skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is this site using some automated translation service? I get crazy odd names for the species when I visit from a Swedish IP address. Examples:

> Graycrowned Crane

> Grå krontrana (Swedish name)

> Grå krönad kran (NG namn)

Or

> White-backed vulture

> Vitryggig gam (Swedish name)

> Vitryggad gös & Vitryggade gärningen (NG names)
>If you assume something will automatically happen, without a particular mechanism

He didn't mention it, but there are some pretty obvious mechanisms for this to be true:

1. Automated drivers don't get tired.

2. Automated drivers may "see" more of their environment than a human can. Human sensors aren't upgradeable.

3. Automated drivers don't get drunk.

4. Automated drivers don't have emotions.

5. Automated drivers aren't distracted by the infotainment system, the children in the back seat, or even some thought about what just happened at work.

6. With time, automated drivers can be improved, while human weaknesses stay constant.

There are of course drawbacks:

1. Humans have intuition about situations they've never been in. Most AI/machine learning still generalizes poorly.

2. The programming may be buggy.

3. The datasets may be inadequate.

So what will happen is definitely out there, but there are clear mechanisms for this to happen.
Throw your nVidia card in the bin and be free. After many years with nVidia I removed the card and I've been happily using Intel hardware for a year now.
The specific assertion was that "NZ doesn't have the same close traffic with any early covid hotspot", but that's demonstrably false.

Perhaps there were more Swedes traveling in general, but that is neither here nor there. [There were an average of 16,300 people arriving in NZ each day in early March.] NZ did in fact have plenty of overseas arrivals returning from various early hotspots (such as New York and Italy) and this is reflected in the confirmed case data showing that a whopping 39% of all of our cases were infected during their overseas travel.

Furthermore, every single significant cluster of cases was kickstarted by an index case that had recently returned from overseas.

It wasn't distance or being an island that protected NZ from experiencing an epidemic outbreak, but rather the rapid action from our government: travel restrictions, isolation/quarantine of arrivals, and strict lockdown of the entire country.
>Ubuntu is also researching if they can get Adobe on board.

Where did you hear about this?
RSI's are a result of prolonged use of the same apparatus, switching to phone after long day of computer use would help in that case. Doesnt help with the eyes or the forward head posture, i agree.
It is released in the afternoon. Someone posted the releae notes a bit too early.
What? In Europe he certainly belongs to the better known composers. And the Largo from the New World symphony is one of the most popular classical pieces. Here in Austria it has even been made into a Christmas song called “Weihnachtsstern“ (Christmas star).
It isn't released yet, right? My package manager isn't bumping up.
> The only 'con' is the pushing of Snap packages.

I don't get why they're doing that. Snaps have mostly created problems for me, like they don't scale when other apps do, or the styling is off, or they don't show up properly in the software manager. The snap daemon on one of my laptops always blocks the shutdown by 30 seconds. Generally a rather confusing experience.
For a long time I've been using Lubuntu on my laptop. However, a couple of years ago they changed focus and

From wikipedia:

Lubuntu was originally touted as being "lighter, less resource hungry and more energy-efficient", but now aims to be "a functional yet modular distribution focused on getting out of the way and letting users use their computer"

I stopped updating my OS since (I'm on 14).

Does anyone care to suggest an ubuntu-like distribution for someone like me who wants their OS light?
considering how sars2 may be infecting through aerosols, it might not be a great idea to cycle for high-risk people . OTOH, keeping people outdoors reduces the infection rate by 19 times , and the sunlight kills the virus in 3 minutes, so anything that promotes outdoor instead of indoor congregations is good

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041202...

https://news.yahoo.com/sunlight-destroys-coronavirus-very-qu...
There should just be a common protocol for all electical devices - heaters, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, computers, TVs, toasters - everything. Some devices might ignore it, but they should still have the data port and the microcontroller responding with "power regulation not supported". The state should regulate that like it regulates normal power sockets, it's a net benefit for everybody and the cost is minimal.

We can just add usb port to regular wall sockets and make a new power plug with that.

Of course the socket should be backward compatible, but any new devices would require the full plug and responding to the protocol.

Over 10 years we could have an effective grid-wide gigawatthour battery. And everybody would only pay for it like 5 USD every time they buy a new device :)

The cost of a cheap microcontroller, power regulator and an usb plug is like <5 USD. And the possibilities of energy savings are huge. There are also big usability improvements (want to have lights learning your habits and pretending you're home when you're on vacations - someone will make that product).

