skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
c.f. South Korea.
c.f. Germany
c.f. Canada

even ... c.f. California.

These are all jurisdictions that took early, effective, widespread action that have resulted in dramatically lower rates of cases and deaths.
Yeah exactly, I think of this as "imperative in the small" and "functional in the large". There's no real cost to local state, but there's a big cost to tracking global state.

(Although game programmers seem to have necessarily built their mental models on global state, and think about it differently. Their programs generally don't get maintained for decades though.)

But "functional in the large" is basically the same thing as dependency injection in OOP languages. State and I/O are explicit parameters rather than globals.

Here is a comment I wrote about that a long time ago, on Disadvantages of Purely Functional Programming:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11841893

To me there's no real advantage to expressing something like "split a string by a delimiter" in a purely functional style. Either way, you have a trivial referentially transparent function you can reuse without causing complexity in your program. You might as well do the obvious imperative thing.

...

So both "functions and data" are effectively and usefully implemented as classes. The key is to make some classes like functions, and some classes like data. And have more of a bipartite dependency graph, where functions depend on data, and data depends on functions.

-----

I also explicitly structure the program as a graph, which I try to make acyclic, but again the problems and solutions are domain-specific. (Programming is very diverse and programmers tend to generalize from their own few examples.)

For example, Compilers and interpreters are inherently mutually recursive, which gives you cyclic dependencies. As far as I can tell, this is the essential reason that Fabrice Bellard's QuickJS has one file that's 70K lines of C. And you can see the same thing if you look at the Zig compiler.

In Oil I "modularize" the cyclic dependencies so you can plug them in and out at runtime (which is actually used in the program), but it has a performance cost.
The spore drive is a correctly-formatted and notarized petition to Juffo-Wup.

The flash does not originate at Discovery and propagate outward as light, but begins before the ship appears, from a diffuse source, constructively interferes at Discovery's normal-spacetime discontinuity, and generates a holographic illusion between the observer and the nebula that just appears to be a flashbulb reflection.

Every Star Trek problem may be resolved by sufficient application of technobabble (a.k.a. [TECH] in the script). It's space opera. Apply the MST3K rule. (It's just a show; I should really just relax.)

The space-mushroom dimension is the same as the gate network from Stargate SG-1, or the wormhole-traversal tech and Leviathan starburst from Farscape. It's the plot conceit that allows the cast to instantly move from one set to another without any of the boring and unremarkable travel time. The exact nature of the instant-transport is dependent on the dramatic series plot arcs that the show-runners came up with in case they ever got past the pilot episode. The cool CGI visual effect used to signal to the viewer that sci-fi is happening now is flawed. Not everyone can pull off the Stargate-opening vortex.

Discovery and Picard are very much darker than pure Roddenberry, in that they portray The Federation as something far short of a perfectly ethical Utopia. In my opinion, this is a decision that allows for a far wider range of character development. An imperfect Starfleet can employ a monstrous starship captain that murders to keep its secrets. Klingons can be more than just a racial stereotype to be used as a script proxy for 1960s Russia (and the language has already been constructed, so might as well use it).
30 year old guy died where I live, recently. He leaves behind a young family.

Do not pretend this can't hurt young people, badly.
I don't really understand the point of temperature taking as asymptomatic patients are contagious (sars-cvd-2 is far from alone in this respect).

This testing provides a false negative which allows vectors to mix with healthy people -- a false sense of security. You might as well not do it.
There is substantial criticism mounting directed at the Heinsberg study [1]

- Immunity tests used might have shown false positives. So the 15% might be too high.

- Results of the highly infected town Gangelt are not transferable to whole Germany with lower infection rates.

- The author of the study is inflicted with a marketing agency, which is at least uncommon in science.

Own comment: The danger SARS-Cov19 remains in the speed of spreading due to missing herd immunity (in contrast to the common flu). 0.37 per cent is still a lot. USA: 327,200,000*0.37% = 1,210,640. Social distancing remains the single most effective tool.

[1] https://www.zeit.de/wissen/gesundheit/2020-04/heinsberg-stud...
I do not have any specific critiques about it, although I remember seeing the authors had some follow-up work.

But the important caveat about that model is that it assumes everyone does nothing. It has been a rather long time since everyone stopped doing nothing, so even if it is entirely correct, it has not been relevant since well before this article was written.
I don't think PostgreSQL supports out of the box auto-failover as MongoDB does. It either needs custom scripting or tools like repmgr.

