skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Who has a technical contact at IRS or state unemployment office?
Too many people are hurting badly from the backlog of unemployment and stimulus claims hiccups due to software and infrastructure problems.

I want to know if there's anything at all that I can do to help alleviate this pressure with my full-stack web dev or devops skills. I'm open to help to learning new things incl. COBOL.

Who has a contact at either the IRS or your state's unemployment office that can describe their technical pain points and needs? (For California, it's the E.D.D. that handles unemployment.)

If their needs and my background is a match, I'm open to being flexible with how the relationship takes shape: temp, PT/FT, contract, 1099, W-2, volunteer, etc.

jayliew at jayliew d0t com

Related post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902195
B&H didn't collect sales tax in the past in NY where they are based, which is what the lawsuit is about.

They started collecting sales tax in NY after that lawsuit was filed, and they started collecting sales tax in more states after the Wayfair SCOTUS case in 2018 authorized states to charge sales tax on internet sales.
Where is the ppe going? And why is dhs stepping in when hospitals are ordering them? Why cannot health care workers order ppe directly? Hospitals are having a difficult time time giving them out to workers because it is low.
Yeah and it's so wrong! Would they have checked the bible they'd agree that the earth is 6000 years old.
Go's GC's throughput is significantly lower than that of all OpenJDK's GCs, and its latency numbers are misleading because they don't account for throttling. To give you an example, a GC that works as follows -- allocate by pointer bumping from a thread-local buffer, and when it runs out, freeze the thread forever -- would count as having zero latency according to Go's metrics, because this infinite pause is per-thread rather than stop-the-world; of course, the throughput will eventually drop to zero, too, but they don't report throughput. Why, then, do you see Go applications performing more-or-less OK? Because of two things: they allocate fewer objects, and they just run significantly more slowly than Java, except this slowdown is paced. In terms of algorithm, Go's GC is pretty-much a simplified version (no young generation) of OpenJDK's now-defunct CMS plus throttling. G1 is a generation beyond that, and ZGC is two.
As an important aside, I'm sure everyone has noticed that grocery store clerks aren't allowed to wear masks in practice. I'm sure everyone has noticed quite a few other jobs where this is so. It seems endangering the lives of certain kinds of workers is nearly universal. Not to excuse them but I imagine Amazon has a lot of company in this[1]. I am very glad at least Amazon employeesare doing something about it.

[1]https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/04/16/coronavirus-worker-at...
Social Media, Slack and Spam
Is there a better method?
I'll vouch for it. This is one of the best layperson's explanations I've seen. Very clear description of the risks posed by segmented genomes vs not etc.
It's common in federal departments. Each department has an "Administrator" who then represents the entire department to those closer to the President, and represents the President to those farther away.
> the anti-science crowd latches on to things like this

Truly fundamental misunderstandings are hard to correct.
Very interesting. Seems like perfect timing with everything that's going on.
Value investing has been replaced by government support. Big companies like airlines are not allowed to "get cheap" anymore. From Berkshire Hathaway alone, there are hundreds of billions of dollars of private money waiting to step in during times like these. Instead, we will "bail out" aggressively managed companies and encourage all big companies to be more aggressive going forwards. Because they have a government backstop preventing them from failure. This will lead to more bailouts in the future, the burden of which falls to all American taxpayers. We are deviating from the incentives that make capitalism such an effective force.
Longevity.
Sad but true. I live in the mountains of central Arizona. This year has been good (8 inches so far, our yearly average is 18 inches for the entire year). Last year was also good.

But, long term, the whole southwest is in a long term worrisome position.
Show HN: Covid-19 Derived Datasets (JHU, NY Times, ECDC) in JSON, TSV, SQL
This is a dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22899272 from a few hours ago which has more comments.
Ayyyy I'm Collin Cusce from the dev team on AVA. Feel free to ask me whatever you'd like about AVA or the Avalanche protocol. I'll try to answer the best I can :-)
Hm, sorry about this. Could you forward that email to me at edwin@stripe.com and I see what's going on?
Show HN: A Scratchpad for Developers
> Zoom has lots of issues, but the pile-on is just dumb.