Want to make sure you switched off that iron when you went to a party? No problem - connect with a smarpthone and check (and switch it off if needed).

There could be several categories of devices with different priorities and default power settings that you could change if you want to:

- background, critical

- background, optional

- background, opportunistic

- interactive, critical

- interactive, optional

- interactive, dangerous if left alone

- bidirectional (like Tesla wall, or a car charger if you want to power your house from your car battery when there is a blackout)

And the house could detect if you're home, and disable the iron if you're not and throttle the freezer and all heaters to optimize the power usage.

Automated vacuum cleaners nad chargers could start by themselves when the energy is effectively free and stop for a moment when there's a shortage.

This will get especially important when electric cars are more common - you don't want everybody to start charging them when they get back home.
> Can anyone prove it?

> The burden of proof is on you to show that they did not earn it.

It was a response to "Didn't they earn it?" so the burden of proof is on them.

> Do they need it?

> Irrelevant. It's theirs whether they need it or not.

So why can't it be given to anybody else whether they need it or not?
Did they fix the dbus (?) bug that made some applications like FileZilla or VLC hang for about a minute on startup? [0]

[0] https://askubuntu.com/questions/1184774/some-applications-on...
Even as a Windows guy, I was wondering: Why would you use anything else than the terminal? When you understand deb packages then you only want the terminal. Everyone else, will want to use a UI and will have no idea what a deb file is.
Future Trends of Human-Machine-Interfaces
So far, I'm very impressed with 20.04 on my personal laptop (a Thinkpad L390). HiDPI works better out-of-the-box (I didn't actually need to enable scaling manually, but did have to add a Chrome and Teams .desktop file with --force-device-scale-factor=1.2). Power management is much better out-of-the-box too (I've gone from 2-3h battery to 4-8h depending on workload, rivalling what I see under Windows).

But you're right about Snaps. I love the concept (easier distribution, fewer dependency issues especially if you're a few years into the lifecycle of an LTS release) but they're not, in my opinion, production-ready yet so it's frustrating to see them pushed by Ubuntu. The main issues we have are the slow startups compared to non-snap apps (which is felt more acutely on old hardware with spinning disks) and the fact that they don't work if /home lives on an NFS server. That rules out their use for many academic and enterprise deployments.
The Heinsberg study specifically said they shouldn't extrapolate to the entire country since the epidemic there had some unique characteristics. E.g: they had an event which boosted spread a lot.
Even if they did make the world's greatest AR hardware of 2020, they wouldn't have a great product because they wouldn't have clear use cases to sell it, and it would be too hobbled by resource constraints of the available tech - much like pen computers of the 90s.

If it were the scifi-like AR glasses of the future, perhaps that would sell itself due to all the dreamed up ideas in movies and tv, but that's pretty far afield of what's possible today.
Lenovo X1E is a laptop... So removing the GPU will be a bit of a challenge ;)

I thought of turning the GPU off under Linux, but external displays (through the thunderbolt port) can only be used with the nVidia GPU. I need external displays for my work, so disabling the nVidia GPU is not an option for me.
A good look at major changes to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS since the last LTS 18.04
One part that interests me is the discussion about simulation testing in "4.3.3.
FEEDBACK THROUGH MONITORING AND SIMULATION" (p. 31 in the PDF).

Alan Perlis says:

"I'd like to read three sentences to close this issue.

1. A software system can best be designed if the testing is interlaced with
the designing instead of being used after the design.

2. A simulation which matches the requirements contains the control which
organizes the design of the system.

3. Through successive repetitions of this process of interlaced testing and
design the model ultimately becomes the software system itself. I think
that it is the key of the approach that has been suggested, that there is
no such question as testing things after the fact with simulation models,
but that in effect the testing and the replacement of simulations with
modules that are deeper and more detailed goes on with the simulation
model controlling, as it were, the place and order in which these things
are done."

What happened to that technique? I tried to look at the papers that cite Brian
Randell's "Towards a methodology of computer systems design" paper, which is the
basis for the discussion (and which you can find later in the same PDF), but
couldn't really find more than a couple of papers and they didn't go so deep
into the details.

