skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just spent a few hours building a Chrome extension that lets you save stuff online (LinkedIn profiles, arXiv papers) into a spreadsheet (Airtable). Thought it might be useful for others so wanted to share it here.

Prob gonna publish on Chrome store, lmk what you think -- thanks!
Well than this at least makes it decentralized and cheap (though of course that central entity could provide that as well in theory...)
"dark web payments for illegal stuff" seems to have been a fairly good match for cryptocurrency, a pretty specific case of wanting a system not relying on a single authority.
Even China ended up resorting to dressing medical staff in plastic bags and reusing single-use masks, from what I can tell - there are pictures out there and everything - and they had the advantage of being able to redirect a huge chunk of the world's supply of PPE into tackling an outbreak concentrated in a single city. The really substantial difference in China is that the press there isn't allowed to run article after article accusing the national government of trying to kill their medical staff, not that they're more competent. (Also, the official Chinese government line is that infections of medical staff happened due to exposure outside the workplace, and there's likely some truth to that from what other countries have seen.)
There's way more to whether an individual is cut out to cope with an extended quarantine than their "choice" of housing and proximity to population center. I would argue that's probably one of the least influential factors. Way ahead of it would be things such as whether you have kids, a spouse, money, as well as other personality traits beyond just extroverted/introverted.

Not to mention it's highly dubious to suggest that introverted people can or do avoid the city for housing and extroverted people avoid the suburbs.
great action to make scala more accessible to developers. this should be a concrete answer to https://www.lihaoyi.com/post/TheDeathofHypeWhatsNextforScala...
Given the amount of hype and money dumped into projects, and nothing more coming out of it more than crypto-currency which already existed and started the trend.. i'd say 10 years is more than generous.
iPhone finger print data isn't sent anywhere; it stays on the phone
Jesus I wish my kids would go off to summer camp for a few months. They are what’s making this most unbearable for me.
41 comments when I write this.

There is a ton of ‘will’, ‘could’, ‘might’, but no ‘is’. The concrete examples pointed to are sales pitches, announcements, protocols, consortia being organized.

It looks a lot like the answer is no.

That may change I suppose, but it really seems like no one is doing anything practically useful with it.
As a blockchain skeptic the replies to this post have so far further cemented my skepticism.

Providing an example of blockchains solving real problems aside from cryptocurrency should be trivially easy at this point: well funded companies have had /years/ to do this now.

It's not just startups either - IBM and other big consultancies have been pushing blockchain solutions really hard.

How much longer do we have to wait for someone to build something that's actually useful, and that genuinely couldn't have been built cheaper and faster without a blockchain?
Depends on how it is counted. If the budget was counted like other countries the defense budget would be over 1.2 trillion per year:

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/tom-dispatch-ameri...
1. It is always going to be a little suspicious, at the very least, that the first COVID-19 outbreak happened in the same city as a virology institute. (Conversely, if we had a bizarre viral outbreak in Atlanta, I would have very similar suspicions.)

I guess, but the last major hop from animal to human was the Hendra virus in Australia in 2017 -- going from fruit bat to horse to human [1]. This was in the Brisbane area which I'm sure has viral research labs nearby, but because they're Australia, nobody even began to speculate as much.

Sometimes shit happens, and it's deeply human to want to create the fantastical explanation. Not saying it couldn't happen it's just again, not the simplest explanation at all, and so it's really just not very likely.

2. Someone sure would start a trade war though.

[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/08/170815095124.h...
You'll have to be more specific about "the current backlash"
Privacy battle was lost long, long ago. Only beachhead left is end to end crypto, and that's all but lost now too (depending on what country you happen to live in).
Show HN: Errorship, use datadog as an error tracker
Honestly not that I know. Though I could neither find a case for where it was attempted and failed.

China explicitly allows for it though: https://www.scmp.com/tech/article/2163487/china-accepts-bloc...
The contact tracing stuff is not going to be based on location but rather on bluetooth beacons from nearby phones.

I'm not sure why this is being downvoted. See https://covid19-static.cdn-apple.com/applications/covid19/cu...:

"The Contact Tracing Bluetooth Specification does not use location for proximity detection. It strictly uses Bluetooth beaconing to detect proximity."
Git uses, in fact, a "blockchain". There's no mining involved (although, given how hard some code reviews can get I'd argue there is still "proof of work" lol) and anyone can create new blocks and is free to accept or reject them.

Like someone else already said I think it's less about the "blockchain" and more about finding ways to decentralize traditionally centralized services.
Hey HN!

errorShip is a python library that sends exceptions/errors generated by your application to your datadog account.

Are you tired of looking at metrics in datadog and then switching over to another website to track your applications exceptions?
errorship exists to solve that context-switching problem, among others.
It's a bit like sentry, bugsnag, rollbar etc; except implemented in your own datadog account.