It's not dumb, it's a response to incentives! As you noted in the second paragraph! Researchers want attention, which is only natural.
Remember there was a vaccine candidate for SARS. It was not further developed for financial reasons. In a different world we could have started into this crisis with a working vaccine delivery system for corona viruses. That had been clinically tested already, maybe us a massive head start like we have on the seasonal flu every year.
Alibaba get to be endorsed by building computing infrastructure for the government, the cake is already split between Alibaba and Tencent.

There isn't much chance someone else could get a cut, even for state owned companies, I guess same applies to Cloud Computing market in China.
Definitely. Both thrusters landing simultaneously was incredible. They truly made a part of scifi reality with that milestone.

The Tesla in space was cool but in the end it wasn't more of an accomplishment than placing any other satellite out there.
Read the room.
Make sure you have Special Relativity down pat beforehand, both intuitively and in terms of math.
Really sorry to hear that, I have a retail checking account with them and would have thought First Republic would have been one of the most on-the-ball.
Ask HN: Where to learn how to build HIPAA compliant software?
I have interest in learning how to build HIPAA compliant software in order to be able to work in contract roles that have that as a requirement. Are there any courses I can take? Tried a quick google search but didn't find anything that I felt confident about.

Edit: I should probably share my background.

- Freelance Software Engineer

- Ruby on Rails, React, Ember.js
Why do you assume people assumed that? I mean, these are things that apply to every human spaceflight on any rocket in any country.

Imagine if anytime anyone spoke about spaceflight, they saw fit to include a giant disclaimer of everything that could go wrong. We'd all just end up sounding like drug commercials.
Here is a link to the dataset itself: https://www.dolthub.com/repositories/Liquidata/bad-words/

And to the chat-bot-profanity-filter:
https://github.com/liquidata-inc/chat-bot-profanity-filter
With a high enough unemployment rate, businesses might have trouble getting anything done because outside conditions start resembling a general strike. In addition, with a high enough unemployment rate, the customers of a business might not be able to afford the corresponding goods or services even if they are sold at cost. Grinding a battered economy to halt is easier.
Thanks for the update! I subscribed and look forward to see what comes. This new algorithm looks amazing.
In the south bay? Pretty good, unless you want to argue for a demographic skew because of Facebook's poor uptake among iOS users.

I mean, no. It's not perfect. It will miss demographics like the elderly with lower social media use, but that group tends to be well-sampled already due to their risk profile. It will probably miss some immigrants too, which seems like a bigger problem.

But really, it's a pandemic. It doesn't care about your socioeconomic status. One of its defining qualities is the extent to which it does not cluster in particular communities like more typical epidemics.
> the name is terrible from both legal and business development standpoints

I guess someone should tell UberConference and Box about that. They seem to have mistakenly thrived despite using extremely well-SEO'd software brand names.
My understanding is no, only current individuals with current residency. However - it's probably harder for them to figure that out than to just take your word for it.

They require a photo of a government issued ID for some stuff, so if you have an old ID that may work.
The problem with BTC is that demand to spend it on normal commerce is close to nil. Most people don't have it, and the ones who do are HODLing.
Right - more time in a degraded state and more stress on the remaining drives during the rebuild (because there will be more data to synchronize).
> An old Slavic word robota (slavery is a good translation)...

This is unequivocally false. I speak both Czech ans Slovak, with the word robota being Czech in origin. Robota either means work in general, or manual labour specifically. It does not, nor has it ever, meant slavery. The word for that would be otroctvo in Slovak or
otroctví in Czech.
PEPP-PT contact tracing standard push could lead to fight Apple and Google
When such words were really in use though, how much was the manual labor a result of choice or freedom of the laborer?
>> But nobody gets paid in ethereum.

