

I'm saying that the popular notion of 'stock buybacks' as somehow a 'windfall' for investors is just not really true at all.

The notions that some individual investors are literally selling their stock, but instead of to some other party but the company itself, is not a big deal.

Stock buybacks are a rational and normal part of financial operations not some 'special win' for investors as some of the rhetoric implies.
Hacker Brought Low-Res Video Playback to Audio Cassette Tapes
How much will these sell for on eBay in 10+ years?
Hey, Apple still hired them. Apple is chosing to dilute its core engineering brand. It's not like an end user can tell if a "real engineer" wrote the shitty webpage that's currently giving them grief.
My feeling is that a lot of companies think: "We need a data scientist because all the big players also have one!"

In fact, they actually don't need a data scientist. At best they need someone who cleans data, creates pie charts or even worse, they relabel the database admin job as "Data scientist".
It is incredible how selfish people are. The frontline workers are desperate for any kind of PPE, but we still have random people, who are mostly staying at home, that want to get in the front of the line.
Because even though I probably agreed to a trade in the terms of purchase, a rescheduled flight isn’t a great solution; sometimes a rescheduled flight can mean the difference between a vacation and nothing. If I spend $5000 on a vacation (hotel and air) and I can’t fly there, I’m out $5000 for no fault of my own.
Every DMV experience I've had has been excellent with fast service.
Thank you for your work sir. I love Selenium.
Zuck used an LLC also, apparently for more control. [1]

One big reason is that he can time the actual donations, for tax purposes. That allows him to make big donations in years where he has large amounts of taxable gains to offset. If he donated $1B this year, he'd likely hit a deductibility cap (especially if he donated to a private foundation, as opposed to a generic 501(c)(3)).

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/03/technology/zuckerbergs-ph...
> the scientific method to do research on data

Exploratory data analysis is often overlooked and underrated.
Dopamine Drives Brain Activity
Who would pay for the buildings / decide who gets to live in which ones?
I don't feel bad for them ... they used the previous bailout to buy back their stock and then spent their profits to buy back more. Maybe they should put some of those shares back on the market if they need money?
But you have a lot of control over the web browser. You can run zero Javascript. You can write extensions. You can easily see network traffic and conditionally block it. You can block Google Analytics.

With native apps, you have very little control. You basically either run it or you don't. You can't just pick the parts you want to run. And you need to use a mitm proxy just to see what it's doing. The OS gives you no power here unlike the browser. A native app can send a request to Google Analytics on every keystroke and it's nontrivial to find that out compared to opening a browser's network tab.

Native apps have some advantages like performance, but they are no free lunch, especially when it comes to privacy.
square also has a large presence in online payment processing, though. not sure what % of their total revenue that is, but just saying, they're not 100% focused on point of sale.
I've poured a lot of time and effort into documenting my C++ TOML library, generally seeking to write the docs as I would wish to find them if I were a new user: https://marzer.github.io/tomlplusplus/

The docs are built using a spin-off of the documentation generator for the magnum graphics engine, which are themselves a really good documentation example: https://magnum.graphics/
I don't think any business plan accounts for half of the worlds population suddenly not participating in the world economy.
Appalling, but not terribly surprising, that white-haired old guys become candidates. While different, very qualified candidates were essentially ignored.
JIT is a compiler - bytecode to native code. Wine is not a translator in that sense - it doesn't rewrite native code to change the APIs it calls. It just provides an implementation of those APIs, which may (or may not) ultimately invoke some POSIX or X API.
Freelancer Directory
The government already has its hand in the food supply with all the farming subsidies it hands out. It can either change the subsidies to match the situation, or get heavily involved into the resource allocation as it has done in wartime.

As a good example, European agriculture is currently threatened because there are no foreign workers in the fields. The German government responded by better connecting unemployed workers to local farms, and by changing the rules to allow some foreign workers to come in.

That's just a hint of what governments are capable of. It pales in comparison to a war economy.
Really? I would consider unchallenged, systemic slavery to be a fairly important problem. Not something to be dismissed as less concerning than another critical issue. I am just surprised by the complete lack of news.

