skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What I saw today driving through the neighboring small town - half of the main street shops and restaurants are closed. Not just temporarily, but the space is empty and there is a big "for rent" sign in the window. I've been going to some of those restaurants for decades - and now they are all but a memory.

It is not enough to give corporations money for payroll - in NY large part of the cost of running business is the space itself. Also I don't understand all these "lending" programs - all they do is defer an even larger payment for later - most of the businesses will not be able to repay that if they have been closed for months. You are basically taking a loan to pay the rent so you can go bankrupt later. Doesn't make any sense.

I don't know what to do but we need to give money and healthcare to people independent of work. Let businesses fail (big and small) and rebuild new ones once this blows over. Corporations will only buy back stocks and and line shareholders' pockets with dividends. Single digit percentage points of the stimulus money will reach employees.

Bankruptcies aren't that bad - usually companies are not dissolved, but go through restructuring and gain a new management team (which one, knowing there is no bailout in the future, will plan better for emergencies like this one).

What we are doing now is perpetuating corporate negligence that will now factor in 100% government bailout and run on even thinner margins and bigger stock price growth and dividends for the shareholders.
I deleted my FB acct a long time ago, but I have been very frustrated by some meetup events using Facebook live to stream The meetup in the COVID era.

PSA to meetup organizers: please don’t use FB live for your events.
Those middlemen run the federal reserve. Good luck trying to remove banks from power without migrating to a different currency altogether.
By that metric, hotels are substantially worse. With an AirBnB, you're dealing with, at most, a number you can count with your fingers. With a hotel, you're - again - dealing with tens or hundreds at a time.

Critically, this means that an AirBnB has a greater chance of being able to disinfect the entire property between groups of guests, at a much lower cost. Now, whether or not AirBnB hosts are doing this is a different question, but it's at least feasible for an AirBnB (as opposed to borderline impossible for a hotel).
> I’ve never heard of a comparable situation.

Yet it is hard to believe scientists would be the ones who only ship flawless software. And easier to imagine that most often, when one realises a previous publication's result was indeed impacted by an error and faces the difficult decision to retract or pretend they haven't noticed, they opt for the other route. I've found scientists in general to have less ego then average, as expected from people trained to care only for the facts, but they still operate in the larger framework of individualistic modern society.
It probably takes a scientist and a woman, whose education generally encourage lesser ego to begin with, to admit such an error.

Or a software author, but there there is no other alternative to guilt admittance than total ridicule, since we are drowning everyday in a world of errors.
> Cancel rent payments, mortgage payments, and property taxes. People simply stop paying and stay where they are, no enforcement burden and no distribution necessary.

This is something I'm confused about. The US government goes through great lengths to support constituents with an array of welfare programs, but goes through equally great lengths to take a lot of that money back from people. It seems awfully inefficient, and supporting those diametric systems seems like an awful waste of time, energy, and money.
It's a lot higher. But I wouldn't be so sure whether chronic back pain from a car crash is better or worse than being groped in a train.
You don't care, but "the TV zeitgeist is gone" wouldn't really be a true statement, in a general sense. The hype of popular TV shows in our culture is very much active today, and it's actively influencing the ways TV shows are distributed and released.
This was such a huge missed opportunity by the music industry. A massive network of volunteers dedicated to curating and meticulously tagging music. I might have payed a lot of money for access to such a network. The largest collection of music in human history... Wiped out because there wasn't a business model in time
Boosting state UI is a good idea and I'm happy the Feds did it. But every state's UI is designed to be short-term help in a functioning economy. No US state has a "pandemic-ready" UI, and in many states unemployed workers are literally unable to reach state admins on the phone because of the call volume.

That's why the Feds should be striving to keep workers out of the overwhelmed state UI programs. "Stimulus" now is incredibly cheap, perhaps even negative cost, because the alternative is people sitting at home on the phone for hours, hoping to reach a state UI admin. That is not an exaggeration.
Ah yes; a fluff piece with nothing in it.