I'm happy to receive any feedback or just chat about it.
> Common Lisp feels non lispy

Man, now I've heard everything.
Ok, but why wouldn't governments simply prohibit the use of these systems then?

It seems easy to do because anyone wanting to pay or be paid has to somehow advertise this.
Because as a name it will die anyways. They just just rolled it out as Firefox Beta.

I wonder if Preview will remain at all than.
I’m criticising the denominator, not the numerator.
?? Brave already has chrome extension support. I do not get why this is highlighted as something special for chromium based browsers.
There was a special Windows version for the EU.
Yet all our git repos are centralised on github
The science of helping out: 'To help yourself, start by helping others'
I do agree that more constructive feedback on possible routes forward would be useful.

Although it's not stated by the author, one simple and low-cost approach is to take more time for further discussion and review before accepting deployment of a system like this.

To those who might argue that we "don't have time to delay" and need to rush this functionality out, then I would respond that a rushed solution can often be worse than doing nothing -- especially if there is no easy way to roll it back.

Therefore my personal suggestions would either be to take more pause before accepting and deploying a single solution like this, or to enact stringent and specific time bounds on the rollout.
Very interesting article. 5 cents from post soviet hole I'm in:

[] US/EU moved production to China because it was/is cheaper

[] It was/is cheaper because innovation in production technologies to this date haven't narrowed the gap for US/EU companies to move production back to US/EU.

[] US/EU workers don't want to compete with Chinese workers because they are "too cheap", but can't scale their efficiency proportionally. This is the main challenge of the developed economies - find how to continue growing the efficiency

[] US strategic failure is in putting all the eggs in one basket - China. Why not to have 5 production hubs around the world is not clear (maybe other nations don't want to work as hard as chinese?)

[] Another US strategic failure is to choose offshoring over local production. This could be achieved by lowering minimum wage or if this decision is not politically feasible - import of workforce. For this you could make elaborate laws where people coming to US for work couldn't stay there and had to go back once their work is done. Arab countries are doing this a lot.

[] The conflict of interest became apparent in times of struggle: virus shown that US is not de facto in control of outsourced production overseas

[] It DOESN'T mean that US must bring back production or start wasteful BUILD projects, which no one ever will use. It means that US must start investing even more into bridging the gap between overseas labor costs and automation due to innovation. Or create even more service industries that will be in demand overseas

[] If US succeeds in this mission - it is rightfully the leader of the world, its system is superior and next development revolution will be theirs to benefit from

[] But if US fails to bring the world new development cycle or someone does it before them - US citizens shouldn't expect their living to improve significantly since financial manipulations can bring you only so far

So if robots happen - all of the above resolved. And in times like this it must be quite easy to repurpose robot, which will solve extreme capacity shocks in the system.

BTW US were building high speed trains - it is called airplane! And was winning worldwide competition to date, but decided to outsource critical development to India... So I guess another example of strategic failure.
This is the feature I'm missing the most from KDE Connect, transferring from Computer to mobile, I ended up using syncthing with a 'send_to_mobile' folder, not the main purpose but... it works.
Yeah, to someone who is wheelchair bound, that the room above them which is only accessible by stairs, is not even close to the same as the room next door.
Muddled thinking punctures plan for British ventilator
Great work, even with the caveats others have mentioned! But to maybe add yet another caveat: do you or anyone here know of any way that a malicious actor could expose a complete fake IP address, say in order to discredit an organization, other than working though an infected machine within the organization? Pardon my ignorance, and my intention is not to have such techniques be made common knowledge (if they exist), but if this is possible then it is an important aspect too.
Get the protection from what?
There's also a "seven minute workout" programme for those who want to have a low commitment start.
Ah, I'm on Preview stable, looking forward to some of these landing there.
awesome.. your blog has been extremely helpful to me.. looking forward to the book.
> Would you be able to list them?

scan (e.g. prefix sum), merge, partition, reduce (e.g. minimum), tree contraction, sort

> what primitives do you recommend a language should provide that's currently missing in the languages you evaluate?

Hardware primitives and powerful capabilities for defining safe abstractions over those.

Chances are that, e.g., I need to implement my own "primitive-like" operation (e.g. my own sort or scan). If your language provides a "partition" primitive, but not the tools to implement my own, I can't use your language.

When people create languages for GPUs, for some reason they add the C++ STL or similar as primitives, instead of providing users the tools to write such libraries themselves. The consequence is that those languages end up not being practical to use, and nobody uses them.
There are things which just “suck” and have no viable alternative. For instance: the Government may try to implement a question on “religion” in the Census or it may not... Is there any useful alternative? Useful for what?

