skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The author is actually preferentially sending samples towards "attractors" [0] for lights and dielectrics. Doing so massively reduces variance. My favorite example is Figure 5 in this old paper [1] (I've never actually read Pete's ray tracing in a weekend, so I don't know if this is in there).

The most common variance reduction technique though would be to do direct lighting (aka "next event estimation" if you want to be overly pedantic). Your lighting in that image looks like it's just a "Hi, I happen to be emitting tons of energy" sphere in space, which will cause a lot of noise. Alternatively, if you are sampling it, you are likely not sampling the sphere as well as you could. You'll want to sample the sphere following the setup in Figure 2 in Pete's "Direct Lighting" paper [2] (which as a reminder, is currently accessible at the ACM during Covid-19).

[0] https://github.com/Dalamar42/rayt/blob/fc57fa4afc080a578e21e...

[1] http://graphics.stanford.edu/~boulos/papers/gi06.pdf

[2] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/226150.226151
Shameless plug: I’ve been a “technical” UX person for my whole career, and a big fan of (and trained by) the Nielsen Norman Group, mentioned elsewhere in this thread.
I’ve always enjoyed this “principles” approach to UX design and wrote “101 UX Principles” in 2018: https://uxbook.io - please do check it out, it’s ideal for non-UX specialists to understand the usability reasons behind common design decisions (and mistakes to avoid). Plug over!
One big potential issue is that it's the only legal way to serve lawsuits and court orders other than in person, IIRC.
I felt your comment off topic.

But I do somewhat agree with sentiment of having immutable news archive as the present Internet is more 'what we can see' oppose to 'what we can know'.
Having troubles today?

Have you been in touch with @dang yet? I am of the opinion that your sort of behavior does not belong on HN.
Better to post them than have unsubstantiated claims.
Think of the oddly familiar security vs usability problem.

The tailored programs always fail to reach some people who badly need them.[1] At the same time they always have some fraud to deal with. You will reach more of the target audience by accepting more fraud. You can also fight fraud more effectively at the expense of those in need. OR you can throw more money at it and try but fail to eliminate both.

Then you'd want to avoid turning it into a blunt instrument. To do this an incredibly large army of skilled and trained people has to be hired (and removed from the private sector) who are tasked with many impossible tasks. (They tried to measure how fucked my back was one time. We concluded that no one had any idea what would happen if I got a job)

Then there is the ego problem of living on hand outs- because A, B and C. Others might not say it but you feel pathetic not being able to take care of yourself.

Also interesting is to wonder who all those industries and markets should be working for. They currently work for whoever has money. This includes you and me but only to a very very limited extend.

[1] - Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong. Examples are not doing this chaos any justice. Try picture a combination of someone close to you dying horribly, physical injury, mental problems and losing your administration. We give you some forms to fill out and you simply can't do it. You just want 3 months of alone time. We give you 20 experts who want you to talk about how fucked up your situation is the year round. No way to move on.
I'm more concerned that it may be drastically expensive-- or completely unavailable-- for rural people to receive packages. Right now UPS/FedEx/etc don't go everywhere and rely upon USPS for last mile in many areas.
It’s not hard or expensive to turn brown rice flour and vermiculite into mushrooms. The bit about expensive to create a pharmaceutical compound growing from a mushroom is just silly. Extraction can’t be that expensive.
Curious to know - why did you move from Miro to Plectica?
You're correct! I was trying to be concise, but instead I caused confusion.
> Many people rely on physical mail for things like social security checks, taxes, bills, communication with family and friends.

All of those things can be done on the internet and don't require broadband.

Also, how many times a year do you have to file your taxes, if you really want to do it that way?
This article is on the website of the US telecommunications regulator. I'm don't think all the comments need to be qualified with "in the US."
Sorry but an argument from authority in the field of economics is not even a little bit convincing to me. Not only is economics a "social science", which are notorious for lack of rigour, but economics itself is purposefully bifurcated into biased partisan "schools". There are many economists which study solutions to regulatory capture who do not suggest that regulators should be cut, if you're only aware of one school of thought in this area then you've been looking in a limited bubble.
You can go to jail for alcohol too. Just depends where you are.
My understanding is, unlike any other government agency or business, the USPS is required by law to fully fund 50 years of pensions.
If that requirement were removed, it would be fine.
Netflix’s Customer Obsession Created a Customer Obsession
Residential parcel volume is up. Commercial parcel volume is way down. Letter volume-- both residential and commercial, is way, way, way down.
I think both of your "Why?" posts can be answered by the viewpoint of the people you question, which would seem to be pessimism based on experience. In the parent to this "Why?" post the assumption is that HN readers are similarly pessimistic, which most of the comments in the subthread to your original statement that people would be surprised seems to bear out.
So just like every big business in every industry.
>These activists always have a dark intention in their ideas that they want some poor indigenous people to be burdened with the work of learning and using a dying language.

