skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is true that current emergency is not the one to be expected. But it is made much worse for the people which depend on everything to come from the employer. If healthcare comes from a "job" - shouldn't the "job" anticipate pandemic in that case? Employers enjoy the benefits of employee's dependency during normal times, but the second things go sideways - they don't want to pay extra to guarantee medical coverage when it is needed the most.

I agree on your second point but this is a flip side of market economy that we have all subscribed to - there are good times and bad. If capitalism is the way to go, then companies that can't survive (for whatever reason) should go under. This pandemic and government decisions affect everyone equally. Lets put our money where our mouth is. Otherwise we should switch to socialism and call it a day.
No greedo, that's not the correct interpretation.

There is currently no evidence of X does not mean X is not true. It just means there's no evidence of X being directly true yet. Nothing I said contradicts the WHO.

What I said was that we can reasonably infer from similar coronaviruses (including both more and less severe ones that are up to 90% genetically identical) that immunity is conferred. Also from other viruses. We shouldn't base our global health policy decisions on that until we have conclusive evidence but there's no reason for you to continue with the messaging when all evidence points to immunity being conferred for some duration of time.

Specifically what I said was that we do not have enough evidence to issue prophylaxis certificates, but that chances are good immunity is conferred based on studies of very similar diseases. I also stand by the fact it would be hugely surprising (totally novel) that any of those testing positive right now are actually re-infections due to the limited timescale involved.

Seeing smoke doesn't mean there's fire, but it means there's a pretty good chance of fire. Yeesh.
> could a a future corona virus vaccine do more harm than being infected by the virus would have done?

Possibly. However, consider that tons of really smart and well motivated people are working on it. And that even if a vaccine is determined to work and be ready for rolling out to the general populace that doesn't mean that work on it entirely ceases.
formal verification continues to come up, but it has the issue that you can only formally verify problem domains you already expect -- and the advanced threat actors for which formal verification is necessary have the toolkit to go off-script to find vulnerabilities.

I think the hype around formal verification also tends to misdirect away from the verification that strong type systems already do if used correctly, though vitally not at the protocol level.
I don't miss a particular website. I miss the absence of intensive and pervasive user surveillance.
I am talking about predictions from politicians not random people online. Professional predictions had huge error bars around various levels of response and tended to be surprisingly accurate IMO.

Hell the stock market still seems to think it’s no big deal.
Healthcare may be "free" but that doesn't mean it's any good.
What about jobs for non students who are self taught and working in another industry but have experience with JavaScript?
If you read in the discussion they reference other data sets to show that more asymptomatic become symptomatic. It is also what the Icelanders found with their data too where most people started out asymptomatic, but many later developed symptoms.
Strength reduction and algorithmic changes will make the most difference, but that requires a much deeper look at the code. I wouldn’t be surprised if the compiler found a way to reduce the number of divisions.

If you have a lot of practice the compiler is not difficult to beat. But it definitely takes some effort and study of the optimization manuals.
Excite chat.

And the general demise of chatrooms.
GANs have been tried many times already for music generation, without much success. GPT-2 works very well for text generation so it seemed promising here too.

Music falls somewhere in between text (as a sequence of chords or PCM samples) and image (as a piano roll or a spectrogram), so maybe some hybrid of image and text generators is needed.
Show HN: Much Love to Elon Musk
Retirement is probably the best example. If you have to save for retirement (so no SSI), you need to plan for your 95th (or 99th?) percentile life expectancy/spend rather than your mean expenses. Since retirement is about doing what you want and not just working for money, that means you have to work extra years so that on the off chance you make it to 100, you still have money.
If that’s the case, it would have essentially no impact on revenue.

Very few people have actual “income” over 1.7 million a year. Most people who could bring in that kind of money are smart enough and have the resources to structure things so that they don’t bring that kind of money in W2 type earnings or earnings that would qualify for this kind of tax.

Or they renounce their citizenship and move to Singapore as some have already.

That kind of tax rate is essentially pointless. It’s virtue signaling at its worst.
That's a good point, I think it very much depends on the area you are in, that's why I added sub-pages for each country, e.g. https://www.iswatersafetodrink.in/germany/Munich. Although to be fair they are still lacking serious data, I'm working on that!

Someone in the chat was kind enough to provide me a good water quality source for Hamburg, if anyone is interested here is the link: https://www.hamburg.com/residents/housing/12792124/water-qua...
If the software doesn’t do what it is advertised to do you do get your money back.
EEVblog
Not even proponents of UBI pretend that it’s the end of human labor. The original idea is that you replace all welfare programmes with one payment.