> That's not true anymore. I've been paided and knows others who continue to be paid in bitcoin.

The statement is true, if properly understood. Colloquially, "nobody gets paid in [cryptocurrency]" means that it's so unusual to get paid in it that it's reasonable to assume no one does. That's not a statement that can be shown to be false with a few counterexamples.
I set a wordpress using digital ocean . They had a template and make it pretty easy..

I used to use AWS when I was at a startup. this light sail seems similar to Digital Ocean's built in templates.

I appreciate the easy set up of the database and code and that it gives you a sane path to https.

https://marketplace.digitalocean.com/apps/wordpress
>Berkshire has always held a ton of cash for just such an occasion.

Perhaps the occasion hasn't presented itself yet...
I don’t think culture is population dependent. Baltimore and Wyoming have roughly the same population but very different cultural attitudes, beliefs, ways of life etc. Its hard to make a case they should have the same policies and expect the same results
If games use it, Nvidia will support it properly. While Vulkan hasn't "won" in the game space (and might not ever), SPIR-V actually already has support from Microsoft. The HLSL DXC compiler can natively output SPIR-V: https://github.com/Microsoft/DirectXShaderCompiler/wiki/SPIR...

So it's not implausible that there's a future world here where DX13 or DX14 use SPIR-V instead of DXIL. After all this makes AMD, Intel, and Nvidia's driver teams happier. Game devs also are happier as then they can ship a single precompiled shader on all platforms - PC & consoles. Microsoft's strong position with DirectX doesn't come from DXIL, but instead from making game developers happy, so SPIR-V's future could easily be very bright.

And then if games are using SPIR-V for compute (and they already use GPU compute for various things), then Nvidia is absolutely going to optimize the ever leaving snot out of it. Likely even more than they do for CUDA, as gaming is by far Nvidia's largest source of revenue: https://s22.q4cdn.com/364334381/files/doc_financials/quarter...
A few questions... Does your ventilator regulate pressure and volume? Does it need a medical oxygen supply? Does it filter the exhaled air? Does it monitor the patients breathing pattern and sync with it? Also what kind of testing has been done to date?
My orig comment in this thread misunderstood the intent of the OP. * shrugs
Amazon is a high volume low margins business. Mass walkouts are very disruptive. Everything stopping 'the machine' translates into direct revenue loss. Amazon went to great lengths in making the machine resilient by having people be more expendable but we're still not at the point in which if a lot of people walk out at the same time, there's an army of scabs in standby to pick up the work and keep things going. If this goes viral and a lot of workers do it at the same time, it can be catastrophic.
Can you give some examples of axioms in pure math that run completely counter to our physical world? For example:

It is NOT possible to draw a straight line from any point to any other point.
It is NOT possible to extend a line segment continuously in both directions.
etc...

or

Things which are equal to the same thing are NOT equal to one another.
If equals are added to equals, the wholes are NOT equal.
The whole is LESS than the part.

Note that the original forms of the above axioms "make sense" to us because everything in our physical experience agrees with them. So when you said that the "physical counterpart ... is immaterial", I was curious to see an example of a "physically impossible" axiom.
I've been talking to as many companies as I can during all of this. The surge is not evenly distributed but a lot of companies are seeing surprising upticks in online traffic and sales.

The big question though is how long will this last? I think the general population has not yet appreciated the possible severity of the ensuing economic downturn.

A lot of trade publications are already starting to sound the alarms on how ugly this could get. A return to 2008 era aggressive discounting is likely going to happen. Retail partners may be crippled by the quarantine. A lot of brands are going to be assailed from many directions simultaneously, it's going to hurt.
It's a completely impossible fantasy. DNA has a half life of ~500 years. Mammoths only died out around 10,000 years ago, which is why it's conceivable that one could be brought back, but all dinosaur DNA has been destroyed for millions of years.
TLDR; Not very unless they were general purpose operating systems vs network operating systems.
> Climate-controlled cultivation will likely become a necessity for food production as climate change intensifies

This is interesting, as massive greenhouse are seen in fiction as the only way to grow crop in hostile environments: Mars, the Moon, Space.