How many people do we think would choose not to buy a smartphone made in China this year, if they knew the supply chain used slavery. Sadly, I don't think people care - as long as they get the latest iPhone... (maybe why I am being downvoted?)
I hear it's only compatible with AAPL brand stethescopes too!
Flew them once. If I never do it again it'll be too soon.
Protective Goggles (like the 3M type) would be a better fit for most use cases. No need for touching or readjusting, having to be careful when looking down, etc.
Maybe the companies in question should save money instead of expecting the American people to bail them out in these situations. Every single financial crisis in recent memory has the same core group of companies not saving money and needing the government's help. Yet when it comes time to help individuals in need the government suddenly wants means testing and byzantine rules around who gets the help and how quickly it can come. Trickle down economics don't work. They just coat the economy in varnish.
No, I think GP is assuming that names are very complex, and even the assumption that people have a first and last name isn't always correct. You can just use a name field, and let people supply the name they want to use.

What do you really need a first and last name separated for anyways? Sorting? A salutation on correspondence? Sorting by last name isn't usually important[1], and you can generally use a full name in a salutation.

Depending on the domain needs, you choose the right representation. If you expect US citizens and want their name as entered on their tax returns or social security card, then you match what those can hold and note to the user that you are expecting those values. If you're just collecting a name to have a name, why put an extra constraint in there that doesn't matter?

1: Not to mention you then get to mostly ignore the craziness that is utf-8 and combining characters and cases and sorting.
Unprecedented glimpse inside quasar unveils black hole at its heart
> Because history shows they can be run at a profit with the same fare, at no cost to the taxpayers.

So can highways; Private toll roads are a thing. Doesn’t mean the National Highway System is bad.
It is a terrible limitation of Latin characters that it's hard to read vertically. However the hard coded as images labels is inexcusable. Zooming in causes the images to look upscaled and terrible.
not fair. it's not a normal service. it's a transportation service. If I can't travel on date X, traveling on date Y may be useless.

One could argue it would be useful for another trip to a different location. Sure. But because airflights prices are so shady (prices changing every day, prices that are different if you have a VPN connected, etc etc), the voucher could make you choose for the worst price.

That doesn't seem fair to me tbh
It seems like the arguments made in the article would more readily support the idea that viruses are spontaneously forming on Earth than in space. If viruses are spontaneously forming on other planets or in interstellar space directly, then they should be forming on the Earth as well. I think the Earth is more likely for a number of reasons.

To start, viruses are generic material wrapped in proteins. The functionality of proteins depends on their shapes and the environment strongly affects the shape of a protein. Viruses that exist on Earth have proteins that are stable on Earth. A virus that comes from a different environment would be liable to fall apart on the Earth. RNA itself is pretty unstable by itself (hence why cells use DNA), but there are plenty of viruses that use it as their genetic material.

Infecting host cells is another matter. Viruses are generally pretty specific with their host cells. They enter host cells by binding to specific proteins on their surfaces. Once inside they take advantage of the specific cellular machinery present. For example, the polio virus has a single strand of RNA that codes for a single long polypeptide that is then sliced at specific point by host enzymes to produce the final viral proteins. Some viral proteins act to suppress the defenses of the cell and the immune system in general. An alien virus would be insanely lucky to be able to infect local life at all, let alone reproduce and spread. Unless life across the universe is incredibly similar.

Given these thoughts, it seems like it would be more likely for viruses to spontaneously form on Earth than another planet (or interstellar space). Viruses forming on Earth would have the advantage of starting with organic materials that already work with existing life. The Earth is generally protected from harsh radiation and extreme temperatures. The most important thing is that any forming viruses would have immediate (relative to crossing space) contact with host cells to infect and evolve.

The only reason it wouldn't be happening on Earth is if the Earth is completely unsuitable for it. Even if both are happening, the vast distances and harsh nature of space should shift the equilibrium strongly towards native viruses. But if the Earth is unsuitable for it then how are viruses able to survive and reproduce on a planet that's so unsuitable for them?
Getting 501c(3) status can take months if not years. Most small non-profits start off incubated in a larger non-profit that acts as their fiscal sponsor. Even if they had an existing non-profit, this might go against the mission/budget/aims of the existing organization.
This is an ignorant comment; there are entirely legitimate reasons why those stores are still open. Alcohol withdrawal can actually kill you, or at least put you in the hospital, and having to hospitalize a bunch of alcoholics is the last thing the system needs right now. People also use cannabis as a safer alternative to pain relief than actual opiates.
I think there is a lot to weigh on many different levels about whether a bailout juxtaposed against buybacks is a good or bad thing. But I’m surprised by how little talk there is of individual investor opportunity. This seems like the bottom of airline stock prices. Here’s a list of their tickers: https://topforeignstocks.com/stock-lists/the-complete-list-o... … which stocks would you buy? JetBlue, American & United seem like bargains & no one can guarantee returns financially but lots of people will fly again.
Allows more flexibility, less disclosure, no forced distributions annually, etc.