Edit: and... five years later. “There was a mistake in the random number generator, all keys are discoverable”. Like, you know, the Intel Security Module.
AWS Lambda – A Virtual Podcast
But still reasonably loud.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ciIy3rqVh8
Yes, it makes it decentralized, but so what? The whole point of this discussion asked by the OP above is to question why (and IF) decentralization is an advantage - what practical benefits does it achieve for this particular use case?

Decentralization is a trade-off; it almost always incurs an efficiency cost compared to an equivalent centralized solution, so the question is if it brings some specific benefits that justify the drawbacks.

Regarding costs, as I mentioned above, the verification in court (which is the whole point of this service) would be much more expensive for the decentralized scenario and the timestamping services are trivially cheap already, so if we look purely at costs then decentralization does not provide any advantage.
This is news to me that the German middle and Lower classes are relatively poor.

Who is this in comparison to?

Could you share where you got this info?
Researchers uncover the art of printing extremely hard steels flawlessly
There's still EFF left to fight for civil rights, although EFF has a much more limited scope.
How to Fake Progressive WebP Images
Why is “asdf”.replace(/.*/g, “x”) == “xx”?
That there are insufficient jobs for poorer people is entirely a political decision. Any country with its own currency can guarantee everybody has a living wage job to go to if it wants to.

Which then has the advantage of competing with crap private and public sector jobs and eliminating them via simple market forces. The “what about the jobs, can I have a bailout” line no longer has any traction when everybody has an alternative job available on tap. Competition can be allowed full rein. Business has to pay the full cost of the labour it uses and innovate around that cost.

But we prefer to use an unemployed buffer stock to constrain wages rather than an employed buffer stock. Always fewer jobs than people that want them. Then we wonder why productivity gains have largely gone to capital over the last 40 years.
Good idea, I also recommend starting a regiment of bullet training resistance.

But make sure you start with a small caliber like a 22. and work out way up to the higher calibers to build immunity gradually.
While it is important to keep Apple and Google under scrutiny and demand transparency, this blogpost is mostly FUD based on silent assumptions contradicting descriptions of the protocol and implementation.

> ensuring that all users of a modern iPhone or Android smartphone will be tracked as soon as they accept the OS update. (Again, to be clear: this happens already even if you decide not to install a contact tracing app!) It is unclear yet how consent is handled, whether there will be OS settings allowing one to switch on or off contact tracing, what the default will be.

I don't think that's correct: you can always disable Bluetooth. Moreover broadcasting, if I understand the documentation correctly, Google and Apple will be providing just general framework: no ID broadcasting will happen until a tracking app is installed. But even if it did, if the tracking keys are not published, it doesn't affect privacy more that Bluetooth MAC address.

> In other words, a malicious app could act as if the user is infected (in a way that is unnoticeable to the user) and extract the daily tracing keys and upload them to the server surreptitiously.

That's true for decentralized tracking not using Google's framework as well.

> This means the technology is available all the time, for all kinds of applications.

In Android ecosystem Bluetooth is available for all kinds of applications too. There is a permissions subsystem that can be applied in both cases.

Everything that Google / Apple Contact Tracing allows is already possible in Android. What it provides is a common standard, implementation, and iOS background Bluetooth capabilities.
Lip Reading – Cross Audio-Visual Recognition Using Neural Networks
If we are lucky, and there is a miracle, the mortality rate will be < 0.2%. Even more of a miracle and the R0 is ~6 and most people are asymptomatic.

However, we could still be on course for a second wave, like 1919, then we are totally fucked.

But we don't know, and really didn't know when europe went into lockdown. It looked like the mortality was ~7% which would have been devastating.

I have yet to see any double blind study that suggests _any_ drug makes an impact. Barring vitamin D, but thats a metastudy, and also its too late for most people (you need a month.)

In short, he asking us to make a massive gamble.

Yes, the poor are suffering, but helicoptering money is a piece of piss compared to re-building a community. if the US had decent unemployment insurance, like germany, then unemployment would be 10% of what it is now.
Thanks for this. Can I ask where you've obtained the stats from please?
A well-run, transparent, centralized entity can easily become an opaque and corrupted entity over time.

A well designed decentralized system will maintain its integrity indefinitely. In practice we've only really seen this play out with Bitcoin so far, but that's because the space is young and people still haven't really gotten their heads around the exact strengths and weaknesses of a blockchain.
What Happened to CongressEdits? The Life and Death of the Famous Wikipedia Bot
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1B3gATS0GE&t=889
"Blending" multiple of them per iteration slows you down!
Jobless Claims by Uber and Lyft Drivers Revive Labor-Status Fight
He also publicly claimed that index funds are a bubble fairly recently.

(https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/arti...)

