skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The fact is competition has been increasing every generation at a ridiculous rate. I like to think society would desire to remove competition as a requirement for everyone and allow basic needs being supplied for a somewhat enjoyable life.

Sadly, I think it will take two generations of travesty before anything substantial happens if at all. I predict a lot of suicide & homelessness if not for some disaster and that wipes out a good portion of the population. Kids aren't dumb nowadays with social media showing them how much of an advantage being born into good genetics or financial privilege happens to be.

I assume a lot of progress will happen regardless. The newest generation has everything at their fingertips. They get to read past experiences and how to approach things while the information is criticized more so than previous decades.
The highways today mostly go below the city. But that is a quite recent thing, the last parts of the Opera tunnel for example was opened only 10 years ago. Car traffic was a big problem in the 1970-2000. Making modern Oslo nocar-friendly and Oslo center pedestrian/bicyclist friendly is the result of massive investments in infrastructure over several decades.
According to the CDC, the seasonal flu kills 12,000-79,000 Americans a year by the same standard as used for COVID-19. Much closer to the widely cited 0.1% IFR.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/faq.htm
I guess latency isn’t an issue when you have bandwidth / throughput to make up for it? Not for kebabs though (pleases to see that as one of the trial businesses in MK, hah!)

Overnight silent electric delivery with custom delivery machines has historical precedent of course:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_float
Don't you think this is because the modern secular attitude has no real foundation to make moral choices and picks "saving lives" almost randomly, just as a plausible highest good? :)

For example, Christianity strives to save souls, not lives. That gives a very different vantage point. From this point it's absolutely clear that the right to speak candidly cannot be abolished on such a ridiculous premise as saving lives.
I am also curious about the effect of "private" communication channels for kids.

They can be hidden to parents and friends irl but still remain public online. I have seen many groups of depressed teens online without adults or someone with experience in them. They all encourage each other to be more depressed because they all have a similarly sad life. The only perspective that gets shared is that life sucks and it isn't getting better.

I think before the digital age, it must have been hard to do it irl or not?
Are you still employed at said big company? Usually the fastest path for somone in your situation would be to slowly transition into a programming role in your company. Some companies even have a well defined system in place for such transitions.

Also, please don't use code blocks for text.
> YouTube provides a paid ad-free option.

It's an "ad-free", with a large disclaimer under asterisk.

> you could look at the Web and say “it’s the largest collection of free information on the planet.”*

Or you could look at the way advertising influences curation of information, and how the viability of ad-based business models mean there's incentive to create sites with things that promise, but not deliver, information. You could look at that and say that the Internet is the largest collection of free disinformation on the planet. Most places that give reliable information do not show or involve themselves with advertising.
Chapter on secure multi-party computation is still in progress/not available, does anybody know of good resources on current state in this area?
Show HN: Xlskubectl – control your Kubernetes cluster with Google sheets
This is why I exaggerate the pi's top cross (like a capital T with two legs). A lot of people write pi in a way such that the top cross has no dangling edges[0]. I always try to exaggerate the unique features of symbols. One can avoid a lot of these problems by first exhausting the least overlapping symbols.

[0] See left variant: https://pm1.narvii.com/6331/cb50e106b141735ad714b934eb18ea55...
I don’t know how many people use Ruby, its certainly not as popular as it was during the Rails hype, so its hard to day, and I don’t have numbers for the visual languages either, but Unreal Engine’s Blueprints has a lot of users. Max/MSP does too, and apparently a lot of artists use tools like Substance Designer to create visual materials and those tools have visual programming too.

EDIT: Media Molecules’ Dreams has a lot of users using its visual language to implement game logic! It sold about 8.5 million copies. Obviously not all people who bought it are using its visual language, but I imagine a very large percentage have at least tinkered a bit. I doubt Dreams would be as popular if it required textual programming.
The robot courier company, Starship, mentioned in the article, layed off most of their employees like month ago because their business was not viable anymore. Here's the news article in Estonian, couldn't find anything in English https://www.err.ee/1069888/robotkullerite-tootja-starship-te...
Does anyone else use update-alternatives to install and maintain software? Takes a little setup work, mainly in scripting the soft links for binaries, but once done it’s a pretty clean way of managing software installations.

http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/trusty/man8/update-alter...
I'm a researcher and Twitter has been an enormous boon for my work; within my field, most 'big' researchers are active on Twitter, they know me now, I know them, I'm always up-to-date with the research (way easier than following 500 RSS feeds) and the 'trends' within my field. It's also the best avenue for discussing anything work-related, at least 3 international collaborations of mine have started this way.
I have a few thousand followers and I follow a few thousand people across different time-zones. Again, an enormous boon if you know how to use it and put in time up-front, people know who I am even though I'm only an early-career researcher. I follow mostly scientists across all career-stages and politicians with power over work-related fields.
By doing serologic studies you can estimate the global number of contaminated people: looking at the number of viral mutations, as well as different strands of the virus that can be identified as being generated in a specific region.