If you remove human labor from the economy, you’re facing a 50-60% fall in GDP overnight, undermining UBI and ever other human activity.

Every person has inherent worth, but that doesn’t mean that everyone can live without being productive in the near future.
Good for climate change.
> Success today has to be defined in formal or quantifiable terms not because anyone actually consciously chose to do it, but because it's the only way you can put it in a computer, which actually was supposed to exist to empower people. It's pretty sad honestly.

Solution: make the computer better. On another note, what do we as a society want?

A. Society wants to survive for as long as it can.

Many decisions don't make much sense. Shouldn't reproduction be considered a crime as optimal population stands at 2-4 billion. If climate change progresses, we would all be dead sooner than later. And more people means more need for energy and construction and everything that accelerates climate change. We defy natural selection as well which we shouldn't given we don't need many people to begin with. Unemployment and automation - you wouldn't have to face that if there were only productive people. Only like 1% of people produce content on the internet, 99% are consumers. If we have less baggage, we would be able to do much more research and don't worry about trivial problems as those are solved through automation. There will be no need for UBI as low skilled folks don't exist. If someone doesn't want to help society survive for longer, they aren't needed.

That's not how the current world works so I am guessing A is partially false.

B. Society wants to survive as long as it can while enjoying hedonism to the fullest.

Might be true. I can't quantify the balance.

C. Survival is a zero sum game and there are many smaller societies coexisting like a network. Competition results in opposite ends for everyone.

This would explain the irrational wars.
One solution could be some form of mandatory rent holiday, although it might already be too late.

The sensible landlords should not be charging rent to their small business tenants right now. If the lose them all, then their properties will be worth considerably less when the dust settles.
Slashdot also has a better moderation system than HN with comments designated as funny , insightful or informative.
No, we're in an age in which innovative projects are suffocated by shady politics before they even onboarded their first user.

Remember the letter sent to Libra consortium members by US senators? [1]

They threatened Visa, Mastercard and Stripe with extreme regulatory scrutiny of all their payment business (not only Libra-related) in case they would stay on the project. The threat worked and the threatened companies left the consortium soon after.

This is right out of the playbook of despotic governance: create laws so complex that everyone is probably violating some of them all the time and then selectively enforce the law against those you don't like.

[1]: https://www.brown.senate.gov/newsroom/press/release/brown-sc...
Software Tools I find interesting
Until ads run in a trusted enclave. DRM for streaming paves the technological path.
discoverdev.io
google.com (when it was still useful), dejanews (and Usenet in general) before Google bought it and took a whole generation's output of tech discussions, formal announcements, and so on with it
>Just because the US Federal government is unable to define criteria, because they don’t want to increase the manufacturing of test kits for political reasons doesn’t mean every other government has no clue.

Cite please?
Parisians using scooters (gas powered) seem not to be bothered by rain or cold that much. Otherwise scooter usage wouldn't be so high. Not as high as Naples though.
When I used bash, I had all of your settings on (had more, some others I can live without - these four I can't). I still have them in .inputrc for programs that use readline!

I have since switched to zsh. Up/down to search history, in ~/.zshrc:

[[ -n "${key[Up]}" ]] && bindkey "${key[Up]}" history-beginning-search-backward
[[ -n "${key[Down]}" ]] && bindkey "${key[Down]}" history-beginning-search-forward

Autocompletion in zsh is a different beast altogether :)
> It's straight from the WHO's mouth.

Nothing I said contradicts the WHO.

> Don't you think that if this was a foregone conclusion, we'd be able to demonstrate that?

I'm sorry, do we need to re-prove how the immune system works? Why re-demonstrate the utterly obvious?

> Isn't it odd, that with people having been infected and recovered months ago, that no one is saying how long the antibodies persist?

No, because it hasn't been long enough. I'm confident that research is under way.
I still carry a torch for Polly Esther.
> by employing a very strict security regime, they can in principle stay completely anonymous

Doesn't that necessarily require avoiding legitimate financial institutions at all costs?
The United States should be an active participant. American exceptionalism seems to have been proven by US governmental actions; current American politicians are exceptionally stupid and exceptionally incapable of rational thought.

Can we PLEASE do something about this. I am sick and tired of being asked to explain a US Govenment action by colleagues and friends in Europe or the Far East. The POTUUS should not be a laughing stock. And science and medicine in the US used to be pretty good.
False advertising is a crime. I don't know where you live but that alone will stop the above problem. And you can get refunds regardless on most major platforms of software distribution available to masses.

