skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know the specifics of any of the companies you've listed, but I do know that financial institutions can't generally tell customers when they're doing something like filing a Suspicious Activity Report.

I suspect one such report got filed for me or a nonprofit I volunteered with when I came across the Canada-US border a few years back to deposit several Canada Post USD money orders plus a single US$20 bill into the nonprofit's US bank account, representing the cash receipts at a conference the nonprofit had held in Canada. (The Canada Post money orders were the CAD cash receipts converted to USD in a way that was safe for transport. We received the US$20 bill physically. Most of the money received for the conference was done via credit cards or PayPal, but not all.)

My reason for suspecting this is how many people came over to the teller's desk to help with handling the deposit, and how long it took with mostly periods of silence. But that said, the deposit happened just fine with no objections raised and no follow-up inquiries reaching me or the nonprofit.

So I don't know whether it happened - but I do know the bank couldn't confirm it if it had. Probably likewise if the same laws required closing an account.

If it's the company's choice without legal obligation, maybe it's just to avoid giving fraudsters information on what works and what doesn't work. Definitely a shitty experience for honest people caught in the mess.
We took an initial performance hit as a result of not moving everything to Ohio at once. We moved our EC2 machines first but then saw increased latency between other services like ECR (where we store our Docker images) and Kinesis Firehose that were still in Virginia, so ultimately we moved those too.

So it wasn't so much that Ohio has worse performance, but that talking to services across region does.

One note on Firehose specifically for the curious - we make requests to Firehose in Ohio, and then Firehose sends the data to S3 back in Virginia (which we didn't want to move). Normally sending data across regions is expensive, but Firehose actually absorbs the cost in sending the streams to S3. We're honestly not quite sure why, but it worked out great for our costs!
Even if you associate each color with a set of names, if the graph where vertices are colors and edges are “these colors are indistinguishable” is connected, and any two indistinguishable colors have the same set of names, then all colors would have the same set of names.

The solution of “assign a degree of applicability if each name to each color” and allow a color name to have different levels of applicability for a pair of indistinguishable colors, sorta solves the problem?

But, in a sense, isn’t “to what degree do each of these names apply to this color” just a kind of identifier like a name is? (Though it has the advantage that we can talk about the identifiers being very close to each other )

We can’t have identifiers for colors always be the same iff the colors are indistinguishable, because “is the same” is transitive while “is visually indistinguishable” is not.

Therefore, in order to be able to describe a large variety of colors (with say, rgb), we choose to use an identifying scheme (such as rgb) which has different identifiers for colors which are visually indistinguishable.
Part of me wonders if testing is kept to a minimum on purpose because lower numbers would help the push to open the economy back up (speaking about US here). But then the other part of me thinks that's just my brain being conspiratorial, because who would be evil enough to do that?
Well, imagine you create a 1-person startup. You make the perfect tool, but you have no customers. How do you acquire them? You can try pumping your own personal network, organically market yourself every chance you get (like HackerNews comments or Facebook posts). However you can, with a relatively low investment, reach an order of magnitude more users with digital advertising. Your startup makes a great product, right? So you'll naturally acquire at least some of the users who see your ads.
Show HN: 235 ideas of what to do while you are on quarantine
Ask HN: How do you see life changing after the coronavirus?
As far as urbit is concerned, I'm definitely a normie, but I still don't get it. Where is all this stuff? Running all of megacorp's stuff takes a bazillion servers. If we're not going to use those anymore, where is my data going to live? How can I access everything from anywhere if there is no centralization? Will my "urbit computer" be running on other people's physical computers? Can I decide to run an infinite number of infinite loops? Will it be running on my physical computer? What if my hard drive dies? Do I lose all my stuff?

How does it actually work?
We’ve run ~2.9MM tests so far. I think it’s likely testing capacity will get there by mid to late may. Especially if we find cheaper and faster anti body tests (which is a huge focus right now).
The US is running out of meat because a plant that supplies 4 to 5% of the market is closing? Sounds unlikely.
The Little Guide to Message Queues
> Preventing the user from doing this entirely is an easy but fairly disappointing "solution" to this problem.

For sure. And if individuals are happy with trading some security for some functionality/flexibility in their software, I'll support their right to make that choice.

It gets more complex when the people affected by that choice aren't the people making the choice. Which is more likely in the case of network programs.

> Usually, the hard part is not security per se, but identifying user intent. You want to come up with a process that ensures that the user who enables potentially dangerous interfaces knows what they are doing.

Indeed. I'd add identifying developer intent to that as well. What functionality am I trying to enable v.s. what else am I actually enabling? Coming up with that process is the herculean task there.
That study doesn't seem terribly relevant. It concludes that owning a vehicle is important to people right now. It doesn't seem unreasonable to assume that in the future, cheap and ubiquitous ride sharing options could pretty quickly drive those percentages down.
Even if many of AWS’s customers fold, the big ones are likely to file for bankruptcy and thus their backend systems will still likely be operational for sometime.

