skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> You've still conditioned massive swaths of the population to be electronically tracked, boiling frog and all.

I don't understand what you mean by tracked here? Until and unless you release your secret keys, the numbers your phone was broadcasting are just random gibberish to anyone other than you.

If you have Bluetooth enabled in the first place, you're already broadcasting a MAC address. Many devices now rotate that specifically to prevent tracking, making it equivalent. In fact the only real differences from your device's MAC are the bit width (tracing numbers are significantly larger) and the fact that tracing numbers are cryptographically derived from an underlying secret.

As far as conditioning massive swaths of the population to be electronically tracked, I'm afraid that ship sailed quite some time ago. Cellphones inherently reveal your (coarse) location in order to operate, modern vehicles carry extensive electronics packages that phone home to the manufacturer, and a seeming majority of people voluntarily upload significant portions of their geotagged lives to various service providers.

I'm about as privacy conscious as you'll find these days, but my only concerns regarding the contract tracing API relate to battery life and the security implications of leaving Bluetooth on all the time (it seems like there's always another zero day being announced).
Show HN: Whadapp.com – Share what you're up to at the moment with your followers
It's not a website, but I'm missing the old Usenet.
They temporarily laid off just the low-level operators, think of them as call centre staff or Uber drivers. These are the people who when a robot gets stuck help them cross a street or navigate around an obstacle. Think of them as support side of the business. The only reason being because US universities are on hold because of the coronavirus.

The new product development, software and hardware side is still thriving.
I want to discuss something but I think I would rather publicly not discuss it. Do you mind sending me an email? (In the profile)
Microsoft Windows 95 Video Guide – Jennifer Aniston and Matthew Perry
I just tried out Nix (not NixOS) earlier this week in the context of creating Docker images.

Getting started with Nix is easy but getting the hang of the Nix language isn't so much (despite having a reference manual.)

My best advice to get you started with the Nix language is looking at what's already available in <nixpkgs>[1].

Going fast-forward, my Docker image got a lot of unnecessary files in it (include headers, configuration files, /etc/passwd, /etc/group, etc.) I have to come back to it and see how I can improve this.

P.S. On the other hand, I succeeded creating a minimal Docker image using magicpak[2].

[1]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/tree/master/pkgs/developmen...
[2]: https://github.com/coord-e/magicpak
Show HN: A GitHub Action to Automatically Format a README for a TIL Repository
Coronavirus Country Comparator
i met so incredible people all over the world because of stumbleupon. it was like a randomize effect artifact of late 2000's for me. :(
> There was no evidence of human-to-human transmission early on, too.

I have two comments about that:

1) Like somebody else said, if you don't look, you won't find evidence, even if it's there.

2) Wuhan officials were incentivized to say it wasn't contagious, ergo, no lockdown needed.

However, it clearly was being transmitted to non-wet market patients in late Nov./early Dec., and Disneyworld Shanghai was closed Jan. 24, so you have to be wilfully blind to say it's not contagious.
Actually no, Starship is like 99% autonomous and self-driving, and just a few % of special cases are handled manually by the operators.
Yes, the lockdown procedures have been successful and the disease is definitely on a downward trend (https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/malta/)

That kind of underscores my point, though, doesn’t it: I’ve had a very atypical experience compared to those of my compatriots (on both sides, Britain being an island but having massively bungled its management in the early stages). I’ve been working from home for six weeks and endure the annoyance of joining a short and diffuse queue to get into the local convenience store, and am at liberty to take a daily stroll in excess of a dozen kilometres; they’ve had their whole existence disrupted (they’ve lost jobs) and loved ones (I recently graduated from “know people who’ve lost their job because of this” to “know people who’ve lost a relative because of this”). It’s truly horrifying, and I’ve experienced it only vicariously, from afar.
That's a nice sentiment, but the reality is that every good book will be scanned, OCR'd and put online by sometime almost immediately. Whether the author may like it or not, these are just the facts of life in the digital world. The faster one embraces it, the less heartache.
Wow, that’s so sad. Y’all raising your kids horrible, no bueno whatsoever.

