skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Pandemic insurance doesn't really make sense. Fires are isolated events, and it is incredibly unlikely that every insured business catches fire all at once.

On the other hand, the very nature of a pandemic is that all insured businesses will make their claims at the same time. It's impossible to actually make it work.
On Linux, selecting text normally places it in the X buffer (a clipboard, but not!). This change apparently selects the text while avoiding the buffer unless you click more, which is really odd.

I'm also surprised (well, maybe not really) that people have never learned about the Alt+D shortcut.
This is great advice for many types of programs; for example, an application to be run in a web browser, or an interpreter. But there is a large class of programs for which “avoiding the assignment statement” does not apply. The author knows this, and mentions it in the “When you can't help it”
section:

“Sometimes, you just can't avoid the assignment statement or other side effects. Maybe you need so much efficiency that you have to mutate state to optimise your program”.

This class of programs includes all high performance numerical code. These programs compute by declaring large multidimensional arrays (usually distributed among multiple compute nodes), reading values from array elements, doing arithmetic on those values, and writing the results into array elements. These elements have fixed memory addresses, so the computation consists in changing the values stored in fixed memory locations. Efficiency comes from minimizing the movement of data and parallelizing as much as possible. It’s what Rich Hickey would call computing with places, not with values.
Phylogenetic network analysis of SARS-CoV-2 genomes
> It's clearly a case of more right leaning areas taking less cautious measures in favor of money.

While I see where you’re coming from with this statement, I’m not sure I agree. From where I stand - a town of 13k people surrounded by a large rural area - it makes sense that we’re taking less aggressive action because the virus is not yet endemic here. Given the growth of confirmed cases in my area (northern Arkansas), it seems those steps are working adequately to keep it from becoming endemic as well.

I propose that areas with lower population density are taking less aggressive action, and those areas are also predominately right-leaning.
Not sure what cybernetics formally means, but apparently it has to do with complexity management

>
W. Ross Ashby is one of the founding fathers of both cybernetics and systems theory. He developed such fundamental ideas as the homeostat, the law of requisite variety, the principle of self-organization, and the principle of regulatory models. Many of these insights were already proposed in the 1940's and 1950's, long before the presently propular "complex adaptive systems" approach arrived at very similar conclusions. Whereas the concepts surrounding the complexity movement are often complicated and confused, Ashby's ideas are surprisingly clear and simple, yet deep and universal.

Good link
Thank you for acknowledging my ability to look beyond partisan biases.
Compile times for my project are around 2m15s to 2m30s. Since this work involves lots of CPU (some single-threaded, some multi-threaded work) and I/O, the spread mentioned above is what I get with multiple measurements.

While it's true that without the mitigations times were much closer to the 2:15 mark, there were still outliers at 2:24. Which means it's hard to draw any meaningful conclusions.

Not sure where you got the "0.5%" figure from.
The proposed technology is quite different from a service that located located devices. Rather, it would track what devices have been in proximity of each other, and not necessarily where.
Have you ever seen a resume that doesn't have the candidates address at the top of the page? I haven't. We typically receive hundreds of applications for any one job. We phone interview maybe 20 of them and in person interview maybe 10 of them. Those who we don't hire are never given a reason why we chose someone else. They don't know if it is because they don't have the requisite skills or because they live 2000 miles away and we would have to pay to move them to our state.

This isn't to say that we never hire anyone from out of state. We have done so on many occasions. But if there are 2 equally qualified candidates, we are more likely to choose the one that already lives close by and can start immediately.
> "outlier results at odds with every other study thus far published"

...which would be? AFAIK, there aren't any comparable studies to date, which is why there was such a buzz about it.
I'd also suggest looking at Pike's ivy as a simple example of an apl like system in go.
https://github.com/robpike/ivy
Your chance of getting a severe case of you are infected is 5-10% or something similar. That’s a case that you want to have a hospital bed for, maybe an ICU bed.

If all beds are taken then many of those severe cases will kill people. Say mortality is 3% instead of 0.5% once hospital capacity runs out. Assume 60% need to get it before we have herd immunity. I don’t think 3% mortality without healthcare is pessimistic. Unfortunately we’ll soon find out if the disease hits Syria and similar places.

Not only that, thousands would also die from strokes and heart attacks and other things that they wouldn’t die from if hospitals weren’t full.

Hospital staff will simply quit when their job becomes a constant struggle to keep the hallways clear of corpses instead of saving people.

It’s not “0.5% dies why are we doing this?”, it’s “we do this so only 0.5% die”.

Between a 0.5% chance of dying and a 3% chance of dying I’d happily observe some measure of distancing for 12 months to get 0.5%.
> Only if infected, you upload your key to the server

You are more right than I was initially, thanks!

