skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ruby. "Ruby" is the word that this source intentionally hid from the headline to make people click.
>On the days that you turn your monitor off, how do you do email?

Poorly. I want to improve aerc in this respect. For the time being, I use a mix of my braille reader (brltty) and piping emails into vipe so I can use my vim plugin to read them.
> How does OrbitDB compare to GUN?

I went to a meetup where the creator of GUN gave a presentation. To this day, it was the single strangest presentation I've ever experienced.

The presentation had numerous obvious errors. The audience kept pointing out major misunderstandings and errors about distributed systems. I remember one awkward moment where someone pointed out a glaring error in the author's model of conflict resolution that undermined one of his key points, which the GUN creator tried to gloss over as quickly as possible. To top it off, he ran out of slides before he finished his talk because he hadn't bothered to complete his whole slide deck before presenting. Instead, he just tried to improvise the last 1/3 of his talk about GUN.

It was so bad that we all walked out of there wondering if we had just been trolled. To this day, I'm still surprised when I read about GUN on Hacker News.

You don't need to take my word for it. I encourage anyone considering GUN to open up the source code and look through some random files: https://github.com/amark/gun/tree/master/src
"When the facts change, I change my mind - what do you do, sir?" -- John Maynard Keynes
A lot of PPE left the country in January and that could have been prevented. A lot more screening and testing of travelers and symptomatic patients could have been done in February, and we might have been able to contain it in a similar manner to South Korea.
All of these attacks on language supply chains have me increasingly convinced that, at the very least, some sort of lightweight formal verification that "this package isn't doing anything obviously sketchy" is necessary. One promising avenue for this is something like Safe Haskell ( https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/7.8.4/docs/html/users_gui... ), which proves during compilation that a library function like

sign :: Privkey -> Message -> Signature

can't steal your private key and ship it off to some scammer. (Because sending your private key to a scammer requires network IO, and the type of this function implies it doesn't do network IO, and Safe Haskell guarantees that it doesn't use any "backdoors" to do IO.) It's not perfect, but it's a pretty good start in the right direction.
> I don't have ADHD, I'm just scatterbrained and easily distracted.

What's the difference?

> When I do hit that "zone" I can stay in it for hours, but I rarely get to that point on any single problem.

Maybe you're already aware, but that's very common with ADHD.
He can't stop everyone else from characterizing one day's data, so even if he knows it's mostly meaningless it's best to get ahead of it. And it's seemed like he does know that - he's consistently tagged "we need a consistent trend over multiple days to be sure" to his analysis.
What's even harder is that you're usually trying to forecast for a reason other than pure academic curiosity. Like, should I be worried about the coronavirus? Should we stay inside? When can we reopen business? But the decisions people take determine the curve and the predicted curve determines people's decisions. If you decide not to social distance, you're changing the future. For that reason, forecasting is better done under different scenarios. For example, don't tell people approximately X (+/- a lot) will die. Tell them approximately X (+/- a little less) will die if we don't social distance and approximately Y (+/- a little less) will die if 95% of us self-quarantine.

It's harder than just fitting a curve, but that's kind of the point. If you want actionable predictions, it is harder.
A bunch are changing in real time right now. For example, telemedicine being full legalized and paid by government insurance, same as in person doctor visits.
Not at all, I'd say most of them aren't.

What I found surprising, is how many executive teams at Fortune 500 companies were also not evidence-based.

When making decisions with hundreds of millions of dollars, many executives I've seen still just do what "feels good" to them.
Can kids be abused at home? Yes, they can, and they sometimes are. Can they fail to get a good education there? Yes, they can, and they sometimes do.

Can kids be abused in public school? Yes, they can, and they sometimes are. Can they fail to get a good education there? Yes, they can, and they sometimes do.
At higher rates than at home? Plausibly, but I have no data.

But all the outrage (at least in this article) is toward the possibility of abuse at home, and inadequate education at home. Where is the outrage for the possibilities of the same issues at school?

But sure, prohibit homeschooling, because that will fix all of these problems. (This is the land of the free, and prohibitions are how we roll.) But you know, maybe we ought to prohibit public school while we're at it. Same logic, after all.
That's what I always assumed you got back when you create a MediaRecorder like so:

new MediaRecorder(stream, { mimeType: 'video/webm;codecs=h264' })

Which is what this project does. Is it actually returning something else behind the scenes?
> Play video games that require intense focus for prolonged durations to perform well like Starcraft 2, CSGO, DOTA 2 helped me build mental endurance.

I used to be better than average at Starcraft 2. Probably peaked around top ~1.5% in the world wide rankings.

My thoughts on this is that the vast, VAST majority of people who play a competitive game like Starcraft 2 will not get any benefit from it. Following this advice blindly would be a disaster for 99% of people.