America was born in a tavern. Ben Franklin was a real lady killer. Churchill saved our world mostly hungover. Jimmy Hendrix really thought he was a Martian

These kids will never amount to anything. Lost generation. Hope there’s a huge backlash...there has to be, human spirit isn’t built for such a sad and pathetic life - hell, at this point, I wouldn’t even call them human

The problem is the parents. The modern parent and grandparent are absolute failures.
Finding your purpose for a fulfilling career
That’s a great question! In short, it doesn’t.

If the website has no RSS Feeds, it scrapes the website and gives you the articles (if it can guess what are articles, otherwise, just gives you the link to the website — in this situation it’s more helping you create a habit to only visit that website once per day, and if you tell me which website it is, I can go in and tweak the logic for it).

Also, thank you so much for the kind words!
RaaS - robots as a service.
It's interesting to not companies like Starship do not sell their robots, but provide everything as a service.
Is this about remote or all-remote?

Does anyone else do this thing when they work 90% of the time remotely and sometimes travel for a day meeting?
This addresses some of the issues discussed.

This can also work for informal communication, to a degree.
With those kinds or positive rates, I have to start wondering about the specificity of those tests.

The UK government recently hat to gave up on millions of antibody tests because they just didn't work.

Coronaviruses in general are endemic and almost always go without symptoms and would also eventually spread to the majority of the prison population.
Blogspam of

https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/pressroom/newsreleases/20...

Full study article:

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acsnano.0c03252
Truth is, Linux doesn't work well on new hardware unless it is some specific models that state Linux support like some dell or thinkpad machines.
You bugs will probably be fixed in a couple of months/years.
If Mr. Robot was about Occupy, what do you think the serie Home Coming was about?

After reading Anna Jacobson books I wonder if it actually reflect reality.
Anodoctally I would say thay most kid do get nauseous in a car drive, but they do get used to it (some less quickly than others).
Yes, it turns out the Tesla devices were actually more practical than first thought.

The caveats are:

1) Would US hospitals accept or recommend them?

2) If US hospitals accepted them, was there an acceptable solution to the aerosolization problem? Wuhan hospitals were segregated into corona and non-corona locations, so aerosolization wasn't a problem for other patients, but I don't know if US hospital systems got that organized.

I highly recommend reading the Wuhan accounts and papers. They really moved fast on improving their response, which the US totally ignored. Only now, Apr. 26, are we catching up to what they found in Jan./Feb. I doubt if it affected the body count much, but time was wasted.

Instead HN wasted months on endless navel-gazing and "IFR vs. CFR" chatter. Really a new low for HN.
> in academia there is this idea that learning good practices is like a 'dirty' thing that is not required

I think you got me wrong. Shipping quality software is not 'dirty' but requires a specialised focus. One can not do everything by yourself - science and engineering are complementary skills. In your example of chemistry, the chemist who designs a molecule does not spend time to ship the molecule to the world.
TCS going fully Remote, post Covid-19 over productivity findings on remote work
Sure. Just sent one.
What's the existing experience in Europe that cut down both on cars and on public transport?
Yes, reality is harsh, people like free stuff and don't mind to steal if punishment is unlikely, but that doesn't change the fact that one's work is one's private property and it's up to one to decide its fate.
What you are describing is closely related to some of the ideas of Intentional Programming.

The core idea is that the code is just a model (AST, graph...) and your editor projects it to whatever format or syntax you like.

Development then is coding in these representations of the model or building new smart abstractions and model transformations (DSLs) for going from your screen representation to lower-level building blocks and eventually compiling to e.g. something that runs on the JVM.

It quickly becomes just as complicated as it sounds.

The best implementation in my experience is that of JetBrains’ free tool MPS (Meta Programming System). They start with the model (your AST) rather than the code.