It’s going to be very imprecise. For H1N1 the global infection rate could have varied from 11% to 21% of the global population, which is a +/- 350 million people estimation.

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2011/08/study-pu...
Article is from '14.
Very cool. Everyone knew about liero in my childhood. I wish someone did this for wings2, a legendary cave flier from the same era. I owe my interest in programming to the amazing lua scripting API. One summer holiday I helped create a community weapon pack with my friends. Although it was completely imbalanced it was great fun along the normal online play, which was more competetive and skill based. For several years we had a small community of around 20 people playing but sadly it died of in my teens. I wish I had a way to contact all those guys and setup a discord server for the occasional game.
Sandwiches That You Will Like
For customers, latency matters a lot.
Rust concurrency: five easy pieces
How can Data Scientists survive layoffs?
Thanks for the quick reply and heads up on the code block. I'll try to fix it.

I'm a full-time student now, and not employed at the company anymore.
Lightbox Photo Grid and Slideshow Component for Vue.js
I disagree. I use boxes and lines all the time, on paper, when programming. I think in boxes and lines. I briefly wrote some Max/MSP visual code some years ago and I found that I no longer needed to do it on paper, because thinking directly in Max was enough.
I’ve raised three children in Manhattan without owning a car. None of my children (who are all college age) know how to drive, which is always an amusing point of interest among their new friends when they get to college.

So when they were younger, there are times when you simply do need a taxi. It’s infrequent — buses, subways, walking cover most of your needs — but there are times when you really need one.
No. There is no reason why it should be a package by itself. It should be part of a bigger util package, which which is well maintained, tested, and with many maintainers actively looking at it, with good processes, such as systematic code reviews, etc.

At work, our big webapp depended at some point indirectly on "isobject" "isobj" and "is-object", which were all one liners (some of them even had dependencies themselves!!). Please let's all just depend on lodash and it will actually eventually reduce space and bandwith usage.
Early in the piece, here is the critical sentence:

> I do not find that lockdowns are a more effective way of handling coronavirus than well-done social-distancing measures.

Properly done physical-distancing measures will accomplish everything needed. Lockdowns are not needed if people will observe proper, well-executed physical distancing.

So why issue instructions for lockdowns?

My guess is this:

Without strict "by the book", precisely specified, overly prescriptive detailed instructions, many people don't properly practice effective physical distancing.

The idea is that the lockdown gives an additional "margin of error" for enforcement and social disapproval to take effect. There are some real idiots out there, and the government guidelines/instructions have to take that into account when they consider enforcement and practice.
It makes sense for authors if they get an increment in status and different leads, say: a number of sponsored appearances, a promotion at work, etc. Generally speaking and in most cases, though, it is just free work for the world, which is good at large and yet unsustainable as a business model?
The article doesn't mention it in the first few paragraphs but these delivery robots are not autonomous, they're controlled by people, usually in a different country.

Here's an article detailing Kiwi's approach. Every other delivery robot is the basically the same.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Kiwibots-win-fa...

> The Kiwibots do not figure out their own routes. Instead, people in Colombia, the home country of Chavez and his two co-founders, plot “waypoints” for the bots to follow, sending them instructions every five to 10 seconds on where to go.

> As with other offshoring arrangements, the labor savings are huge. The Colombia workers, who can each handle up to three robots, make less than $2 an hour, which is above the local minimum wage.
> They all encourage each other to be more depressed because they all have a similarly sad life.

Huh. Not saying this isn't true, but just sharing my experience:

I have never seen this. Instead, I've seen groups of teenagers trying to support and uplift each other.
Do you mean "they have seen nothing" or "they have seen things", as in bad (or meaningful or powerful) things?
Can confirm. My life has really dramatically changed for the better once I finished schooling and got a job. While in school (and uni) I felt a lot of ennui - it went away after I got tasked with doing real things that actually matter. Of course, not long after that I learned how imperfect the "grownup" world actually is, and some of the bad feelings came back - but it was still better than being in the infantilised state.
Every engineering team that picked up a code base has at some point had a meeting where someone starts ranting about how the code that they are looking after stinks and it would be better to rewrite it, or move to some alternative.

This seems to be true if the code is the product of one person working for a few weeks or 20,000 people who work for 10 years.

A few years ago I had a conversation where the team insisted to me that the extensive documentation and instructions for a package were worthless because "good code is self documenting" the leader of the pack had shiny eyes and banged the table several times.

