skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> to allow compilers to optimized based upon the assumption that a program won't do certain things.

Emphasis mine. This is always wrong. Correct (and thus legitimate-to-optize-based-on) knowledge of program behavior is derived by actually looking at what the program actually does, eg "p can never be NULL because if is was, a previous jz/bz/cmovz pc would have taken us somewhere else"[0]. Optimising "based on" undefined behaviour is only legitimate to the extent that it consists of choosing the most convenient option from the space of concrete realizations of particular undefined behaviour that are consistent with the environment (especially the hardware).

0: Note that I don't say "a previous if-else statement", because when we say "p can never be NULL", we're already in the process of looking for reasons to remove if-else statements.
As someone who just quit nicotine (e-cigs/NRT/tobacco-free “dip”) after nearly a decade, stay away from it at all costs. Nicotine is a wonderful brain stimulant (nootropic), but it’s far too easy to become and stay addicted.
> "It's unfeasible and way too expensive to extract psilocybin from magic mushrooms and the best chemical synthesis methods require expensive and difficult to source starting substrates...”

This is one of those situations where I feel like we (humans) are approaching it all wrong. Why over complicate it by trying to “extract” the psilocybin instead of treating it like marijuana and growing the mushrooms in highly controlled settings and then testing for potency?!

As someone who’s recently had very positive experiences with both large/small doses of magic mushrooms, it’s disheartening to see us remake the mistakes of the past by trying to over-engineer something from nature. IMO, the optimum approach would be to have humility and simply be stewards of this wonderful gift. There is no reason That psilocybin shouldn’t be administered in its most common form, as it has been for thousands of years, other than it would be harder to profit off of.
Not in India atleast, we have fm stations at 93.8, 106.4 and so on.
Oh, they proposed in Feb 2020 to cut the budget for preparedness further of course. https://www.medpagetoday.com/publichealthpolicy/healthpolicy...

“The proposed budget also cut the CDC's discretionary budget authority by $1.3 billion in fiscal 2021 compared with fiscal 2020 -- a 19% cut -- including $25 million from public health preparedness and response outlays.”
Nicotine on its own is also addictive, though there's some evidence that it's less so without a MAOI (so that would include gum, patches, and vaping). I actually find that real cigarettes can help more than just nicotine alone, since there's a natural cadence to its use. So work for a couple hours, then take a 5-10m break, rinse and repeat. It naturally rewards yourself for work done as well as giving you time to process what was just completed and what needs to be done next. Also cigarettes help set the break time (when the cigarette is done you go inside) vs gum or patches or vaping where you can just keep doing it forever.
Fair enough, but wouldn't it make sense to have a stockpile of reusable PPE that could last through a crisis? Then if you ran out of disposable PPE you could switch to the reusable stuff. Perhaps mistakes would be made in disinfecting it, but it's certainly better than people wearing substandard masks and garbage bags.

We're now forced to reuse disposable PPE due to the shortage. It would have made a lot more sense to be reusing PPE designed in the first place to be reused.
I'm still using a Hackintosh (Gigabyte EX58-UD5) I built in January 2010 as my main desktop. Bought a second-hand graphics card on eBay for £50 and upgraded it to Mojave. Everything works fine except sleep which I don't really miss.
The early moves of the various arms of the American government mostly made things worse. Like banning almost all tests.

So I'm not sure we'd want them to move faster. Perhaps make them move better, or at least abstain from moving so badly, first?
In the US, you only get 200kHz between stations, while other countries allocate 300kHz spacing, giving them slightly more bandwidth.
If anyone is interested here is report published in 2007 by St.louis Federal Reserve about the 1918 Flu pandemic.

https://www.stlouisfed.org/~/media/files/pdfs/community-deve...
> often starting with K or W for some reason

All commercial radio and television stations in the US have call signs starting with K or W. The division is geographic -- west coast stations use K; east coast stations use W. (The dividing line is, roughly speaking, drawn at the Mississippi River.)
Learned something new - the time before Shockley.
Experts criticise Dutch government's approach to coronavirus app
Translating documents at enterprise scale with serverless
Yes, it's quite similar to PopClip!

Tip is less intrusive and targets programmers (because your provide the script). PopClip is more out-of-the-box and more automatic (I assume PopClip monitors mouse events, but not sure).

I wanted to build Tip for Ubuntu as well but I couldnt find a good mechanism. Mac OS's system-wide service is such a beautiful mechanism. Slick and offer the right level of privacy.

Quick note on text manipulation. Mac's system-wide service can modify text as well!... But sadly I couldn't make it work in a slick way. I might need to attempt at it again
> A lot of PPE left the country in January and that could have been prevented.

