skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A surviorship bias at its finest. There are so many aspects of this disease we don't understand, trumpeting various accomplishments on incomplete data helps no one. It is a small, isolated island nation, neither the measures taken nor the expected outcomes of same measures are representative for larger societies.

If anything Germany is far better case on how to manage an outbreak than New Zealand.
There is not one mention of full-time versus contract work. If he didn't control for that, this entire post is totally useless. Contractors charge a premium because they don't get other benefits, like healthcare.
It's also something of a mini-hub for travel from USA to Europe. A lot of America's do a mini-vacation in Iceland on the end of a trip to Europe.
I miss being able to use alsamixer on my rooted android 4 phone. It was by far the best way to control every aspect of sound output on an android phone. It gave you total control over everything, including overriding android's built in limits on various outputs. You could make your external speakers go nice and loud and bring your headphones down really quiet while still being audible. Android's sound management is exceedingly abysmal and just seems to get worse with each new version.
I meant perhaps NSA agents are trained in social engineering too. Or it may not have been the NSA, but FBI or CIA or even Military Intelligence too, pretending to be NSA.
GitHub Free and what it means for developer tooling companies
I usually pretend I'm walking when I use Google Maps in Amsterdam. Most of the time that's the shortest route on a bike as well or close to it at least. No hills and lots of bicycle paths here luckily :)
It took me awhile to come to terms with the truth that "You are not their target customer." Fair enough.

Except that they built their brand off the backs of people they no longer want using their platform...
I believe they raised and tried to address this confounding factor by determining whether or not one is a smoker based on a date prior to COVID-19 hitting. But I only skimmed it, so can’t be sure what they did.
C++ is a multi-paradigm language, and programming in it does not force you into the object orientation. Sure, there is a lot of encapsulation going on in the standard library, but it does not mean that you have to follow the same approach in code you write (although I find that it is the ability to specify destructors that separates C++ from the plain old C, and you cannot do that if you do not write classes).
Just because you shouldn't doesn't mean you can't.

(C itself is not specified very thoroughly but C - a C implementation - is, in the sense that it only does one thing for a given line of code)
> New Zealand doing so much better than (for example) Iceland?

They are only doing so much better if you define better solely in terms of deaths (about 14x per capita). The difference is that New Zealand locked down; Iceland had much more modest restrictions (and did very well overall with containing the epidemic - a bit better than say the locked down Bay Area)

The interesting question is if "deaths/capita" is the correct and only metric. Both countries are basically at the end of their curve and Iceland lets say might lose about 200 years of life (using some worse case guesses for currently hospitalized) or about 5 hours a person.

What's better for the average person? A 4 week lockdown or life expectancy dropping by 5 hours?
Not sure they were massively more empathetic either. The reality is that because it's an isolated island whose countrymen aren't regularly jetting back and forth it had relatively few cases in mid March and found it completely practical to quarantine everybody who had been overseas for 14 days at that point. Fiji's doing pretty well apart from the tourist industry too, and I'm not sure their government is also outstandingly scientific or empathetic.

Certainly, some countries have done much more counterproductive things than NZ and some countries would have had better capacity to respond if they listened to epidemiologists more. But for all the UK government has legitimately been criticised for being slow to respond and poor at communicating, it went into lockdown on exactly the same day as NZ. It just likely had at least two or three orders of magnitude more cases at the time.
It's only 10x for web. Anyone using python for batch processing won't see the gains because the work is done before pypy warms up.

But yes the only people who wanted better unicode were web people. So they could have been better served moving to pypy.
" This game made me empathize less and less with environmentalists. Forests are an impediment to a transport network. Wildlife are pests. Renewable energy has extremely low ROI."

It's funny you should say that. I noticed that nuclear energy in Factorio is waste-free, and (at least without mods) there's no risk of a nuclear reactor suffering a meltdown and massively damaging large areas of your base.

Also, it was interesting to see just how massive a solar panel array you'd have to have in order to match even a coal power plant, never mind a small nuclear power plant.

On the other hand, Factorio's factories pollute, and fighting hard to reduce pollution is a major part of the game.
I used to think that but G Suite hasn't notably improved in years and I don't think everyone bailing to Office 365 / Teams is doing so out of blind loyalty to Microsoft. Google needs to take the user experience seriously — things which aren't a Real Engineer's Favorite Problems™ are often just as important.
That'll you need more testing through the rest of the pandemic until it's either over or you come back positive.
Also works well on non-text files, similar to `strings`! I don't think it works as well, but can still be useful for quick checks.
I was so tuned into the subject, it took a minute to understand the lol material in the statement. @csence, thanks for showing that there is life outside of immigration.
In particular, the study mentioned here does not seem to take this into account.

