skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am something you could consider smart; wrote first program as 6 years old, gave talks at conferences, worked on crypto-concesus algos, now I do research oriented consulting.

Some points:

- pattern recognition is basic brain function and everyone has it

- you need PERFECT health to be smart; check testosterone, sleep, weight, nofap, exercise etc.. 90% people have brain fog for some stupid fixable reason

- there is nothing wrong with CRUD app maintenance if you make good money. Challenge is nice, but gets old very fast, unless it is a hobby.

- avoid relationship until your life is in order. Huge time sink and ruins concentration.

- stop reading crap (politics, twitter... )
Our society certainly didn't start as a representative democracy or a free market -- slavery was very much still a pillar of the government and economy.

Fast forward a hundred years to the early 1900s and you have things like the Kern Resolution finding peonage and unfree labor in West Virginia mines.

Another century later and today we have ~7 million people under the purview of the prison system in the US [1], including people in prison for debt. (And in many places, these people are used for forced labor.) We have poverty level minimum wages and many systematic failures that prevent people from participating in democracy. It's subtler now than it was a hundred years ago, but there are still plenty of people who are excluded from participating from the economic or democratic institutions in this country.

Also, even if everyone had access, we used to have a vigorous labor movement, and socialism was considered a valuable part of our society. [2] There are plenty of people today who would argue that our society is at least partly socialist (and should be more socialist).

You can't claim a representative democracy and capitalist economy if there are unfree people and forced labor. Or if there are unequal access to either.

[1] https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2020.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidarity_Forever
The city and state have made barely any adjustment throughout the entire period, so I’m not sure what you’re referring to when you say that they’ve been adjusting. Fishing remains banned, in only this state and no other. People have written to the governor, protested, and yet nothing. Does that seem rational to you or does it seem like ignoring the voices of constituents (particularly those in central and East WA, who are not politically aligned with the governor).

Parks, golfing, fishing are all open in CA. Private construction should have been permitted this entire time since it is trivial to do it responsibly - but everything from new home construction on an open air site to remodels done by one person are not permitted. Numerous European countries have already taken their first incremental steps to reopening things but we don’t even have a date for those first steps in WA. And yet jogging and cycling are fine even though many studies show they’re more dangerous than most other outdoor activities.

As for parks - the city prevented people from gathering in open areas and likely caused them to gather in closed areas or in smaller parks. The big parks have tons of room and can easily be used responsibly, and the city and state need to strike that nuanced balance, instead of just using the most risk averse approach possible.
We won't have the economic counterfactuals really.

At some point, people would have got the idea about reducing contacts for themselves, but say that didn't happen in New York until 2 or 3 or 4 times as many people were infected. Not a ridiculous scenario, and who knows what the economic situation would be.
Wait two years before you make bold claims.
Super Mario Bros on Intellivision (work in progress)
Magnetocapacitance
To be fair, when it comes to being valuable, criminals consider violence like armed robbery and murder valuable because it helps them achieve their goals, and yet we agree that those things are not a benefit to society and created laws to discourage and punish such acts.
Investors who nurture a good bet early do get rewarded. Not always, but sometimes.

Covid-19 makes clear that we should be showering the people who stopped SARS, the many Ebola outbreaks, and more with gratitude.
Your conclusion does not follow from the premise. Perfect timing is always producing better result, but do we have a way to establish perfect timing in the moment, lacking the benefit of hindsight? It's very easy to overfit the answer.

If you do it too late then more people will die than could have, if you do it too early you will end up overreacting and sending economy into a tailspin every other year without a good reason. You will also lose trust of the people, killing your chances at effective containment in the future.

Also, sorry about the downvotes you're getting. I think you're raising a good point and in a good manner.
I think you hit the nail on the head here. This person tries to get us to believe they're stupid; but, if they believe that themselves, truly, then they're going to create self-fulfilling prophecies. They need to find something they're interested in to work on every day. 8 hours is a long time each day to be doing something, it's better if you're interested in it, so that at least some of those hours are fun.

And I will say, and I have often repeated that software development, programming, is a horrible job if you don't love it. Programming sucks if you don't enjoy it. It's too much thinking, too much abstracting, too much typing, too many meetings, and horribly, horribly boring - unless it's your thing, and then it's not.

OP, don't force it to be your thing if it's not your thing.