The learning curve is steep and it is difficult to adopt it in teams where people are more focused on shipping features than building exotic tooling to help them do it.
The initial cost is quite low and there are techniques to reduce the growth factor, but I’ve seen no evidence of anything that reduces this below an exponential scenario.

Over large scales, exponentials can be reasonably modeled by a piecewise function that’s 0 below some threshold and infinity above it (1). That translates roughly into a fixed number of options that can be maintained, modulated by your development practices.

Without knowing what that limit actually is, what’s the best strategy for spending this limited resource? As there’s no such thing as an average person (2), I contend that this budget should be reserved for things that materially affect accessibility.

(1) This is the standard approximation for a diode’s I-V curve, for instance

(2) https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/010203.pdf
Why Tanzanian Apps Fail (I worked for 10 Tanzanian startups from idea to launch)
Your comment gives anecdotal support for the argument that much of the change mentioned in the article comes down to demographics.
> academic excellence "with a twist"

Nailed it better than I ever could.
As an asthmatic person, I hope this too. Berlin is quite bad on some streets, especially due to people's love for diesel cars.

This also includes trucks and diesel buses.
Type systems can encode invariants even on the protocol level. For example you can hand-write or generate (multi party) session types to avoid deadlocks etc.

For Rust there is https://crates.io/crates/session-types from http://munksgaard.me/papers/laumann-munksgaard-larsen.pdf
The most shocking part of this article was the revelation that the original article was not retracted. The entire conclusion and data were entirely wrong, yet the paper still stands. That’s really damning for the journal at least and likely speaks to a pretty bad culture in the wider field.

Kudos to the author for doing the right thing, but the fact that there seems to be no way to remove a paper that is blatantly false because retractions are reserved for deliberate misconduct is horrifying. Not only does this setup long term fucked up incentives (no downside to fraud if you paint it as a whoopsie), but it also harms all work that had cited that work and anyone doing literature reviews not realizing the ground other papers were standing on has dissolved away.
Technically if your pixel operation is commutative and reversible (as could be with alpha blending), you could store a buffer of pixels at the current position, then undo the previous pixel by current window at that buffer and then re-apply the operation with the new pixel value, and then directly send this to the display?

Am I missing something apart from the fact that alpha blending is not actually commutative and/or reversible; and the fact that nobody implemented this yet?
Would be more like

function main(pkgs: Map String Package = (import(sys.path("nixpkgs"))({}))){
}

I'm not sure if it's better at this point...
And that's pretty much as good as it gets. With the notable exception of community maintainance, eg. Lineage OS.
This is particularly frustrating to witness in Australia, where we have all but eliminated covid-19, but there is no political will to eliminate it entirely. Had we closed hairdressers, building sites and takeaway restaurants a month ago, we would be looking at zeroes for daily infection.

While many places in the world cannot yet justify the costs of elimination, a country like Australia, bordered by water, could have reached the goal before fatigue set in. As it is, I am resigned to awful subsequent waves culminating in the so-called herd immunity goal.
Building your identity should not be tied to building your brand when you are 16. I’ve grown up in Europe but lived in the US for some time. What I noticed is a distinct lack of subculture in young people (college), everyone seems to be very homogenized and this is in stark contrast to what I perceived in Europe. Of course this is anecdotal but I wonder if this is a result of this crazy system that doesn’t allow missteps, doesn’t allow building your own identity, but instead forces you to be focused on security and your brand from an early age onwards as not to be crushed by college debts.
Also: The utility file will never be updated and fix existing issues within the utility itself (unless you look up the package and diff it yourself). It's a trade-off.
Those business class seats on "legacy carriers" are not available for double the price. Try some flight searches and compare direct one way flights between two cities in Europe. First of all, you will have a hard time finding a direct flight by Lufthansa for example. Secondly, a Lufthansa business flight will usually be over 5x the price of a Ryan air flight.
Do you have your own blog? I am impressed with the prose and content (and perspective! seems incredibly self-aware) of this comment, _especially_ considering your age. Since you say you too are playing the exhibition game, do you have a personal website? If not, I'm sure people would read what you have to write. It's interesting.
I miss the Internet 1.0 culture which inspired a lot of classic sites. Before the corporates moved in it was nerdy, eccentric, intelligent, creative, hilarious, and sometimes literally insane.