Actually, to be even more precise: only if infected, you upload the set of your own derived keys, and apparently only for the days you could have transmitted the virus to other people.

From the documentation:

"Upon a user testing positive, the Daily Tracing Keys for days where the user could have been affected
are derived on the device from the Tracing Key. We refer to that subset of keys as the Diagnosis Keys.
If a user remains healthy and never tests positive, these Daily Tracing Keys never leave the device."
It's probably an easier solution to create a processed video device
As per:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22803769

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22732801

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22804429

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22802281
They can compel, but also what they typically do is to purchase from them the data. That way they don't even need warrants. We tally need stronger regulations about sensitive information like that.
I'm the beta channel so I've had the new address bar for like 6 weeks or whatever. I didn't like it at first because it was kind of jarring, but within just a few days stopped noticing it. When I saw the discussion here, it took me a minute to realize what people were even talking about... what new address bar? That's how quickly I got used to it and don't even remember what it was like before.
Show HN: UV Sanitizer for Phone and Everything Else
Insanely cool.

E-ink is just one of those technologies that ought to be so much further along, but I've always gotten the gut feeling that the company that controls this tech is just so out of touch.

Reading how the software can't be shared... I shouldn't have been surprised.
I thought this one might be about microfrontends. It was not...

We are currently working on a solution for this problem (scalable SPA where multiple teams can develop and deploy independently). Its been used by some of our clients for quite a bit now. Their dev teams seem to like it so far.

If anyone is interested our GitHub repo is at https://github.com/smapiot/piral - thanks!
We wouldn't want someone to violate any obligation. When we offer the trial period option, we always have a discussion about whether that's something they're able to do, and comfortable doing - work-wise, family-wise, etc.
This is why I dislike that some have characterized the bill as a "stimulus." The point of stimulus efforts is to stimulate the economy, implying that it's ready to be stimulated. It's not. The $6 trillion is life support. We've put the economy into a medically induced coma. The $6 trillion is what we need to keep the economy alive, barely, while we try to get Covid-19 under control. Once we've done that, we'll need separate stimulus to get out of a depression.
Did anyone else notice the mention of the M61 20mm Vulcan cannon that's staying installed? Have these guys got live weapons and ammunition for these craft?
I was addressing the contrast ratio, which people seem to sort of measure inadequately in sunlight.

There are two comparisons between LCD displays that should properly be referencing S/N ratio instead of contrast.

With a glossy display, whatever is behind you STRONGLY affects your S/N ratio, especially in black.

In sunlight even a very bright LCD is washed out almost to unreadability (though I am surprised how well recent phones still manage to still function)
People are still going need cars at the same rate they always have.
It'll roll out through Google Play Services, not an OS update for Android. https://twitter.com/markgurman/status/1248667196722573312
I drove to Microcenter with my son yesterday, picking up parts for new workstations. Brought my son to get out of the house, he brought a Mad magazine (Christmas book special edition) and read it the entire way. RIP Mort!
Six years at Lightbend
Been struggling with this myself the last few days! I don’t NEED to go out or order all of this fancy video conferencing equipment for my weekend virtual happy hour but it’s way more fun being locked inside if I do.

I was fortunate enough that the previous owners left behind a god-awful teal paint that works amazingly as a ‘blue’ chromakey.

For a huge upgrade in camera I’m using the OBS Camera app on iOS which wirelessly beams an NDI stream to my desktop.

For lighting I’ve just played around with various lamps from my house.

The one thing I did order was a USB microphone because I couldn’t stand the thought of wearing a headset or adding latency with wireless earbuds.
Where did you get that? Even the main title is refferring to the main point being that CuPy does not accelerate NumPy even in the case where it should be absolutely expected to. Then I used my implemetation to demonstrate that indeed GPU implementation for such a huge matrix should be many times faster.

I never claimed that my library aims for being a replacement for CuPy, or to have any compatibility with NumPy.

It would be more valuable to CuPy developers if I debugged CuPy to discover why that problem exists, but why should I be obligated to? I was writing this for a perspective of a user of these libraries.
It's not that easy. Social networks, particular urban dense ones have the characteristics of small world networks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-world_network). The distance between every person in a city is maybe 5-6 individuals. You can imagine how many hundred people you stand next to, how many people they stand next to, and so on.

So if say, the chance of being infected in an interaction is say 5%, then the chance at a distance of two is 0.25%, the chance for someone at a distance of 3 is merely 0.01%, etc..

Do you really think it's a rational use of resources or your attention that if you're one of the countless 'distance 3' people to alert you? Unless you had some mysterious ability to determine with extremely high fidelity that infection has occured from metadata alone, which doesn't exist, it's a tool for mass panic.