As a former high ranking master league player, I would mostly dedicate my time to memorizing and mindlessly practicing build orders. All responses I made in the game to my opponent were born from literally thousands of hours of practice and memorizing how certain interactions in the games went. 1 Marauder beats 1 Stalker. 2 Marauders beats 3 Stalkers. 2 Marauders loses to 4 Stalkers. For every single game interaction possible. I doubt an actual full formed thought ever crossed my mind during gameplay.

That's great for just zoning out and crushing noobs, but as a top 1.5% player I was absolutely TERRIBLE when compared to even low ranking professional players.

Why? Because they spent time watching replays to understand their opponents and to meticulously analyze their mistakes and think about solutions.

I didn't do any of that. I just memorized popular strategies and got good enough at pressing certain keys in certain orders that I was considered a "master". But I didn't master anything really. What does that say about the 98% of players who were lower ranked than me? What does that say about the larger player pool of Starcraft 2 which don't even compete, but rather play single player or arcade?

I want to make a critical correction to the quote that prompted me to reply.

> Practicing video games that require intense focus for prolonged durations to perform well like Starcraft 2, CSGO, DOTA 2 helped me build mental endurance.

The point I want to drive home is that concentrated, deliberate practice is the key to building mental fortitude.
And this wouldn't be surprising - most hospitals do have written policies for how they'll triage should it become necessary.
I guess I’m not sure what definition of “works” you are using?

Humans have a tendency to see the thing in front of them and claim, I did X, and then Y happened, so X must have helped cause Y. When in fact no such thing has been proven.

I think there are a lot of things different about those examples you gave, and absolutely no scientific way to draw a conclusion about a particular intervention having a particular effect.

Here’s an interesting comparison between Australia and Canada for example, who both responded similarly but have ended up in markedly different situations. [1]

So instead I would offer a different framework for the discussion.

In the end there are only two simple questions with COVID. 1) When we hit the endpoint, what is the total prevalence in the population, and is it lower than the natural saturation point?

So my guess for #1 is that at the endpoint, we will see that basically everyone who could have gotten it did get it. To put it another way, I suspect only the highest risk population taking the most extraordinary precautions will end up not having antibodies to SARS-CoV-2, everyone else at some point being naturally exposed.

In other words, I assume we will reach whatever the top of the S curve for COVID would naturally be based on the biological nature of the virus. Essentially, I am assuming that vaccines will not play a large role, because it will have played out before they become available, and/or because we don’t have any coronavirus vaccines and it’s probably harder to make one than we think.

2) How long do we stretch things out to get to that endpoint, and therefore, how many lives are saved through increased availability of medical care and, on the flip side, how much economic cost is incurred?

My hope here—based on some very preliminary data—is that we are actually much further along than the testing might indicate (e.g. 5% overall prevalence and much higher in certain metros, vs 0.2%)

From a health care perspective I think that the only effective treatments we have today are minimally invasive and extremely scalable — oxygen therapy and frequent repositioning. We are learning that ventilators have proven to be basically lethal to COVID patients, therefore increased availability and usage of ventilators presumably just increases the death rate. There have been no controlled studies either way at this point so no one can say for sure.

At this point because we have no effective cure or treatment, and because initial antibody testing seems to indicate COVID is extremely widespread despite the shutdown, I am very skeptical of the current approach paying off both in terms of delaying spread & saving lives through higher availability of care.

[1] - https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-canada-and-a...
We absolutely had the tech to get testing up fast. The problem was that the government screwed up making the CDC test and then made every other test illegal. It was pathologically stupid.
I always assumed Whistler in Sneakers was a reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joybubbles
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22906455
If there was a public place for posting these with peers, that was built for TILs rather than just a repo, would you use it? Especially if it included an easy way to export all to markdown for backup?

This would allow folks to see each other’s TILs, search them, browse by tag, like/favorite each other’s TILs, and some other fun stuff eventually
I shouldn't be giving advice because I'm probably worse about this than you, but I've read a lot of books on the subject and tried a lot of things. Some things I've had success with:
- journal/Todo lists, just the act of writing about what I want to do seems to make it real, till I start procrastinating about journalling ;-/
- say "I want to" instead of "I have to" or "I need to". You do what you want right!?
- set a timer, do some work, then reward yourself by setting a shorter timer and having some fun
- get an accountability partner, schedule a call where you discuss each other's goals, bust their balls

Good luck finding a solution and if you do tell me how you did it!
I did this many years ago, and am now terribly slow at typing on a phone with a qwerty keyboard, and still cannot use a Dvorak keyboard on my computer...
Ask HN: Good overview of live streaming audio/video client/server architectures?
I'm curious how something like Clubhouse or Streamyard works and having a bit of hard time putting together the pieces because most of Google is concerned with setting up live streaming (as a user and not as a developer).