For example by legalising 'hoarding' and 'profiteering'. Then some enterprising speculators could have bid for the PPE in the hopes of selling them for higher prices later.
Interesting to see this article pop up. I recently became obsessed with finding the best butter after having some on a trip to France last year, and so I rounded up a few contenders and my wife and I did a double-blind taste test. All butter was demi-sel. Results were:

1. Échiré
2. Rodolphe Le Meunier
3. Isigny Sainte-Mère
4. Bordier (!)
5. Clover

Clover came in dead last by far, even though it's generally considered a respectable northern California butter. More surprisingly, neither my wife nor I liked Bordier much at all (and it was difficult to find — we ended up locating small samples of it at ONE65 in SF). It definitely had the most unique flavor and color of the batch, although I can't say it was one that I found very pleasing. I'm almost wondering if I got a bad batch since everyone raves about it so much. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get ahold of Diane St. Clair's butter to test, although I would love to try it at some point.

Échiré though is amazing. I can't get enough of it. I honestly didn't like butter all that much before trying it, and now I use it in everything I can. There's just something about how creamy and unusually flavorful it is.
Er, that's in the first sentence. What could be said a little more clearly is that the frequency 90.1 is actually the channel 90.0-90.2 since the convention is to tune to the center frequency. A convention of tuning to the lowest or highest frequency of the channel would be equally valid - its just not how its done.
The first point does seem to be a bit of a thing in the direction of noble savage/naturalistic fallacy, in the way that appeals to stop Amazon deforestation on the basis of hidden uncovered local plants might prove to be miracle drugs that will safe humanity are overselling wonders previously unharmed by the modern world.

That said, the preservation of endangered languages is definitely in of itself a valuable and noble pursuit of knowledge. It preserves our understanding of the past, at the very least. And for something more groundbreaking, there is the whole matter of the Pirahã:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8772388

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=740687
Classilla handles modern pages better, but iCab has better performance/memory usage
There's no reason to expect any seasonal dependency given south Asia's experience, is there another reason you expect it to go away for months and come back later?
Thanks for sharing. Watched and enjoyed them both.
Nit: hope the mic got fixed - for a moment I thought the firealarm went off
Hi,
A blind python developer here. You can do the job and though it has its frustrations with inaccessible tools, there're always alternatives. The two best things that you can use for web development are VS Code, because Microsoft are currently in "we love accessibility" phase of their product cycle and doing a good job of it, and emacs because it gives you a text-based os at the cost of a somewhat steep learning curve. People are using braille displays though it is not unavoidable. As a screen reader, you can use emacs speak with emacs, orca in linux, voice over on MacOs and IOs, and NVDA for Windows. Specially for web devs, there is an NVDA addon that can help object positions in web pages and has some other nicities if you are the type to do front end. Developer tools in all browsers have some more work to do before being fully accessible so there will be some issues there.
If you need some more info, program-l@freelists.org is a blind-dev community with experienced visually impaired devs. Feel welcome anytime.
That is such quite a stretch of the imagination and I sure didn’t read it that way. I may be wrong but here’s one fun example from this comment section that I wanted to “respond” to and demand some clarification on.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22911497

PS: I work with like 65-70% of that stack daily
Also, since we already have 4-aco-dmt (which is virtually identical to psilocybin), so there's no real reason to extract.
The private sector response was pretty decent. For example, the major American sports leagues shut down on their own before the US government had any clue about what to do.
Australian Govt to be clearer.

Looks like the app is unlikely to get much effective traction. There's numerous problems like the app having to be in the foreground the entire time you're out and about.
I think you might be surprised what you learn if you ask students who are about to enroll in college if they think it's a rip-off. I bet basically none of them say yes. Some graduates such as myself might even tell you that they value their college education, even though they ended up working in something completely unrelated to their field of study.
Isn't parcel volume up substantially right now? How could a post office be teetering when online retail is at unprecedented volumes right now?
Your post focuses on ventilators but the government could have ordered additional PPE in January easily.

That’s exactly what Taiwan did for instance - maxed out their own factories and ordered more machines to make PPE in January.

Meanwhile, in mid-February, the largest American factory for making surgical masks was running at less than full capacity as the owner complained to the media that no one would make a long-term contract with him and he and his employees were burned last time he ramped up production for H1N1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/02/15/coronavir...

> “ In an interview, Bowen said he could make 1 million masks a day if he ran his machines around the clock, a huge quantity for his firm but an amount that would barely make a dent in global demand. He’s hesitant, however, to ramp up production at the facility [. . .]“
Been teaching myself RL from introduction to RL (E.2) https://yashbonde.github.io/musings.html and working on rough ideas of what I think real AI driven computation would look like so running subset of tasks on it.
I'm normally pro-digital over anything analogue, but broadcast radio is one medium, possibly the only medium, where analogue is better.