Bluetooth will give you a match for up to 10 meters. The official safe distance is 6 feet. You can't even tell from a bluetooth match if people were close enough at all.
I've been waiting a long long time. probably ff 6x?

I even dug into the doorhanger source code.
Rocket Lab captures Electron stage in mid-air with helicopter
Not simply just old people [1]. Texas has also categorized religious gatherings of 50 as an essential service, whereas abortion clinics have been closed.

Texas is taking a very different approach from California.
...How dare you even consider making something cool that others might want, and result in further sales! For Shame!

(Truly insane position of the company - they ought to hire this person and make this a product one can buy.)
> ‘... spies?' I thought we were chums with the Low King!’

> 'Of course we are,’ said Vetinari. ‘And the more we know about each other, the friendlier we shall remain. We’d hardly bother to spy on our enemies. What would be the point?’ - Lord Vetinari - Thud (Sir Terry Pratchett)
FDA: Human trials can begin for Emory Covid-19 antiviral
The former. You have a guarantee of consistency, whereas otherwise you must adjust for this in your application code. Database performance wise I agree they are equivalent.
Long-living trees account for bulk of biomass in some tropical rainforests
I see. I'm also on Linux, but i guess i've mostly been doing ctrl+L to go to the address bar, and that's been selecting the whole text since before the change? Because i didn't notice that change...

But i understand it's frustrating to have the behavior of clicking on it change all of a sudden. I see the point of the change too (if i click on the address bar, i'd assume it's because i want to go to another site, or copy the URL, so selecting all text is convenient), but UI changes will always bother people who are used to the existing behavior.

I just don't think it's so black and white bad as some people paint it to be. And at some point i feel that harsh criticism is not constructive at all.
Farewells piling up:

Six years at Lightbend, by Eugene Yokota (Scala sbt, scalaxb, scopt)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22836399
My guess (hope) is a group of reasonable adults talking about this collaboration (remotely) decided that the order of logos was of far less importance than them working together.

Someone probably said — “how about this?” and scribbled something. May have even been a Googler.

Then everyone else just said “sure”.

At least, that’s how I’d like to think it went.
It would be hard to imagine if they didn't? Seems like stuff like this always comes to Windows first. I use Win10's built in virtual desktops but I keep all my browser windows on one desktop so I've never tested it, I would just be shocked if it didn't work on Win10 also!
Yes, we've had to tweak our on-boarding process for the trial period.

Most candidates have a local dev environment up and running in the first couple of days, and complete their first task (from our real backlog) in the first week. Within the 2-3 week trial period, most are able to finish several meaningful tasks.
Just imagine if this had caught on. You'd pop down to Kwik-fit to get your control rods looked at.
Please don't post political flamebait to HN. It leads nowhere good.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This is a silly article. Every plan made to date has been laid to waste by reality.
A. Resilience costs money. Just in time and other business practices which trade resilience for profit result in more fragile systems. If a business can charge more for a product when people need it more, then there is an incentive to build extra capacity into a system. If there are laws which prohibit raising prices when the need is greater, the capacity won't be built and/or surplus production won't be created and stored.

B. Because of the incompetent actions of the federal government. But even given that, why wouldn't you expect different actors to bid against each other? It's not illegal, in general, to charge different prices to different entities. In any case, that wouldn't apply to foreign companies.

C. Price controls lead to shortages. Anti-incentives lead to shortages. "Rear-facing anti-incentives" or the uncertainty of not knowing whether the capacity you build today will be confiscated in an emergency leads to shortages.

Also see: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/02/pr...
Happy Birthday Tobeva Software
I've done a lot of work through x2go, also windows machine connecting to ubuntu. And I've almost exclusively used seamless windows which makes superior multi-screen (and single screen) UX as window management is just native windows.

Well, I guess it depends on the use case etc. but I find seamless windows to be the holy grail for most of my work. And the ability to resume an entire session is great!

Didn't have that many crashes, maybe once a month or something, still a bit frustrating but not enough to scare me away. But yeah, maybe I was lucky, didn't get the most reliable impression of it but it did still do wonders for me.
80 year olds not ready to die will quarantine themselves, no lockdown needed for them.

Some young people are benefiting with fewer car accidents. Some old people are having to wait longer for transplants as there are fewer organ donors dying of accidents.

Also fewer middle aged people are having myocardial infarcts.

My children are not so upset that they don’t have to go to school.

I wonder if countries benefitting from tourism will finally get rid of visas and passports to encourage international travel again. Probably not, but one can dream.

Maybe if the us ends up bailing out the entire world, there won’t be a reason to protect the borders with passports as we will have a United States of earth. Fed swap lines are already available to around a dozen countries.
Major Verizon Wireless Outage in the Phoenix Area
This is really hard to keep private and anonymous, but I'm glad that the world's to biggest mobile OS makers are working on this.

