skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Beautiful. It was a great idea: congratulations on it spreading the way it has.

My reaction on seeing this, probably like that of many other people, was, “wow, that would be so cool”. But of course if it looked like this normally we wouldn’t think much of it at all, just like all the other gorgeous sci-fi skies we see in movies or read about in books: multiple moons, two suns, close proximity to a ringed planet, etc. If these were our sky, they would be unremarkable.

We are surrounded by incredible beauty and so rarely stop to contemplate it. But the beauty is there nonetheless.

Your idea is a great reminder to pause and look up. There are deep lessons in the sky.
> Not enough wealth for almost anything.

That is absolute bullshit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22993157

"2M chickens to be killed in US processing plants due to lack of employees."
Uncertainty doesn't mean the end of objective truth [video]
Rather than PDF, you’d actually want an EPUB. All the benefits of the web in a single asset without the format where data goes to die. ePub can be rendered anywhere. PDFs are a pain on the small screen.
If Chinas numbers are accurate, then we are doing this all for nothing, the total global deathtoll will be less than a normal year's flu season.

Is that your position?

I should be clear: I don't trust Trump or the West particularly. But mass faking numbers like this is common in China and very rare in the west. The west cheats in other ways...
Show HN: Snipz (shareable code snippets with PRs)
The whole point of the exercise is to recruit good people into the military. That means they've got to know who's doing the hacking.
CV Sourcing
CV Sourcing is the most important but very time-consuming aspect of the recruitment process, which means it makes very good business sense to outsource this particular task to a professional team who can deliver and even exceed the expected results.

http://topresourcing.co.uk/cv-sourcing-uk/
> And it may be that it's simply not possible to have something like futures trading without this systemic vulnerability when the market is small enough for an individual to attempt such a scheme.

That is very definitely not true, as shown by the fact that there are many, many commodities where futures trading is allowed and nothing like this has ever happened.

In fact, the article is frustratingly incomplete concerning how it was really possible in the first place.

Because there must be something really dysfunctional in how a futures market is set up to allow this scenario.

Normally, if someone tries to buy up all the futures, the price would go through the roof, especially once people notice that that is what's happening. The scheme would fail at that point because you'd run out of money.

I also don't really understand how it was possible for the market to be flooded to the point that the produce was dumped en masse. It's not like people had produced more onions than normal or that they'd all go bad at the same time.
On the contrary, this is a problem that goes "complicated-easy-complicated" the more you think about it. You're at stage two, so here's the mindfuck: Why aren't we constantly stuck at local minima? Surely these problems we're throwing at ANNs aren't all convex.
Grief is never wrong, only our relationships to grief. This is true of all emotions.
Beastie Boys Story Is an Enormously Moving Movie About Growing Up
The Controversy of MSG
you're in luck my friend. Perl has had a quantum computing module since the late 90s:

https://metacpan.org/pod/Quantum::Superpositions

As far as I can tell this one still outperforms all existing "hardware implementations".
Flagship Killer Turned Flagship
I don't trust the involved actors enough to use this app, if i want maximum surveillance i'll just move to China or North Korea.
This was also discussed here a few months ago by the author of utmapp (Qemu on iOS). In order to get their code to work, they need to effectively run their own code in debugging mode. And yes, this requires the same entitlement as the JS JIT.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22387742
You and I probably took 4 or 5 years to recognize the alphabet. Cut the machines some slack.
AWS built simple-db with Erlang [0] but then seemingly haven't been using it much ever since... I wouldn't be surprised if simple-db has since been moved to aurora (like document-db [1], neptune, and timestream) or dynamo-db [2] behind the scenes?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_SimpleDB

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18869755

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18871854
Harold McGee on MSG: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1oR0EYaOHY
Yea, ended up putting in a submission for PPP at the end of last week.

Thanks for the heads up though! Didn't see it till just now...
I really like this demo to show how empty our solar system is: https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem....

Or the RL version in Sweden: http://www.swedensolarsystem.se/en/
Hi, OP here,

I started working on this app a couple of weeks ago, trying to improve Singapore's model of using Bluetooth tracking by adding data anonymization and decentralization features.

I ended up with a solution that is similar to the D3P-T, with some implementation differences.

The app is available as an APK for Android [1]. As for now, the iOS app is not easy to distribute, as Apple does not allow coronavirus-related apps to be published on the app store.

--

[1] https://github.com/RaphaelJ/covid-tracer/blob/master/release...
There was very strong lobbying from CCC and others. Apples decision will have played a role but the project would've suffered from a lot of distrust even if Apple had allowed it.

We won't know why exactly it was abandoned but I would give the CCC more credit than Apple.
Well, the measure of efficiency most of the world cares about is “overall profit”, which — around the efficient frontier — has a good proxy with “overall output”.