Article is named "Delight of Development" but of course the author is "not a developer anymore".

>My focus now is less on building software myself, and more about enabling others build better software.

Translation: I don't produce anything but lord it over people who do. What the hell is "Developer Relations"? Has the industry gone mad?

Most of us got into programming because we enjoyed it; until the "Industry" with its useless "managemeent" layers destroyed our motivation/enjoyment of it and turned us into unhappy drones.
> Turns out there are already tens of millions of them not getting vaccines, measles immunization is down 50%

Does the lockdown help in lowering measles transmission rates?
I haven't read the book. But I have watched all of his videos. It's quite funny that he didn't mind that the students slept in his class. He only got irritated if the students were talking.

Anyway, yeah, I agree, his videos explained cryptography to me in a clear way.
I believe you, but I think there's a difference between watching someone work and working – if you control the motions, they're not unexpected after all
I miss the fact that you could build a fun site that could get popular just by word of mouth without SEO, social media campaigns, influencer endorsements and the other hoops we need to jump through now.
No way in related to the mistake in the article. Mistakes can and do happen.

But if you sold me software to solve a problem and I paid you for it. You wouldn't refund me if the software didn't solve my original problem? I feel like that's scam but I could be wrong. I didn't get what I was promised and hence I am entitled to a refund.

If you got a laptop with broken keyboard or the privacy friendly app that you paid extra for turned out to be facebook, would you not want your money back?

You can't just use mistake as an excuse if you promise "specific" things like written in your implicit/explicit contract.
Overgrow.net
WeWork Feature Doc Set with Campfire, Forbes Entertainment and Olive Hill Media
Having a programmer's knowledge is very valuable for CS. But CS is not about programming, it's about the fundamental mathematical structures that underlie computation.

CS and SWE are definitely related but distinct. Knowing both is best, but knowing one well and having a very cursory and elementary knowledge of the other is perfectly fine and useful.

It's like studying the Maxwell's theory does not make you a qualified electrician, nor even requires you to already be one.
You don't have to central plan, and our food production and manufacturing have not stopped... we aren't drawing down stockpiles, the critical things are still being made.

What we have stopped are things like restaurants and entertainment... there aren't stockpiles involved with those things, we just aren't going out to eat and aren't going out for entertainment. They can start right back up when we end quarantine.
This is framed more classically in terms of the compiler and toolchain: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref... "Reflections on Trusting Trust"
> Let's assume the least profitable employees are effected the most and thus have to absorb the largest unemployment hit.

That assumption is wrong in this context. The employees most affected aren't the ones providing the least value under normal circumstances, they're the ones providing the least value during a quarantine (presumably because they're not working at all), which isn't strongly correlated with providing low value in general. For example, a hotel may have to do layoffs, but that doesn't mean hotels are unproductive/unprofitable in the general case when there isn't a quarantine.

And the likes of hotels may not be the quickest to rebound either. A lot of people are using their vacation time right now, and will have a ton of work to catch up on when they go back and not be in a position to take more time off to travel. Even after people go back to work, they're going to be wary about traveling to hang out in a huge venue with a bunch of strangers for a while.

So what you want is to create a lot of general demand so that former hotel workers can find work doing something else until demand for travel comes back, on top of the workers who had been doing those things already.
I really hope those grad students that she mentioned didn't get a couple years added on to their degrees as a result of this. I mean good on her for finding the error, but I can't imagine what it would be like to be told "cancel your thesis, I made a mistake and your work is now invalid."
What I miss...

Amdzone
Firingsquad
Anandtech
Tomshardware
Hardocop
Bunch of other sites that I can't remember. The pc/mac chat room on AOL.
> you immunize (a-la Bitcoin)

Honest question: do Bitcoin proponents honestly believe it “immunises” them against the law?
> You would expect a much higher death rate for a shorter amount of time.

