skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Enterprise Devs, what are your company provided PC system specs?
I really doubt this will get any traction, but I'm sick of this laptop my company provides me for development, as are a lot of the other devs, but our ownership thinks they're perfectly acceptable for app development.

We have these;
https://store.hp.com/us/en/pdp/hp-elitebook-840-g6-notebook-pc-customizable-4wg26av-mb?jumpid=cs_com_nc_ns&utm_medium=cs&utm_source=ga&utm_campaign=INT_COMM_I5_HGM_BR-DT&utm_content=sp&adid=312654707024&addisttype=gpla&4WG26AV_MB&gclid=CjwKCAjw7LX0BRBiEiwA__gNw_YtJsIJ7oiWoQdY-mOwjiCItn4HTQOjhgPYMO7-tthUaCX-bpiCbRoCSGQQAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds

We have the 14inch screens, i5, and 8g of RAM 'package' from HP as leases.

I am not sure what the lease costs us, but let's just take the MSRP of $1,400.00 as a point of comparison.

We purchased 3 applications from an offshore team that we run and debug locally. These are Angular Websites, setup to run against a locally running webapi. All of the projects are setup in Visual Studio solutions. Nothing against VS. But 3, 6 project solutions creates quite the stress on the machine.

Now, I've seen plenty of people create fully featured sites via. their macbook airs, but these are enterprise applications. I'm talking hundreds of Mbs of JS, business logic, and async http calls. Between all of this, my CPU is pegged and my RAM is absolutely maxed out.

Not to mention I work for a company that is extremely vested in security (rightfully so). So we have a 24/7 security scanners running, looking at our laptop files for things potentially dangerous.

The obvious reason we have these is because they are bulk leased. So the people on the floor doing research, the sales people, and the account managers also use these things.

I just want to get the barometer reading on what everyone else in enterprise is using.
While you sleep, specialized neurons inhibit memory formation
John Boiles has a proof of concept of the OBS virtual cam. I tried it out and it worked for me, although I had to build it and OBS from source. He has good instructions.

https://github.com/johnboiles/obs-mac-virtualcam
12M-year-old fossil crab find and prep
> I can't imagine doing that easily with a commercial sanitizer when somebody arrives in your home :)

Currently here in Ontario when you go to the liquor store (LCBO), they ask a series of questions and then spray your hands with commercial hand sanitizer before letting you in. It is... weird.
Not sure what your backend is like, but there are plenty of packages for Django and Flask that let you do this. https://pypi.org/project/django-impersonate/
I can't sleep without earplugs. The silence is amazing.
Some badly written software will ignore nsswitch.conf(5) [0] and query the DNS instead of looking up in the hosts(5) file for some hosts that are designed there (redis).

sort(1)'s `-un` will truncate and delete input if it's not purely numerical [1].

[0] https://git.sr.ht/~moviuro/moviuro.bin/commit/d9cdf0556bb005...

[1] https://git.sr.ht/~moviuro/moviuro.bin/commit/0c83ac72d91798...
I've used https://incompetech.com/ in the past for royalty free music for game jams and other hobby projects. It's the site of one musician that makes all of this stuff and releases it for free.
Same for me on the camera angle part: I have connected the work laptop to my private 4k display, but I'm not using the Logitech camera which sits on top of the 4k display (mostly because I would need to clean my "hobby desk" then, not really in the mood for that :-D), so I use the integrated one. This leads to me looking straight at the large display and the camera facing me from the lower right. Well... Could be worse.
Also bidets, nintendo switches, instant yeast, powdered milk, etc. I actually snagged some wine yeast on amazon and I'm on my third loaf of bread. Bidet was the best "waste of money" I have spent in a long time. My TP usage has been slashed.
Yeah he’s pitching that California has already reached herd immunity.

The premise is that covid-19 arrived in fall and that unlike everywhere else in the world, it arrived, spread without so much as being noticed at the ER.
By reading 'The art of computer programming' (Knuth) from cover to cover :) He'd be more than willing to listen to you then (according to his own words, ironically printed on the backcover of my copy of TAOCP).
The Psychology of Founders Who Win in Downturns
I would love to see the raw data on how many transactions have been abandoned because of ReCaptcha; if I had to solve a test to purchase my shopping, I'd go elsewhere (and there are places that are not as hostile out there).