I feel your “output per worker” measure of average individual efficiency is not a good metric to optimize - just fire everyone except your best employee and you’ve maximized it.

Edit: employer -> employee typo
First, that's a limitation of git.

Second, it's easy to fake PGP: https://boats.gitlab.io/blog/post/signing-commits-without-gp...

Third, we're adding support to SoloKeys to do this using a hardware token: https://github.com/solokeys/solo/issues/395#issuecomment-612...

We're also collaborating with https://keys.pub/ to make "sign/verify" use cases easily usable with a GUI for everyone. So I'd say there's hope?
Various Shapes and Forms of Numbers in Python
I admit it's not transparent. First, they were downplaying it. Second, there were many cases of interrogation, detaining like what you've posted.

With that being said, I didn't mention any number, but the situation turned to be optimal for quite a while - it's too obvious to anyone who lives here.

It's quite a thing to see once the government realized the downplaying was a fault, how fast and effective they could implement their quarantine policy into every corner in the society. It's both incredible and terrifying to see the executive orders implemented by every community, village, malls, and every individual.

The original point I wanted to make is, there were a lof people believed the history was ended by American style democracy, it wasn't. There is still quite a room for optimization.
Hey HN,

Snipz is a small app that lets you share code snippets.

These snippets aren't static, but can accept suggestions, which are merge-able via a 'merge password'.

The original link is a live demo, but the source code is here (Snipz is a WIP, comments / suggestions welcome):

https://github.com/deta/programs/tree/master/snipz
> encouraging your users to give their private keys

I read it twice and still can't find the place where it was mentioned this to be the case.
> May I ask, what do you believe the Chinese death toll has been in total so far? The official number is 4642 I think. So if other countries are as efficient as China, this whole pandemic will kill only around 23,000 world wide. Let's up the Chinese are being accurate and we get these excellent numbers!

Your reasoning doesn't make any sense. The number of deaths is dependent on the number of people that get sick. China's lower number of deaths simply reflects the stricter containment measures it took to control the spread of the epidemic.

The mortality rate among those who get infected is probably similar in China and Western countries. I could imagine that the mortality rate might vary by a factor of a few, based on how many ventilators are available, how overwhelmed hospitals are, and other similar factors. But the percentage of the total population that gets infected can vary by orders of magnitude, based on how aggressively you contain the epidemic.

As of yesterday, based on the number of confirmed cases (a lower limit, but it gives you a sense of the differences):

* 0.02% of the population of South Korea has contracted the virus.

* 0.3% of the population of the United States has contracted the virus.

Expecting the same percentage of the population to die in South Korea and the United States would be silly, based on the very different rates of infection. The same goes for China.

> I am actually very happy to concede that the Chinese government has been effective (after the first few weeks of the outbreak at least).

Then why is it so surprising to you that the extreme public health interventions they took (cordons sanitaires, quarantine centers, strict lock-downs of many cities, regular symptom checks for large swaths of the population, etc.) suppressed the reproductive rate of the virus and drove the number of new infections down drastically?
I still use PGP to encrypt files with secrets in them that I am sending to a known source, and I know it's still the base encryption for a few well known file servers. A new player in the market is welcomed.
Note that this article is not hosted in the official 'article' namespace, but in the 'Wikipedia' namespace (hence the Wikipedia: in the article title), which is specifically reserved for non-encyclopaedic content, including editorial pieces and opinions.
Electricity.

Electricity is always explained by its effects, but never by its actual nature. I'd like better explanation :-)
Sweden ambassador: Stockholm could reach herd immunity by May
The reason for this solution is pretty simple: onion farmers felt that the cause of the problem was the onion futures market and they lobbied their politicians to ban them. The politicians didn’t care and banning the futures is a much more obvious visible action than introducing some complicated regulation. It’s also faster/easier to do and looks like a stronger, more serious reaction. So the reason for the ban is that it’s what people wanted and their elected representatives didn’t have strong feelings against it.

The reason the ban still exists is pretty simple too: no one cares strongly enough to lobby to have it lifted and so it remains by inertia.
Yea, I had to stop after scoring 5
IQNet Website – Survio
Thanks for relating this story. It's good to be able to point to comments that serve as concrete examples.

One of the things I mentioned in that post is folks' tunnel vision—in these cases, tunnel vision on the parts of the people associated with the project who are unable to see the actual number of hurdles that an outsider will encounter. The post on the Light Table blog[1] that I referenced lays this out, too. Its title "Pain We Forgot" is almost self-explanatory.

1. http://lighttable.com/2014/05/16/pain-we-forgot/
You know, I'm reminded of the way the CCC conferences are run. Basically, everything (except the toilet cleaners I think) is done by volunteers (aka the people visiting the conferences). I think usually about a third of the attendants do at least a little bit.