My main question is what happens on the server to accept live streams, mux them together, add overlays etc.

My guess is something like this:

- RTMP stream from client (or WebRTC) to Server
- Server runs something like GStreamer which can frame the video stream, apply overlays, output RTMP stream
- Send that to nginx and expose to client

Does AWS have this encapsulated as a service yet or are most people operating something like this at the compute level?
Interestingly, the last time I heard an argument like this, it was being put forth in favor of using butane or propane as a replacement for CFC refrigerants in cars. That idea never caught on, but it's not clear if safety concerns in accidents were the reason.

At any rate, unless Farmer Brown regularly drives his fertilizer sprayer around on the farm at 70 MPH, I'm not convinced your analogy holds much more water than the anhydrous ammonia does.

Hydrogen is best thought of as an energy transfer mechanism -- an extremely lossy one at that -- not an energy source, and I don't see that changing anytime soon. It's hard to believe that ammonia-based storage is the missing factor in the hydrogen equation that we've all been searching for.
Perhaps the problems you want to solve are too hard. In this regard, I really like Jonathan Blow's advice [1].

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XAu4EPQRmY
I wonder how advances in online teaching will affect homeschooling.

One thing I'm not sure about is the perspective that public education prevents child abuse. There are probably other more cost-effective ways to do that than with the current school system.
"Being able to live near high-income jobs is the most direct path to the middle class in America." 100%
i trust the govt, but would not do it. a self reporting system is better than giving up privacy rights.
I have a harder time believing this after 2016.
That's intersting! In the case of persistent threads as mentioned in the link, can the set of moderators be mutable, and still have eventual consistency?
The Device Invented to Resuscitate Canaries in Coal Mines (Circa 1896)
Yea my first programming job was translating word docs to accessible html for universities. The jobs around section 508 compliance seem mainly government related
What to Build Now?
It is time to build. What to build?
> I love how the graphic shows a homeschooled kid locked up.

And not just locked up, but locked up in a house made of books while the other children play outside. And the books are Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, and Bible. With Arithmetic misspelled.
Companies hire consultants when they need people part time. That is why most retired people become consultants instead of trying to find part time work.
"Thanks for taking the time to share how superhuman you are" is not "asking for personal decency".

Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. We're here for curious conversation, which doesn't go along with the style of argument in which people cast each other's comments in the worst possible light. If you review the site guidelines you'll see that many of them guard against that argument style. That's no accident, because it's so common in online discussion generally, indeed has become the default. It takes conscious work to have a place that doesn't fall into it. That's what we're trying for.

Note this one, for example: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." If you'd review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the intended spirit to heart, we'd be grateful.
Hackers steal $25M worth of cryptocurrency from Uniswap and Lendf.me
Chrome doesn’t use WebKit anymore. Perhaps you’re thinking of Blink?
I suspect there's a number of families out there where one person makes over $130k, but makes less than $260k as a couple (so they'll still qualify).
You'll never guess what happens next.
Yeah because he knew that there was a supply crunch at the time and wanted them to go to first responders. Morever there is not solid evidence that mandatory masks are necessary, as Singapore hasn't mandated them, and amidst other social distancing procedures and testing regime, they have kept numbers relatively low.
I read a blog post a while ago that was quite remarkable. From memory it was someone going blind (your age) while studying law, and halfway through couldn't read any more.

Determined to finish his degree he developed the ability to listed to audiobooks ludicrously fast, way faster than reading, and it opened up a whole new world to him that was previously hidden.

Chumhumming around today I'm pretty sure the man's name is Isaac Lidsky. He's done TED talks and been interviewed on podcasts, written blogs posts, etc.

Go check him out and even try and contact him.

Good luck. I reckon you'll be strong enough, prepared enough, and with a little help from lots of people be able to thrive.
SwimOS: Distributed platform for building stateful, real-time streaming apps
Silkworms are killed in the production of silk whereas simply milking the goats would let a kind of continuous process happen. It would still need to be untangled and spun which is a pain, but that would hopefully make for a better industrial process than vapour cooking tons of insects, which is also icky.
There's also Netsurf, Dillo, as well as Links and the rest of the text-based ones.

The monopoly should definitely be fought.
> People like me are only looking forward to completely autonomy -- I am forbidden to drive, you see.

This thread is about automated driving from a systematic point of view, it isn't about you.

> if it didn't treat "everyone can drive" as a truism.