In summary, it took the form of a simple game, for which many players deduced the optimal strategy. They then modified its behavior, without notifying the subjects, so that the optimal strategy remained the same, but was less successful, and many players strayed from the optimal behavior. So were they exploring? Had they simply lost confidence in their earlier assumptions about how the game worked? We don't know why they strayed, because "while the answer to that is beyond the scope of this study, Krajbich said, it likely takes a lot of mental energy and planning to always make decisions based on your knowledge of the environment."

Notice, in that quote, the willingness to speculate about a cause despite an experimental design that could not deliver evidence on the issue... (To be fair, I probably would not have noticed that inconsistency if Krajbich had picked a putative explanation that I speculate is more probable.)
I remember when they banned 23andme in MD, I researched it and it turns out the health insurance companies successfully lobbied against it with the argument that information asymmetry may lead to loss of profits.

I'm still salty and I think this is part of the same scenario.

Having said that, I think Governor Hogan is one of the best governors out there wrt state level response to Covid. Right up there with Newsom and Cuomo.
On the other hand, shouldn't there be a productivity drop with so many people working from home while their kids also aren't in school? I'd expect that to offset any increase in demand—after all, Git isn't Slack; remote work shouldn't cause people to push all that much more often, right?
Are you being naive on purpose, friend?
Are they an engineering-first company though? E.g. the entire XMPP fiasco wouldn't have happened if engineers had made the decision. Which engineer would shut down an open protocol to fight a competitor instead of offering the better product? In the end, they lost the space to Facebook and now Zoom anyway.
ECC (unbuffered) is kind of a crap shoot from what I understand and will largely come down to MB support. Only way to really tell is to try it. I know from past generations for AMD, that Asus has done better than average in working ECC. Just my $.02
I'm all over the thread with comments like these since the whole charade is ridiculous and is only getting undue attention here since Patrick is popular on Hacker News and very few commenters have familiarity with Japan, either as a whole or especially regarding the pandemic response.

I've never met Patrick personally but also had a lot of respect for him from past writings; that's probably why I was so disappointed with what he did here. If I weren't knowledgeable about Japan, maybe I'd also just assume he's right because he feels like someone I know, but I do know better and that's why I'm commenting.

My shots aren't at his arguments about pandemic modeling, but everything he's done surrounding that. As plenty of other comments here mention; everything is heavily self-promotional and smug. And I agree under normal circumstances the above comment would be flag-worthy, but he specifically staked his reputation on this with extreme language, so I mirrored that. So I apologize for the poor tone; but I think it's appropriate in the context of referencing that Tweet.

A friend showed me the tweet last month and asked if it was about the pandemic in Japan. I said it can't possibly be that since everyone here sees it coming and knows the government is just dragging their feet. And I don't mean "everyone" in a smugly exclusive sense; all of the top comments on every article on the Japanese news sites were saying the same thing.

So maybe there's novel work in the white paper; that's great, but my "best shots" are that it's ridiculous to claim that no one else saw this coming, this paper influenced Japan to shift their strategy, and being public is going to get him persecuted in Japan (those last two even seem contradictory). These would all be obvious to anyone living here, and make it seem like Patrick is using this information asymmetry and his existing reputation to blow this into something it's not in the eyes of a foreign community.
The fact it's an isolated island with a small population and it's their summer no doubt helps too...
Yeah, I don’t understand that comment.

New Zealand is amazing. But it also has large mountains with snow. It’s not exactly warm though.
we just use our regular CI infrastructure for running linux, macOS, and windows. we have infrastructure for managing VMs for our different supported platforms, setting up filesystems, and so on.

here's a talk from one of our engineers on our macOS CI infrastructure: https://blog.macstadium.com/blog/virtualizing-mac-infrastruc...
Not necessary, when I did my degree, our Algorithms and Data Structures class was done in C, a couple of years later the same course was upgraded into Java.

However, I know from former university friends, that eventually became TAs, that was what required from students was kept at the same level of requirements.

The professor responsible for the class, had a battery of tests (almost a decade before unit tests became a known term), and having the tests green was the first requirement to even accept the class projects.

Those tests did not only test for correctness, performance, memory consumption and execution time were all part of the acceptance criteria.

This is what is missing from many teaching institutions.
It doesn't seem to take the social aspects of smoking into account. In a sense, smokers were already doing social isolation.

I'd bet that people who scream on street corners are less likely to contract it than people who spend time quietly on street corners.
Everything in life is a trade off. Most smokers know its bad but smoking is not 0 benefit, otherwise people won't smoke. They accept the risk and willing to trade the cost with the benefit.
Thanks for sharing your experience on this rewrite. I have a few questions:

1. I'm a bit surprised that you don't persist the scenarios of the tests after a failure, only its seed. Does it mean that when you want to replay it, you have to redo the minimization phase? Or, do you have a way to find a seed for the minimized scenario?