You just sign up in the system and choose a shift. Some jobs need an introduction and your account is cleared for them once you attended. If you meet a certain amount of shifts worked you get a t-shirt and preference at next-year-ticket purchases.

What you usually see is even the people with the menial jobs getting really into them as well. The ushers will experiment with new routing to make it faster, the people running the checkroom will optimize the hell out of it and have a competition with the next shift.. it's good fun.

This works because a) they want the whole endeavor to be a success, b) they are allowed to freely fulfill the roles and experiment, c) nobody in particular and everyone in total profits from the work done, d) you can pick up one shift or 20, it's up to you and surely a couple more.

I think it is possible to be passionate about packaging items for sure, but not like this. So I wouldn't say it's impossible to run society with UBI, but it will have to look quite different.
I do believe that modern society regressed on these topics.

Another instance is "insanity". Today the standard answer is psychiatry/psychiatric ward.. But there was a documentary about mildly handicapped people being hosted by a group of elders in a big house. And these potential patient, looked happy as a puppy in this environment. Gut feeling level of improvement IMO. Now I think I've read that people accepted handicap that way before .. it was just how life was sometimes, and it seems it was a better answer than stuck in a hospital.
We'll keep poorly reinventing distributed computing features until we have a real distributed operating system. We're actually not that far off from it, but good luck convincing a mainline kernel dev to accept your patches.
It's not on the Gates' Foundation radar but how about a very high quality, matching set of mask and glasses/goggles? Costing about $30.

The mask is reusable and the glasses fit very close to the skin around the eyes...perhaps even with a neoprene apron that seals against the face and the mask. It would also stop your hands from easily and unconsciously touching your eyes, nose and mouth.

The idea here is that, in public, it protects the wearer against others and protects others from the wearer. If widely adopted this gear would vastly reduce the cost of the "test and track" effort and everyone would just feel safer in public.

This virus is unlikely to be going away any time soon. Some say it will be with us for a "very long time" because even a vaccine is likely to be effective only over the short term and therefore the "herd immunity" will never really take place. We need to get serious about the long term strategy. This could be a one cheap, quick and effective tactic for reopening.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good.

GDPR did a lot to shift the window back and put the behaviour of the big adtech companies in the sunlight for a while.

The enforcement side is definitely lacking, and black mirror might still have done more to shift opinion, but it's not all bad.

Consumers all over the world now have the ability to request data takeouts and deletions, etc. And anecdotally I've noticed more and more sites honouring the opt in requirement for 3rd party tracking scripts.

It's a solid improvement over the status quo of 2017.
Just a few other recent Sweden coronavirus discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22982885

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22919074

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22944891

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22908103
I don't think I've ever needed a difficult conversation with my peers or vice versa, so far. I'm open to feedback. I give feedback as nicely as I can. I've never been uncomfortable with this, but maybe others are.

I've never needed to have a difficult conversation with my managers, but some of them have needed to have difficult conversations with me. Most of the difficult conversations have been related to performance but rooted in politics (management at my company does not follow the HR set policies and has a very opaque rating process).

If I did need a difficult conversation with my manager, then I would start the transfer of job search process. One thing I have found in the 9+ managers I've had is that they either don't the power to make the change, or they don't care. As a non-manager, I am completely powerless and would need to move to a team with a better manager to find a better atmosphere.
note that Sequoia Capital is totally unrelated to the Indian silversmith and inventor of the Cherokee syllabary
> If Chinas numbers are accurate, then we are doing this all for nothing, the total global deathtoll will be less than a normal year's flu season.

How do you figure that? The lesson from China is that the way to keep the death toll low is to enact extreme public health interventions to stop transmission of the virus and suppress the epidemic. The lesson isn't, "Everything will be fine if we do nothing."

The reason fewer people have died in China is because fewer people have gotten sick in the first place. The way that happened was through lock-downs that were far stricter than anything implemented in the West (and a whole host of other measures, like regularly checking everyone's temperature and quarantining anyone with a fever).
That's what INRIA and Fraunhofer thought as well, yet their approach is now dead.
>> And then, what happens if a debtor pays back its debt? Is that money consequently getting "erased" again ?

>Yep, pretty much...

I would add that if the system is fractional reserve then it increases the proportion of the bank's reserve allowing more money to be created. So while it's technically true that it's destroyed you could see the next loan as its reincarnation, no..?

I didn't go here in my response above because my vague understanding is that we're not strictly a fractional reserve system any more, though I don't understand how.
In the current situation (and possibly in others) if a democratically elected government think it should be a certain way, then they could be excused for forcing Apple to make it that way.
Mutuelle senior pour les retraités
Not all these wars are lame:

> Various supporters of the US Libertarian party (founded in

> 1971) argue that they own the meaning of the word

> 'libertarian', that placing it next to 'socialism' is a

> contradiction in terms, and hence that libertarian socialism

> (described circa 1850) cannot possibly have existed. An edit

> war and request-for-deletion war ensues.