Example: If an airline company were to file for bankruptcy, then their booking management system (the part not likely handled by Amadeus) would still be operational. Their transactional systems (databases and associated infrastructure) would likely still be kept running, however their analytical workloads may see some trimming.
I really love the Urbit system. But I'm not sure why anyone posts about it here - it has never attracted substantive discussion and I don't think it ever will.
From the article:

> ...channel traffic, increasing by 15%

> ...one in four media buyers and brands have paused all advertising for the first half of 2020, and a further 46% have adjusted their spending downwards

> Digital ad spending is down by a third, according to the IAB — a slightly less painful drop than the traditional media’s 39% cut

Traffic is up but ad spending is down more than the traffic increase.
Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet
> Just close up shop entirely and go to deliveries / curbside pickup

Existing grocery delivery services are already way overburdened, and desperately scaling up[1].

> risk their lives for your oreos.

You can't possibly think that going to the grocery store is so frivolous and unnecessary, as this statement would imply. Or do you?

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...
I agree with the idea, but I also think there are limits.

Let's say you build some kind of product based on some Azure/AWS product. The negative reading of it is: you spend money on innovation and have to pay Azure/AWS for infrastructure. Your product will constantly have to improve to keep up with the competitors, Azure/AWS keeps getting your money. And if your product becomes stable enough, they will make it part of their offering.

Another example would be Apps, with Apple later folding their functionality into the OS and kicking your app off the store.

But judging by my own examples, this migth be more of a platform problem.
Yarvin has crank tendencies that show up in Urbit, but the ones that do show up have less to do with his politics and more to do with his penchant for obscurantism. He wants to be seen as a thought leader, in politics, computing, and elsewhere, but both the ideas in Urbit and his political ideas are either relatively straightforward to someone learned in the art, or highly objectionable. So they are wrapped in matryoshka-doll nestings of obscure notation with the promise "Just accept it for now, it'll all make sense in the end."
This seems to be a pretty sensitive claim, but it also seems completely reasonable to me that people who practice something more are better at it than people who practice something less. Even if it's a completely different domain than your work, it's still developing your intuition and exposing you to new abstract concepts.
Read yes, but not write to removable drives. This setting is used on every machine in a VFX company I worked for. Although, I don't know how supported it is across platforms.
This seems to be the plan, beyond modestly trying to grow supplies for medical response.

The U.S. is not ramping up a slew of mask production lines, unlike, say, Singapore.

We're not ramping up testing capacity to the point where we can have every person wearing a high-quality mask and getting tested to start contact-tracing regimes.

I wish the federal government stepped up here.
> Could you (or Arathorn) expand on why Olm should deviate from the Signal protocol, instead of trying to reproduce it as closely as possible?

Because the only premise for strictly adhering to the Signal protocol has been invalidated by Moxie's personality.

With a false premise, why maintain a true conclusion?

In my OP comment, I outlined some criticisms of what they're doing, and suggested ways to improve it. Some of these (dropping AES-CBC+HMAC for AES-CTR+HMAC) have meaningful gains but, strictly speaking, are not Signal-compat.

The change to the ratcheting protocol adds a layer of indirection in the forward secrecy, but that also deviates from Signal. (My proposed change would make it closer to what the Noise Protocol Framework does.)

> Which requirements are different?

The technical requirements aren't changed, but you can get better performance AND security on more platforms by using XChaCha20 instead of AES-CBC, so that's a meaningful security gain that Signal cannot boast (i.e. in the context of legacy Android devices).
Hah, you can still do that on Win10.

I wonder why they even bother letting it go to half-screen?
Please don't do religious flamewar on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I think it depends on a few factors. For a lot of children in poverty (already experiencing food insecurity before their family lost more resources) or with abusive family it will be remembered significantly worse.

For me personally, as an adult, I work in an essential industry and spend every waking hour at work pretty much so life hasn't really changed at all and my level of stress hasn't increased in any meaningful way.
It's mostly nonsense, so don't waste too much time trying to understand it.
I second this. Been using TransferWise for a while (few years?), a very satisfied customer.

Their onboarding and ease-of-use are phenomenal - even for senior people who are not technically literate. I recommend it to friends, family, clients.
I recall it being true on my 2014-era phones (can't recall if it was a Moto G or a Pixel). I wrestled with turning Location Services on and off every time I wanted to navigate until I eventually gave up and left it on permanently. Opening the app with Location Services off would produce an (as far as I knew) undissmissable prompt demanding that Location Services be turned back on. Perhaps there was some way to work around this, but it's clear what message they were trying to send.
I'm immediately curious about the actual age distribution. Drum compares this to mortality for people between 20-65. My guesstimate is that grocery store workers are on average younger than the general population. I also wonder how many of the older grocery workers are taking time off.
GPL never says you can't charge for software.

