skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here’s a 2019 preprint that concludes “We show that cigar-shaped models suffer from a fine-tuning problem and have only 16 per cent probability to produce light curve minima as deep as the ones present in `Oumuamua's light curve. Disc-shaped models, on the other hand, are very likely (at 91 per cent) to produce minima of the required depth.”

https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.03696

So it seems like there is still a lot of conjecture involved... Yet the National Geographic article misleads by showing an artists impression (pictures are truthy) while treating the elongated shape as fact on every line (the alternate disc model was also mentioned in original paper trying to deduct the shape, although the paper concluded it was less likely). Poor reporting IMHO.

I am not an astrophysicist, but this is the second Nat Geo article that I’ve read recently that has really failed my good reporting sniff test. Edit: failed to meet the high standards I expect from Nat Geo.
Ask HN: Why don't we place ads based on the content?
Why don't we place ads based on the content, instead of the user, the way print does? Given all the concerns about user privacy with targeted advertising in general, as well as the fickle revenue from this [1], it seems like it should at least be considered.

I admit I am coming from a place of ignorance about this topic and am just curious. This seems like an obvious thing, at least in some cases, so I don't understand why it isn't even considered.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22856324
For me it is either math + algorithmic challenges, like projecteuler [1] (which is amazing), or going back to system programming, like trying to write something worthy without libc. Like others have commented, I do need to do this every now and then (~once a year)

[1] https://projecteuler.net/
They also arguably make people hoard less. If you can't resell for a large profit, there's no point in buying more than what you feel hedges your risk. So you'll buy 200 masks instead of 20 000.

Disposable PPE is also funny in a way that it makes no sense to buy it unless you buy in bulk. If you can get 200 N95 masks for $20, it's OK. If you can buy 2 masks for $20, then you'd better spend $1000 or don't buy at all. A lot of people buying few masks each just wastes a whole supply of masks that could all go to one place (e.g. a hospital) where they would make a difference because there would be enough of them to be used properly.
Agree, and I'm read to pay for Chrome Premium ( or as it is called now - Brave browser )
>They are asked to submit a portfolio of their own original work.

How do you assess that it's their own work?

> Incompetent programmers don't have anything to show, and our industry makes it easy to come up with excuses about why, excuses that wouldn't play for a digital artist.

Such as?

One thing to bear in mind is that ultimately there is no perfect way to hire, whether programmers, artists etc ..
I don't understand how you can use stealth as an example. The only way you can fairly simulate stealth mechanics is by making every enemy render the scene at low complexity and then check if it can see pixels of the player model. Maybe some games do this but from my experience what happens when you get caught is pretty boring. They sound the alarm and they all hunt you down as if they had a radar because actually doing the simulation is too expensive. There is no need for a third state. Once the alarm is on it is on but it shouldn't mean the enemy knows where you are.
> Slavery was enforced (and subsidized) by many governments; it wasn't exactly a creature of the free market.

Chicken or egg. You can make this argument either way. The fact is that slavery has been around for a lot longer than the governments that "enforced" it and it eventually took governments to abolish it completely.

> As we saw with toilet paper (and hand sanitizer), the average person will hoard anything they are afraid will not be available tomorrow. Companies have shown more restraint in this crisis and others.

Luckily in a well functioning democracy it would not be the toilet paper hoarders that'd be charged with coming up with ethical legislation.

It's not either or. Legislation doesn't solve everything, but neither does a completely free market (which doesn't and couldn't exist anyway).
The content is wrapping at every character, rather than on word boundaries or with hyphenation.

The relevant styles:

.subcol {
hyphens: auto;
word-break: break-all;
}

`word-break: break-all` should be replaced with `overflow-wrap: break-word`. Those two properties are quite subtle in their meaning and interactions.
We run two servers and one laptop on Gentoo Linux. Other two boxes run Arch Linux. :)
Link: https://www.nongnu.org/renameutils/

On macOS with Homebrew, install with `brew install renameutils`.
This is exactly what DuckDuckGo does and what Google did prior to targeted tracking and advertising. It's basically the old school web advertising model. I'm guessing it's not as popular anymore because it's not as profitable.
You have to give them an “A” for effort. They are coming out in front of the encryption wars, even if it’s a half baked approach.
Top Bootstrap Developer Friendly Templates for 2020
Rust for Functional Programmers (2014)
I do have enough. And I also have some context on quite a number of cultures (with different writing systems, including cultures who have actually migrated or tried to migrate from one to another) and it's obvious latin alphabet is the most practical in the context of computers, cyrilic being just slightly different (essentially the same in the most of the technological and practical aspects - the only difference is it's non-ASCII and has slightly different set of glyphs). I don't say practicality is the only significant value to consider though, indeed the cultural value also is very important.
Raspberry Pi's Cheapest Computer Could Ease Ventilator Shortage
Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World by René Girard.
Note that i've mainly tried 86box, which is a PCem fork (but AFAIK it is kept in sync with PCem and the main difference is a nicer GUI for Windows and that it provides nightly builds optimized for various CPUs).