Learning multiple languages has been shown to provide many benefits to a child's wellbeing, though I don't see anyone forcing anybody to learn or use the language.

>If young Ojibwe people are choosing not to use it, then maybe it's because they don't want or need it.

Kids stopped using it because they are shipped to residential schools that used to punished use of their nativity language. There was no "choice" offered.
Most mail services make all their money on 'junk' mail. I don't know what the numbers for USPS are, but their biggest problem is likely the lack of advertising in the form of mass mailings.
China's fiscal revenue plunges 26.1% as virus ravages economy
Diodes exhibit capacitance that varies with respect to their DC bias. I know this is used in GHz RF applications.

Using opamps to create virtual reactive components (capacitors, or inductors) that would otherwise be impractical to build directly (too high of value) is an interesting trick.
Show HN: A new EventEmitter for Deno ( and every other JavaScript runtimes)
Either that wouldn't happen or it would be solved by the UPS equivalent of a PO box, which eliminates the last mile problem by moving the mailbox.
The article doesn't really answer why. It basically says that FM is channelized first and then the center frequencies are determined; while AM is assigned center frequencies first.

But why are AM and FM different here?
I've lived in the US for many decades and work in commercial radio, and this is the first I've heard of there being channel numbers for analog broadcast FM radio (as opposed to frequencies). I have seen channel numbers or designators like "Blue Dot" sneak into infrequent parlance in lieu of frequencies assigned by the FCC in other bands. But, this is increasingly uncommon, or in the latter case, based on manufacturer specific use.

Not terribly surprised though, Title 47 is crusty and full of surprises - these channel numbers are certainly defined somewhere.
https://academic.oup.com/view-large/figure/2074913/annhygmeq...

https://academic.oup.com/annweh/article/54/7/789/202744
It’s Time to Learn
Several schools like Colgate, Vassar, and BU are dropping their ACT/SAT requirements due to coronavirus, so you might not be completely out of options.
Proxies API
"Proxies API has been built to make Data mining more easier and efficient. After spending years in data Mining and web scrapping prjects, this API was built to support the Online Crawling Apps and Softwares.

Want to send custom headers?
Want to run sticky sessions with a single IP?
Want to scrape AJAX-based content?
We have you covered. You can customize almost all this in a single line of code, no matter the language you are using or the setup.
Proxies API was created for developers by developers with the goal of making it dead easy to get started with zero coding overhead."
Court rules Twitter can't reveal number of US surveillance requests
I'm a big fan of Automate the Boring Stuff too.
FYI: Yamaha's advanced synths (Motif and Montage) are based on real-time linux.

I bought an MX49 and they include the GPL and a download link.

But if you're expecting a random linux flavor to just work with audio, I don't know if that's reasonable, since nobody packaged or tested it with that in mind.
There’s no way around the fact than an 80% fatality rate of ventilated COVID patients is absolutely staggering.

That makes ventilation an absolutely last ditch effort. It means if the ~60,000 ventilators already in US hospitals before this started were each used just once ever to ventilate a COVID patient, you would expect 48,000 of those patients to die.

I’m sure this also has a pretty significant effect on the ICU utilization rate as a percentage of hospitalizations.

And this is besides the fact that early serological testing points to the overall hospitalization rate being significantly lower than 10%.
It's my understanding that parcels are where the money is. Is that wrong? Parcel volumes in my country are up north of 150%, I'd expect similar or even higher numbers in the US.

But if they really are dependent on letters, why? Letters are a dying business and there is no future there.
The tl;dr is that the Baymard institute publishes something on Medium limiting its distribution, the UX for finding out what the institute has to say (if you cannot read the article) is - read some blurb on Medium, search for name of institute to find website, go to website and decide if what they have to say is useful for you - or in the case where you go through HN or some other commentary on the article reading the comments first before searching for site.
> Apple now even recommends zsh shell over bash!

Worth reading why they did that: https://thenextweb.com/dd/2019/06/04/why-does-macos-catalina...
You first dude.
I totally agree with you, but why is it a problem right now? Parcel volumes are at dizzying heights.
It is a marketing problem. I think that Alton Brown did wonders with promoting US artisanal products. On Good Eats he often pitched small high quality producers of various ingredients.
As far as I understand it's too inconsistent, i.e. very unevenly distributed within one fruiting body. Not sure if that's the reason, but: if you ever bought mushrooms/truffles in the Netherlands, there is no psylocibin content on the box. And if you try googling, the estimates vary pretty wildly (although it's possible that it's just a lack or proper research)

Also not everyone enjoys the taste of mushrooms or truffles. And psychedelic entities don't care whether they are coming from naturally occurring or synthesized psylocibin ;)

Also, humility and appreciation come in different shapes: for example I recall that Shulgin never consumed his pure psychedelics with juice because he could distinguish 'chemical' tastes and had appreciation for that
The mail-in ballot angle is really concerning here. We need the ability to do that. And we need a post office to do that.
A tailored program would not allow you to keep your 100 k in savings.
> Don't act surprised that people are getting cabin fever.