Be cautious, be kind and look for value in the code that you are using - not just problems. Also, consider: if you can pick up a code base (written by someone who knows the science) would it not be more profitable to repair, document and improve rather than demanding that the scientists learn both your skills and your way of doing things? If you conclude the latter, would you (hand on heart) be able to empirically demonstrate that your way of doing things is the right way?
> I had been using a 2013 Mac Pro for at least 7 years.

Assuming the 2013 Mac Pro came out in 2013 I'd say that's at most 7 years.
1000 miles one way takes about 15 hours at highway speeds. It's not that different from a transcontinental flight plus the time it takes to travel to and from the airport, wait at the airport, etc. You're also free to bring as much luggage as your vehicle will allow, stop and rest at any time, or go sightseeing along the way. On top of that, the seats are more comfortable, and it might even be cheaper for a family of four.

The only downside is that someone has to drive the car for all those hours. As soon as that problem is fixed, I don't see myself traveling by air at all unless I have to cross an ocean.
Showcasing Beautiful Typography in TeX
16-year-old here. My experience is probably markedly different from most teenagers in the US (I'm an immigrant who goes to a competitive school full of other immigrants) but I find that, for the most part, this article hits the nail on the head. High School is nothing like the usual media portrayal - I've never heard anyone even talk about a party, nobody's doing anything stronger than weed, nobody's fucking or even dating at all.

Smartphone use definitely has a negative effect. I'm in some APs, some Honors, and some regular classes and the #1 difference I've observed between the kids in each cohort is how often they're on their phones. The CP kids leave their phones on their desks and are making out with the damn things whenever they can, sometimes even when the teacher is trying to lecture them. The Honors kids have them under their desks and only use them when they have nothing more pressing to do. The AP kids have them on mute in their backpacks. (I leave mine in my locker, and only use it to listen to music.)

Most of the anxiety is over college admissions - not necessarily to the Ivy League (everyone knows that's just luck of the draw), but the "second-tier" schools (Carnegie-Mellon, Rensselaer, Duke, Cornell, etc.) where over-achieving can still net you a good chance of admission. There's a lot of focus on "building your brand" and trying to "stand out" (make your life more "interesting" in the narrow ways that look good on a college application). The more technically-oriented kids are balls-deep in resume-driven development; they follow the tutorial for every trendy tech buzzword possible (mostly data-science and ML stuff) so that they can blog about it on their Squarespace-generated portfolios. I'm a member of the FIRST Robotics Team and, like everyone else there, I do absolutely nothing, because the team has 5 times more people than it actually needs. I once witnessed the entire programming subteam (about 20 people) spend 3 hours trying to flash an SD card.

The main thing I notice among my peers is an obsessive (borderline autistic) focus on "getting in" and having good credentials. Enjoying your life and doing things that you take pride in are secondary to the all-encompassing drive to impress people who know nothing about you. I wish I could say I'm above it all, but I've certainly internalized it to some extent - I feel a nagging sense of guilt when playing video games, or reading books that don't imply intellectual clout, or anything else that's internally rewarding but "non-bloggable". If I had to characterize my generation with a pathology, it would be exhibitionism.
On Memory in Human and Artificial Language Processing Systems [pdf]
I really dislike Nix/NixOS, but I think it's kind of unreasonable to claim something is unappealing because of a learning curve. Pretty much everything on the planet has a learning curve; if a project is genuinely innovative or aiming for a paradigm shift, and you find the benefits of it worthwhile, there's probably always going to be a learning curve.

That said, are we really reading the same post? What's presented here is...really simple, and you should be pretty much familiar with most of it if you actually set up Gentoo and Arch in the past; pretty much everything directly translates that requires user interaction in this, and the package format is pretty similar to write & read, too.
> ‘it is better to be interesting and wrong than boring and right’

This is why fake news is such a hit ;)
Except that it wouldn't speed things up at all. Academia writes run-once code, which changes spec fourteen times in one week. Their use case is orthogonal to industry.

Have you considered that maybe the academics actually know what they are doing?
Also, what happens if it rains?

That is a cultural dislike. Seriously.

I was born in the states - Indiana. NO one walked when it rained unless you were poor. When you did walk, you probably had an umbrella. Being female meant that sometimes, people would offer me rides randomly.