As for immorality, you can read the justifications here starting from item 4 (Voices from the Revolution): https://www.drdobbs.com/the-ethics-of-free-software/18441458...
Yeah, many of them seem to have no Wikipedia page in any language. Seems weird.
I found a more reliable source for the cost of naval nuclear reactors: the Congressional Budget Office [1]. They investigated what it would cost to switch some surface ships from conventional to nuclear power. The main result:

"CBO estimated that the acquisition-cost premium for a nuclear ship would be about $1.1 billion per destroyer, $0.8 billion per LSD(X), and $0.9 billion per LH(X)".

In particular for the last class LH(X) (helicopter carriers, similar to the Wasp class), the reactors would be two A1B used in the Gerald Ford class of aircraft carriers, which generate about 700 MW.

[1] https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/112th-congress-2011-...
That will help, but it certainly can't facilitate all of the normal consumer behavior that the economy relies on. How do you drink at a bar or eat at a restaurant with a face mask on? Would you event want to?

It might help people be more comfortable performing essential tasks in public, but as long as we're seeing thousands of deaths per week on the news, people by and large are going to stay home if they can.
covid is currently killing more people per day than the flu on a bad season, and that's with a lockdown.
> I'm quite curions if there is another profession where this is the case.

Any artist, really. The line between work and leisure are blurry at best.
I’ve heard good things about IA Writer
https://thesweetsetup.com/apps/our-favorite-markdown-writing...
even home mad masks are effective.
Google pay is also more of a competitor with Paypal than Apple pay. Not very many websites allow Apple pay on a desktop, for example.
Grocery store workers aren't going to be looking at aggregate statistics to make their decisions or decide how they feel. They are going to be basing it on "Joe in produce died and we think it was Coronavirus."

Then the entire store will be scared and it's not unreasonable because they probably interacted with Joe in produce at some point recently.

A lot of people aren't getting confirmation by testing. Most people will self diagnose based on symptoms. This means that official data undercounts deaths from the condition and unofficial data overcounts death from the condition, but this is a case of "which way do you bet?" And when faced with a pandemic, the way to bet is "That guy with that cough who is now dead probably died from the pandemic. No, I don't need official testing to be scared that I'm next because I pulled a shift with him recently."
> It's common for intellectual humility to be perceived as incompetence or weak leadership. "I don't know what to do, but I'm open to hearing your ideas!" is not confidence-inspiring. Admitting to mistakes can be the same.

I think this is a failing of our constantly-broadcasting news cycle and incorrect belief about what leaders should be. Yes, leaders should help their people be confident. But we also need to stop putting expectations on leaders that they know the answer at every minute or communication. Otherwise we incentivize them to put out incorrect information or decisions for fear of being seen as weak.

I also have a feeling that our instant "like" culture, mass mobilization of (generally uninformed) public opinion, and belief that democracy to the lowest level is not the right way to manage situations that require contemplative expertise and specialized knowledge.
>The first 7-8 paragraphs are about the author (Hint: I don't care.)

For someone as controversial a personality as the author is, he would be wise not to talk about himself alongside the technology.
But who's going to visit these people? Many of the laid off are in service industries.. Who is going to travel or go to restaurants if they could catch a deadly disease from doing so?
A monthly newsletter of curated responses to this very question organized by industry and vetted by industry experts.
Is that the track record we've set? Does everyone who currently need masks to work get them - like nurses and doctors and folks working in shipping warehouses? Because there is a lot of contrary evidence to that.

https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-workers-pandemic-risks-ow...

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-warehouse-workers-staten...

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2020/04/11/corona...
For compilers that are written in C++, changing the compiler is using it. ;)
Most executives are very short term thinkers and thus while your logic makes sense it’s generally not how most people think. They need cash now so they cut first and think later.

You’re right that some smart execs will run into the fire as everyone is fleeing, buying up cheap adverts for a long term investment. There are some signs of this with a few companies seemingly increasing spend to take advantage of the cheap prices. Purely anecdotally I noticed a lot more adverts from Scott’s on lawn care products. Their pitch is basically “hey so the lawn care guy is on lockdown... go to our site and we’ll ship you fertilizer and tell you how to apply it.”
Not really. The math is chosen to fit the physics, remember, not the physics chosen to fit the math.
"dying" is hyperbole. The manufacturing sector has been on decline for 40 years but other sectors are starting to build up. The downtown core has seen a boom in revitalization, particularly these past 5 years. There's a push for tech and startups.

It's basically in the same metro area as Chicago. Would you say Chicago's dying? It may have declined (or not grown as fast as other US cities) lately but "dying" seems like hyperbole, no?
>RTLD: 41 cited deaths among 3M grocery workers is a lower death rate than the population as a whole ?