From the official docs:

>> PostgreSQL does not provide the system software required to identify a failure on the primary and notify the standby database server. Many such tools exist and are well integrated with the operating system facilities required for successful failover, such as IP address migration. [1]

[1]https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/warm-standby-failove...
How to Innovate with Morphology Matrices
Of course the data exists. See eg. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LREM25TTUSM156S

The issue people are talking about unemployment rate and not the joblessness rate is that people care about ability to get a job if you want one. The joblessness rate includes people who are looking for job but can’t get any, but also people who are supported by their spouses, retirees, and people living on government benefits who are not looking for job, because they are disabled, too busy with childcare, or care for other people needing it, or ultimately too lazy and having too little self-respect to stop living on charity of others.

This wide aggregation makes it very difficult to understand what actually causes changes in it: are more people jobless because of expansion of disability benefits? Or maybe there was a surge of people retiring early? You need to look at other indicators to understand it. For example, good amount of growth of employment rate in recent years is a result of many people, who previously drew disability benefits to compensate them for their inability to work, actually going to work, once the work became better option than government check.

For this reason, unemployment rate is a better metric to look at, because it tells you something more useful and has better signal to noise ratio.
There is also a table with more details here https://www.mediterranee-infection.com/wp-content/uploads/20...

But it's still unpublished at this stage

There have been already many reactions to these new claims. Very quick to dismiss him again for the lack of any control group despite him comparing to other hospitals who do not treat with HCQ...
You say that like that’s not problematic.
The article does not mention what the author means by “scaleable” projects. Scaleable in terms of the codebase being used by tens or hundreds of apps? Scaleable in terms of tens or hundreds of developers working in the same codebase? Scaleable in terms of millions of users with different hardware and devices using the web sites?

My guess is that it is “scaleable in terms of a team of 10-20 developers working on the same codebase”.
The practices are fair in this sense, though I’m a bit unsure on the specific library recommendations and why they are better than the alternatives not listed. I was also missing things like tooling om test coverage - and agreeing with the team on how to go about this - or code review practices and enforcing (or not enforcing) this.

When it comes to scaling for millions of users, things like monitoring, alerting, logging, measuring performance in smart ways are things that also need to be done.

I happen to head up a web team who is building “scaleable” web apps in this latter regard (we have millions of monthly paying users around the globe whom we need to scale for) and I’ll write up the additional practices we use to “scale” with w small team in a later post on my blog [1] for anyone interested.

[1] http://blog.pragmaticengineer.com
> But in their eyes, Elm is not done

I think this is one of the major themes of all the 'Elm dramas' that we have been reading and hearing about. Elm core team should stop recommending it as a stable platform that people can try out (which Elm clearly is not).
Only one of those 6 suggests an "easier" interviewing path. And it doesn't happen at Google, so I'm still comfortable saying the process is meritocratic.

You're trying to argue that processes to encourage women to join somehow make it easier for them to be hired. Those aren't the same.
Pandemic forces startups to shift gears
Spanish flu was very closely intertwined with the war, because of which people were kept in the dark almost everywhere. Lack of reporting translates to lack of awareness of the pandemic which translates to people working and shopping fearlessly.

The difference now is that people know there's a pandemic, and many would be averse to go out working, or shopping even though the scale is much lower than that of Spanish flu.

Random tidbit:. It's named Spanish flu because that's one of the few places where it was reported, because it wasn't involved in ww1 and had no reason to shut down the press. Everyone thought the flu epidemic was in Spain.
I suspect that we here on HN may suffer from selection bias, in that many of us do work that is most amenable to moving to remote.

There is also an issue of transition, where there plausibly is quite an efficiency lag (months, at least) before people become get really set up, even assuming they are able to be as (or more) efficient.
Having some states do the right things and others not doing so is kind of like having a pool with a peeing section.
Interesting question although unlikely. Certainly it's not possible with the mechanism of malaria transmission which uses a multi-species cycle.
The downside risk here is that nobody wants to take any of these businesses over because it doesn't make financial sense anymore in the post COVID era, and then the economy spirals and we're all screwed. The economy is built on aspirations, and right now, there aren't a whole lot beyond a short term cash infusion from the Fed.
You're not describing a company with payroll as a (or the) major expense.
We Built an API for iMessage
> APL was developed to mimic mathematical notation

APL was developed to replace mathematical notation. Making it a computer language was almost an afterthought. Indeed, there have been some trivial mathematical proofs in j[1][2][3]. Perhaps those give you a better idea of the connection?

1: https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Essays/Trains#Proof_of_Compl...

2: https://code.jsoftware.com/mediawiki/images/8/82/A_Proof_in_...

3: https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Essays/Ackermann%27s_Functio...
No one is addressing the issue right now because we aren't even in a situation to exploit the alternate arrangement. Suppose at this very moment we switch over to the quarantine the old people strategy, and go to largely unrestricted life for other age groups. Even in the 20-50 year old range, the hospitalization rate looks like 20%. Say we're actually missing 50% of cases cause they're so mild, so it's really 10%.