I cannot understand the stupidity of putting your entire business in the hands of an advertisement company who gives no shits about you as a business or a person, apart from your data.

I can say for certain ReCaptcha has made me reconsider a purchase and is a major factor in my purchasing decision. If I can't use all my privacy tools (including noscript, and I only whitelist a few times to get the right scripts), then I don't care about what you're selling.

Hopefully in the near future ReCaptcha breaks altogether due to enhanced privacy protection.
I don't think it's hard so much as it's niche. I bet the vast majority of people use their phones or tablets for video calls.
https://meagher.co

I write about personal experiences in tech and try never to generalize.

When I launched Mute.vc on HN https://meagher.co/mute-vc/

Incrementally Building A Blog https://meagher.co/incremental-blog/

Thoughts on Building Paid Software https://meagher.co/paid-software/
Got an inexpensive headset from Logitech. It's fine, but it's glossy white... Well... Guess you'll have to die one death.
A sigint alliance established after meetings in a pub and named for a brand of beer. That is charmingly comforting.
This isn't accounting for combinatorial math. If each sample is negative 85%, then the probability that all 10 samples are negative is 0.85^10, or about 20%. If any sample turned positive (the other 80% of the time), then all will need to be retested. Instead of 1 test per sample, you're now running 0.2 * 0.1 + 0.8 * 1.1, or about 0.9 tests per sample. You've increased throughput by 10%, but not nearly as much as was hoped. Note that these numbers get more favorable with more negative tests, though.

The general formula is (r^x) * (1/x) + (1 - r^x) * (1 + 1/x), where r is the percentage of negative tests and x is the number to mix.

With an 85% negative rate, it's more beneficial to mix 3 tests at a time for 0.72 tests per sample. (2 samples gives 0.78 tests, 4 gives 0.73) As more samples come back negative it becomes more advantageous to mix more, but you shouldn't mix 10 tests at a time (as opposed to 9) till you get to about a 96% negative rate, at which point you're running 0.44 tests per sample.

Edit: The binary search algorithm mentioned elsewhere would probably be more optimal, but I'm gonna do my day job instead of figuring out the dynamics of that one.
> Also, why raise at 10% interest when interest rates are so low?

There's an old proverb in finance that goes:

"If you borrow a million and can't pay it back, you're in trouble.

If you borrow a billion and can't pay it back, the bank's in trouble."

There was no way Airbnb was going to get that kind of cash at anywhere near 'market rates'.
Personally I’d put a higher frame rate near the bottom of my wish list for a better webcam. First, improve low light performance, autofocus, white balance, dynamic range, and autoexposure. Once those are good then we can talk about frame rate and resolution....
A lot of overlap with Soundcloud I'd say, plus I believe there's a lot of (amateur?) musicians who do it as a hobby instead of for money. Money doesn't have to be the end goal. And music doesn't have to be universally good to be published. Publishing your music with no expectations is not a bad thing to do.

Plus, for example, IF it's used in an indie game, and IF said game becomes big, the creators could send a donation or contract in the direction of the creator. I mean take the guy that made the Minecraft music, C418; he started off just posting things on his blog and an indie music forum, but ended up getting in touch with the creator of Minecraft; he kept the rights to the music, I don't know how it works legally but I like to think Microsoft sends him a licensing fee every month to use the music.
This is one where the nature of this virus not sending most young people to the hospital throws off that stat, heavily.

So, if they are right and most cases don't go to the hospital, then this is high. If they are wrong, and most cases do go to the hospital, then they have basically no idea how it spreads so quickly. At least, their stories are going to need massive revisions.

And again, I'm not claiming anyone wants this. Nor that I know all. Age just feels suspiciously like a proxy for whatever is upping someone's risk.
Well, we already turned the clock back past the New Deal let's just go ahead and strip away the Progressive Era as well.

I knew the FDA had drastically reduced the number of slaughterhouse inspectors but regulatory capture is the order of the day after all.
It sounds like Cloudflare is paying at least partially in free/discounted Cloudflare services.
Chatbot Datasets for Machine Learning
> I miss the optimism and simplicity of those times.