Basically more control.

Emerson Collective (Laureen Jobs) is probably the most prominent example.
Off-topic comment / feedback about the blog post:

The author self-describes himself as "_Trusted_ Consultant" in the blog's subtitle.

The comic strips illustrating the article do not mention about the permission from identified license provider(s), and are cropped, does not help building trust - at least in my case.

Are they used with authorization from their authors?
We've decided as a society that it is acceptable to have massive oligopolistic too-big-to-fail corporations in control of critical sectors. We have no choice but to bail them out.
IANAL but I’m unaware of a legal entity that ensures non profit. Usually that’s just a tax assessment of 501c3 status. But charities themselves are corporations typically.
From his Twitter:

> Why is #startsmall a LLC? This segments and dedicates my shares to these causes, and provides flexibility. Grants will be made from Start Small Foundation or the LLC directly based on the beneficiary org. All transfers, sales, and grants will be made public in tracking sheet.

Private + non-profit combinations are not uncommon. I'm not sure about the specifics in the US, but getting the status as a non-profit acknowledged is also a PITA in some jurisdictions, especially if he dedicates part of it to non-traditional causes like UBI.
> They walk too close and there's nothing I can do about it.

Are you stuck in place? Can you not move? Do you have no voice?

There is a lot you can do, and other do about it.
Although others have replied to you, I'll take your comment as constructive criticism. Though the tone could be better.
Data science is correctly valued when you realize how relatively unimportant it is. It is a small cog in a larger machinery (or at least it ought to be).

You see, decision-making involves (1) getting data, (2) summarizing and predicting, and (3) taking action. Continuous decision-making -- the kind that leads to impact -- involves doing this repeatedly in a principled fashion, which means creating a system around the decision process.

For systems thinkers, this is analogous to a feedback control loop which includes sensor measurements + filters, controllers and actuators.

(1) involves programmers/data engineers who have to create/manage/monitor data pipelines (that often break). This the sensor + filters part, which is ~40% of the system.

(2) involves data scientists creating a model that guides the decision-making process. This is the model of the controller (not even the controller itself!), which is ~20% of the system. Having the right model is great, but as most control engineers will tell you, even having the wrong model is not as terrible as most people think because the feedback loop is self-correcting. A good-enough model is all you need.

(3) involves business/front-line people who actually implement decisions in real-life. This is where impact is delivered. ~40% of the system. This is the controller + actuator part, which makes the decisions and carries them out.

Most data scientists think their value is in creating the most accurate model possible in Jupyter. This is nice, but in real-life not really that critical because the feedback-loop inherently moderates the error when deployed in a complex, stochastic environment. The right level of optimization would be to optimize the entire decision-making control feedback loop instead of just the small part that is "data science".

p.s. data scientists who have particularly low-impact are those who focus on producing once-off reports (like consultant reports). Reports are rarely read, and often forgotten. Real impact comes from continuous decision-making and implementing actions with feedback.

Source: practicing data scientist
It's a team effort! I'm more of a fan and advocate for the project these days.
> Touching one's mask is infinitely better than the alternative of touching one's face

That depends entirely on if there is a viral build up on the outside of the mask.

Discouraging people from using N95 masks was specifically to avoid the private hoarding of masks.

But discouraging use of other masks (and N95) by the public is because they do not protect you if they are used wrong. When any air passed around a mask, then you are at risk. Using them right requires proper equipment, sizing, testing, etc... And getting people properly fit, etc was not something that was remotely practical for the general public. That's not to mention the materials used... properly protecting masks have to be made of high-quality and consistent fibers.

The current recommendations for wearing masks is not to protect the wearer of the mask. It is to protect other people. If you take it as a given that there is widespread asymptomatic cases of the virus, then you don't know if you have it or not. So wearing a mask is to protect other people from you. If you are wearing a mask, any virus that you happen to shed will be trapped as you exhale, or at least not be able to travel very far.

Unfortunately, any help that wearing a mask would offer to the wearer is often countered by the false sense of security that they bring. There are many people in masks that think they are protected so they can ignore keeping their distance from others. This is 100% wrong.

The best way to avoid germs from other people is to distance yourself from other people.
The ferries in New Orleans would like a word with you.