I moved to Trondheim, Norway. There is a saying here - "There is no bad weather, only bad clothes". Which, you know, is only half correct. I do not drive here. I walk. I take public transport. I do this regardless of whether in general. I do tend to avoid walking if it is really heavy rain, but not so much in normal rain. People bike with snow and ice on the ground (I'm not that brave). And yes, clothes make a big difference (though they do not turn weather 'good). You simply get used to it and get over it.
Since my penmanship isn't all that great, I use quite a few of these guidelines when I'm writing out math problems. At any rate, you can ignore a lot of them if, like most people, all you need is A-Za-z0-9πθ+.
Let's assume there is no technical way the contact API can be misused. You've still conditioned massive swaths of the population to be electronically tracked, boiling frog and all.
"Clojure For The Brave and True" is also another book who's author explicitly chose their publisher (No Starch) because they could also publish the book for free on their website. Not only is it free but also amazing book, one of the most enjoyable books I've read about programming overall and also made me dive into the Clojure rabbit hole that I'm now lucky to work professionally with during my day job. https://www.braveclojure.com/clojure-for-the-brave-and-true/
Paul Graham – Dynamic Languages Wizards Series – Panel on Language Design
This assumes there's a choice. If there's no jobs to be had, then the choice is "sell stuff or starve".

Not all small businesses need capital to start. And a lot that did start with capital didn't really need to (I've seen so many people rent an office as their first move, for a business they could easily run from home).

To use your analogy: imagine if the government wrecked your house, but left you with the mortgage. You can't move anywhere, can't buy another place, can't rent anywhere. You'll have to rebuild from the rubble.
Contradicts what the parent said. Seeing no value in anything, are you part of the problem you're describing, perhaps?
I think it will be worst for small businesses that have a strong component of physical "means of production" ownership: the means won't go away but they'll be owned by whoever happens to have access to cash at the massively parallel firesale.

Business that have been based on rented property anyways are much easier to restart and landlords of otherwise healthy businesses might lose less long term if they allow skipped rent in the crisis instead of enforcing it now and then go through a lot of idle months from fluctuation due țo a series of failing new tenants.

In the first days of the Italian lockdown I picked up some mentions on international news that they were intending to pause mortgages and rents for the time of the lockdown, shifting some of the economic burden on banks (who'd be far more practical to bail out) and the rentier class. Anyone able to chime in with more details about that? Was it just an announcement that was quickly subdued by well connected landlords? This approach sounds incredibly helpful and practical to me, but I could easily imagine attempts to put it in concrete legal terms to fail miserably.
Seems high. Here is a systemic review of studies done on the 2009 influenza coming to a conclusion of an IFR of 1-10 deaths per 100 000 infections.

"The consistent estimates of the infection fatality risk at around 1 to 10 deaths per 100,000 infections identified in our review"

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3809029/
Having just learned about Nix a few weeks ago, and after an (admittedly cursory) glance at the language and documentation, my main intuition for why it hasn’t been adopted is that it could be more standard. For example why not use an established language instead of creating one from scratch? The syntax and features of the language look similar to Nim for instance. The benefits would be network effect as well as developer tooling support for newcomers.
My experience was different. I really enjoyed working in visual languages and found them quite pleasant to navigate.

I also found that when applying good software engineering principles, visual languages can look very clear. Its just most users of visual languages aren’t professional programmers and never learned software engineering principles like abstraction. Here’s the thing: textual programming languages are also impossible to understand and follow if they don’t follow software engineering practices, but that’s often ignored because we’re used to programming in them. Well abstracted textual code is usually compared to badly abstracted visual code and textual languages are declared the “winner” (even if it shouldn’t be a competition at all).
Because web engine is the only thing people run on their phones?
Makes sense, but it's still exclusively up to author to decide if he wants to have his work available for free or not.
> My second issue is that the files clearly aren't machine-editable. There's no sensible way to make a GUI that can edit your hostname if the hostname is defined in some Turing complete functional program.

I don't disagree with the overall argument you are making however on this point alone, they aren't meant to be machine-editable. They are functions, they take arguments. So you can make your module or system configuration or whatever, have unassigned variables and then have your function take them as parameters. Your GUI can invoke this function with arguments from the user input.
I would like to know about the group. I think it depends on the community you are in or the platform you use.

Also, by encouragement. I don't mean direct encouragement but subtle topics that may negatively affect your mental health being brought up often.

r/teenagers is similar to what you describe, last time I checked.
> it's kind of unreasonable to claim something is unappealing because of a learning curve.

It's not unreasonable at all. It all depends who is claiming that. Consider Mac OS and compare it to any Linux in terms of the learning curve. Can my mother say that Linux is unappealing because it's to hard to learn it? Of course.

Even among engineers there are people to prefer just getting the stuff done without spending hours or weeks on configuring their environment (even if it could pay off).
I use DuckDuckGo's iOS browser. If you use it's Clear Data functionality, most sites will display the article (because they think you're a first-time visitor).
If you want to get the original running in linux:

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/3u9hna/how_to_get_li...

EDIT: Ok, this worked a few years ago, it's not working for me today on 18.04.
43 Things https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/43_Things