330 million Americans, says 70% aren't at highest risk, all become infected, at 10% hospitalization -> 23 million hospitalizations required. Spread over 18 months, that's still an additional 1.25 million hospitalizations every month. That's 0.3% of Americans in hospital for COVID, constantly (assuming average 1 month time in hospital required - yes I made that up).

For context, roughly 0.7% of Americans are incarcerated at any given time.

Still a logistical nightmare. You can tweak those numbers however you wish, but they generally all giving mind boggling logistical nightmares.
> I have high confidence privacy will be well-implemented by Apple's involvement

oh yeah! let's blindly trust closed source solutions for privacy and security. This have worked so well every single time in history! </sarcams>

I guess it will be doubly safe if we blindly trust the company that previously saved plain text location data for every app to see.

geez. i know people here invest heavily on APPL, but c'mon. Keep at least a little bit of common sense in the comments!
No, I'm simply stating a fact. There is no reason for you to presume motive. You have chosen to perceive the slogan as hateful. This is your belief, your perception. It's not present in the slogan itself.
It took a couple of months for the Robert Koch institute to figure out what masks are good for. Let's give Dr. Streek some time to figure out how fomite transmission works.
OK, that's me putting the smartphone in a drawer and picking up a Nokia 3310.
And apparently principle zero is make scrolling janky for some godforsaken reason.
When I see that small businesses get shut down, but Walmart gets to keep selling everything because they have a grocery section, I get a little disgruntled too. New Mexico just shut down standalone liquor stores... but Walmart will be allowed continue selling liquor. If I owned a store, I'd be pretty upset that the governor appears to be enriching the very biggest "everything" stores while driving me out of business.
$1500 for the display, plus a $500 board to drive it, plus...

I really like it, but not that much!
The political food fight is hogging bandwidth to the point that it's difficult to discuss how to restart the economy... or even how to get protective equipment to medical professionals.

We're all tempted to feed that, but please resist. Thank you.
I think the big problem is who do you count? Probably not children under 18, or the elderly (starting at what age?), and what about stay at home parents?

Or do you survey people and ask them if they are not worrying, would they rather be working?

And how do you count people in the gig economy? Or folks who used to have professional jobs but are now making do with a service job because they can't find something like what they had before?

Counting unemployment is not straightforward.
Do you really think that this feature has drawn a line in the sand where previously they couldn't track you and now they can?
Sourdough, Status, and Self-Isolation
Yeah, this "perception-action cycle" has been well known and taught in neuroscience for a long time. What's new, at least since I studied it, is the anti-correlated tick-tock of these two key networks that seems to be happening. Amazing how similar to a game engine consciousness seems to be panning out.
That's Facebook's UI for chats. And it's useless IMO.
Good luck with living in modern society
"We were not able use these techniques in Firefox, as they recently reduced the timer resolution to 2ms. The techinque presented here is potentially relevant even for this timer resolution, but some parameter tweaking is required.?"

AFAIK, Chrome's highest resolution is also in the ms range.

I have some thoughts, too, but thoughts don't amount to a working exploit. Show me a currently working exploit, that is in the open. As far as state actors developing such exploits, there are a ton of holes in that scenario at every layer in the stack.
And make it double?
No specific numbers, but I have friend who uses thick impasto style with oil paints. At one point he was trying out cheap and expensive oils and had a studio visit with the owner of a major gallery.

The first thing the gallerist did was point out every painting that used the cheap oil paint. Now he exclusively uses Old Holland brand oils. some of which list for 300-500 USD for 225ml.
I believe we seriously understimate how widespread is the virus.

Let not-so-at-risk people go around will also helps in not moving completely blond in this episode.

I know people that are sure to have caught it, didn't get tested, it pass away, and now are still locked down for the foreseeable future.

In Italy it was asked to several people to donate blood, all of them though to have never got the virus, turns out 60% of them already got it.

We need something more than just staying at home.
That certainly would of played a part and in bidding for the contract the military may of needed 3 quotes. So h usual suspects quote, large amount as case of if they accept, then we can afford to just do it and still cheese happy, if not, no investment beyond a fat large quote. So only takes one serious player to do a quote more realistic and yet profitable and they are up and running.