2. Do you have some tests where you generate a set of operations and play them twice: one time with the mocks and one time on the real servers to check that they have the same results?

3. The article says "Note also the importance of the commit hash, as another type of “test input” alongside the seed: if the code changes, the course of execution may change too!". How are you ensuring that a commit really fixes a bug, and not just change the execution path to a happy path where the conditions of the bug are not met? By playing again a lot of tests, or do you write a new unit test that exhibit the bug to ensure the reproductability?

4. Do you think we can say that CanopyCheck is applying randomized testing at the unit tests level and Trinity is applying it at the integration tests level?
Warmth is still an open question, but generally coronaviruses spread much slower in warm weather.

Chinese immigrants visiting family for Chinese new year were a large source of initial infections in America, Canada, and Italy.
The Instagram Story with Bloomberg’s Sarah Friervia
> This wasn't government inflexibility, or stupid law, or selfish interests: it was a community improvising to deal with a tricky situation, and doing so imperfectly.

Improvising law and doing so imperfectly seems like a textbook recipe for "stupid law". That particular stupid law was worth complaining about "the law being an ass" (because it obviously was) and "the perfect example of government inflexibility" (local gov goes forward with putting down blameless horses based on an obscure law enacted 80 years ago in response to a situation that is nowhere near prevalent nor relevant today)

Maybe I'm missing something obvious but in light of this I'm curious how that specific example helps your argument?
A little bit off topic. I just wondering it support git write access over https? Not just read only.
I think NYC skews it. NYC, which has a loose definition of COVID-19 deaths, is responsible for half of the US deaths. There's also really no other metro area in the US which rivals NYC in population density. After all of this, I think we're going to find the IFR for NYC to be closer to 1% while the rest of the country is under 0.5%
Still SFP based though, netgear has an 8 port + 2 10GbaseT which does 2.5/5 as well for ~$150 (GS110MX). Which is a real upgrade path, particularly for POE wifi AP's, and people unable/uninterested in pulling cable.

The problem with 10G is that the datacenter/nerds are still pushing sfp/fibre. Which completely misunderstands how people actually use 1G today. These 10GbaseT switches are literally drop in replacements for existing switches, and as the need arises cables can be upgraded. Which it turns out for home use, properly terminated cat5e works just fine at 10Gbit.
The thing that struck me most about the article was this quote from the Rust Survey (2019):

“Compiling development builds at least as fast as Go would be table stakes for us to consider Rust“

Go was designed from the ground up to have super fast compile times. In fact, there are some significant language issues related to that design decision.

Using one of the primary design goals that impacted language structure as "table stakes" is almost certainly going require a lot of effort with some serious unintended consequences.

Improving compilation times sounds good. Aiming high is good. But reaching "best of breed performance" is major initiative.
I have actual data on my writing productivity to back this up. There's a chart at http://www.dahosek.com/writerly-resolutions-march-status-qua... which shows my progress on my novel for the month of March. Once the quarantine began, my progress collapsed. April has not been much better. My reading has not necessarily fallen off, but other productivity has.
Especially not trams, right? No motor vehicle has ever had a tram approach from behind them before we had bike lanes.
[Not the person you addressed this question to].

I don't. Do you? We are 3 months into this mess and have wildly divergent facts that can't be reasonably reconciled.

Some attempts:

* The regular flu season uses 75% capacity of the system. A disease that's 3x worse will lead to 225% capacity needs.

* Maybe this disease is remarkably more contagious than the flu. In a tightly packed place like NYC, you might get all the cases that you're ever going to get flowing through the system within x weeks, whereas a less infectious flu season might trickle the same caseload within 2x weeks.

* This is out of the ballpark deadly, 10x-100x worse than the flu.
So you're comparing your scalability with a company with over 40m users and 100m repos.

Can you talk about the geographic distribution of your 10 servers?
This was pre 9/11 too, so he didn’t hesitate to hand over the source code based on any sense of patriotism.
Having a GCC monoculture wouldn't be much better.
That's a nice idea, I'll experiment with it. Cheers
Sample penetration test report [pdf]
My mom has gotten stuck in the purchasing interface before and she was confused whether she was buying from google or from best buy, and then all of a sudden she lands up in a different retail experience to check out. She couldn't tell the difference between legit websites and scams (though amazon has this problem too)

In an attempt to create a unifying shopping experience, they instead created something that feels fragmented and destroys trust

Disclaimer: I am a former AWS and Alexa employees
As another developer: stop being lazy. It was much worse back in the day in terms of browser differences.
As an American, the mix of meters and miles really threw me off. When it said "40m" and "5mi" I thought it was switching between estimated travel time and distance. For me, it would be better if it was consistent with the measurement system (using miles and feet, OR meters and km).
I've fallen way behind in my podcasts because I don't have the time that I usually do in the office/commute to listen.
We can actually answer these questions rather than just guessing.