First, California is still on partial lock-down, not full lock down. You're still allowed to go outside for exercise and essential shopping with social distancing in the best case scenario. That's farm from ideal, but way more relaxed then most of the World when trying to tackle the spread of COVID. Several posters here are from Spain or Italy, they couldn't/cannot leave their homes at all!

In the worst case its almost entirely unchanged: I've seen several examples of Youtube celebrities coming in from out of state on their motorcycles to to do a mini tour, ride while the roads are practically empty and the weather is good (Maxwrist) to shoot new videos for their channels; to professional motorcycle riders extending their stays (Scott Redding) in SoCal to take advantage of weather and riding conditions under relaxed lock-down conditions as opposed to Europe where they're from to prepare for what, if it is done at all, will be a very short but intense season.

With that said, the sooner this ends the sooner we can try and get back to trying to rebuild our lives. I personally was on Round 2 at SpaceX.

Its useless to protest under these conditions, and only further increases contagion which will put a strain on the local economy further. As well as hospitals and all essential workers within them and will extend the stay at home orders.

Personally, this is one of the things I can't stand about being home in California anymore; for most, Nature doesn't bite back often enough, so most people think they can do as they please and seldom experience just how harsh Nature can be so that gives them a sense of entitlement and a false sense of confidence that they're immune to consequence.

Those of us that were born there and span several generations are acutely aware that earthquakes, fires, and torrential floods are game-changers and has significantly impacted every single generation so its best to conduct oneself with that in mind so we can get on with living our lives as soon as possible.

The weather is such a double edged sword. I highly doubt these people would be out pulling this stunt if they got the 10 inches of snow we got this week in CO.
Anybody who can't afford to have a courier hand-deliver the thing and is still doing it has no idea how much a lawsuit actually costs.

This would also provide an opportunity to fix it the other way -- instead of requiring the USPS to do it, allow any certified letter carrier to do it even if it's UPS or FedEx.
if that’s the worry we can just subsidize UPS etc to service them.

it’s a lot cheaper and more efficient than this
Someone more knowledgeable please step in to correct me but: I think what can be desirable from this process is the lack of variability in the product when you produce it at scale.
DAB+ was meant to deliver high-quality AAC above 128 Kbps, preferably 192 Kbps or higher, unfortunately it ended up being broadcasted using the lowest bitrate to squeeze as many stations as possible, usually at 64 Kbps, it's a total disaster...
If you tune to the lowest frequency in the channel, wouldn't that be bad because it's on the border with the channel just below it? Tuning to the center of the channel seems like the only sensible thing to do, it's not just a convention. Or am I way off here?
Make it a game to find goals that excite you.
It's funny that nobody has ever changed the frequency units from Mc/s to MHz.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/47/73.201
I recall buying a USB Bluetooth adapter in the mid 2000's that was maybe $12 shipped from Asia. If that was a the cost to the consumer for a device that was mostly a bluetooth radio I suspect that the cost to add bluetooth to a high volume product was probably at or below $5 ~15 years ago.
Interesting, they state the conclusion that "both surgical and cotton masks seem to be ineffective in preventing the dissemination of SARS–CoV-2 from the coughs of patients with COVID-19 to the environment"

But they also say this:
"The median viral loads after coughs without a mask, with a surgical mask, and with a cotton mask were 2.56 log copies/mL, 2.42 log copies/mL, and 1.85 log copies/mL, respectively."

That seems like a significant reduction in transmitted viral load? I would think that masks can have a positive impact even if they aren't perfect filters. If you look at their table of data, the reduction trend is consistent across their tests. But between the small number of patients(4) and samples, and the number of Petri dishes that came back as 'Not Detected', it seems like a pretty low powered study. :-/

They are also explicitly testing coughs. I wonder about the effects on filtering droplets generated from normal breathing and talking.
They made a Mistake at Teleportation: "The technology will exist that will allow for the “faxing” (teleportation- sending/receiving) of actual inanimate objects, such as text books, clothing, jewelry and the like."

