skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Robert Glass wrote a series of articles in the 80s and 90s defending COBOL. I once wrote him (the old fashioned way, with an enclosed check!) to get back issues of his old printed newsletter because I wanted to hear what he had to say about it. Those don't appear to be online, but here's an article he wrote in 1997 for CACM:

https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Cobol+-+a+contradiction+and+a...
The Road Back from Covid-19: Masks, Tests and Tracing For All
Ah yes I turned off all the "smart" features I could. I don't trust Samsung with anything. I use a Chromecast for streaming needs, it's very reliable.
To protect the elders, yes, but also the young, the frail, the immunocompromised, the asthmatics, the poor, the homeless; human life in general. Also, we are attempting to ensure people going to the hospital for anything else are still actually able to receive care, as healthcare labor is limited and resources are strained. Screw the market.
How do you feel about contributing what you’ve learned to the documentation?
I think they're hysterically funny, though I'm having trouble imagining a use case for the leggings.

Clubbing? Throw on a long coat to cover it until you get to the club, then wander around making provocative ironic social commentary without saying a word.

That's all that comes to mind (and isn't an option currently, due to the pandemic).
> Finally, you are making a giant but unfortunately common logical error in using these already questionable death counts to make the case for an overreaction without attending to the obvious fact that without this "overreaction" every town, village and city on Earth would be Bergamo, where army lorries are conscripted to transport the dead from overwhelmed mortuaries, or worse.

Italy has the highest average age in Europe, and we know the virus is about 100X worse for people over 65 than it is for a 20 year old. Lombardy is the oldest region in the oldest country in Europe. The average age of the dead in Italy is 80.5 and has 3 underlying medical conditions. That's why it's so high there. I specifically called that out in the [EDIT].

I'd suggest doing some more reading.

The demographics in Gangelt skew older too, but otherwise they appear thoroughly average, and a totally reasonable representative sample. Especially as you yourself call out they were "particularly hard hit."
No clue who/what a moxie is (presumably some guy) and it makes this threads title seem even more absurd.

OP feeling like we all need to know what moxie thinks about this reminds me of this [Chappelle Show skit](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mo-ddYhXAZc) about getting Ja Rule's hot take on current events.
Yes, there were very large, long shutdowns during the 1918 flu pandemic. And they had more of an effect than what we're doing now, because people couldn't work remotely.
>But, no books have been cooked.

Just spiced enough to make them taste better.
Dark Mode with Custom React Hooks Using Local Storage
the person behind the double-ratchet algorithm used in WhatsApp and the inventor of Signal
Well, minors can't even vote ...
Is it not also murder to host an event bringing together people who are likely carrying a highly infectitious deadly disease to sit indoors with other people who are likely to die from that disease?
There's no better way to hide the truth and cook books than with extra irrelevant information passed as the most important one...
Filling in PDF forms with Python (2018)
If the web worked like that, it probably wouldn't be so popular today.
Well, that’s simple. If the dollar weakens and there is inflation, interest rates will rise. You don’t want to hold onto bonds when the interest rate rises. The price of a bond is inversely correlated with the interest rate.
Also if you add gait recognition, you can add as many masks and hoodies as you want, but you will not escape recognition.
If I were doing financial stuff, I'd probably use a language with a better type system than Java or C#
> Your lifetime odds in the US of dying in an automotive accident is 1:103 [1].

No they're not. The lifetime odds for the average American are. For opioids as an example, as someone who doesn't use opioids, my lifetime odds of dying from an overdose are essentially nil. The distribution is bimodal.

> This is fair to compare against COVID because due to its extremely limited propensity for mutation, the COVID mortality rate does represent what approximates lifetime risk. (i.e. unlike the flu, you won't get it again).

You claim this with great certainty, but it hasn't been around long enough to know that it won't mutate in annoying ways.

Further, it's still not fair to compare that way. In the past 2 decades, we've had 4 or more dangerous flus that aren't seasonal (SARS, MERS, H1N1, H5N1, COVID-19). Of these, most weren't infectious enough to be super dangerous, but two were (H1N1, COVID-19), each of which killed at least 100K people worldwide, and COVID-19 is on the path to claim a million lives worldwide this year.

That's not a once-in-a-lifetime event, it's once a decade or even once every few years.

> I argue the best testbed is the German study I cited where they actually tested... everyone.

And the flaws in that study have been noted elsewhere. SK is a better testbed since they also tested huge swaths of people, even those not showing symptoms, and

> CFR is not mortality rate

The CFR of the flu is .1%, which would make COVID more contagious, and 30x more deadly. I'm not sure why the mortality rate matters since given the higher infection rate, COVID would have an even higher mortality rate.

> Life's risky, and you're not comparing honestly.