Digital compression simply doesn't cope with packet loss well enough to be practical. Even with a very weak FM signal, in emergencies you can still hear through the noise.
> It's also not the case that reducing government mandated restrictions will just snap the economy back. Plenty of people are going to avoid sitting in restaurants and the like, regardless of what the government says.

Yes. And that's a good argument in favour of gradually lifting government restrictions: the private sector will do some of its own lockdown as necessary.
Maybe it's time. The whole USPS as a quasi-governmental entity thing has been an anachronism for about a hundred years and a farce ever since email replaced its raison d'etre.

Just delete every law on the books that distinguishes it in any way from UPS or FedEx and let it live or die on its own merits.
They used to be used in the UK (BBC radio was 2LO), but were phased out almost a century ago, kept only by Amateur Radio users.
Clean start.
But why bother if you're not using it anyway?
Alternatively, consider plant based butter if you're concerned about climate change and don't want to support industrial animal farming (i.e. same reasoning behind plant based burgers which seem popular on here: make the product directly from plants instead of inefficiently feeding plants to cows first):

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/225411135_Comparati...

> The margarine products analysed here are more environmentally favourable than the butter products. In all three markets (UK, DE and FR) the margarine products are significantly better than the butter products for the categories global warming potential,eutrophication potential and acidification potential
This has two components. First, Trump hates the Postal Service, because he mistakenly believes that they are giving Amazon (owned by Bezos, whom Trump despises) too good of a deal:

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/98006358159204761...

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/98006541963256627...

The second part is that Republicans believe starving the Postal Service will be yet another hurdle to throw in front of mail-in voting, which is gaining momentum amidst the coronavirus crisis. After all, without USPS, there wouldn't be a low-cost option to mail ballots.

The entire thing is cynical and vile.

edit: judging by the downvoters I guess I hit a raw nerve...
Maybe invest in something, but I mainly do it to try not to be stressed if I'm not working or in a situation like this one.
Dosing is far easier in pill form regardless?
For those who like this: it also reminds me of a small company that makes Hooks amps.

The Wizard also include those simulators but the nice thing is it uses analog knobs. But you can program presets and the knobs will move back to the preset settings.

http://www.hookamps.com/phone/wizard.html
It’s amazing to me that this isn’t being covered more on the mainstream media.
Psilocybin may be an underrated chemical precursor. 4-substituted indoles are notoriously difficult to synthesize. Psilocin is a rare example of a natural one. (LSD is another.) For example, a milliliter of 4-bromoindole costs a whopping $75:

https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/catalog/product/aldrich/524336?...

Presumably this technique could produce psilocybin for much less than $75 per milliliter.
If I remember correctly, the Economist also had cover stories warning of a too hot real estate market in 2004, 2003, and 2002.
Compartmentalisation as a Means for Ensuring Privacy [an Overview]
I can't imagine I would get much junk mail delivered through UPS and FedEx.
Or you have an employee who buys their health insurance on your state's ACA exchange.

There's even a decent chance that they can get an ACA subsidy. To get a subsidy they need to get their MAGI below about $49k (I'm assuming they are single...someone else can do the numbers for families). MAGI is for most people income - HSA contribution - retirement plan contribution.

With an HSA and an IRA they can knock up to almost $10k off their MAGI, which means they can take a part time job paying up to $59k/year and still get a sweet ACA subsidy.

If your company has a 401k, and they work enough hours to qualify to contribute to that (1000 hours/year, I believe), using that instead of an IRA would let them knock around $24k off MAGI, meaning they can take a part time job paying up to $72k/year and still get a subsidy.

The way ACA subsidies work is that even if you barely come in under the MAGI limit, it is usually pretty substantial. You might expect that as you get closer to the limit, the subsidy decreases--and you would be right--but it isn't the kind of gradual decrease to 0 that you would probably expect. No, it is a slow decrease right up to the cutoff then it drops to $0.
Theres a lot to be said in favour of a shorter working day. Not many people can deliver value after 9 hours of concentration!
You can make capsules from ground up mushrooms very easily.
Hey, drug on wars still exists in the world. You can get excessive jail time just for having some (regardless of quantity) marijuana on you - and that is in "western" country. It was not so long ago that "marijuana had no possible medical application" and was scheduled as a class A drug in UK (and I think, still is). There is a lot of stigma, and decades of bad science, propaganda, and manufactured hatred run deep. Research is difficult, if at all possible because excessively harsh legislation. And who benefits?.. criminal cartels and enforcement agencies. This is also why scientists go such extreme lengths to create psychoactive mimics ("legal highs") - so they can research the stuff that is at least similar without going to jail. It's a fucked up world, my friend.