For DOS games, DOSBox is generally the better and -especially- faster choice with the main exception being mid80s games that assumed a 4.77MHz CPU (you can still play them on DOSBox but you need to fiddle around with the cycles and even then it assumes 1 cycle = 1 instruction, whereas PCem counts cycles correctly and also it takes into consideration the graphics card performance whereas DOSBox draws things as fast as it can).

For Windows games, assuming you cannot run them in modern Windows, it is basically the best choice - assuming you have a really fast PC, otherwise you'll get sound stuttering and slowdowns (with my AMD Ryzen 7 3700X i can emulate a Pentium 75Hz -mostly- fine but anything above that starts to cause sound to stutter).

Though in my experience 99% of the Windows games out there will work in modern Windows with something like dgVoodoo2, a framecapping tool like RTSS and perhaps adjusting the compatibility options. It might take some fiddling here and there. Notable exception being mid-2000s games with DRM.
"I came to the almost opposite conclusion that the obvious answer was that everything is tradeoffs and compromises."

Probably the smartest answer there is.
If weird annotations can work for slightly different phonemes in Orthographia Bohemica and for Zamenhof, I'm sure you would be able to use them for tones as well.
this is going on since 3-4 years already but no intervention has really taken place.

In South of Italy the trees are being removed, but a truly intervention hasn't been deployed.
Greece Handled Coronavirus Crisis Better Than Italy and Spain
I get your point, but would you say "a 99 year period" is synonymous with "a century"?
Love the idea. Really hard to navigate and read, because content ends up in little boxes. But I love it as a bit of fun!
> And willingness to pay is a pretty good proxy when marginal utility falls off pretty quickly with quantity.

I don't understand why people aren't talking about how disposable PPE defies this point at the low end. Hoarding a million masks doesn't make you better off than buying a thousand, but buying ten N95 masks is as good as buying zero. Masks, gloves, even hand sanitizer are consumables, so getting a little bit of them for everyone is as good as just throwing them into a hole and setting on fire. They work only when concentrated in bulk. Like a thousand of masks per household, or a million per hospital. Enough hand sanitizer that you can actually disinfect your hands every time you accidentally touch something outside. Etc.
I started with something that's completely unrelated to my professional work and to my other side projects: home computer emulator programming.

I moved from C++ to the much simpler C which I started to enjoy more because it's not putting such a "mental barrier" between my brain and the problem to solve (another option would've been to use an entirely different programming language you're currently interested in but can't use "at work").

Basically: have one or several fallback projects which are completely different from your usual work, without any self-imposed deadlines or long term planning to go back to when the other work becomes boring or overwhelming, just having fun is the main point, and part of the fun is going back to the core of what makes programming actually fun: Just whipping out code in a way that "feels right" to you, and seeing things actually happen, free from outside opinions or priorities.

From time to time (usually over the Christmas holidays) I take a deep dive into this project, but otherwise it's just a few hours a week at most, usually with months-long pauses inbetween.

PS: it took me a few months to "detox" my brain from the "professional software development process" that has become the norm in the "industry" ("agile" processes, software development patterns, estimates, tickets and all that crap). Those had been deeply ingrained into my brain in the last decades, but it's important to realize that all these things are, in fact, turning programming into a chore where burnout is ineviatable.
Counter to that, a lot of companies are scaling up their web/mobile presence and offerings because they can't let their customers into the building. I'm a contract programmer and business is arguably booming.
> And that's not necessarily a good thing.

Nothing is 100% gain or loss.

But I believe there is nothing in our current situation that is worth more than having a united humanity, which can only happen if well all can understand each others.

> There are some things that are simply untranslatable to English - these words/concepts are closely tied to the way we live

It's ok, you can use the native word in an english sentence. English does that all the time: "je ne sais quoi" (french), "taxi" (turkish), "pizza" (italien), etc.

> Now if everyone in my town starts speaking only English suddenly, it would definitely affect the way they think[1], function, and would inevitable change the culture.

Yes. Change is inevitable anyway. But we can choose to change in one direction. I think the direction of uniting the human specie is the best choice.

> preserving a language might help preserve a culture.

I'll exchange my own entire french cultural heritage in a blink if suddently I could make the entire world speak one common language.

But it doesn't have to be.

A culture is not this immutable things we think it is. Most thing we call ancestral are really just the result of a continuous transformation process that have the same flavor, and so that we identify as stable. Even centuries old religions have been changing all the time.