And the risk from COVID goes up if everyone catches it simultaneously. The CFR goes up even further if hospitals are overwhelmed.
In the US they're classed as chattels, more or less the same as any inanimate object like a wheelbarrow.
How about you provide some proof? Like op did
Very cool work, but it's a little jarring to see photos of segregation, war and famine being used to show off the algorithm (https://filebox.ece.vt.edu/~jbhuang/project/3DPhoto/3DPhoto_...)
For reference WhatsApp is ~70MB (that's considered small) and a Facebook app is ~380MB on iOS.
yes, it retains way more heat than your oven rack or a typical sheet pan. The real question is how much better is it than a ceramic pizza stone? Better, but probably not a huge amount better.
Hacking – Scamwatch
There is no such thing as a 'toxic person'. There are people who do not fit in a team, there are people who don't fit a companies goals, there are people you can't stand.

The most difficult lesson I've learned is even the worst person in the world has their uses and I only hurt myself by not admitting that.

If I can't stand a team I move on as quickly and professionally as possible because life is too short to fight pointless battles.
PDF: http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/books/IntroCyb.pdf
I've been looking for a replacement for my smartphone, mainly because I don't want to be addicted to apps anymore, but also because I'm tired of charging it every 1/2 days even though I barely use it.

I stumbled upon the Lightphone II (https://www.thelightphone.com/), a gorgeous slab-looking phone, with an eink display, and I realized this was the way for me: battery life for days/weeks, minimal functionality, good looks.... unfortunately the price (350$) is way too high at the moment, I can't afford to put that much money into something that ultimately isn't that important.

I wish technology would improve though, because I'd really love to have a simple phone like that. No need for Android, only something like KaiOS would be more than enough.
Unless you are a very long term gold trader with very deep expertise, I would almost guarantee that the market knows a lot more about the correct price of gold than you do. It's not "expensive as hell" but likely fairly priced.
I disagree completely with this article. What I have seen that should give people pause about microservices is, if you are not good at building software (which most enterprise shops simply are not), microservices could potentially destroy you.
But your legacy monolith already brought you to your knees so you have little to lose.

Most enterprise shops simply are not mature enough to implement dumb pipe/smart endpoints not because theres something especially hard about doing it but because their teams and their business people don't really have the perspective or desire to successfully manage such distributed complexities.

Where the monoliths fail is in the idea that this distribution is not needed (it always is) and instead offloads this on to the use of many different integration technologies such as queues, message buses, caches, document databases, RDBMS sidecar systems that will share data inappropriately, cause unresolvable data consistency issues, and generally only solve local problems while creating global ones.

Microservices are the other end of the spectrum, if your design has anything to do with sharing significant amounts of data to complete a transaction, you are entering a world of pain. You can share some data at the API level but beyond that you will be in for a ton of trouble. Its true this requires more discipline at the design level and more discipline in implementation and operations.

The moral of the story is that if you cant level up to managing microservices with the horses you currently have, personally, I would leave it alone. If your 3-5 years behind the curve already as an enterprise shop, you may want to consider
putting your whole system into maintenance mode, and paying a competent organization to manage it, buy a startup or buy some COTS and call it a day.

As for the single server guys know this, yes you can make a ton of money scaling that out on a limited basis and selling your startup or IPO-ing. But know that as soon as you cash out, it will be someones job to completely rewrite your single server drivel to serve even one more customer or business need in a predictable, scalable, cost effective manner. See JBoss, see ROR, see any already dead on the vine monolith technology. Its over there in the corner of the office. Its called the trash bin.
As a georgist I think this idea is very flawed.

(not building housing can increase existing house prices... but is not necessarily a good move)
You do not die from the virus by parking in a lot, all things being equal.

And if you don’t die physically from parking in a lot, government can’t tell someone their interest in parking for the spiritual Bread of Life is categorically less important than a desire to ease acquisition of Hot Pockets and Cocoa Puffs.

If the lot is unreasonably dangerous when parking, they can mandate grocery delivery.
Entrants in this year's Darwin Awards.
No corporations do not and should not.

If your profits are 5% then for a year-long "rainy day" you'd need to make profit for 20 years and keep it in the bank without ever returning it to investors. That's ludicrous.

Look up the "Accumulated Earnings Tax". The IRS essentially requires companies to return their profits to their shareholders each year and not save it, or else face a tax penalty.

In the case of something unforeseeable like a global pandemic, both corporations and individuals need to be helped out alike. Companies large or small shouldn't go bankrupt because of something so unforeseeable, and neither should individuals.
Constitutionally protected rights aren't absolute though. And Churches are required to obey all sorts of laws already. Mundane the city can demand that a Church fix their leaking sewer lateral. And red tag their building if they don't.
Extortion emails back on the rise, says report (2019)
> You can know how to program without being a professional programmer.

Of course you can. You just… won't be a professional, and won't be held against professional standards (minimum output & quality, that kind of stuff). That's okay. But if you're going to get paid for it, you ought to be better than a random self taught amateur.