It seems like every generation (minus those who came of age in WWI/II) think this is true for them.

Is it really true, or are we just all reflecting back to when we were younger and the world was simpler because we understood less.
Function getting differentiated regularly is a loss function defined as (DesiredOutput(x) - HugeNumberOfParametersAppliedTo(x))^2. Are you saying that the symbolic expression gets transformed and is then used to represent the gradient?

I thought that PyTorch, Tensorflow and similar already do that.
How can someone demonstrate this claim?

reCaptcha is wildly sophisticated under the hood[1]. I use it on all three major browsers and find the number of challenges varies from 0 to 4: sometimes it says I'm verified without doing anything, other times I need to go through 4 screens.

I would love to see someone put some numbers behind this claim, because I think it is false.

[1] https://www.blackhat.com/docs/asia-16/materials/asia-16-Siva...

EDIT: Are you downvoting because you don't like reCaptcha, or because you can't (or won't) set up an experiment to demonstrate this claim and prefer to just jump on the bandwagon?
Even without that 2x, all benchmarks are still in the same ballpark which is impressive in its own right. It will be interesting to see where this goes.
I detach/reattach mosh sessions all the time, using the excellent dtach tool.
If you care about slave labor, buying Apple would be one of your mitigations. They have extensive outside review of their supply chain practices, reported on regularly.

Your risks are more smaller companies that the media hasn’t put through the ringer. And Samsung, which got caught using prison labor.
Home Staging Trends for 2020
We don't have enough runway to care about privacy, we'll just un-collect all that data once we raised!

Sorry for the sarcasm, but I buy this now as little as I buy it in other situations.
Let's Encrypt | SENIOR SOFTWARE ENGINEER | US, CANADA | REMOTE | FULL TIME https://www.abetterinternet.org/careers/

We’re making HTTPS easier for developers to use, we’re doing it at scale, and we need your help. We’re a first-of-our-kind Certificate Authority (CA). We make TLS/SSL certificates available to anyone, for free, and we offer an API to do it. This means more people can enable HTTPS on their websites, with less work. That protects everyone’s web traffic from snoops, and makes us all safer.

We’re looking for an additional software engineer. Maybe that’s you!

Here’s what we’d like you to bring to our team:

- At least a year’s experience writing code in Go, or a couple of years in another compiled language.
- Attention to detail and a willingness to spend the time it takes to get things right.
- Experience writing unit tests and integration tests.
- Excellent communication, organization, and prioritization skills.
- Prior experience with cryptography and PKI is not required. We will provide on-the-job training.

Check out the job posting to learn more about what our software engineering team does and how you can help.
https://www.abetterinternet.org/careers
All these people who keep saying “if this were World War II we would be cranking out vaccines and ventilators overnight” really need to read up on the first year of American involvement in World War II.

Pearl Harbor was attacked on December 7, 1941. American forces didn’t win a real victory until the Battle of Midway in June 1942 - six months later. American planes didn’t start bombing Europe until June 1942 either. And It wasn’t until the invasion of Guadalcanal (July 1942) that American ground forces were able to take offensive action against the Axis.

Big efforts take time to pull together, particularly when you start them from a completely unprepared state. And with this thing, as in December 1941, we were definitely unprepared.
Yes somehow I had wireshark in mind! :)
An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website
Moto Razr review–RIP to our Moto Razr (March 30, 2020 – March 31, 2020)
It's incredibly annoying that you can't use your APPLE iPhone camera as a webcam for your APPLE Macbook, but instead are forced to use the atrociously terrible cam that comes with the Macbook.

I've tried workarounds using the excellent OSB, but there's currently no software that let's you reroute video on a Mac (like Loopback does for audio)

EDIT: I stand corrected, as user wolfhumble points out below, EpocCam seems to do this - thanks! https://apps.apple.com/us/app/epoccam-webcamera-for-computer...
I don't understand how Amazon has not shut this down. I went to buy one a month ago and it was already at this piratical price. Don't they actively prevent price gougers when they find them?
Average is meaningless. Either you have broadband and you're physically capped at 1 Mbps upload, or you have fiber and it's -roughly- unlimited.