This is TRUE, and can be easily done with 3D printers. Note that "faxing" by definition is not "teleportation", but "copying at a different location", which is exactly what 3D printing is.
I think the parent was still an interesting comment. What it said was indeed worth noting.
>On Jan 17, the day the masking ordinance went into effect, the # of new cases/deaths declined, the first decline in quite some time. This continued until the epidemic faded.

same-day effect, especially on the number of deaths, of the masks? To me it sounds like it peaked and started to decline before any effects from the masks as the masks effect on the death number would take a few days at least. I mean i'm not against the masks, i do think they have positive effect, it is just in that case it seems that the mask ordinance came too late. It was already something like 2 months of the raging second wave.
I think you might find this interesting - https://serenade.ai/
I like some of the other answers, but I'd like to add a potentially different filter on this situation. Sometimes different filters offer different kinds of insights into the same problem.

The thing that came to mind immediately when I read your concern is the big 5 personality traits. The big 5 is possibly the most thoroughly researched and supported concept in psychology. There's tons of info about it online.

Your situation, when looked at through the prism of the big 5 might be a combination of any of the following: low openness, high neuroticism, or high disagreeableness. You'd have to read a bit about these personality traits and do some introspection into which of these applies to your situation. You'd then need to look at the specific techniques to train the partiality traits you want. Fair warning, it's not generally realistic to actually change your personality type. But you can learn to change your behavior. For example a high neuroticism person might always be extremely anxious about public speaking, but they can learn skills to help them perform when necessary.
The sentence doesn't read that way, but if that's what they meant, it's just as wrong.

YC's publicly-stated strategy from the very beginning has been to cast an extremely wide net, knowing that most wouldn't amount to much but the outliers would return enough to deliver a huge outcome overall.

And a key part of their strategy has been to be so founder-friendly that most of the promising startups would want to be part of their program.

If you look at the number of "unicorns" that have emerged since 2005, it's remarkable how many went through YC.

It's also notable that basically none of the spectacular boom-then-busts went through YC.

That's not "dumb luck", it's a well-thought-out strategy that has been proven to work extremely well over a decade-and-a-half.
Did I complain? In this and other comments in this thread, I described differences because I, at least, find them very interesting.
My sleeping issues were never bad enough either until my team started having daily 9AM meetings. Ugh

I haven't tried L-Tryptophan! But I'll give it a go. My medication hasn't really started taking effect yet but hopefully I don't have to take sleeping medication once it does. Thanks for the suggestion. :) Hopefully that helps also.
Not really. The problem isn't that we don't have a record of past news, it's that we're not critically reading the records we have. IMO it's fundamentally a social issue between journalists and readers.
I do not see many exciting features, except the new sound features of PS5 and maybe the instant loading with improved SSD in PS5. All else is quite boring.
One aspect of why any sort of mask is encouraged is that it helps prevent the unconscious face touching. I scratch at the side of my chin/beard when i'm thinking. With the mask on i sense it's present and causes me to stop the urge.
According to the article revenue from advertising (junk mail) is down 40% while local businesses are mostly closed.
A chrome extension turns Instagram posts into 3D images with 3D Photo Inpainting
Backpropagation as we use it is not feasible in the brain, and is a general algorithm, this case is more specific, it's actually reinforcement learning.

Expectations are part of RL, they measure if a strategy improves or not compared with previous experience.
If starlink gets off the ground as promised broadband will be a solved problem.

I feel like the most likely scenario right now is it will take on a limited form of its current self, maybe delivery once per week? Much higher postage?
Superforecasters don't have a great record on the pandemic:

https://twitter.com/outa_joseph/status/1250592983659024385?s...
My brother bought a rural place that doesn’t have any internet whatsoever, and it’s not that far out in the sticks. If internet access is needed to interact with the government/banks/etc, we have to do better to provide it to rural folks.
Or maybe we accept that the postal service was important enough to include in the constitution, [1] stop demanding an important government service pay for itself, and just give USPS tax funding to make up any shortfall.

Lets also not forget that UPS and FexEx often use USPS for the last mile of their shipments. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_Clause

[2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-mail-does-the-trick-for-fed...
> Extraction can’t be that expensive.

From the article, apparently yes it can: "It's unfeasible and way too expensive to extract psilocybin from magic mushrooms"
Wow doing that would make so little sense. The benefit of dvorak is less finger movement when touch typing. It would be interesting to optimize the keyboard layout on a phone for less finger movement while swiping, but that probably looks a lot different than Dvorak.
Cats that go outdoors get maimed. Lost. Stolen. Attacked. Run over. Are obese from eating their home food, hunted preys, and fed by neighbors. Live on average 7 years.

Cats who stay indoors are much healthier, live 15-20 years, and are just as happy. Of course you need to play with them more so they don’t get bored, they need to have access to windows to look at interesting things all day. But it’s really only cruel if you expect your cat to live its own life without ever going outdoors. Otherwise they really don’t care.

Ask any vet what they think of letting cats outdoors, you’d be surprised.

And in the case of declawed cats: the pain can be so strong for the rest of their lives that it can drive them nuts causing all sorts of behavior problems. It’s illegal in a lot of places because that is cruel.