Who knew we would be making our own planet a hostile environment.
So do you have another metric which can be compared across companies objectively? Or is it okay to soak the feel good by boycotting a company even if it means choosing worse ones?
Layoffs coming after quarterly earnings.
This has already been done by William Leibzon, its a bad idea and for the most part everyone despises him now.
Essential as in the first and so far only permanent manned orbital station with countless research projects ongoing & likely tens of thousand of people supporting the project directly and indirectly by their jobs ?

ISS is not really designed to operate unmanned for any length of time & you could easily loose it due to some simple failure that the crew on board can easily address.
How do I find all the modifications of a given string using Git
I feel like with the advance of renewable energy sources and the lowering prices on things like solar panels, it might become quite plausible for places like Barrow to start growing their food with these methods, utilising zero fossil fuels (or close to zero.) I've seen videos of people with pretty sprawling underground "bunkers" set up for growing fruits and vegetables. They require tons of energy, of course, but if done on a governmental scale, I'm sure it can be pulled off. Both to provide more varied food options and to achieve self-sustenance as well as give an option for a worst case scenario where deliveries are impossible.
Thanks, look forward to this. I think there is a market for 'drag your music into the app and export a music video' using your visualisation.
Hey HN!

I was working on this project, is pretty straight forward in that it's just a way to store random scripts, I usually don't like having them in an open file on my editor because I can accidentally close the tab and I have to write the code again.

Also it's kind of cleaner because sometimes I save these scripts and they show up on git and I have to keep them in mind.
a really cool way to explain RPKI, thanks for sharing!
If this sort of seizure is being conducted under the Defense Production Act Section I, there should be greater transparency of what PPE materials are currently subjection to allocation control. Otherwise, we might as well have the National Guard protect shipments from seizure within the states.
Yes, what is patented is some commercial application of some knowledge, and that application is the invention. It doesn't matter whether the knowledge itself is invented or discovered. When an algorithm is patented, we're no more patenting math than we're patenting Newton's laws when a car brake is invented. We're patenting a commercial application of either, and that must be the invention.
Everything that does not expose to the user what is happening, and ideally give the user control over what can happen and when, is as bad design as clippy was on Microsoft Word.

Only too-clever-for-their-own-good-designers like automagic things. No user does.
>On an infinite tape, there is no "first byte", only "a byte placed where the tape already was when you started" (i.e. at offset=0.)

Maybe, but human brain likes things starting at 1.
When I lived in Toronto, my next door neighbour Luigi did that with a fig tree he had brought with him from his native Sicily some decades ago. Every year it bore a couple dozen figs for him. The whole family was a living stereotype in pretty much every way, but his gardening technique definitely bore fruit.
You can't hide it in plaintext, which is the point.

I think your post got partially eaten by HN as formatting but I understand the []() format for MD--but you can see where that's at least 2 chars longer than just putting in the raw URL, and not super necessary in my editor that auto-linkifies. The markdown formatting is so I can share it with other people and paste into gdocs, but 50 char wide plaintext is the primary format.

It's also an internal shortener service within an established company that maintains it well, but I appreciate your points for public ones.
Startups, Newsletters & Life Post-Airbnb with Lenny Rachitsky
I've been using 0.5% for mental math, rounding down from the lower bound from this study in The Lancet:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...

I would be surprised if, after this current wave of infections, the percentage of people with antibodies in the US is higher than the low single digits.

Herd immunity without a vaccine is a pipe dream. Our best bet is to massively ramp up testing and contact tracing and really start pushing the number of infections down to a point where parts of society can start functioning again.
Thanks for flagging this.
Do you know if you was hitting the https or just http?
> I simply decline to participate in behavior that is unapologetically wrong.

