skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Every time evidence leans the author towards "viruses might come from space", I find myself leaning the other way.

My general view is that cellular life and viruses mutualistically co-evolved from life-like junk at the very beginning. Cells provide the metabolisms necessary to fight entropy. Viruses promote genetic diversity while acting as a stress-test to ensure cells can survive their environments. This seems separate from the trichotomy offered:
- Virus first
- Reductive virus
- Escaped genes

"If viruses originate from the cells that they interact with, one would expect there to be significant genetic overlap between the host and the parasite"

The generally small amount of genetic material in a virus is being used for viral reproduction. I assume most functions encoded in the genomes of cells are useless and expensive for a virus to replicate. Hence, they'll drop out; we'll be left with oddball viral genes for viruses to do virus things.

[clipped list of reasons]
"All of these facts together suggest that viruses are the raw material from which living creatures build their genetic material. They’re like bricks in a building, ..."
I think of viruses more as clipboards (like copy-paste in your OS). Great for moving info around, but wholly dependent on a cell metabolizing somewhere. Hardly building blocks.

"If that’s the case, it’s possible that the absolute simplest viruses, ones who consist of genetic information encased in a capsid made from a single repeating subunit, could be abiotic products of the cosmos. If that’s the case, we would expect to still find viruses as you got further and further away from the surface of the Earth."

Considering the density of viruses in the ocean (mentioned by the author), it seems a simple gust of wind would be enough to cover the earth in viruses.

I believe extraterrestrial life is nearly certain and that viruses can survive in space. I also think viruses depend on host cells to reproduce. A virus would have to land in the primordial soup to be of any life-generating use. By that point there would be enough lifelike junk for the virus to be an unnecessary step in the recipe.
A lot of COBOL software is running on IBM mainframes under z/OS. In that case, it isn't just COBOL, it is all the middleware and OS components the COBOL interacts with – CICS, IMS, DB2, VSAM, JCL, DFSORT, etc, etc, etc. Duplicating all of that functionality is an infeasible task. Duplicating a big enough subset that you can successfully port a real world mainframe app is achievable, and a number of commercial offerings exist which do that – e.g. Oracle Tuxedo Application Runtimes for CICS/IMS/Batch, Tmaxsoft OpenFrame, UniKix, etc. However, building such a solution is a huge amount of work requiring a rare skillset, and I doubt the open source community has the ability/resources/motivation to replicate that work.
Sure.

But for an equal amount of effort, raws and manpower you could get much more out of traditional manufacturing, much quicker.

The product is a very simple stamp, with very simple dies with little wasted material. Perfect for traditional production methods.

It's great people with machines are contributing to the effort, and empowering/informing individuals to be able to do so as well. But it's just done simpler traditionally.
Is there a link between pandemics and solar activity?
How is ZeroTier on dynamic allocation? Small code size is one WireGuard software security goal; minimizing dynamic allocation is the other.
> Never store firstname and lastname in the same field

funny, where would you store the middle name then? and the second middle name? married name in cultures where the spouse changes or double it? of course in normal form you need a name table, with an order column, and so on and so long.

anyway, this article goes straight to the notions everyone can fetch on any book and skip the interesting and diffiylcult part about database design, which is understanding your domain so that no future expansion is prevented by a wrong cardinality on a relation that was simplified from reality.

because if it's a user database you might get away with just the name, so you can address people during support calls. if it's an accounting database, you might want to know someone name at the time of invoicing, having multiple records with start and end validity times, and if it's a FBI database for protected identities you might have to have multiple name aliases referring to a single person.
How will life change post-Covid?
Unfortunately, that’s a good way to get banned from a service
Weren't they boasting about their microservices and how great it was a few years ago? I guess they're like Airbnb and all these companies that are continuously rewriting and refactoring their whole tech stack every year, gotta keep the army of engineers busy.
Yes, this is why I said "comes closest to the ideal." I would argue that Cuba, relative to its neighbors, is not that impoverished, and that being under sanction from all of the world's top economic powers has put a damper on Cuba's potential. Cuba is no paradise, but they have made some significant strides.
It's interesting how you refuse to answer anything I'm saying. You're simply proving my point.

And you know full well what it is. You don't need any of them. They're all dishonest. We'd be better off having honest conversations with each other rather than tribally organizing behind ANY mainstream media (colloquially called news, but they aren't).

And yet the only thing you can focus on is attacking your perceived enemy, ignoring the enemy you choose not to see.
This is all great in theory, but in reality there are hundreds of thousands of these parts being delivered to hospitals right now, and they came from lots of people with lots of 3D printers at their houses, hackerspaces, and printer farms.