It's not the scientists' approach that is wrong, it's the legislators...
So price most rural citizens out of mail?
Which is pretty much my point, people get exposed to the low quality of the supermarkets in the U.S and think "I don't like that stuff" and as a consequence never try for the top quality.
Innovation Validation Without a Product
Yeah, it's maddening, isn't it? I would never go back to analog cell phone systems, and I could waffle for hours why analog TV is really not as great as some might remember, but for radio transmission FM stereo radio was simple, elegant and with great quality. DAB+ is in many ways a step backwards, I think.
Interesting. You think UPS and FedEx aren't interested in the new money on the table from advertisers that are suddenly willing to pay their higher prices?
I will, thank you!
I know it is a scientific study published in Nature that the NPR article is based on. Cats kill birds, I have zero doubts, cats kill lots of birds, that’s likely. Cats kill as much as that estimate says, I have significant doubts. For multiple reasons:

Whenever a predator kills a bird there will be traces such as a bunch of feathers and inedible parts at the location of the kill and/or consumption. Never seen a single one of those.

It is a single estimate, never replicated.

There are hundreds of starlings, tits, and other small birds in my neighbourhood. It’s not like birds are a scarce resource. Nether do they seem especially held back by the local cats.
What mail? Spam? People don't mail things anymore. It's why they're going out of business.

And it's not like mail would be unavailable. If it cost $2 for rural customers to mail a letter instead of $.50, would it really matter for the two letters that still get mailed a year?
Tips and Tricks for getting your Microsoft Certification
> I have realized that I easily give up when I face a hard problem.

Watch a master tackle a hard problem. Copy their resilience and enthusiasm. I've done this for a few years and it taught me to be patient and focused. Also, leading requires responsibility. To gain a sense for leadership, try teaching and helping others. Show them how you solve problems.
If you can design and reliably manufacture re-usable PPE, I am certain there would be a market for it.

I design some non-medical mechanical assemblies (various types, for use with electronic equiment), and have no idea how I would design (reliably manufacturable) re-usable PPE for use in a biohazardous environment. As far as I can see, the problems would mostly be in the joints and fastening features between different materials. Some features (such as filters) will likely need to remain at least somewhat disposable, as I believe that all biofilters have a limited lifespan.
Agile Introspection Asking Your Software Development Team This One Question
> if one packet is dropped or smashed, there is a higher probability of following ones to meet the same fate.

Not necessarily. I am not an expert on this topic, but I believe physical device failure is one of the least common reasons a packet is dropped (at least on physical cable transmission). I think link saturation, priority routing (for certain types of packets, or contractual reasons) might be more common. There are thousands of routers out there with a variety of different configurations that decide which packets go through under which conditions.
Did everyone switch out their car radios?
Cannabis was downgraded from class A to a class C drug in the UK in 2004, but was upgraded to class B five years later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drugs_controlled_by_the_UK_Mis...
By the way, in Europe, even for analog TV the channel numbers have been relatively hidden since at least the 80s. TVs would instead be "programmed" to have sequential program numbers, which behind the scenes pointed to actual channel numbers. The channel a station was on could differ widely between regions, so the channel number was just a local implementation detail.
There is/was also usually some more or less common order of stations, e.g. in Germany you'd always put ARD on 1, ZDF on 2, the regional "third" station on 3...
I guess it's nice that schools in Europe are teaching community values, social values, democratic values, ideas about nondiscrimination and tolerance of other people’s viewpoints. In the US, schools seem to be teaching guilt and self-hatred lately. I'm sure it will pass but I don't blame people who want to opt out.
As predicted.

Let me know when you muster up courage proportional to your ego, and maybe we can have a discussion that consists of something more than insults and evasive tactics.
That 9/10 figure is misleading, if you browse the list here: https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500_archive/f...

Many more than 1/10 of those names are still dominant companies/brands, but some have gone through mergers or restructures, meaning the 1955 entity no longer exists but the business lives on and remains very strong.

BP and Shell are on that 1955 list, and are obviously still very strong companies.

According to the Lindy effect [1], the longer a company has existed, the longer it is likely to continue to exist.

Both BP and Shell have long been diversified companies (even in the 1950s, Shell had vast business activities outside of petroleum), and have long been investing heavily in various forms of alternative energy.

They're not likely to disappear in any foreseeable timeframe.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
It took me a while to realize there was any geographic significance. I live in a metro area split by the Mississippi, so we have a roughly 50/50 ratio of K and W stations.
Helmets should be optional so long as you are an organ donor. You could have a different coloured license plate.

Maybe that would get the point across?
You seem to be disconnected from rural life completely.

Many people rely on physical mail for things like social security checks, taxes, bills, communication with family and friends.

Remember, broadband never actually got rolled out everywhere like phones did(hint: one was considered a vital utility)
If it's after hours then you're on call and you should be paid to be on call.