You may also have some depression. It may genuinely be worth seeing someone about that to help you navigate it and grow and cope with it. Depression is horrible, and any step that can be done to help yourself through it is a huge win for your own peace.
That is not at all my argument. I am saying the posted article paints a picture of Seattle and New York City being equally susceptible to a huge explosion of cases. The differences between the two cities (in terms of density, public transit, tourists, etc) is about as significant as between a city like Boston and a city like Manchester, New Hampshire.
What I'd love it's bingding easily remote directories as local. Not NFS, but a braindead 9p. If I don't have a tool, I'd love to have a bind-mount of a directory from a stranger, and run a binarye from within (or piping it) without he being able to trace the I/O.

If the remote FS is a diff arch, I'd should be able to run the same binary remotely as a fallback option, seamless.
Do you honestly believe that they are trying to do something other than stem the harm from this pandemic, or are you just protesting about something they did in the past that you're not happy about? If it is the latter, have you considered the harm that your protest may be doing?
> - Turn the HN angry mob mode off - it’s not helpful. We’re all in this together.

I actually believe this is helpful. Just in any democratic setting you want different types of players. You want the "burn the system down" people, because they provide harsh critiques and don't hold back. You want the "okay, but I have reservations" people, because they will push forward but also consider what they are doing (and will likely whistleblow if things get out of hand). You want the loyalists because they will push forward despite criticism. The trick is that you need a balance of these people (and the unmentioned players).

Specifically here I don't think we've even answered the question of "should we have contact tracing apps?" Because of this, I do think having that angry mob is helpful. They loyalists will push forward building it but the mob will help us decide if we even want that technology in our society. If we decide we do, we'll have it. If we decide we don't, well we'll know better how they would be designed.

__Being critical of those in power is a keystone to democracy.__
IQ tests are not pointless, the scores have strong correlation with lifetime achievement and are useful for population statistics about things like educational outcomes and the harms of childhood malnutrition. The meaningfulness of the test score breaks down if someone carries out a campaign of preparation, but that doesn’t make the tests useless. IQ testing gets a lot of flak from people who seem to have an axe to grind, in much the same way that BMI measurements get a lot of flak from people who fall well within the range where it’s useful. Sure, MENSA is stupid and BMI isn’t a useful measurement for professional athletes, but so what?
> the miniseries drew heavily from Svetlana Alexievich’s master work ‘Voices of Chernobyl’,

Some criticize this, saying that it's not a reliable source. Personally, I agree with you that it's a master work really worth reading.

And I was frankly disappointed too by how the miniseries used Alexievich's work.

For instance, they turned the deeply poignant love story between a condemn fireman and her devoted wife into some empty crap in which both individuals are just oblivious to the drama in their life.

I don't even understand the logic!
A Nobel price author gives you the most beautiful scene in which a bedridden dying hero remembers to offer flowers to his wife on Victory day...

... and you turn it into this?!
Depressing !!
But Google has millions of unpaid workers that could do part of the job: Recaptcha users.

I'm only half joking. If parts of the process can be outsourced in a responsible manner, I can't see why Google wouldn't.
I think there's still things that ring out to me as true even though I didn't have that experience (Grew up in Iowa). So I'll agree that it's not always the hyper-competitive aspect of it, but it's the need to have a personal brand and to push that out on social media. And the desire to escape from our current economic conditions by credentialing is still there, even though it's not nearly as intense, and not all people here feel it equally.
Faster JSON Support for iOS/macOS, Part 8: Dematerialize All the Things
Not too surprising from the company that deploys kubernetes to every local restaurant. :) https://medium.com/@cfatechblog/bare-metal-k8s-clustering-at...

Their own equipment engineering is also impressive, based on a high school classmate’s work there in Atlanta.
Teardown plz: new podcast hosting SaaS just launched
What I was eluding to was that irc (as a server to server protocol) is fine. As a client it has deficits but those are quite literally smoothed over by websocket capable bouncers and weechat relay.

IRC The protocol is not competing with slack. The IRC ecosystem is. And yes, it lost.
The idiots in question are endangering not only themselves, but everyone they come in contact with. This includes essential workers in transport, medicine, and retail. They also exacerbate the strain on critical health infrastructure. Preventing the collapse of critical medical infrastructure is the primary objective of social distancing.

Attending an anti-lockdown protest without taking proper social distancing measures is more akin to driving drunk on the freeway than it is to shooting heroin into one's veins. The latter can in many circumstances be understood to have negligible impact on the rights of others, the former cannot.

The question of "at what point do social distancing measures overstep the legitimate exercise of government power" is a nuanced one. It requires weighing individuals rights against one another in a situation where cause and effect are at best thinly statistical, emergent from collective behavior, and regionally variable (NYC != rural Kentucky).