We can definitely talk about what would have been better and more efficient, but in the meantime people need this stuff today.
The framing of open APIs disappearing because of bad actors doesn't ring true to me. In my view, the golden age of APIs disappeared one-by-one as tech companies realized they won their respective markets and consolidated their power.
Some counter-examples include Route Planning or determining where to locate a Consolidating Freight Service. If your addresses are not normalized, you lose the ability to see two addresses listed as "from city center, three lefts" and "from city center, one right" take you to neighboring locations.
The last part of that is an interesting theory. Would you expect to see a lot of relatedness between different viruses if that were true?
Are you talking about personal homes or other types of construction?
you should rename it to

Ask HN: How will life change post-Covid?
To Fight Coronavirus, U.K. Asked for Some Volunteers. It Got an Army
Damon Motorcycles Is Attracting Millennials with Safety Tech
AI is preserving our ability to converse with Holocaust survivors after they die
The world is a lot more nuanced than your manichean view is making you see.
If someone is facing me and a stream of airborne particles hits a plastic shield instead of streaming out to me, it seems pretty likely that I will be protected.

I'm certainly open to the idea that fluid mechanics are complicated and somehow air currents are going to do unhelpful things, but until I find someone with a paper on the topic I'd much rather be talking to someone wearing a face shield than not.

Plus obviously wearing a face shield will protect against self-inflicted infections from a contaminated finger.
> disposable

This is reusable, easy to sterilize w alcohol.
I would be surprised if there is the political will at docker to do this when it wasn't a priority for compose itself
If you are unable to provide a service people paid for, then you give them their money back. It's pretty simple.

You can give people an option to leave as credit (e.g., we'll give you $400 of credit instead of a $300 refund) but it should be just that - an option.
Quick summary to preempt more of the repetitive HN comments caused by not clicking through and then scrolling:

* It's an LLC instead of a 501c3 because that allows more flexibility. This is not unprecedented

* It's $1B of his wealth in terms of Square stock

* There is a spreadsheet to track where it's going https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-eGxq2mMoEGwgSpNVL5j...

* The order of operations is COVID-19, then girl's health and education, and UBI

* It's 28% of his wealth
They switched from per-user licenses to per-computer licenses. I am not sure how this works with previous lifetime licenses.

With my lifetime Arq 5 license I can upgrade to a single computer license with 50% discount and to a 5 computer family pack for 62% discount and I am not sure why the first option is even offered to previous lifetime accounts.
Hey thanks for clarifying it for the other user! I also agree with everything that you're saying, in this and other comments in the thread
Thanks for filing and discussing it. It's sad that this change landed from issue initially specified as "browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll should default to true" but actually ended up as "let's toss this option away completely and be like every other average browser". :(
Glad our service could resonate with you. Thanks for support!
There's a third option: building up cash reserves for the inevitable down times. This is one of those "privatized profits, socialized risk" situations. It's not attractive to save money when you know you can get bailed out or go through bankruptcy without too much pain.
https://ieftimov.com

Started it back at the end of 2014. I have been maintaining a twice-a-month publishing schedule (roughly) for the past two years.

In the past year and a bit I've been focused on writing about backend topics from a Go angle. Usually the posts are +3K words, with relevant code examples, explaining a deep technical topic. I always try to I take the reader from first principles and build the knowledge up from there.

Here are a few popular ones:

* 14 articles (and counting) on Testing in Go: https://ieftimov.com/categories/testing-in-go

* Understanding bytes in Go by building a TCP protocol: https://ieftimov.com/post/understanding-bytes-golang-build-t...

* Make resilient Go net/http servers using timeouts, deadlines and context cancellation: https://ieftimov.com/post/make-resilient-golang-net-http-ser...

* Golang Datastructures: Trees: https://ieftimov.com/post/golang-datastructures-trees/
I don't think it says that at all. You can't cherry pick two particular institutions and draw some sort of conclusion about "society". In this particular case it seems like the entire conclusion is based on nothing other than preconceived notions of what reactions "Stanford" and "Oakland" trigger in the reader. There doesn't seem to be any particular details about the actual situation at either location and how those institutions are managed.
I don't care if airlines innovate. I want rail to innovate. Airlines should be obsoleted. Build a train across the Bering straight and through Greenland.
As someone working with my maker space to deliver 3,500 shields a week to our local health organizations, I can confirm we do all in fact feel good for being able to play our small part. Helping people feels amazing, I'd recommend it to anyone!
I don't think you'd even have to look at extinct life. There's so much life that hasn't been categorized. You can basically take a soil sample from anywhere in the world and find new microorganisms in it. Archea are a great example of this. They're small, single celled organisms. They're best known as being extremeophiles, but exist basically everywhere. But the majority of them are difficult to culture and study. What's particularly interesting is that viruses that infect archea are known to be very different from other viruses.
If it were only used by recruiters, that would be a nice tool to improve cold contact outcomes- I still manage to get no shortage of recruiter contacts even though I have virtually no linkedin activity (I don't even log in or browse the site).