If this does really work, it could trace millions of people and give this pandemic some sort of order. Identify hotspots and show a heat map of spread.

Definitely a step in the right direction, hopefully it's executed well too. I'm pretty sure Microsoft be jealous they didn't win the Mobile OS market.
Am i the only one who thinks it's mindblowing that people use Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, etc. however now that Apple + Google release a tool to prevent thousands of people from dying in a pandemic they start thinking/complaining about the possible privacy implications? (without even having read the specs or knowing the details...)
Most offline systems, and many systems used only for using trusted code (which obviously bars anything with a web browser, and most internet-connected personal computing devices, among other things). Applications that equate roughly to "Scientific number-crunching" for example are generally systems where security doesn't matter much.

There's a case to be made for gaming, and the mitigations if I remember correctly definitely ding performance on quite a few games, but because most computers used for games have significant amounts of sensitive information on them, among other things, I don't think it really holds well.

Benchmarks (I really dislike linking to this site, but given it did a bunch of benchmarks, it's not the worst thing, I guess):

'Up to 50% performance loss!' is obviously clickbait, and I disagree with a lot of the wording & conclusions & so on, but there's definitely some workloads where the trade-off makes sense.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux-42...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux-42...

Warning about those benchmarks, though: they're of a rather old kernel version, I imagine they tank performance less now. However, given that 5x has been performing way worse to my knowledge than 4x, 4x is probably what most people would be using for these sorts of things.

EDIT, added section below:

Ah, here we go; how it's effecting modern stuff:

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=spectre-...

The mitigations ding it a reasonable amount for a substantial amount of workloads, though it's not as intense as it used to be.
> if handed a big ball of mud, is it riskier to start from scratch and go for something more triumphant, or try to evolve the mud gradually?

Reminiscent of Chesterton’s fence. But then, we end up in such a “complex” situation only when one thing can have multiple causes & effects — which is difficult to model correctly in a clean slate formulation.

The simplest solution seems to be to avoid making software that complex in the first place (we can exert far more control than in the physical world).

But then if we think about Peter Naur’s perspective about programming as a mode of theory building (of the domain) (unsurprising, given the basic cybernetics principles such as the law of requisite variety & the good regulator theorem), then the answer seems to be — unless your domain is really complex, think hard before you implement, and keep refactoring as your understanding improves (and truly to pick problem formulations / frameworks / languages which make that feasible. Of course, easier said than done.) The key point is to keep refactoring “continuously“ to match our understanding of the domain, rather than just “adding features”.

Aside: In my experience, software built on a good understanding of the domain will function well, untouched, for a long time — so long as it is suitably decoupled from the less-well-understood parts. The latter kind, though, generates constant churn, while also being an annoying fit. Really brings home the adage “A month in the laboratory can save a day in the library.”
> At least this way you will get some control

doubt it.
Reddit launches own Ethereum community token
Fantastic quote!
Rethinking Team Culture with Sequoia, Calm, and Juan Pablo Buriticá (Webinar)
Not that I find that comment totally unbelievable, but citation please?
Have you ever killed someone without a gun? Not trying to be metal, but I was in a self defense situation many years ago and and something terrible happened.

Shooting a gun vs using "household chemicals and gasoline" to attack someone, to say nothing of knives or bare hands, are so apart from each other that I know for a fact that you have no experience with violence or how much easier it is to do violence with a gun vs other methods. You are just parroting teenager-level philosophy.

Besides all that, we have huge amounts of data over more than 100 years. Turns out, and this will shock you, when you have more guns you are more likely to shoot people and kill overall.

I don't want people to die because Bubba finds it badass to own an AR-15 they will never use except maybe to kill themselves or a family member (statistically, these are the no1 and no2 most likely people an American is to kill with their gun). Do as you will I guess but almost nobody needs to own a gun privately.
A comes before G? Logo designs typically have a logo followed by text. Seems to apply here too. It might not be anything about who can pee further.
Once you know it you see it everywhere. It's kind of amazing how common of a pattern it is without people even knowing it explicitly.
People are working on contact tracing, this takes care of one of the harder parts without dictating central control in a pretty sensible manner. Being wary of privacy adverse interests in this context is good but in this context makes little sense. This specification only touches the question of data leaving the device in ways that restrict what the outside party, in an RFC manner MUST wording, can do with the data.

It's pretty clear that we will get contact tracing applications in many parts of the world, regardless of any action Apple or Google might have taken. Might as well base it on something that does not compromise the user base wholesale.
I regret to be on 75.0 and I can not find that parameter. Removed?
If the government loses authority, what entity would fill the power vacuum?
Related from a couple days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22804149
There's no way we should trust a dystopian regime to just quietly abolish itself once its rationale for existence disappears.