So culture will change as well. It will adapt, and keep what is meant to be kept, then drop the rest.

We will lose some valuable things in the process, but to gain much more.
TerminusDB is about to launch a set of features that are all about... (drum roll) Decentralized Version Control for Structured Data!
> If wealthy people make a habit of spending irrationally they go broke.

This just isn't the case. Unless they're spending irrationally AND a large proportion of their wealth then spending irrationally is unlikely to make them go broke. And unfortunately some people have so much wealth that they can spend market-distorting amounts of money that are still a tiny fraction of their overall wealth.
> Still using .NET Core 1.x?

We're on a mix of 2.2 and 3.1 where the default still is json or have i got this wrong?
It's really too late to manage this. Testing hasn't been made available in time mostly due to total failure to plan and political decisions not to manage any of this.

All we can do now is turn up and down the level of isolation depending on how many ventilators and ICU beds are available. We will have to do that on a sort of feedback, trial and error basis because we lack capacity and what capacity we do have is being wasted.

The only question is whether anyone will be held accountable for this colossal mess and the preventable deaths its caused, or if we will just accept this happening ever 5 or so years...
You're not considering what I feel to be the most important point here.

The immediate result of price signals is huge amounts of money will become available to anyone who is producing a scarce good. If something in your scenario (government, public pressure, whatever) interferes with the market then the people who produce food will no longer be awash with money and will not produce more anywhere near as fast.

Even if people are starving the solution is not to ban disaster profiteers or implement price controls. The solution is for the government to start buying food at market prices and distributing it evenly. Working with the price signalling system, not against it. It isn't efficient but if people are starving then sure efficiency isn't the single biggest problem. At least it keeps the incentives where they need to be.
Indeed. This reminds me of what I've read about WWI -- and the fall of several monarchies. We don't have many monarchies now -- but the old world order is changing.
gh – GitHub's new CLI
Widespread collapse in the startup world
If you use Linux DOSEmu will run much faster.
1) Steal manhole cover
2) Sell to junkyard for drugs
3) Take drugs whilst waiting for it to be replaced
4) Repeat
How would this work from a bandwidth and caching perspective? I'm thinking it would be problematic if hundreds of workstations need to download gigs of software at 9am every morning.
What's the Type of JSON.parse(JSON.stringify(x)) in TypeScript?
But technology is so uncertain past 6 years that successfully making half decent tech bets might mean your specialty is somewhere else.

Will GCP certifications still be useful? Should Google be the certifying body for their own technology? When a field is so dependent on proprietary tech, does it make sense to certify people as metaphorical Windows Metro experts?
An unprecedented look at Apollo 13’s damaged service module
exactly, see: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium
> There isn't an alternative.

There is an alternative: distribute wealth. On aggregate people tend to behave a lot more rationally than individuals do. So if you spread the buying power as widely as possible then you get a more rational market.
Epic photo. Spending anytime with a coyote seems to be mystical in a way. I shared some time with one at another national park some years ago. It’s crazy when you are both experiencing the same thing, but not. There is something about looking a coyote in the eye that words can’t describe.

Thanks for sharing your story!
Oaths: How do they Work? (2019)
As far as I can tell from reading the (very well sourced) Wikipedia article on minimum wage, the general consensus amongst economists on the pros and cons is not at all what user "notidentified" to is claiming, and is backed up by plenty of actual studies.
Glowing silicon nanowire reveals how to put optics in your CPU
It "could be" almost anything. Billions of years, hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy alone.
Vote-by-mail should be having its moment. Will it?
For me, it is essential to find a project that absorbs me. Usually that’s a personal itch just project, not one at work.

Code reviews, agile “stand up” meetings, sacrificing one of quality or features — all that kills interest, for me. Don’t do those.

I sometimes go months without a fun project. Fortunately, I have one while in quarantine.
The problem with the recent -- currently postponed -- changes is not with the IR35 itself; it has been a thing for quite some time now. The changes are about redefining who is responsible for determining the IR35 status: in the old (still valid) regulation, the responsibility is in the hands of the contractor's company, while with the new changes it falls down to the end client.

The reason this change is not welcome by the contractors is that many end clients -- primarily large banks and similar corporations -- do not want to bother checking each individual contract; instead they tend to make blanket decisions and declare all external contracts as inside IR35. And being inside IR35 is the worst of both worlds: you get taxed as if you're a full employee, but you're still not entitled to full employee's benefits like paid sick days or holidays.
Google readies its own chip for future Pixels and Chromebooks
> But unlike a game, the observers aren't limited to limited perspectives in our 'real' universe.

How do you know?

How many "players" or "observers" are there? How do you know that?