Then e-commerce and adtech happened and it became a lot more homogenised and a lot less fun.

Usenet was a distillation of the culture and a crucible of madness. Yahoo Groups were (sometimes) a more grown up version.
Some back of envelope estimates: 75 minutes of walking to get to the workplace. Approximately 50 minutes if I go via bicycle (directions are not straightforward for many reasons). This is regardless of weather and/or traffic if on the road. 30-40 minutes if I go via metro + train (the actual trips take 10ish minutes each).

Unless forced to do differently, the most efficient choice is evident. I'm also lucky enough to live inside the city. Commuters that can't work from home have it even rougher, since they live outside and they take up to an hour or more with public transport.
Show HN: Linux Webcam Automation
The chances of an antibody test kit not being sufficiently specific to SARS-CoV2 as opposed to endemic coronaviruses is quite high.

Now, what are the chances that some government institution acquired tons of crappy test kits, didn't validate them before use, and then proceeded to publish the results which just so happened to be exactly what they wanted them to be?
I was shocked by lack of public transport in Houston when I visited a friend there in 2008. He warned me to rent a car in the airport, but still it was unbelievable by European standards. And people in richer suburbs actively opposed any public transport claiming it just brings crime. And forget walking. In many cases one cannot legally reach some areas by feet.
Yes, decreasing the cost to capture more of the demand curve doesn’t need a special term. That’s why “induced demand” is so dumb. The demand was always there, the busy road was just too high a cost.
> These kids will never amount to anything.

I’m not sure that’s what they need to hear.
Not all unemployed people get unemployment benefits; in some states, few do
Isn't "building your personal brand" just a synonym for "building your resume" or "building your reputation"? At least, unless you're planning to become an Instagram influencer with their own line of cosmetics?

I can assure you, kids have been doing extracurriculars that look good on college applications for longer than most of us have been alive.
It’s completely wrong discussion. Remote work should be prioritized, so the people don’t need to move to overcrowded cities. Less people in the cities, less problems with their cars and crappy public transport.
Living in Tokyo as well and yeah, the subway is a nightmare. It's GOOD, gets you everywhere pretty fast but for daily morning commuting - nah. Taking an overcrowded train every day squeezed into heaps of people that all don't want to be there gets very depressing with enough repetition cycles. A good reminder of how insignificant everything is.
I am glad I have flex time and can avoid peak-time trains.

But Tokyo is also very bicycle-friendly with not many aggressive drivers (ignoring taxis), so that's my pick to get around.
> I'm surprised to hear you compliment my writing style.

Your comment had me on the edge of my seat, like a report from the trenches.
I share that sentiment. I don’t understand what they were aiming for, but it is certainly not user friendly. There are too many steps involved to dismiss it.
The Nix language is much, much simpler than anything C-like or Python-like. It's basically just JSON with some support for variables and recursion.

It being so simple is why the whole system works.
Ask HN: What is the easiest way to get a PhD?
As a hypothetical exercise. You want to add a "Dr." to your email signature, and you have $10K to spare.

What would be the easiest (in terms of effort and time) way to get a PhD that is somewhat legit (no diploma mill or fake university)?