The average of 9 households having broadband and 1 having gigabit fiber may be 100 Mbps theoretically, but practically that's 9 people who can't use a HD webcam.
A drone is way more loud than the various electric delivery vehicles used in Netherlands. Aside from how loud a drone/quad copter is, the noise is also high pitches (more annoying). Traffic is/can also regulated somewhat by limiting the hours that these can operate (at least in NL; though that's usually to businesses). Some of the delivery vehicles have an optimized design, minimizing the space they take (e.g. the ones used for an online supermarket called Picnic).

Aside from electric vehicles some companies (DHL, Coolblue) also use electric bikes.
Again, anecdotally, mine's gone from 1 Mbps upload to 30 in the last ~10 years or so. I don't have fiber, I've got Spectrum over the cable lines, in a small market with not much competition. (It's either Spectrum, or the local phone company's shitty DSL offering. There's one local fiber company, but only in a couple percent of households... including literally my neighbor, but not me.)

Specific data on upload speeds is harder to come by, but https://www.tomsguide.com/us/internet-speed-what-you-need,ne... says "According to Ookla, the average U.S. broadband download speed is 96 Mbps and average upload speeds are now at 33Mbps."
To me it was almost all patriarchy disguising itself as benevolent wisdom and all the more insidious because it dresses itself up in father knows best clothes. Every bit of it is heavily gender stereotyped. It's not clever manners to refrain from controlling your spouse's individuality! Yikes.

Anyway I'm not offering this in the spirit of debate but in sharing. As a minority myself, I understand that we all stew in the pot of the majority and the powerful. In order for someone to extend an olive branch and offer you back your humanity, it had to have been taken from you first.
Managing Our Way to Economic Decline
Haven't been back where I can post.

The time lag is a valid way of deriving this number. In places that do a lot of testing, the number does look lower than 20%. Especially considering most only test those that go to the hospital.
order a bidet instead.
Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, FBI: r00t3d
Lessons from 10 years of home office
Many of the shelter-in-place orders have banned anything not essential, like groceries or other supplies. That includes moving.

How did the supply dry up so fast when no one is to leave their houses? It has to be AirBnB/travel bans; even the 2008 housing bubble 'asplosion didn't move that fast.
Great, thanks! If you get stuck, e-mail ai@axiom.ai and well see if we can help.

It sounds like this is a possible use-case, but it depends on the scale at which you want to scrape.

Axiom is good at pulling out data from complex workflows with forms.

It's not designed for doing large-scale scraping (...IP rotation etc.)
They could, if they actually owned leased their own properties like hotels do, instead of shifting the risk on to homeowners and taking their cut.

But that wouldn't make it a 'billion dollar company'.
Mosh + Blink (iPadOS) is a great combination.
IMHO CPATCHA is a lazy way to protect your service as you shift the burden to your users.

Maybe if you are big and essential for some users, you can afford that. But if not, be aware that users will turn their back on you if you add obstacles between them and your service.

Edit: meant to say “be aware that some users will turn their back to you”
Note that optimal branch factor would probably depend on the expected negative rate. If 98% of your samples are coming back negative, it may be more optimal to divide by into 4 or 8 groups instead of 2 groups.
Computers don't care about mathematical equivalence. For instance, dividing by a number is generally slower than multiplying with the inverse of that number. Also, memory access patterns can make a difference of night and day.

I'm not sure though where exactly the idea that GA is slower comes from. It's all down to the application and implementation. Perhaps it's because GA generalizes so well to higher dimensions that many libraries are overly generalized and thus slower than vector algebra libraries that need special cases anyway.
A Message of Hope for Covid-19: Give Love (A Tribute to America)
The official KDAB position:

https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/2020q2/006101.h...
Zoom’s 90-day plan to bolster key privacy and security initiatives
How to Provide Test Fixtures for Django Models in Pytest
I think it's probable, but I wouldn't say its safe to assume.

We haven't found a vaccine for HIV yet, despite a huge global effort over the last 35+ years.

The vaccine for influenza only works on some strains and has to be re-developed every year. Influenza is still a top 10 cause of death in the US despite ~40% of the population getting vaccinated.