Only if surviving covid-19 provided immunization against a other infection
Many small business are minimally impacted. A small government contractor updating a website is hardly going to need additional government assistance when everyone is already remote.

Trying to hand out money to all small business is a nightmare which does not actually accomplish much for the money.
There is no conspiracy there, it did happen.
Great summary, but what exactly is wrong with overfitting here? If you have enough memory for the model and you train on every square foot of earth’s surface in different conditions, you shouldn’t have to worry about anything else right? Also, you might be able to generate synthetic data pretty easily here, making it suitable for GANs etc.
I would've appreciated it if you clarified this in your own comment :)
Thank you for the reading material. I believe I'm going to find myself in a similar situation soon and having those resources could really improve my chances of recovery.
Old versions of the current if still alive..

Amdzone.com
Tomshardware
3dnow
Hardocop
Firingsquad

Pc/mac chat room on aol chat.
US included a payroll protection program (PPP) in the CARES act last month, which pays for payroll for small businesses with some forgiveness provisions. The forgiveness terms are very roughly summarized as, "don't lay anyone off and the government will cover 8 weeks of wages for anyone making less than $100k / yr". News this week is that a second round of funding will go out for the program.
Here's a bit of history that might get lost: OiNK's rules specified minimum bitrate of 192k for MP3 uploads. OiNK was a British tracker, and Radiohead's "pay what you want" MP3 release of _In Rainbows_ (2007) was purposefully 160k to be under that limit. I don't remember if the upload was allowed or not :p

https://www.nme.com/news/music/radiohead-579-1352475
what? Small businesses are shuttering permanently all over the country.
It would have been derided in those terms if you had guessed all these Labour staffers were actively sabotaging their own party's candidate while it was happening.

And there clearly was a conspiracy, you can even read excerpts from the chats where they planned a lot of it!
Loop your l's, and cross your sevens and your z's to avoid confusing them with ones and twos. Exaggerate the differences between your i's and your j's by looping your j's. Curve the base of your t's to avoid confusing them with f's. Math is a lot harder to do when you cannot distinguish your variables from each other and numbers.
It is a qualitative analysis done by an enthusiastic amateur (me). You may disagree, and it is perhaps noise. Who knows!
I make a great living selling Cursive (https://cursive-ide.com). I use perpetual licensing with a year of updates, $99 for personal and $199 for commercial licences. Renewing for more updates initially costs half that and then goes up linearly to 75% over the first year after update period expiry. I also have a free non-commercial licence for OSS work/student work/personal hacking.

I figured that I would sell about the same number of personal and commercial licences since there are still a lot of hobbyists dabbling with Clojure, but in the end the vast majority of my sales and revenue are commercial licences. Most of my revenue is new licence sales, but I see a fair number of renewals too.

Short answer: a good path for monetization is just charging for your work. It's kind of old fashioned but it does work, even for dev tools. If your product solves a real problem companies are willing to pay to make the problem go away, especially if your product is more polished than the (presumably OSS) alternatives.
Many != Most != All

Some companies are suffering others and are uneffected and a few are even benefiting. Restaurants may be shut down, but farmers are still growing food, and some tiny toilet paper factories are operating at 120% capacity. Trying to subsidize everyone erodes the idea of capitalism, it’s politically expedient but that’s not to say it’s a great idea.
Why is anyone surprised?

Quarantine is harmful, and only useful if we’re preventing something worse. That’s probably the case, broadly — but the policies in other countries raise questions about US policies.

This is compounded by the arbitrary nature of closures, eg public construction and landscaping can continue but private can’t. People resent politicians arbitrarily (and self-servingly) picking winners and losers in the economy.

It’s further compounded by the fact that leaders haven’t announced a clear vision for when this ends. People complied because they cared and wanted to prevent deaths — but now we’re in a situation where the workforce is devastated and being hurt by arbitrary requirements, with no clear plan.