The field or subject doesn't really matter.
Yep. You can write for a future where desktops boast single-core speeds in the 10GHz range. That's how you get Crysis, which still has performance issues on the latest CPUs.
The developer told me personally that it is definitely open source so I'll be back with more
Dehumanising and dismissive. "Please do not post shallow dismissals to HN" about tens of millions of people.
Yeah, not sure what to make of that. Apparently this is a reference to the black earth belt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernozem). The article isn't particularly well written. Why only the Chernozem belt can be farmed (short term climate conditions maybe?)? What kind of mismanagement USSR exhibited that led to massive grain shortage on their end?
"... the book was published in 2005, and has been available as a free download since 2008"

Actually he didn't follow the advice.
Population can be a burden. As the US has learned, economic systems can't grow forever; maintaining the US standard of living is a significant strain both geopolitically and environmentally. It will be much harder to provide a similar standard of living for 1.4 billion people.

I suspect that China will hit similar limits soon, if they haven't already. We do see signs of environmental and geopolitical strain there.
I agree with you technically.

But even with the current cellphone location tracking and geotagging by individuals, this is the first time that I recall of publicly acknowledged and accepted form of automated electronic location tracking that is to be submitted to authorities.

I'll just add that joining the Communist party in the USSR and the Nazi party in Nazi Germany was also voluntary. You were just sidelined from society if you didn't. This whole thing is a step closer to hypothetical Chinese-style social scoring, not a step away.

EDIT: I'm not saying this (Chinese-style scoring) is what will happen. But which is a step closer to a reality where it does? That makes me uneasy and I personally think it should make a great deal more uneasy.
Just some advice, since you said you're 16. When you get a compliment, I know it's tempting to downplay yourself and seem humble, but a "thank you" is almost more appropriate. Stand by yourself :)
Maybe because the cpp version includes stdlib on top of stdio?
It makes sense that trans people would be left-leaning because people who aren't left-leaning tend (painting with broad brushstrokes) to be opposed to equal treatment for trans people. Similarly, trans people can often be quite socially isolated because it's difficult for them to integrate into a transphobic society. In the US, there are 26 states where it's perfectly legal to fire someone simply for being trans.

Beyond that, I think you are quite off base in comparing trans people to online Communist and neo-Nazi radicals. You are probably looking at a much narrower slice of the trans population than you think you are. Assuming that you don't actually have some kind of anti-trans agenda, I'd rethink how you're expressing whatever point you're trying to make here.
I killed Steven Hawking.

It had to be done. He knew too much.
Lens Aberrations Explained
Did that course help you get a job?
They should be conscripted to the war front with symptom-suppressing medication, to prevent further contamination of inmates.
It is an herculean effort trying to master modern Assembly.

Back in the day, you could easily know all opcodes for a given CPU, and their clock cycle timings.

This is the SIMD guide for the Intel CPUs,

https://software.intel.com/sites/landingpage/IntrinsicsGuide...

Which is only a tiny subset of all the opcodes that a modern Intel CPU is able to understand, let alone what AMD also offers.

You need tools like VTune from each CPU vendor to actually understand the CPU clock timings of each opcode in micro-ops (microcode execution unit).

While you can master a specific subset, like knowing AVX instructions, mastering Assembly back to back like in the old days, only when writing Assembly for stuff like small PIC microcontrollers.

Trying to master a language like C++ is easier, which says a lot about how modern CPUs look like.
I wish that weren't the case. A good book can help millions and I feel we'd get more good books if authors were paid well. Writing a book isn't an easy task and it can take years to write.
> Same goes for Open Source software with donation jars.

But no open source software is being sustainably developed on contributions form donation jars. There might be 1-2 exceptions, but most open source projects make pennies from donations.
Scientists are also humans and humans are always making errors. The only thing is that the probability of a scientist making an error is 10x lower than another human, only because they made 1000 test errors before they talk.
But they can add more roads via tunnels, bridges, etc. People just don’t want to pay the cost but instead of just saying that they handwave with stupid crap like “induced demand” to pretend it’s an intractable problem.

Also, tons of people give no fucks about going to the city. It’s not some grand final destination. Some of the worst congestion points in the Bay Area aren’t anywhere near dense city.