No one said that or implied that anywhere here. You hallucinated some sort link between this conversation and your own frustrations.
The photo in the article has the caption "These reels contain "synthetic" spider silk fibers spun from the spider silk proteins produced by Saanen goats. Photo © Lewis Lab at Utah State University.". What is the difficulty with spinning?
Hello! I have Type I Usher myself and my vision tanked when I was 27 (~8 years ago). I'm a writer, so I can't give you much programming advice but I've been through the gamut in terms of technology and life changes. I'm happy to share what has and hasn't worked for me. My email is in my profile.

I do want to say one thing, though: It absolutely sucks at first but you'll adapt. One day at a time.
It feels like the lesson here is that enforcement with arrests is going to provoke a backlash, whereas convincing people it's good for them is a better strategy.
Wow, all of the comments on HN so far and all of the comments on the article's website say more or less that the article is terrible. Is there any merit to the article's claim that homeschooling should be more regulated?
That is in fairness a pretty weak response. Being "very close" in quality to another solution which can produce in greater bulk isn't useful, unless you anticipate outdoing it in the future. In what proportion of usecases are they actually superior, I wonder?
Do you have proof of your claims?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice
You might also want to check out "dragonfly", which is a Python based system for integrating applications with speech recognition and synthesis, and includes a large library of pre-existing modules for many popular applications:

https://pypi.org/project/dragonfly/

Project description:

Dragonfly offers a powerful Python interface to speech recognition and a high-level language object model to easily create and use voice commands. Dragonfly supports following speech recognition engines:

Dragon NaturallySpeaking (DNS), a product of Nuance

Windows Speech Recognition (WSR), included with Microsoft Windows Vista and freely available for Windows XP
Got it, thanks man
And this is a developer who also maintains iOS/iPadOS versions along with the Mac version, so not using Webkit on Mac would mean having to maintain and develop for two rendering engines since Apple mobile OSes require using Webkit.
A database implemented in JS; very encouraging. I guess performance and robustness were not a priority.
This is not good advice and if anything can make people feel worse about themselves and have the opposite effect. Do you also think that an alcoholic should just "do it" (i.e. stop drinking) or a depressed person should just "get over it"? Where's the line (I know I took your example a bit further to prove a point).. Our brains are complex and it takes all kinds of psychological "tricks" to make progress on certain things.. In the scenario posted, making tiny almost insignificant progress, over and over, is a good way to go. I also like (depending on what I'm having a hard time getting started with) outlining my work, especially if its writing or a presentation - write headings, keywords, thoughts... rearrange a bit here and there and in the end you realise you only have to beef out words into sentences and the whole thing is almost done and being at that stage you get a huge win and the remainder is a breeze. So different approaches. Even with your career though, putting an actual short and medium term plan together for yourself (and maybe sharing it with a friend or family member) can help tremendeously!
It's a problem that strongly correlates to the cities richest in high-income knowledge-intensive jobs.
Modern HTML rendering engines are much much harder than you think, switching to webKit is a way to prevent obsolescence for any browser that doesn't have a huge team of devs behind it.
I have but they are all Korean.
Agreed about poor phrasing, it isn't really about "understanding". But we know that humans are robust through millions of years of evolution, and we know that, mostly, their incentives are aligned with other humans. I don't think it has much to do with intuition either though. For example, I believe I have a pretty intuitive understanding of what most current AI systems do (that's the field I work in), and that's exactly the reason I would not trust them to make fully autonomous decisions in cases where they need to be robust to humans trying to exploit them. I have absolutely no intuitive understanding of how airplanes work.

> There are some cases where the answer is yes e.g. we trust airplanes built and ratified by experts even if we don't know how airplanes work on the presumption that, at least in the conditions we care about, airplanes have been tested and behave correctly.

A big difference is that airplanes do not interact with humans, and humans have no incentive to exploit airplanes. They are a system that purely interacts with the physical world, or physics, which seems to be simpler to model than human behavior and is not fundamentally adversarial.

With many blockchain networks, e.g. Bitcoin, you are in an adversarial environment - exploiting the network yields huge payoffs. With a fully autonomous AI-based decision making system you can get something similar, depending on where it's applied. For example, tricking recommendation systems to uprank your product, automated trading systems (responsible for flash crashes), impersonalization through voice/face recognition, etc. To be fair though, most AI systems are not deployed in adversarial environments, but blockchains seem to be, since you can almost always profit from exploiting them.
The target was Ruby developers who use Windows and Bitcoin. I didn't get the sense that common libraries are infected - more that there are hundreds of libraries that are typosquatting. It would be interesting to find out if any of these libs ended up as dependencies.

Love the TacoBell.check_win.

The most successful attack was a change of an underbar (atlas_client) to a dash (atlas-client). Seems good to standardize these kind of non-alphanumeric characters in library names. Still, seems like open source web stores like this might need some level of human moderation?
This is an odd time to attack Amazon?
That actually makes sense! Cool!