Though I suspect we aren't, in fact, much better than the average self taught amateur. That would be an indication that we still have progress to do.
Similar problem with Ada. 2012 standard came and for a long time only AdaCore supported it... Now going for 202x I'm thinking only advocating small changes that don't reduce ease of reading code...
In essence, this moving conversations from a “category” ontology (mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive) to a “tags” ontology. In a sense this is rediscovering email/list addresses with cc ;-)

One can set up “tag subscriptions” (propagating hooks) for tags, such that at the lowest level, the messages you see are all the messages you’ve been tagged in. This can even be made declarative, so adding/removing tags can re-jig who will see which conversations.

There is an obvious niceness to this approach :-) What would you say are the problems/challenges with this modeling of the domain?
It's not so clear that COBOL is to blame:

> COBOL “remains one of the fastest programming languages,” said John Zeanchock, associate professor of computer and information systems at Robert Morris University. “We get calls from big companies in Pittsburgh, like Bank of New York Mellon and PNC Bank, looking for COBOL programmers. The limitations of COBOL itself are probably not the problem with New Jersey’s system,” Zeanchock said, adding that a single mainframe computer could probably handle the processing needed for an individual state’s UI unemployment insurance system, even if the number of applications increased tenfold.

https://slate.com/technology/2020/04/new-jersey-unemployment...

The article goes on to note:

> When it comes to our broken social safety net, COBOL isn’t really the bad guy: blame Congress for underfunding the programs, and states for failing to make up the gaps.

And later:

> “We’ve known for a long time that even a much smaller crisis would lead to daunting challenges,” said Dutta-Gupta. He points out that during the Great Recession, state unemployment agencies were so understaffed that their agency heads spent shifts answering applicant phone calls. Even if states weren’t getting federal funding, they still could have paid for better technology with their own tax revenue. According to reporting by the Tampa Bay Times, former Florida Gov. Rick Scott and current Gov. Ron DeSantis ignored repeated warnings that the state’s website barely functioned.

This looks a lot less like a computer problem and more of a process and institution problem made much worse by chronic underfunding and understaffing.
The Netherlands Considers the Hyperloop
Thank you, that's a fascinating article and I'm going to finish reading it, but I'm ot arguing against languages that are designed to be terse and expressive to a certain mode of thought, but rather languages like JavaScript that are not designed to be terse and are deliberately made so at the cost of readability. I just don't find it interesting. It does not follow that the resulting machine code is faster or smaller, so I don't see the point beyond playing a game with language.
This is all case data, not population studies. The Gangelt study is different because they tested the entire population and not just people walking into hospitals. They found the CFR in Germany (2%) was roughly 10X higher than the actual mortality rate in town.

The CFR is always going to suffer from adverse selection bias at this stage because they're only including people sick enough to walk into a hospital, and not folks who were asymptomatic, and not folks who got mild symptoms and didn't tell anyone. That's going to be basically every young person. Only the old end up in hospital and they're dramatically worse hit.

Population studies are not directly comparable. A global CFR of 1.5-2.5% sounds right, but that doesn't mean that's a mortality rate. The mortality rate is closer to 0.37% based on the population study I cited.

You seem to be arbitrarily multiplying and dividing CFR by 2 to fit a narrative. I'd love to see other population data but I think this was the first and only study, which is why the numbers are much different than you're citing.
What I really disliked about this analysis was its lack of discussion around core PCE, something the fed watches very carefully when it comes to managing its monetary policy. It talks about "dovish", but really perhaps the fed isn't being dovish at all and is just desperately trying to maintain its 2% price inflation rates.
Ah, that makes sense then. Though I do think "Founder of Signal comments on new Google/Apple contact tracing proposal" would be a far less absurd title than "Moxies take on...", further adding "private" in quotes is a bit cheeky and definitely imparts bias into the discussion.

None of us developers here are dumb enough to think an api whose goal is to literally track and trace human beings is 100% private. The question is really, is it private _enough_.
The 14th amendment is one of the anti slavery amendments.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/amendmentxiv

The free exercise clause is part of the 1st amendment, and means just what it says. The federal government may not infringe on the free exercise of religion.

A concert may look like a religious gathering, but it is not. The legal barrier to prohibiting a religious gathering is far higher, and for good reason - given a simple perusal of history.

The 14th amendment has been interpreted to incorporate the bill of rights (which includes the free exercise clause) into governing the powers of the states as well. This was not necessarily the case prior to the Civil War.

It is true that gathering together is dangerous at this time. It is also true that it is dangerous to allow panicked officials to abridge our rights without due process.
I've played with audio software for a long time and I recently experimented with Active Noise Cancellation. There are a few things to keep in mind:

* A "live" ANC process has no control over the environment from which it receives the audio signals that it acts adversarially against.