Two thoughts:
Maybe bloomberg will interview him whenever they want a somewhat contrarian bearish view?
If he made money from short positions now, could it have been for a reason completely unrelated to COVID?
It reminds me the often quoted story of the paperclip maximiser. This powerful AI set up by a factory to improve its production of paperclips. Its objective function is solely to maximise the number of paperclips produced. So it does a great job at it, then becomes out of control, starts consuming all resources on earth to produce more paperclips, and once it has destroyed earth, goes on to take over the universe to produce paperclips.

I feel a lot of the scientific advisors to governments are "covid19 death minimisers", solely focusing on people dying from this virus at the expense of any other consideration, like the effect of elective procedures being postponed indefinitely, tens of millions of families in hardship, economic collapse, etc.
The cases which caused doctors to suspect an outbreak of SARS-like disease had a tie to the wet market, but it turned out those weren't actually the first cases. Also, the fact that SARS was caused by a wet market means that Chinese doctors are going to be a lot more suspicious of SARS-like symptoms in workers at one than they are in general. Basically, the evidence suggests that the apparent ties to the wet market might be an illusion created by the fact that the health system was looking more closely for disease outbreaks there.

Something similar happened in Italy. The case which tipped them off to the fact that they had a major outbreak was someone that was only tested because they'd had contact with a person who'd travelled to China recently, but the general consensus is that was a red herring and the outbreak there originated in Germany.
At least three other people?
The way the community talks about doing things the "swifty" way is very reminiscent of the way the python community talks about the "pythonic" way of doing things, I've used both languages extensively so maybe I fall into the hysterical camp. Swift falls a little into the obsessive category too.
If a spy needs to be armed, they already failed.
Blockchain has one genius product: cryptocurrencies. They totally have a use, by technology enthusiasts, people with deep distrust of governments, and last but not least, criminals. You can’t have a trustless, decentralised currency using other technologies at present.

As for other applications, yeah they are all made up so far. And anticipating any other comments, the world could easily do without cryptocurrencies.
Fantastic, classic paper. Well worth the 20(?) minutes of attention it requires. Learning, memory, information theory...
Companies are not living beings and as such they can not "be" evil. The evil or good stems from us, living human beings and our behavior.
As a user of Facebook. They shouldn’t be most upset about the privacy problems. A developer at Facebook should be ashamed of helping to build the absolute garbage that is the Facebook advertising suite. It’s a maze of bugs.
The Economist Asks - Has covid-19 killed the big tech backlash?

https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2020/04/16/has-covid-19-k...
You're right.
My question was to be taken from a privacy standpoint, and I was referring to some critics today (both inside and outside the tech community) of how Google and FB specifically handle privacy.
>Well it's far more important to have the ACLU working on advocacy and rights for LGBTQ+

Important for who, may I ask? Aren't there many groups fighting for that?

How many groups are working to promote civil rights?
Play regex golf: https://alf.nu/RegexGolf

Since many people are not good at them, whenever I use a regex in code, I add a comment with at least one example of the text that is to be matched, and note what the regex is also attempting to avoid. This is also a learning activity.

There is also the "Mastering Regular Expressions" book.
We might be lucky to have a low mortality rate but why does it require a miracle? All new evidence seems to suggest a <0.5% fatility rate and a large number of infected people with mild or no symptoms.
I really don't like the idea that a blockchain is just a chain of objects that commit to eachother by hashing. That is not what anyone in the industry is referring to when they say "blockchain".

A blockchain is a trust minimizing, independent network which allows participants to interact with eachother such that:

1. Everybody knows who did what, in what order
2. Significant confidence exists that the order is fixed / finalized (git can't give you this)
3. There is no set of controlling parties that could reasonably be expected to change the rules of the system, even if they were all trying to work together.

When someone says "blockchains are going to change the world", they are talking about the above three properties, not about the ability to commit to a thing that commits to other things.
Thanks, I am well aware of every kind of multiprocessing and quasi-threading in the standard library, having built several large Python systems over the years.

I also understand the benefits of task queues. However, there are many cases in which you do not need any of those. Specifically, everything you wrote applies to the web backend/distributed systems usecase. Doing things in the background in a simple application, not so much. My problem is exactly with introducing distributed systems machinery for a local process on a single machine that doesn't need any of that.
Oh, I see, thanks for clarifying, I was seriously confused for a minute there :)
Understanding gRPC, OpenAPI and REST and when to use them
The Most Important Software Innovations

link: https://dwheeler.com/innovation/innovation.html

hn: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18691399

Too many people confuse software innovations with other factors, such as the increasing speed of computer and network hardware. This paper tries to end the confusion by identifying the most important innovations in software, removing hardware advances and products that didn’t embody significant new software innovations. This paper presents its criteria for the most important software innovations and sources, the software innovations themselves, discusses software patents and what’s not an important software innovation, and then closes with Conclusions.

The results may surprise you.