I'm not really sure how one would go about letting recruiters use it but not HR / managers, though. Very much a double-edged blade.
But the fact they do not have the warchest (or insurance) against an event such as this means all those earnings were false. They weren't risk adjusted. Kind of like I can drive around without insurance, but once i crash (or get a ticket) my savings disappear.
Many people do just that, but it really depends on what you use it for.

Synapse resource usage is dependent on the complexity of the rooms that it participates in, not the number of users.

So if you intend to use it just to talk to a few friends, you'll have no problems at all. If you want to join rooms with 1000s of other servers participating then it will be hungrier.
It’s already 42% off its 2020 high, not saying it won’t fall further but it’s not like investors aren’t aware that Square revenues are gonna take a big hit.
Fast fashion speeding toward environmental disaster, report warns
Somehow Bootstrap became the jQuery of CSS for me.

I used it excessively 6 years ago. Then the v4 took an eternity to release and I already switched to different solutions.

I would have thought that people that are still using it are doing so because of legacy support.
Published March 2020. It's not about some Slack issue that is
irrelevant now. It's about misconfigured TURN-servers and at least for
me it's a current thing ;-)
This looks super interesting!

1) How does this compare to BlazingDB/MapD/etc, especially in queries on <some benchmark> per $ per hour on AWS?

2) I don't see a way to give you money. What ensures that QuestDB will be around in the future if I architect my data pipelines around this product?
It’s sucks for them (and their viewers). It doesn’t suck for viewers who want to see the thing that went viral - not some new video with product placement etc.
Does IS&T also build the developer-facing Feedback Assistant?
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.

How is it a "forced reinvestment"? Buyback requires two parties to the transaction, the company is buying shares, but someone has to sell them. This can be you. It would be forced reinvestment if the company just kept cash and never returned it either through buyback or dividend, which incidentally is what most people grinding against airline stock buybacks seem to be suggesting.

Really, stock buybacks and dividends are mostly equivalent, with the exception of the tax treatment, which is the whole reason why companies increasingly prefer the buyback route.
Gotcha - it wasn't actually clear from the way you wrote it originally.

So in that case it is really jurisdictional. The US falls down pretty heavily on the corporate-owns-everything, but not everywhere does.

In my experience It's pretty common for companies to retain emails of people who have had outside contacts at least for a while, so nothing gets dropped on the floor, usually redirected to a supervisor or whomever took over the projects.
Then that entity becomes responsible for everything on its property as well.
Here's an EU (UK/Ireland so it's English) one:

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/81nqrPdi1nL...

There are almost 200 pages of EU rules and guidance in the first document [bottom of 1], and some hundreds more pages in related sections of that site.

That said, the cheap-brand bleach in my cupboard has a word-for-word translation into Danish of the English text, and a consistent layout, and there's some merit in that.

[1] https://echa.europa.eu/regulations/clp/labelling
> approval rating has been increasing

FWIW, that is not holding true. He got an uptick in approval of 2-3% early on, but it has been slipping a bit since then, trending slowly back towards where it was previously. About 45% approval, about 50% disapproval, so he's still underwater.
So, the requirements of open-source + have entity with paid hosting are both equally important. First one to ensure I can continue using whatever I setup on the hosting, in case the entity behind it cannot. And the paid hosting is important because it gives better odds towards the service actually sticking around.

What I likes with Yahoo Pipes compared to NodeRED (at least as far as I looked at NodeRED, I might be wrong) is that Yahoo Pipes worked out-of-the-box with services out of the box. I seem to remember that you could use the Google Search API for example, with Yahoo Pipes and pipe that into other things. That's what Zapier does as well, but with less flexibility than NodeRED.

So I guess my dream would be something like the integrations provided by Zapier but with the UI and flexibility of NodeRED.

Haven't seen pipes.digital before, I'll take a look as it looks interesting, but for anything serious, open source is a hard requirement (gotta learn from the Yahoo Pipes history :) )
American Airlines had negative free cash flow during the last decade yet did $12+ billion in share buy backs. They essentially borrowed money and handed it over to investors.

Yet instead of liquidating their assets once their incompetent management hit a sand bar, US tax payers have been required to bail them out with loans and grants.
The worst experience I've had with the DMV is having to wait a while.

Air travel is already all about waiting, and much of it is already fully government run or heavily regulated. Not sure what you expect to get worse.
I think there's a middle ground: allow them to compete as private businesses but require that they contribute some fraction of revenues into a common pool that pays out refunds and wages for a few months if a major travel-halting emergency happens.