The question of the meaning of "liberty" and the compatibility of liberty with socialized means of production (and the meaning of "socializing") is quite a deep subject. So, not lame.
SICP in Python
It's past subjunctive. The present subjunctive is still around but scarce: "Lest he think less of me" or, in a frozen expression, "Be it ever so humble ...".
> Australia passed laws in 2018 which enable law enforcement to compel tech companies into inserting backdoors into their software

No, it didn't. The bill had language specifically intended to address these concerns. Read the bill [0]. The relevant part is under Part 15 > Division 7 > 317ZG, which you can also see at [1].

This section explicitly forbids the government from requesting that a provider "build a systemic weakness, or a systemic vulnerability, into a form of electronic protection". It also forbids the government from asking a provider to preserve such a weakness.

It also explicitly indicates that this definition includes:

- "a reference to implement or build a new decryption capability in relation to a form of electronic protection"

- "a reference to one or more actions that would render systemic methods of authentication or encryption less effective"

So no, the government did not pass a bill that allows them to request encryption backdoors.

These weren't even amendments made later, this language was present from the very first version of the bill [2].

The reporting around this was simply atrocious and made me lose a lot of respect for news sources I'd otherwise have thought were respectable. Just read Wired's article:

"Systemic vulnerability means a vulnerability that affects a whole class of technology, but does not include a vulnerability that is selectively introduced to one or more target technologies that are connected with a particular person," the Australian law says. In other words, intentionally weakening every messaging platform out there with the same backdoor wouldn't fly, but developing tailored access to individual messaging programs, like WhatsApp or iMessage, is allowed."

They cherry-pick a quote from part of the legislation but just so happen to ignore the rest of section 317ZG, which invalidates their claims.

Other publications were even worse, they couldn't even point to which parts of the law were objectionable.

If you would like to disagree with my assertions, please provide evidence-based claims, as I have.

[0]: https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/C2018C00495

[1]: http://www5.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/ta1997214...

[2]: https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Bills_Legislat...
Keybase's "Crypto tools" tab can do this, with "known destination" determined via social proof.

https://keys.pub is a re-implementation of this use case without the messenger/cryptocurrency baggage that some dislike about Keybase.
To be honest even PGP signing has some issues: it's not clear what does it mean to sign a commit and there is plenty of misuse of that (see [0], `git push --signed` solves some of these issues).

Git patch workflow doesn't support signed commits and some kernel devs explore alternative ways of signing [1].

[0]: https://mikegerwitz.com/2012/05/a-git-horror-story-repositor...

[1]: https://people.kernel.org/monsieuricon/introducing-b4-and-pa...

By "keybase providing alternative" do you mean that they have hosted, encrypted git repos?
If you're so inclined to go down a rabbit hole of 100+ hours of content, I highly suggest having a listen to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History [1]. Dan is particularly interested in military history, especially ancient military history. He has an episode on Caesar's conquest of Gaul (which he argues in any kind of modern context would be called a genocide) as well as a series on the great Persian kings, called the King of Kings. This is specifically about the Achaemenid Empire talking about Cyrus II, Darius, Xerxes and the likes.

Now as Dan would say, he doesn't find scientific and technological advancements particularly interesting (from a historical perspective). Like if Edison didn't invent the light bulb, someone else would've.

What he finds far more interesting is historical events that could've completely changed the course of history and one of those was the Battle of Marathon [2]. This was a battle between the Persians and the Greeks that the Greeks somehow won. Had they lost it would've changed the entire history of Europe given how important Greek culture was to everyone from the Romans on. Bear in mind when this happened, Rome was a small regional power at best.

He talks about the psychology of ancient warfare. One thing he notes is that the closer someone is to someone, the harder it is for them to (psychologically) kill them. From a gun at a distance is completely different to hand-to-hand combat.

At this time, the Greeks fought with spears that were very broad. Stab someone in the guts with one of those and their insides would literally spill out to the point where the likes of Herodotus described the ground at Marathon as being soaked red in blood.

Likewise, ancient culture and justice must be almost incomprehensible to us. Fun fact: the origin of the word "decimate". When a province rebelled against Roman Rule and Rome would crush them, insurrection was punished particularly harshly. People would be put in groups of 10 (hence DECImate) where each group was responsible for choosing which of those 10 would die and for killing that person.

How did people cope with these things? How would PTSD fit into this world?

EDIT: the way some downvote on HN makes me sad.

[1]: https://www.dancarlin.com/

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Marathon