It seems that simulation testing only recently resurfaced with Will Wilson's
2014 Strange Loop talk about how FoundationDB is tested. In fact they seems to
have done exactly what Alan Perlis said in 1968, but they never mention any
source of inspiration/prior work. Was the technique independently rediscovered,
or had they in fact read the (in)famous 1968 NATO software engineering report?
Why would you do find / ... instead of locate ... ?
Desolder the NVIDIA card on a laptop?
These vessels can sit out or avoid storms just fine. They are not abandoned hulks, they have plenty of fuel onboard and an active crew. Weather systems in this area don't develop from nowhere, they originate in the far west and can be seen and their movement predicted a long time in advance. These ships can travel hundreds of miles in the days before a serious storm arrives where they were.
And one important aspect of being a "cyclist" is to regularly drive some distances, like > 10miles. The biggest problem with bike paths is, that they are often decided by people, who mainly drive cars and only very occasionally, without much training and experience take some short joy rides of bikes and think this qualifies them as cyclists.

You don't have to be sporty at all, but once you cycle at least once per week > 10 miles, your perception of bike paths changes quite considerably.
I work in big business (a large bank) and see gross inefficiencies. I also see vendors aggressively trying to sell us solutions to these inefficiencies. I.e. the solutions already exist and creating them may not be the hard part - the hard part is to get companies to adopt them, given how disruptive a rollout of many of these solution is.
You may be able to either:

- Use Nouveau instead of the proprietary driver

- Use a nested X/wayland server, which should then presumably support fractional scaling

- Use non-fractional scaling and adjust font sizes
The only thing that holds back my Employer to switch to Linux for 6500+ Desktops is Microsoft Office and full MS Exchange compatibility. The Collegues who need Adobe Products just have to work with Apple Machines anyway.
Phoenix Framework v1.5.0 has been released
>The only 'con' is the pushing of Snap packages.

The graphical "gnome software" software installer was replaced in the default install by a snap-only fork named "Snap Store" with no support for Flatpak (see https://bugs.launchpad.net/snap-store/+bug/1871944). Were there some technical reasons for this move or was it a business decision to kneecap the other package format?
I use Gentoo at home and up until a year ago at work (when my replacement didn't want to deal with it).
Would you outperform uncompressed TIFF with sufficient copies of a compressed file? Or compressed file plus parity file?
I could see why this might've entered into part of the discussion in a review for the original iPhone SE in 2016, but for a second iteration of this model it seems like trodden ground to point out that many average consumers don't like or need change, nor the price tag that comes with that change.

On the other hand, the 10s saw a dramatic increase in model variation in Apple's product line. It's been said before but I now have a fair amount of trouble knowing whether an iPhone model is current gen or not, I see people talking about iPhone 8, iPhone X, iPhone 11, iPhone XR, iPhone 11 Pro and now the iPhone SE has had a refresh again. A far cry from the canonical product line where Apple insisted one device was perfect for all... Whether that's a positive or a negative is up for debate. Samsung were doing fairly well until the S10 line where there were three versions of the Note and non-Note models. Google's Pixel line appears to be the last to keep with roughly one phone a generation (though the 3a slightly disrupts that rule).
AWS is now African AF as it opens Cape Town region in South Africa
Same here. What if Airbnb has option where you pay extra for a deep clean before you check-in from approved vendors?
Awesome. Now let's wait for Elementary to upgrade (all my Linux machines with a GUI run it)
satoshi
BillionShieldsChallenge Against Coronavirus Video
> about 5 µs/km

Which puts it at 200km in a millisecond (5 microseconds is 1 / 200 of a millisecond.) Like I said "modern communications is at a fraction of lightspeed", although I didn't want to guess what fraction. But 200 / 600 = 1/3 is a reasonable fraction, seems legit.
BillionShieldsChallenge Against Coronavirus
Help your friends and neighbors recycle empty soda bottles into face shields and become a hero! #BillionShieldsChallenge #Bottles2Shields Twitter @BillionShields
Is this the same "alkaline diet" that considers all citrus fruits to be alkaline?

That should be all you need to know about how silly that whole thing is.

Human blood has a normal pH range of 7.35 to 7.45, very tightly regulated by the body. The pH value of food does nothing to change this, especially since it has to go in the stomach, which as you hopefully know is full of strong acid.
Gain of Function Research: what do bioweapons labs actually work on?
cycomanic says it better than I; science is not much more than the systematic creation and review of evidence. It isn't easy but it isn't usually very exciting. There would be a scientific consensus that you should get out of the way of a passing vehicle without any need for peer review.

> I'd like to know your stance on climate change, btw.

* Never seen an explanation that convinced me I, my descendants or anyone I know could be at risk from climate change. Particularly after calibrating expectations on the huge amount of background risk over 100 years. Climate change is less threatening than other alternatives over the century (eg, WWIII US/China for economic reasons, peak oil/returning to a pre-fossil-fuel standard of living, maybe it turns out some sort of 1:100 year solar storm takes out the communications grid, plain overpopulation).