In 2018, 3.82 million people flew into NZ, an increase of 1.2 million over the previous year. Iceland meanwhile received 2.3 million people in 2018, most from the United States, which is in line with historical averages of around 2 million.
Dekker's Algorithm
Open source software still has costs associated with, if not in cash, then in time.
Yeah, I reread your comment, but you responded before I deleted apparently :-) My mistake.
Neat and thanks for the explanations! When you say running it as Webassembly, is the entire thing compiled that way, or is that just in the front end with Octave running on the server?
No, write access is only supported over SSH, for security reasons. SSH key authentication is stronger than password authentication, and git.sr.ht doesn't have access to your password hash to check anyway.
> Unfortunately NAND Flash is not an archival medium, as data can fade in as little as one year when powered off.

A marginally-related comment: Curiously, HDDs are not totally immune to this problem in the long run. Many types of EEPROMs (basically used by everything that has a CPU/MCU inside) only have an officially data retention duration of 10 years, beyond the date, there's no guarantee by the manufacturers that the firmware won't be lost. Yet surprisingly, most consumer electronics work fine after one or two decades, indeed it's because the EEPROM manufacturers are being conservative, not to mention that most electronics are stored room temperature.

There is wild variations of rated lifetime in different microcontrollers, a most common rating is 10 years, but some are 40 years or even 100 years at 25 °C. It indicates that it's related to the semiconductor process, and it also implies EEPROMs have a lot of potential but it's expensive and/or there are too many uncertainties to make any guarantee. How long will today's technology last in the wild is still largely untested in practice.

Long story short, I see EEPROMs as a time bomb of the digital (dark) age. Imagine when a future archeologist wants to download data from a HDD made in 2010, only to find that all firmware and parameters in the EEPROMs are gone, permanently bricking the electronics, even when the platters, motors and the head are good.

Conclusion: In terms of data archiving, SSDs are bad, HDDs are much better and suitable for most people, but tape drives are still the real archival medium.
For the price, 1600AF is probably the better option... if these were in the sub-$70 range, it'd be a good option.
Turbine: Facebook’s service mgmt platform for stream processing
Isn't GraalVM completely tied to LLVM bitcode, and therefore has all the same problems that LLVM has ?
GCC can't do runtime retargeting. This is a major drawback because suddenly you need your distro to think about your pet niche target. Suddenly you need your build system to choose the correct linker instead of just being able to use ldd. I'm a big fan of GNU and the GPL, but clang is much better in this regard.
Not only does this article not say that "nobody saw this coming", but it in fact says the exact opposite thing.
Perhaps the optimal control problem would pique your interest more, once the differential equations have been nailed down in a form that also incorporates the interventions.
Ugh, so frustrating to hear this as a remote worker who is only remote because of family. Putting in a lot of effort into applications is not sustainable considering you will not even get a response from a surprising amount of companies, especially during covid where there are a lot of hiring freezes and a higher amount of job-seekers.
Looks like I missed something ... ? What's the context in which you think so?
Apparently there are different strains of Covid-19 floating around. There has been speculation that NZ (and Australia) may have largely been hit by a less aggressive version of the virus than, say, Europe.

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&obj...
> They accept the risk and willing to trade the cost with the benefit.

This is only true at the very beginning of a smoker's habit.

I know a lot of smokers. Exactly zero of them are "willing" to trade the cost for the benefit, for any meaningful definition of "willing".

Addiction is hard. Many addicts rationalize, but few truly "choose".
I guess to be fair, this was in 2000. Before we knew the Snowden revelations, etc. I also wonder if he handed over just the source code to the shareware version or the full version? Also, nearly everything is open sourced now...so I guess it isn't the biggest boundary to cross?
While it does seem like a good ad, is there any data on whether it is actually effective?

The title for World's Cleverest Anti-Smoking ad really should be given to whatever actually gets people to stop smoking.
I couldn't find anything on using Intel or AMD GPU cores with ffmpeg, but some ARM boards seem well supported.
But then, why would any company take the risk of developing a new test?
You think the NSA impersonated themselves?
Show HN: BalanceViewer helps you get control over net worth, income and expenses
Wow it's a good thing they were examining a "dumb criminal's" laptop instead of preventing 9/11. If they had done that the armaments manufacturers would have missed out on a bonanza.
I knew that charging under water freezing temperatures could damage the battery, not storage or usage. Could you please share some details? I am evaluating to buy an electric bike, but during winter temperature can get to -20 °C/~0 °F, so it would be helpful to learn more about that.
Isn't that a lot of IO capacity for a home server?

BTW, I checked Xeon D motherboards and got scared with the prices.
In Canada distances are almost always in meters/kilometers. For US I assume they would want feet/miles.
I'm just waiting on Patrick Collison to respond to you and put you in your place!