Many countries have pro-consumer laws which protect them from exactly this.
Nope. Shell specifics go into the name or extension. like .bash_profile over .profile.
or /etc/.../bla{.csh,.bash,.sh}

.profile is only for login sessions, .shrc is sourced on every shell fork, about 1000x more than .profile.
I suppose that this "right-wing Tory supporting organ of Rupert Murdoch" is "effectively defend[ing] Corbyn and his policies" for a simple reason - it's fun to stir the Labour party up.

In truth, electorally the Tories would far rather face Corbyn and the tankies at each election. Starmer looks like he's going to be a far greater challenge. It is good however that there is a functioning opposition that will apply effective scrutiny now, as that is good for governance, whether you're on the left or the right of things.
Massachusetts: 6.8M population, 53.3K cases, 2730 deaths. [0]

[0] https://www.mass.gov/doc/covid-19-dashboard-april-25-2020/do...
Which professional pre-peak predictions were surprisingly accurate?
I just want to say: wow! You are showing me something I bet many others are really not aware of: degraded SSE performance in these types of processors! Your DIVSD vs DIVPD comment makes a lot of sense too. Man I feel this HN thread has been just a gold mine of this kind of information.

What is the speed with restriction to SSE3? That would finalize the tests.

Do you mind if I directly quote you in a follow up post? This is really good stuff.
Make FB a platform to exchange money globally.

If successful, FB can reap billions in transaction fees to allow users to transact on their platform, be it for money transfer or for ecommerce.

I would not be surprised if Zuckerberg sees a future where the reserve currency is a digital one instead of the USDollar, where global currencies are valued in relation to Libra, rather than the $
yes, I didn't see elevators, but I did see escalators on the busier ones.
TLA+ doesn't prove anything to be "correct" or "flawless", I find it extremely worrisome that you claim as much. It failed to exhibit traces that violated your invariants, which says something completely different.
PowderToy is also excellent and fully free and open source, falling sands, material interaction, etc.

https://powdertoy.co.uk/
It's beyond laughable that a programmer would import a module to do something built-in to the language (String.padStart) or trivially done in one line of code.

I would fire a programmer who imported modules for things like this. Is the world of "full-stack developers" and "front-end engineers" using JS full of kids who can snap Lego bricks together but can't read or write code?
That was for GPS positioning; there were no security fixes in that update.
I agree, I managed to make it through a PhD in physics and I never had a problem. Neither do I recall any of my class mates having a problem with hand written notation.
There literally massive evidence - second infections with SARS-CoV-2 are rare. This would only be the cases if the initial infection provided protection.

What is more of a question is how long this immunity lasts. The evidence to date is not long just like the other coronaviruses.
> The cumulative excess deaths for all Europe in the last two months matches the COVID-19 reported deaths

This article claims that most Covid-19 hotspots have significantly more excess deaths than reported covid deaths. Suggesting that there is a lot of underreporting. NYC being a notable exception. I think several countries count only corona deaths in hospitals, but systematically miss all deaths in care facilities. https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/corona-todesfaelle-wie-v... (charts should be readable despite any language barrier)

(I don't defend either view. As the old joke goes, don't trust any statistics you haven't manipulated yourself :) Statistics and causality have always been difficult, even more so in exceptional time with imperfect short-term data only.)
The Bearer of Good Coronavirus News
The property values are not going to be affected by any individual landlord, but keeping a reliable tenant may be extremely valuable during the recovery. Getting a good tenant is often difficult, and getting any tenant at all can be near-impossible in a recession.
I remember one of the health experts in a Sam Harris podcast saying in an interview the dosage affects the severity and that this is seen in some other viruses (though I don't recall which ones). That's one reason doctors and nurses might be getting hit so hard, due to the continual exposure.
Statute overrides contract. How else can you not sign yourself into slavery, or make previously legal things in contracts (like making chinese people take the back entrance give a 1950s hoa 'laws' example) get struck out after the fact
And also because their promises are meaningless. Trump said people would be covered, but as recent as the 9th of this month, there isn't a real plan to do so.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/20/coronavirus-treatme...
It helps increase the income inequality and class gap, so some would say it's very efficient.
What do you mean digital? Every number in yhe digital realm is currently backed by an asset or a reserve currency like the USD.