You don't, though, which is the other person's point. Unless you've radically changed your consumption habits to only buy directly from producers (and ecommerce is ruled out, since you're not okay with the typical conditions of logistics employment). In reality, you've singled out Amazon. Which is fine! But at least admit that. It's a political statement, you haven't achieved labor rights veganism.
They were well known for failing.

The ones I got only failed on the outer edge.

Worked out nicely cost-effectiveness wise if you didn't trigger the failure mode.
AWS Holds the Line on Cloud Bills as Customers Ask for Relief
The dot pattern looks like some kind of machine-translatable grid. That could be fun when people start posting images of their cards online...
It's Yen-denominated debt-- mostly useful to Berkshire so they can make Yen-denominated investments without currency risk. It's at less than 1% a year, which costs virtually nothing given the options it opens up for Berkshire. And you'll note that that debt makes up less than 1% of its total cash position, it's really just there so Berkshire can buy something quickly in Yen if an opportunity shows up.
Original title did not fit in the field: "Europe’s PEPP-PT COVID-19 contacts tracing standard push could be squaring up for a fight with Apple and Google" Hope this change did not editorialize it too much.
Operational theory of mathematics: you define (invent) some rules, of starting points and ways to change them. Like the rules of a game.

In a sense, all possible outcomes already exist (only to be discovered).
> That being said, that's the game. If you can't get it done, someone else will get hired through linkedin, and you won't.

But it's not the game here. Recruiters are being introduced to these candidates outside of LinkedIn. The requirement to direct them back to LinkedIn is self-imposed and arbitrary. It would have been a perfect opportunity to allow submitters to choose a link that they feel best represents them.

This is Rocket crowdsourcing data for their own use.
Sometimes I wish we could pick a US state and turn it into this vision. Social safety net for all, free healthcare for all, no loopholes for the rich. There are so many people who would like to see how this plays out. And more importantly, the expectation of the outcome varies WILDLY from smart person to smart person. Personally, I believe this state would be bankrupt in a matter of years, companies that produce tax revenue would move elsewhere, and moral hazard for those who don't feel like working would rear its head in ways not seen since the USSR.
Similar story here and with many of our customers. It's been radio silence with larger banks (Chase) and community banks.

It's rumored that, just like how BofA prioritized companies with active business loans, other banks are giving money to ensure their loan customers can continue to pay existing loans.
/r/smallbusiness is now pretty much all SMB owners pissed that after doing everything right, their banks are saying there's no money left to disburse.

People are sharpening their pitchfork tines...
Airbnb is not a public company, which quarterly earnings are you thinking of?
Skatepark filled with 37 tons of sand after skaters ignore No Trespassing signs
The USA is capable, they just lack the leadership in Washington to do so.
sorry for the late response, but reason is you can't do a restore with takeout. I can backup from GSuite, and restore into consumer gmail. Its how I did my migration. Or any other combination. It also backs up in Maildir format, which is more compatible with more tools than in mbox format that takeout gives us. So it's just a more versatile tool. You can always convert mbox to maildir, there are tools like mb2md. but ive had issues where it mangles HTML emails and images.
It's absolutely insane that PPE isn't something that's being procured on a national level. Why are hospitals and clinicians having to deal individually? If there were a monopsony buyer (i.e. the Feds), suppliers could be bullied into providing reasonable terms.

Well, I suppose the real answer is: Because that's not how healthcare works in America...
We seem to have spent an amazing percentage of that energy on spooling up ventilator manufacturing instead. Most of that capacity will be ready once the crisis is well beyond its peak.

I also do not understand why we weren't able to scale basic PPE quickly.
What a stooge.
"At best, their biological makers seem to be degraded remnants of genes that cannot be read—broken-down components rather than intact parts of a sequence."

So... what good does that do?
Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid
Hiring freezes and non-freezes: https://candor.co/hiring-freezes/
Security experts have concerns about Apple and Google contact tracing