No government is going to get their response to COVID-19 100% right, but I'm pretty sure focusing exclusively on individual self-harm would be an abysmal heuristic.
I'd second that, somewhat. The things I'd consider myself to be good at are the things I care about. I can still quite clearly distinguish between personal and "business" interests, and don't feel a blurriness between both if I do not want them to blurr, but it is the one thing that has helped me (apart from being at the right time at the right place) to progress in my career.

What I'd take away from what both godelski and me are saying (if I were you): Find topics that sound interesting to you, dig your heels in, learn about those, play with the concepts. 9 times out of 10 something will come out of it, and if its just yourself understanding better what you're actually looking for.
posix_spawn is a thing as well.
2M is far above the median net worth for Americans. If 2M is barely enough to survive on, then maybe Americans ought to tax wealth harder to build up a social safety net capable of taking care of them in their old ages.

> In my opinion that’s straight up immoral.

In comparison to the bottom 75/90 percent (rough estimate) not being able to survive their retirement.
Green Lake would be less crowded if those near living there could go to other parks that normally are far less crowded than Green Lake. However those other parks had their parking lots closed by the city, which means locals near you have no choice but to crowd into the running trails around Green Lake.

On the trails - I think we could easily force them to operate at half density by closing half the lot at popular trailheads. People would spread out to other locations as a result.

Even so, you don’t have to be 6 feet apart all the time. The WHO’s guidance is only 3 feet, for one. But you also get a benefit from just MOSTLY reducing contact, and even on crowded trails people aren’t on top of each other except at the destination. With mask requirements the risk is likely low.
I’ve seen enough colleagues who are just in it for the money and found a niche inside the company that avoids anything demanding. In that regard you can work in a mind numbing fashion that other, often lower paid, professions also have. I wouldn’t recommend it though because the trouble comes when switching jobs can’t be avoided.
There is nothing in this comment that strikes me as real. Not only was it completely unnecessarily to condescendingly talk about how allegedly smart you are, the points you gave sound like they came straight out of a wantrepreneur youtuber's vlog.
Ran out of disk space, want to run another service, want to check if there's any software updates.. I don't know, in my case I had it in a moving box for 1.5 years and I was pleasantly surprised it even booted and immediately started serving up stuff to my TV.
So this system uses the spec language ACSL (I assume it's a formal spec language, FSL).

How widely used is it? I've heard of TLA+ being very popular. Then there is Z notation, and about half a dozen or more others.

If there is no standard FSL, do I have to learn a new FSL everytime I want to apply formal methods to a slightly different system I'm working with?

Formal methods is a hard enough area. Lack of standardization makes it harder.
Betterweb List's Front End Weekly Roundup – Week #1
NYC, SF, Silicon Valley, Seattle, LA, etc. are all full of successful people who went to public universities that didn’t require crazy high school credentials to get into.
Weekly roundup of Frontend focused resources for building better experiences on the web
The Australian government is not a single monolothic institution. It's a set of hundreds of thousands of people with different agendas and intentions. You cannot assign singular agency to the entire government; rather we have to go case-by-case to understand the implications of programs like these.
Hard to offer any kind of constructive advice without some indication of your personality or what you do enjoy.

I'm skeptical of the idea that you're not smart enough. In my experience, becoming a good programmer requires some relatively low-threshold capacity for logical thinking combined with a tenacity for debugging and understanding how things work. Being a genius who picks up math and CS concepts quickly is far from required.

If you struggle with patterns and applications but are bored by simple CRUD apps then it may be the case that you just don't like programming that much. That would certainly make it very difficult to learn and retain anything.

Overall though, you sound more depressed than anything. If that is the case then it colors all perception of what you enjoy or don't enjoy, and probably should be addressed directly before making any major career decisions.
It is not as simple.
The main value proposition is this:
With a single file, you describe the desired state of your system. That file is configuration.nix.

You put in there what packages you want installed, what users, what SSH keys, what services systemd manages.

Then, you run `nixos-rebuild` and then you switch your system to that configuration. The old state of your system stays around until you run garbage collect. So you can rollback to it, if you want.
The connection is that the residents have simply come to accept those conditions and many related ones that probably will turn out to be relevant. It's a culture. (no pun intended)

I haven't been to Tokyo, but I have sat and watched groups of rats feast on curbside trash in Upper Manhattan. Many times. (And the roaches--ugh.)
It would have been more logical to limit ingress to the parks and trails according to the size of the place, much like was done with stores.

Greenlake cannot be cordoned off though, so it has to be just closed.
> Even assuming a single process (which can be talking to endpoints in many countries) should be locked to a specific locale is nonsense.

This doesn't matter. I'm not sure why you think this matters or what problems will be caused, but a server using a unicode locale (C.utf8 or en.utf8) doesn't localize things for those clients, it just is able to not crash when printing their usernames to log files.
A serious approach to science starts with study, likely decades. If politicians are serious about science, why did they study law or business and not science?