That is, make it so they can't compete on "whether they anticipated a global catastrophe".
Unless you prepaid. I got forced into taking an apartment rental I wanted to back out of when I got laid off because I made the mistake of paying promptly. I might have had a chance to fight it otherwise.
They've got an all-Airbus fleet. They will be an excellent choice to avoid flying 737-MAX.
What amount of cash reserves would have allowed them to survive their business becoming illegal?
You're just not sending the database - you're sending whether or not it's the database. If you can only send a binary "is the database or is not the database" then 0 and 1 is indeed fully losslessly compressed information. If that's really what you want, then that's how you would do it. Full, perfect, lossless compression reduces your data down to only that information not shared between the sender and the receiver. Sending either 1 or 0 is, in fact, exactly what you want to do if the receiver already knows the contents of the database. Compression asks the question "what is the smallest amount of data I have to receive for the person on the other side to reconstruct the original data?" If the answer is "1 bit" then that's a perfectly valid message - the only information the receiver is missing is a single bit.
Hey, thanks again for reporting this. I _think_ I have it sorted now. I wrote my own chess room.
You’re right, WeWork probably doesn’t own any of the buildings they operate in
I'd store the middle name in the first_name column. Like for example "Juan Martin" would be in the first_name columns and "Del Potro" in the last_name. Apart from the middle/first name incongruence that you may highlight, I believe that this design is not awfully bad and should serve in most situations.
The will once emulating an iPhone is something that people can feasibly do. While there's been commercial interest in this area, it's not widely available yet.
Depends on the amount of data, reports, pipelines... If the company is small you might not have any of these problems. Every Mom&Pop store has some sort of data to run the business but they don't need a "data" person.

Once you have 10s of datastores + pipelines, 100s of reports and a "data lake" in the TBs you'll likely be needing specialized people.
BuzzFeed jettisoning Germany, Brazil offices
For smaller hospitals i‘d guess every single one piece of protective equipment counts.
I think it's pretty simple. If you don't get the virus, you don't go to the hospital or die in the hospital. If you wear an N95 mask, according to the best data available, you have a 91% smaller chance of catching the virus.

Yes, it's possible to make mistakes donning and duffing. However, that same meta-analysis also showed a large benefit for community use of masks, so actual use, not perfect use. To the extent that there is a problem with improper use, we should be teaching people how to use them instead of telling people not to wear them.

I never said wearing a mask made you immune. Seatbelts don't eliminate your risk either, but at this point only very backwards people drive a car without one.

BTW, as of today, COVID is the leading cause of death in America.
Aren’t $1k of dividends taxed more than $1k or capital gains?
This is what I experienced with Tap Tap Revenge on iOS. What used to be one of the highlights of iPhone and iPod touch gaming was eventually bought out by Disney, ported to Android (poorly), and then phased out. Luckily, users had dumped some of the song packs and put then online, and with some reverse engineering and hooking, you could swap the game’s server endpoint with a custom one and play it again. This was my main side project in high school junior/senior year and a highlight in my college application.

Unfortunately, it also became victim to Apple’s discontinuation of 32bit apps.
Exactly what I meant, the fields CAN contain whitespace. The first_name, last_name is one that I find useful
Hey I thought he was referring to the last paragraph in the article too…
How GitHub Became Popular?
Does anybody remember how GitHub became so popular in the first place? And turned out to be this software giant?
I think you are missing what is probably the biggest factor: they can be very expensive to run if successful.

If you create a popular API, people are going to find creative uses for it, and because they can, by definition, be automated, you can get rapid growth in traffic with not that many users.

There is a bit of a 'tragedy of the commons' that goes on, because the people writing apps that consume the API have no incentive to moderate their usage, or try to be efficient.

Since the company that is providing this API is paying for the resources to run it, they can quickly get very expensive. Unless there is a clear financial benefit for allowing it to continue, most companies will shut them down eventually.
This doesn't even start to address the amount of damage he has done to the US and to the world through his bad management at Twitter. He bears a large slice of responsibility in creating the situation we are in.
It's not a zero sum game.

It makes tons of sense for people with 3d printers to print as many as they can now because they can get them in the hands of people now. But once dedicated manufacturing comes online, that capability is going to be quickly become irrelevant.

The comment I replied to seemed to suggest individuals were printing 10s of thousands of these per day which is clearly not true. Thousands of individuals are printing a few each day which is vastly different.
We are all likely to be wearing PPE like this after the lockdowns are relaxed. Widespread testing + PPE use is the only chance we have to return to something normal before a vaccine is available.
Anyone else getting Radiohead album art vibes?
As shawnz hinted at there is a protocol dance that happens before the data is sent over. I don't know exactly what it consists of, but I suspect it's more than just tcp-level responses saying the port is open and ready to receive.

Playing along in that dance is arguably unethical and shows intent.