So even without any buddy buddy contract factors, the whole bidding process and list of approved suppliers and viable suppliers would of seen the usual suspects asked to tender no matter what. Now any new party actively seeking that type of work in a new field like this would if anything be more at risk of underquoting compared to the other tenders. So be interesting if those tenders for this contract was known. Certainly be very insightful into this whole process. As it is not how this company won the contract, it's how the others lost it and I dare say, quotes so large that if taken, be impossible to lose money and if not, no investment lost. Take it or leave it type quotes though will often play out in many contracts and with that, make any quote realistic (even too realistic) stick out. Hence known people who will always pick the middle quote if down to personal choice. Business, gets down to the lowest and some various degrees of vetting if that company can do what they see, varying from none down to proven track record and some serious auditing. Hence the usual suspects quoting for many things plays out as track record and vetting and auditing done already.
It isn't going to be every company. It's better in the long run for the health of the market if companies' financial success correlates with their asset prices - it isn't good for investor confidence to add in an X factor of whether companies are going to have the political capital needed to get bailed out.
I can't imagine Scenario #1 being the issue. It should have been the first thing they looked at when designing it. If it is, it's a new level of terrible QA that Apple has been plagued with in recent years.

My lack of faith in humanity can see #4. Another great thing nerfed by dumb people.

Regardless, the firmware releases are an embarassing fiasco that demonstrates a lack of coordination and communication within Apple.
Automotive and Aerospace Engineering Built the World’s Most Sustainable Scooter
That CNN article claims that US intelligence agencies somehow knew about the outbreak before, as far as we know, even the actual doctors on the ground in Wuhan did. All of the known timelines point to doctors there spotting the first cases in December and becoming increasingly alarmed about it at the month wore on; the headline claim in that article is that the US knew about it in November. Small wonder that the intelligence agency in question issued a rare public, on-the-record denial.
if you believe that, then I'll trade you 20% of my expected 10 year income for 20% of my current discounted net worth (which is theoretically what a company's market cap should be, a discounted claim on future distributions).

revenue today (or in the shorter term) is always more valuable than revenue 10 years out. put it a different way, what if there's another "act of god" in a few years? the probability of an extreme event occurring within a discrete timeframe increases as your timeframe gets larger, thus your certainty in revenue projections should decrease as you project further out.
Two courses taught by faculty at the Russian institute HSE (Higher School of Economics).

1. How to Win a Data Science Competition
https://www.coursera.org/learn/competitive-data-science

2. Bayesian Methods for Machine Learning
https://www.coursera.org/learn/bayesian-methods-in-machine-l...
Try '-no-remote'. Or was that '--no-remote'? Anyway, that's what I've used for years and years when needing to run firefox over ssh X forwarding.
> It's unrealistic to expect that people won't want to travel or eat out.

Yes, people will want to eat out. But it will be fewer than a few months ago because a) layoffs, b) less disposable income, c) the fear of less/no income soon, d) the fear/risk of getting sick, and other reasons I can't guess.

Whether that is -10%, -50% or -95% has yet to be seen and near impossible to predict usefully right now.
https://www.nbc4i.com/community/health/coronavirus/dewine-ac...

Hope this helps.
It's a somewhat noble sentiment, but an absolutely terrible idea in practice.

Letting large businesses (airlines etc.) go bankrupt isn't just a disaster for the rich -- it's a disaster for retirees who hold a majority of savings in equities (index funds etc.), as they've been told is the responsible thing to do.

Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater -- or grandma out with the billionaires.

We want to reduce inequality? Great. But do it in a targeted way, through taxation that takes into account people's income and overall wealth. Not in a blunt-instrument way that harms middle-class savers along with hedge funds.

And not through letting a host of major corporations go bankrupt through zero fault of their management/board.

(Remember, it's not like an airline can buy insurance against a months-long pandemic, nor are public companies supposed to retain unnecessary cash in times of profit -- the IRS virtually requires them to distribute it to shareholders either through dividends or buybacks.)

EDIT (in response to comments): OK, I exaggerated a little -- retirees shouldn't be holding a majority of savings in stock. But since one common rule of thumb is to hold a percentage in equities that is 100 minus your age, a 70-year-old still has 30% in equities. And your 50-year-old saving up for retirement has half. The main point still stands: normal middle-class folks hold equities as a significant part of their savings. It's not just billionaires who own equities.
The phrase is:

"Privatize the profits, socialize the losses"

As workers, we get the downside, but not the upside. We are peasants like all of those in times past. Only difference is standard of living is higher now, so we should be so happy to get the scraps.
This is the first honest explanation I've received - thank you. SneezeMap has had hundreds of upvotes on reddit, been praised by industry leaders like Balaji Srinivasan, received free sponsorship from Facebook, and been approached by 2 Y-Combinator companies for parternship opportunities. In my experience it takes a few tries to get relevant content to enter forum discussion.
This reminds me of the old joke that, because the possibility of there being two bombs on a plane is infinitesimally small, you should always bring your own bomb with you.
And living with the erosion of Constitutional protections that seem all too easy to push through in times like these, but impossible to roll back afterward.
Good to know! I'm going to try it out, but I just figured I would point that out incase it wasn't known to your team.