A Hepatitis B vaccine was developed in the 1980s, but no one could develop one for Hepatitis C (though it is now curable with drugs).

The current vaccine for dengue fever virus, which infects 400M people annually and kills 40,000, is not widely distributed because it increases the risk of severe infection in some people.

I do think we'll get a vaccine. The amount of research money and scientific attention that's going to be dedicated to COVID-19 over the next year will truly be unprecedented. But we are in uncharted territory.
To clarify why that's a crazy premise: Italy
Never even heard of "sourdough starter". I use them small dry-yeast packets from Lidl. The point is that human shit and saliva are the surest way start right kind of fermentation of moonshine and hooch if approved products are not available. E-coli and other critters die anyways in the anaerobic process or in the oven.

BTW. My "local bakery" is probably in Estonia. In another country that is. Wider Helsinki area is under lockdown and yeast may not be approved essential.
> Either you have broadband and you're physically capped at 1 Mbps upload, or you have fiber and it's -roughly- unlimited.

This is... not the case?
They are different shapes, each shape has both a plug and a corresponding socket. USB A is the traditional rectangular plug/socket, while USB B is the bulky somewhat square shape usually found in printers. There are also mini and micro versions of both A and B, each having both a plug and a socket.

The traditional USB connection has a host with a USB A socket, which provides power; a cable with a USB A plug in one end and a USB B plug in the other end; and a device with a USB B socket. All traditional USB cables are A to B cables, with a USB A plug and a USB B plug; an A to A cable would allow connecting two hosts together, and both would try to provide power at the same time, which might damage the hardware.

USB-C is completely different; all cables have two USB-C plugs, while both hosts and devices have USB-C sockets. Which side provides power is negotiated through a dedicated configuration channel.
Perfect example of why understanding your domain is so critical to analytics. There are some key assumptions that need to be made before any thing is explored. Love it.
Ah I see, yes I agree.
When on the other hand I hear of states arguing over masks and ventilators, and of NY being over capacity, I can't empathize with his current advocacy for an immediate loosening of stay-at-home orders (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-07/michael-b...), as well as sentiments like this https://twitter.com/michaeljburry/status/1247338200269389824

> Domestic violence "flourishing." This happening right now. Infuriating that governments sacrificed these women and children with blockhead policies lacking all nuance and understanding. Politicians and media ran roughshod over these victims. #COVID19

It's ironic that in the same tweet that he criticizes governments for lacking all nuance, he fails to note that the two anecdotes reported in the story come from China and Spain, which are among the hardest hit, which are likely the most justified for harsh measures and lockdowns.

He does point out many severe negative consequences, but they seem to be based off wrong assumptions. There is no universal testing because there are not enough tests.

There is no recommendation for the seemingly promising drugs because afaict there is not enough to meet demand. I don't see why "But there is no time for that." If there isn't enough of it anyway.

The situation may change but his current unnuanced criticism that doesn't seem to address aspects of his recommendation that seem to me need to be addressed does not convince me.
Did VMS TCP/IP support suffer due to poor effort from Digital, or as an inherent side-effect of the kernel design?

Could poor TCP/IP performance have been a consequence of 'real asynchronous I/O support'?

Berkeley sockets is obnoxious [Example]. But the advanced user can get fine control over it. If you have a use-case that is vulnerable to back-pressure, with Berkeley sockets you can manage that away. Some friendlier API designs would have worse options.

Berkeley sockets is ubiquitous, and there is not much to compare it to. Insights from VMS would be interesting.

--

:Example. A selector indicates that a socket is ready for read/write. But what that actually means is contextual, depending on whether it was created as a client or server socket. You can't attach metadata to the socket to assist with that. Rather, you have to maintain parallel structures.
Maybe it uses javascript, but the site works _great_ without it.
Transformation Status: Failure
I don't think there's a world where Rich Hickey would have had it running on BEAM. From what I've read, a large part of why he originally chose the JVM is because companies he wrote software for would be okay with something that runs on the JVM, but not something like Common Lisp. And surely not BEAM.

At its core, Clojure attempts to be practical. Running on the JVM was a practical decision.
I always think of Dr. Nick, "Inflammable means flammable‽ What a country!" [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8mD2hsxrhQ