* When transmitting audio waves from one medium to another, there will be latency. Perhaps not much, but it will be there.

If you accept these two positions, then consider this:

* What happens when a sound wave that is being combatted (via phase inversion) suddenly stops, or inverts it's own phase? That's right, ANC could potentially double the amplitude of the frequency being combatted.

* I imagine that ANC technology takes advantage of latency to ensure that they don't damage people's hearing, but the nature of ANC requires low latency in general, otherwise you can't be sure that you are combatting the correct frequency (at which point you risk doubling the amplitude due to abrupt changes) - if someone more familiar with the actual algorithms could chime and correct me I will happily stand corrected :)
Yes, I do. And thank you for the correction. Hello YC family...
No, you are not misinformed. Both RDP and X11 can send both drawing commands and bitmaps. However, as /u/moonchild says, only older programs seems to be sending drawing commands directly. Newer programs want to be fancy and uses toolkits that do their own drawing to have visual effects. (Witness the speed of Emacs vs. editor-du-jour)
You have to download the entire database. The check is done inside the framework, recorded ids are not exposed to the frontend apps.
In re: B5, I've a confession to make. I never watched it. I've seen a few episodes, of course, but I was homeless at the time it ran and I've just never gotten around to it since. I should probably go order the DVD set right now, eh? I know a teeny bit about the story and characters, and I've heard that it was written as a single super-arc, which sounds awesome.

Those Klingons sound more interesting than what I was afraid they were like.

> My additional complaint is the pressure put on inter-character drama and general "character development". As I often repeat, if I wanted to watch the deep emotional struggles of people and their relationships, I'd pick literally any other literal/movie genre. Sci-fi (and to some extent fantasy) is unique, because it can get away with extensive world building and exploring ideas that are hard to explore otherwise. It serves as a real-life holodeck simulation. And I'd prefer my sci-fi to focus on that.

I couldn't have put it better myself. So much this. And I find it doubly exasperating because there's so much written science-fiction to draw on, going back decades! Where is the movie/mini-series of "Moon is a Harsh Mistress"? ...oh! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress#F...

> In 2015, it was announced that Bryan Singer was attached to direct a film adaptation, entitled Uprising, in development at 20th Century Fox.

I wonder if that's still happening?

I think "The Legacy of Heorot" would work really well as a movie.

I know it's kind of a cliche (and more work than it seems) but I kind really want to start a sci-fi production house... just a little one. Y'know? Specializing in hard sci-fi mostly, but not neglecting the other, uh, dimensions worth exploring.
Nowadays there is a free enterprise client that does not install a server nor does it require admin rights. For me it works quite good, close to RDP.
The person you replied to said that C was the language of choice for speed and not rivaled by pascal or basic. What games were written in pascal or basic and known to be competitive with other high end games of the time?
Are CAP and Harvard so far in their bubble to realize that not every American has an updated smartphone that can even install new applications, let alone a cell phone at all? This also relies on people having the responsibility to keep their phone charged on their person with the app running at all times.
You have completely ignored the most important parts of that graph, which are the inputs and outputs at its boundaries. Recall that the halting problem, Gödelian undecidability and the Church-Turing correspondence place very hard limits on the ability of axiomatic systems to define the truth, even in an abstract sense. But we see this all the time in computer science and programming. Something which takes so long to compute that you can't distinguish between whether it's accomplishing useful work for a given input case or not has a completely different kind of conceptual characteristic than "discrete maths, graphs, boolean algebra, group theory..." There's less universality. More details. More arbitrary, capricious conditions that you nevertheless have to not just work around, but determine how to build resilient systems in spite of.

It is almost cruel to taunt practitioners working around the hard, messy, ugly constraints of reality with the beautiful, elegant, and noble idea of not just conceptual mathematics, but the ability to immanentize it. But, this does little to solve the inherent messiness of the world that the software interacts with, and the messy things that people do which affect what it needs to do.
Then why can't SEC have the authority to deal with congresspeople too, though?
In some parts of the world, "guys" (as used above) is deemed to be gender neutral.
I also remember a comparison between Barack Obama and Lee Hsien Loong. While President Obama was learning JavaScript for the first time in office, PM Lee had written a C++ sudoku solver prior to high office in addition to being Senior Wrangler (top math undergrad) in Oxford. No, hard intelligence isn't everything (in fact it's probably overvalued in most parts of our society), but it may be a reliable indicator of other character traits important for soft skills, like persistence, diligence, and thoroughness.

POTUS makes $400k per year. Singapore's PM makes $2.2M / year. It's hard to avoid thinking you get what you pay for sometimes. Personally, I would be much more inclined to consider public service if salaries for government positions were competitive with the free market.

If I can reliably purchase a George Washington or an Abraham Lincoln quality POTUS for $300M per year, I would consider that money very well spent.