Naturally, people aren’t just going to sit there hurting — and if leaders don’t articulate a clear direction towards fixing things, people will find their own.
html5zombo.com if your device doesn’t support Flash
> Especially kids who lose weeks of months of schooling who they will have a hard time getting back.

I really don’t get the thing with compulsory schooling - it’s not if they will never get educational instruction in their lives
https://dj3d.io/room/TueVDJ61
Live Rap
small businesses are dying everywhere, I'm not sure if we're in the same reality.
And replace people with aliens.
GameWinners.com. Great source for video game cheats. But the best part for me was the chat room. I would say crazy things to people. Good times.

Also GeoCities. I wouldn't gone into web development without it.
I think high school courses are a great way to solve this problem. I took two years of computer science before setting foot on a college campus, so I knew for sure what I wanted to be doing.

For the record, I was never super interested in the really abstract theory and math, and I was just okay at it, but I could do it well enough and was motivated to push through by my love of SWE. I don't think I'm alone in that.
As far as pricing: simply purchase the properties for whatever their value was last declared on tax forms. Can even add 5-10% for good measure. You lowballed the government to decrease tax burden? No problem, that’s the price you get.

This isn’t an anti-millionaire plot, so it doesn’t matter much what he earns. This is a hibernate-then-stimulate plot.

We cannot hibernate if businesses and individuals are getting absolutely gutted at the end of each month.

We cannot stimulate if stimulus checks are going directly into landlords’ pockets.

After this is over, yes, either the government can keep it (as Singapore does) or even sell them back, giving preference to the original owners at the original price (who had been kept employed throughout the hibernation).

The land itself is not charging landlords to hold it, so landlords don’t need to be charging tenants to exist on it (except mortgages/taxes, which would be frozen).
What needed to be done? Backstopping unemployment? Making sure there is some funding for the medical establishment?

This was the 3rd bailout bill, of many? They had time for 4 hours of debate, but then went for a voice vote so they wouldn't be on the record.

This 2T bailout is going to go down in history as one of the most reckless things / or outright transfer of wealth that has ever occurred. It was bad legislation.

Lastly it was dishonest -- calling a grant with conditions a loan is just a lie. People pay back loans, these will never be paid back.
Unicorn Vs. QEMU
Good for the swedes, we’ll find out eventually right?
too bad much of the money got eaten up by large corps

https://www.forbes.com/sites/eriksherman/2020/04/24/public-c...
This is brilliant. I cannot wait for WASM to take over everything. It's going to (hopefully) bring about true cross platform development.
Dmoz[1] was supposed to be that. Sadly it withered on the vine as well.

The thing a directory does well that search doesn't is being able to eliminate the things you don't want to find. Let's say I want to find information about operating a whatchamacallit. While I can ask Google it may tell me that, but I'm also going to see a lot of information by people trying to sell me a whatchamacallit. In a directory I can find the category that covers the information domain I'm interested in then search only within that subtree for what I want to find.

[1] currently archived at https://www.dmoz-odp.org/
Individual bankruptcies are not bad.

Mass bankruptcies are terrible.
Classic Universal Sci-Fi Flix
The trick is rebasing your stuff before you push it anywhere.
I don't feel too bad for the oil fat cats but when oil prices fall it can hurt the electric and fuel efficient vehicle industry as well. Granted prices will go back up as soon as this is over. Its not to say that people don't care about the environment at all but cost does have a factor.
Wonderful! Why do we still have to work again?

It won't be very long before Magic Money Tree loses to toilet paper, pound-for-pound.
We achieved better results than _every_ pre-peak prediction. What do you measure?
Funny, I run an “enterprise” stack almost entirely made of Java. I wouldn’t trade it for NodeJS for the world.

Making upstream changes indeed would be very, very hard. But I never have to make upstream changes because they’ve spent quite a large amount of effort on stability.
You are correct, it is possible to prevent some of those conditions in some (but not all) future cases.