Provoking people with the label "hostile to science" helps no one, especially during a crisis where 2 million people still could die horribly.

Political and economic forces start wars which easily kill millions.

And concerning "hostile to science", is science:

> "I have the cure!"

"Bah! Science!!! Get it away from me!"

or

> "Science says you are to die today. First, give all your money to me, a rich guy."
This sounds like depression to me. You're having trouble finding activities that interest you and feeling pessimistic about the future. It's easy to get stuck thinking that everything is hopeless or you're going to feel like this forever.

Try taking some time off to decompress and talking to a psychologist. It's a slow process and it can be very challenging but with time you can start getting excited about new challenges again.
Not a coincidence. I talk about that a bit in my thesis on curves: https://levien.com/phd/phd.html
These are all state agencies. They're already sharing data with each other anyway (e.g. the jury selection tool is getting feeds from many of these other sources).

What huge legal issues? This is all the government. Of course it has lists of all of its citizens, and can and does use said lists.
Christine, very attractive and minimal site. Well done.

I see on your “new site” blogpost you mention “This content is markdown rendered by Purescript.”

..have you considered doing a write up with more detailed information as to how your site is generated or a howto? I think many might be interested.

Thanks!
The balance is that there are orders of magnitude more problems that might happen than problems that do happen.

So the devil is in the statistical details... Which is greater? The average effort required to prepare for all the possible problems, or the average damage caused by the subset of those issues that will actually develop into problems.
It is possible but extremely unlikely that anyone would ever bother to do this. Anyone that cared that much would just use something with source available and save themselves a whole lot of pointless effort that would have to be repeated every time a new binary was generated.
vacuum tube delivery might just deliver covid at high velocity everywhere.

I propose electronic delivery methods, maybe DSL + 3d food/widget/organ printers. The printers would require anti-virus software.
HI, have you been screened for ADHD/ADD? A number of the things you've said sound familiar to me. ADHD (generally) gets worse as you get older.
You're seeking completely perfect solutions in a time of crisis where a "good enough" solution might save a lot of lives. Cut them some slack for trying to stem the harm of the pandemic. This situation affects every human.
I love how these timelapses let you experience the fact that we’re all moving in something bigger.
I am the same but maybe because we've learnt over time that touching our makeup smudges it? In which case, perhaps it's a good idea to wear a lot these coming weeks!
Back in the 1980's, I heard virtually the same argument -- just replace "C++" and "visualization" with "assembly language" and "compilers".

There turned out to be lots of room for improvements at the top! We could put almost all of the old housekeeping and busywork into our tools, and use a much simpler language for describing the unique parts of our program that we actually care about.

I see no evidence that our current style of object-oriented programming is going to turn out to be the pinnacle of computing abstraction. The median language is (slowly but steadily) climbing the abstraction ladder, and each step brings it closer to an abstract visualization.
TOTAL AGREE MIKE. WELL SAID!
Swap performance has been similarly underinvested.
They seem to be different problems though, as that LWN article suggests. It's probably easier to checkpoint/restore an entire image's state than an individual process' state.

But even calls like gettimeofday() work differently when running on hypervisors than they do when running on bare metal
> The long term effect is arguable since we don't know if we can prevent the majority of people from getting infected.

That's why the phrase "slow the spread" makes sense. Even if we can't prevent people from getting infected eventually, we can slow the spread enough that hospitals can handle incoming patients. If everyone gets infected at the same time, there won't be enough ventilators to treat everyone.
German minister backs creating legal right to work from home
First of all, there were emergency protocols in place and radiation levels were monitored. While there was hope that incident could be contained and radiation levels were low no evacuation were needed, but it was planned and prepared. Imagine moving 35000-50000 people while providing food and accommodation.

Moreover if you compare it to Three Mile Island incident this was done faste and was organized better.

It's not about patriotism. Similary to volonteers during COVID outbreak people knew the danger but felt that they need to do something to prevent graver harm to society and people. Please note that we're talking about 1980s and Soviet people were properly informed about radiation and its effects.
Information here: https://github.com/NDevTK/DownloadBypass/wiki
Out of curiosity, what ties you to Gmail?
I don't ask for software complexity, but I also want to be able to tell it what I want it to do with absolute authority.

There will never be a happy medium.
You are smart enough to be a programmer, you just have misconceptions about what programmers are supposed to be.

All that really matters is if you can build things that work.

People who can do the above will get paid, can even be CTOs.

So what if Google wouldn't want you as a programmer, that's for a particular type of person.