Sure, transactions are digital, but the underlying nature is still physical.
http://menuetos.net/

Just the register allocation itself can be a gigantic pain to do by hand, even with a limited register set of x86,

Actually, that's one of the main advantages of using Asm --- compilers are relatively horrible at register allocation, because they don't take a more "holistic" view of the program, and end up shuffling values between registers or registers and memory far more often. This is why handwritten Asm has a unique "texture" to it.

let alone other RISCs with much larger register files

There's much less room for optimisation with handwritten Asm on a RISC, because with x86 the opportunities are precisely those the compiler can't easily see, unlike a very uniform and boring RISC.
Luckily, they were masters' students, so the damage will be limited to a semester or so at most (in the US, generally a master's thesis isn't the most important part of a degree). If it was a PhD thesis... I don't want to think about that.
Pixelsight.com

It was a site that created web graphics and logos (great looking ones, too). You just had to enter the text, select styles and parameters, and a gif came out. Amazing for 1994. It was one of the few non-static sites of the time.

The creator, Keith Ohlfs, passed away in 2016 of a heart attack.

The saddest thing is that there is no code left behind to recreate it. I believe the site used the NeXTSTEP API, so it had to run on a NeXT server. There are no screenshots showing you how the site worked. Maybe the only thing left are the graphics created by it on archive.org.
I do find issue with your need to re-envision our social fabric.

My feeling is that there is a failure to communicate somewhere here. At the risk of just digging my grave deeper, if only because I'm horrendously short of sleep, let me try a second time to explain what I mean.

Our demographics have simply changed a great deal. It's not unlike saying "We can't weave what you want us to weave. We don't have the right material for it. That's why attempts to recreate the fabric you love have big holes in it."

When I was growing up, there were lots of kids out and about to play with in my neighborhood because most families had more than one child. You mostly don't see that anymore. The suburbs are ghost towns, with no children playing in the streets. Now, one child is quite common and parents have no choice but to join clubs or similar to intentionally create social connections for their child when that would have happened organically a few decades ago.

I was a homemaker for many years. I'm not against the nuclear family. It's just reality that our demographics have diversified, yet our architecture hasn't kept up and it's creating problems.

What I'm saying is the single family detached house was designed for a certain type of lifestyle and it's a lifestyle that relatively few people can arrange anymore. It's a cog in a machine and it no longer works for current demographic realities and we aren't changing it out for something that does work.

I'm sorry that I don't know how to say that more clearly. These are not really points I see made very often, so I'm not aware of well-developed language and standard protocols or mental models for conveying what I'm trying to say.
https://sookocheff.com/
> or the plethora of adblock browsers out there

I use Brave, is there another someone likes more?
> Facebook provide health insurance or a grocery store

Amazon does both of those. (some) Modern tech companies want to be everything platforms.
> there won’t be nearly as many people stepping up to replace them.

Strongly disagree with the last point. If there is one lesson that I remember from the history of US -- entrepreneurial spirit is the reason this country exists in the first place. My only worry is that Google, Amazon and Facebook will use this time for huge land grabs in all niches.

Many stores that closed have already been on their last legs. And in the digital realm there can only be one winner (try beating Amazon at online sales or Google in search...) So you are right in the sense that it will be even harder for many people to step up against the tech giants - but this is a whole different issue.
What happened to Slashot in the end? I went there a few months back and the topics are still being added but the comments section on all articles was off topic conspiracy theory rant type stuff, with nobody replying to each other.
Fun fact: gopher is still alive! It's not the same as back in the early 90s, but the protocol and some servers are alive and kicking.
Wow! Even repeating that call always yields the same result in zsh - as long as it's a subshell.

I think your comment will save my sorry ass one day.
https://distributed.dask.org/en/latest/efficiency.html#don-t...
Yup, it is infrastructure. All those quaint cubic rock paved hilly streets in Montmartre with obstacles tobprevwnt cars parking and and cars parked on the side are a cycling hazard, especially when it rains.
It’s also unclear whether the lockdown is accomplishing anything. We have enormous economic damage, lots of boredom, no dramatic decrease of cases in most places, an unimpressive amount of progress toward herd immunity, and no meaningful increase in testing, prevention, treatment ability, or clever policies from any level of US leadership.

In other words, what have we accomplished by locking everything down? Delaying large numbers of deaths by a few months?

Extending the lockdowns until we maybe have a vaccine in 2021 does not seem like a great idea.
I will periodically be reminded about this comment, with the intention that one day, when I check, you will have replied with a URL to your blog.

No pressure, I’m just looking forward to it.
https://write.as/devstories/
The spike receding is due to incomplete data rather than a reduction in deaths. Deaths (especially in the current circumstances) can take a couple of weeks to get registered properly.