Kinda sucks if you have any of those conditions right now though.
This is beautiful and humbling. An example of a scientist who loved being wrong was Fred Hoyle. Quote: ‘it is better to be interesting and wrong than boring and right’.
Qubes OS Architecture next steps: a virtualized GUI domain
Yeah, some people just don't have the head even for regular programming. One of the people I started CS with really just wanted to make games. He was creative, and wasn't a dummy, but he hated programming once he tried it. He could squeak through on the assignments but it was just miserable for him. He switched majors long before we got to the really abstract stuff.
Both realities exist.
More importantly, I’m not paying to sit through ads.
Kuro5hin.org. It was the best of internet culture and discussion before apps and 24/7 connectivity.
Japan has a good bottom-up focus by addressing employee payroll and by proxy employee/employer job security during a negative economic outlook.

Grassroots money instead of helicopter money.

The government directly intervening to support employees sounds like a better effort to influence widespread impact than propping up employers to trickle down the money with vague guidelines and questionable oversight.

Businesses, in particular SMBs still need financial help, but that help should be separate from the public support help for PTEs and FTEs.

The US still clings on to the top-down approach to solve these problems, counter to Japan (not that Japan is perfect either).
A few diehards are still discussing things on Usenet.

comp.misc was brought back to life as part of the slashdot beta exit. Other groups have some traffic as well. Nothing like the heyday's however.

And there is a free, text only, news server named Eternal September:

https://www.eternal-september.org/
It's not just because of less traffic. Police are over-stretched right now, as is the entire justice system due to Covid-19. A lot of people are taking advantage of this and many types of crime are way up. (I'm also Toronto area)
Excerpts:

"Flexible: QEMU cannot emulate a chunk of raw binary code without any context: it requires either a proper executable binary (for example, a file in ELF format), or a whole system image with a full OS inside. Meanwhile, Unicorn just focuses on CPU operations, and can emulate raw code without context

[...]

Instrumentation: QEMU does not support dynamic instrumentation, but with Unicorn you can register customized handlers for various kind of events from CPU execution to memory access. This feature gives tool programmers all the power they need to monitor and analyze the code under emulation.

[...]

Lightweight: Unicorn is much more lightweight than QEMU because we stripped all the subsystems that do not involve in CPU emulation. As a result, Unicorn is less than 10 times smaller in size and also in memory consumption.

Safety: QEMU has a bad track of security record with a lot of vulnerabilities that can be exploited to break out of the guest. Its history says that all of these bugs are from subsystems such as devices, BIOS, firmware etc, but none of them comes from CPU emulator component. Therefore, in principle Unicorn is much more secure because it has way smaller attack surface."
Sure, yet I can name a few that are more profitable now than they where 6 months ago. It’s really a question of industry not company size that determines how their handling this.
The number of remakes really was a homage to how incredible the game is. I remember myself and my friend on the floor crying in laughter over some modded Liero shenanigans. As far as I remember, the original Liero webpage described Liero as a game built around an idea for physics - so replicating said physics isn't entirely trivial.

I also recall that OpenLiero was doing a "whitebox" implementation of the physics (much like OpenRCT). That project should be pretty close if you're looking for something run on your desktop.

This page is 1000% spot-on. My muscle memory even kicked back in, after more than a decade.
I used to do electoral politics for a living, and I think people would be surprised at how often this kind of thing happens.

In the "old" days, if a candidate wanted to run a campaign that we thought was a waste of money, we'd buy a few billboards on the route from the candidate's house to their office or campaign HQ. We'd make sure those neighborhoods were carpeted with yard signs.

Facebook wasn't yet a behemoth back then, but we did the same with ad buys during specific TV slots - a practice now being used by lobbyists to reach the current occupant of the White House.

You have to manage up in political campaigns just as much as you do in corporate life.
As an United fan, I relate and hope so too.
Paper to PCB Timelapse