If you're comparing grocers death rate against the population as a whole, that's not a good comparison as it doesn't control for grocer's demographics. I think that grocers would be younger (on average) than the the general population, and therefore should have lower death rates.
Not sure if this has changed, but the last time I tried the YouTube Premium trial, they heavily pushed their own content (eg Scare PewDiePie) which was so completely opposite from anything I watch on YouTube, I felt I'd just replaced one ad experience with a worse one that I was paying for. I'd rather see the non-stop Masterclass ads (at least they were often relevant) than see PewDiePie everytime I log in.
No. One company that makes masks says they're not expanding production. The last time they did, as soon as the crisis was over the hospitals started ordering from China again. They had a huge stock of unsold masks, and almost went bankrupt even after layoffs.

That's the free market.
con·de·scen·sion noun

an attitude of patronizing superiority; disdain.
IBM scrambles to find or train more COBOL programmers to help states
I'm not sure what you're getting at. In planes (and especially in planes in pop culture), autopilot does allow flight without keeping your hands on the wheel and eyes on the road, so to speak.
Remarkably treacherous, not to mention regressive, but not that much surprising, given how much the Labour party has shifted its course. When Margaret Thatcher was asked in 2002 what was her biggest achievement, she replied: “Tony Blair and New Labour.”

This is also true in the US; if Eisenhower were to time travel today, he would find himself to be on the left.
Nice! Html forms brings in revenue?
Solid work. Nomad List has really improved over the last few years.

Is most of your NL revenue from user subscriptions or ads or ...?
Harvard Dataverse Resources for COVID-19 Study
I have written a blog post about this:

https://tkainrad.dev/posts/twitter-accounts-in-software-engi...

The problem with many such lists is that they include people who are famous, but don't tweet much or don't tweet about tech.
I tried to include only people that tweed regularly and actually tweet about software engineering or related topics.
Maybe it's PNO

https://source.android.com/devices/tech/connect/wifi-scan

> On devices running Android 9 or lower, when the device is disconnected from Wi-Fi and the screen is off, PNO scans occur at 20 second intervals for the first three scans, then slow down to one scan every 60 seconds for all subsequent scans. PNO scanning stops when a saved network is found or the screen is turned on.
Completely agree. I can't even find good information about what our current testing capacity even is (the numbers on the CDC website are hilariously wrong--New York has almost as many positive cases reported per day as the CDC reports have been run--both positive and negative results--nationally). Further, for whatever reason, I can't find good information from the media about what various levels of government are doing about testing.

It was almost inexcusable in the first month--CDC was clearly planning for an outbreak on the order of thousands of people in total (tiny reserve of masks and ventilators, severely limited testing capacity, etc), but now it's been a month that South Korea has had drive through testing facilities and by all appearances our CDC still doesn't even know how many tests are performed per day much less how it's going to scale up testing so we can "reopen our economy".
Does workman's comp cover on job exposure?
So this is mostly about Nix, but I've used (in production!) CoreOS, which implemented some of the same concepts.

You couldn't just update anything easily. Well, anything is possible, but CoreOS made it very hard to do it the wrong way, with the readonly system partitions.

But it made upgrades really easy. And you have a second, backup system partition to boot from, if the update messed up things.

We had to move back to a 'standard' Linux distribution and now all those old habits are creeping up. It takes a lot of discipline (and enforcement) to avoid the applications of 'fixes' which get eventually forgotten.
> Trying to draw conclusions on the relative safety of a grocery store employee versus the general public from that number is crazy.

That's exactly what the Washington Post article is doing.
It's also not very public if rich people can go everyday and poor people have to wait a year, isn't it?..
Yeah I think there is a tension there. If you care about systems and internal quality and want to get paid for it, I'd suggest software performance or security as promsiing fields.

Performance and security are both cross-cutting concerns that span layers, i.e. you're not just thinking at the application level. It really is a separate kind of thinking and a separate kind of work.

Though it seems that it's mostly large companies (e.g. "big tech" and a few other places) that care enough about performance and security to have dedicate staff for them. Most other shops are too busy with "business stuff", and they may reasonably want to outsource that work to experienced consultants.
I'm still looking for "Urbit for normal developers."

For instance there's a notebook, from the way this article talks about it I would assume it's a collaborative notebook (otherwise it's pretty boring). What kind of data structure is used to store it? How are edits communicated and conflicts resolved? Assuming conflicts require some domain-specific computation to resolve, where does that computation happen? Is there an access control list, or some secret that gives access? How would revoking access work? How do changes come in and out of the user agent/browser? Where is the program that manages this hosted? How do I get updates to that program?
Metadata and Saag Paneer: Metadata is not a “nice to have”