How large a proportion of our universe do they observe?

The reality is that we do not know. We don't know if there's even a single "player" or "observer" over time, because for what we know there could be that only brief disconnected "slices" of time are ever simulated for single observers - we never directly observe the past and present at the same time; we only "know" the past from our memory in the present, and we have no way of knowing if that memory is an accurate representation of anything. Nor do we have a way of knowing if our sensory input is an accurate representation of anything.
Maybe they were, a little bit. Two and a half months ago it was becoming obvious it's going to be a problem.
For general principles, I recommend

https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Economics-7th-Gregory-Mank...

I started with vulgarisation but it didn't lead me very far. This is a reference textbook used by economics students around the world. It's surprisingly entertaining and teaches you the basic concepts of macro and micro economics.
Definitely Keynes. Much of the fundamentals hasn’t made much sense earlier, but it does now.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Maynard_Keynes
Whenever someone visits your content, they download and redistribute it, like a torrent. You can also pay for services like eternum.io to (additionally) distribute your content.
> Their theory of the business cycle is the reason they successfully predict every crisis to the tee (except for timing, no one can do that), while other economists are just blown away in surprise that it even happened.

A prediction without timing is no prediction at all.
What Is Gay for Pay?
Capital - Piketty
> Speaking as an economist, I tend to get nervous when other economists talk about circumstances where "morality trumps economics."

Krugman invokes Rawls:

> The classic argument here is, of course, that of Rawls, whose 1971 “A Theory of Justice” argued that we should evaluate social arrangements by imagining ourselves having to choose institutions and policy behind a “veil of ignorance”: what society would you prefer if you didn’t know who you would be?

* PDF: https://www.gc.cuny.edu/CUNY_GC/media/LISCenter/pkrugman/why...

* https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/1246432215422111745
Mental Health and Well-Being During the Covid-19 Pandemic
If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say it's because production in a gas power plant is simply regulated by burning more or less gas. If you need more gas, you can likely buy more. While production in a hydro power plant can be brought up and down by draining the reservoir faster or slower, a hydro plant has a lot of external factors that a gas power plant hasn't.

The current water level in the reservoir, expected drainage and rainfall over the year, environmental regulations concerning water discharge and intake levels, fish, etc. all play into it. Note that a hydroelectric power plant doesn't just generate electricity, it also regulates water levels pretty far up- and downstream from the plant.
A very simplified version of Austrian economics boom and bust cycles would be that central banks provides money too cheaply which leads to non productive investments resulting in a first a boom and then a bust when those investments don't pan out. Worth noting is that empirical evidence for this is slim at best. I think a better explanation for the 2008 crisis is that commercial banks mismanaged risk of mortgage backed securities. And I have a hard time seeing the current crisis having anything to do with cheap money
I sort of feel that the title needs some punctuation somewhere to not be ridiculous.
Also, I fail to see how an economic theory can predict a depression caused by a pandemic...
Influenza-like illness based on Kinsa devices drops bellow the expected average
Reminder: please always post arXiv links to the abstract page, not directly to the PDF. https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.02456
I know this link has also been posted about 3 weeks ago, but I found it interesting now because of the updated Observed/Atypical/Expected chart they have on left of the page. The above-Expected trajectory observed starting with about March 1 was kind of, well, expected, giving the circumstances at that time (no social distancing implemented it in times of a pandemic), but I found just as interesting the bellow-Expected trajectory of the curve that has started around March 21st.
That makes no sense. People can enslave others without any "government" being involved, and they have done so for thousands of years. The people enslaving the others just need bigger weapons so the slaves cannot revolt.

Government can prevent people from being enslaved. But without a government being involved, slavery will still happen. In fact, it will happen much more often as is evidenced by the fact that modern day slavery happens primarily in countries where governments are not powerful enough to stop it.
After 15 years the original still shows up in a modern browser more or less exactly as it did back then. I wonder if this WebGL/javascript heavy thing will even load in 5 years.
Tnx for the article, was useful to read. I also found info about the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) approach on https://softteco.com/blog/infrastructure-as-code . One of the biggest IaC benefits is the opportunity to store all the infrastructure code in a separate repository.
- very interesting UI. Somebody should offer you a front-end job!

- but needs more testing on the sliders. Why 1 hour and 60 minutes?

- idea: some people who use todo lists place a monetary value on each task to sort for the priority.
Android phones will get the Covid-19 tracking updates via Google Play
Yeah, heaven forbid you have to read an article to find out what it says. Doesn't matter though, HN has already dismissed this article as state fabrication, cos "China" so you don't need to read it anyway.
I would rather people neither buy to resell, nor buy to hoard "just in case."
Aw, Snap Your Birthday Party Has Gone Virtual