* Society could have gone nuclear at any point from around 1970 and solved the coal part of the fossil fuel problem. I've never seen a push for that in a climate demonstration. I don't think the activists are serious about solving problems; they are more interested in making people respect their opinions. It doesn't look to me like they really perceive a threat - they havn't seen anything that scares them enough to try working with their opponents to find compromise solutions. Fukushima vs. the more far out predictions on the climate front are not even remotely comparable levels of risk.

* We're much more likely to be able to solve problems if we embrace cheap energy than trying to preemptively guess at and mitigate uncertain threats.
Snaps also create a myriad on mount points which is quite annonying. I like Appimage though.
I don't know if they've removed the ability to do it. I don't think you've ever had to do it. You can just hit space, or just start typing your password from the lock screen.
I never said you’re trying to convince readers; it is simply interesting to observe the impedance mismatch in play, as yet another case study :-)
Google is cutting summer-intern pay by as much as 50% in countries like Canada
In China they have lots of new MIPS developments based on existing MIPS architecture.

The question it's not if someone will use some old MIPS ISA in a few years from now on, the question is if someone will improve the ISA from now on, in the same way x86 and ARM are consistently being improved.

Some companies are still fabbing old Z80 CPUs, but that's not to say Z80 has a bright future.
Ask HN: Solutions for wearable proximity sensors (for social distancing)?
Hi,

I am looking for wearables that can help with real-time proximity detection (that for example vibrate when you are too close). The context being the coronavirus & social distancing (in a corporate/industrial environment) of course.

Examples of a few Belgian companies working on this:

- RTLoc: https://rtloc.com/
- Romware: https://www.romware.io/
- Lopos SafeDistance: https://www.lopos.be/en/

Also, I was wondering if anyone knows of open-source solutions, or apps. I find a lot of examples of contact tracing tech, but no real-time detection. I guess with an app for example it's a bit difficult due to the accuracy of bluetooth & gps signals.

Thank you for any leads you may have!
BillionShieldsChallenge Against Coronavirus Video French
How to Use Finder as a MacVim File Drawer
Clearly I have been doing completely unsafe things for some twenty years now. This blows my mind.
Sorry I just kinda found this funny since it's basically becomes an IRC client that you can't chat in.
Hyperdome – the safest place to reach out
Interestingly enough, Fractal scaling worked for me in 18.04, but it doesn't work in 20.04 (the thing just crashes). Anyways, hoping for a fix
BillionShieldsChallenge Against Coronavirus Video Arabic
> with supervisors, you mostly have just one concern for reliability ("how do I start this into a known, good, consistent state?"), rather than hundreds ("what happens if -this- fails? Or that? Or that other thing?")

Thank you for this comment. I have used Elixir for a couple of years and is a concept I have always understood but have never been able to explain coherently and succinctly.
Not sure if it's related, but I have a nice bug with VLC where if I suspend my machine with it open, /var/log/syslog fills my main disk to the brim with error messages!
BillionShieldsChallenge Against Coronavirus Video Spanish
This Dr Robert O Young? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-38650739

> The father of the alkaline diet, Robert O Young, is hailed as an inspiration by one of the UK's most popular food writers, Natasha Corrett, but he faces a jail sentence for practising medicine without a licence. One patient who believed he could cure her cancer, British army officer Naima Houder-Mohammed, paid thousands of dollars for his alkaline treatment, which consisted mainly of intravenous infusions of baking soda.
BillionShieldsChallenge Against Coronavirus Video Russian
I can do this too. Being optimistic just means having positive bias.

My point was about optimistic bias you get when you frame every discussion about negative aspects of something as fear. Which is exactly what you was doing there. This rhetorical trick:

> Why point out it could all go bad? That seriously can't count for an intelligent assessment of the situation. It's an expression of fear. Why don't you read the optimistic reading more often? It's almost like people think fear was virtuous.

Buying this, there is no way to rationally point out that things could be bad. You just ruled out arguments of the people you disagree with without engaging with them. Only optimistic prediction or information is allowed in rational discussion.

> Where do people discuss the postponed cancer operations and their casualties, what is the cost of livelihoods destroyed, like yoga studios and hair dresser small businesses? How do you even measure it?

I distinctively remember those being discussed. You can discuss them. I am not saying that these should not be discussed.

But they are not optimistic. They are pessimistic and if I wanted to frame them as "fear", I could. And it would be equally dishonest rhetorical trick.
If you're just looking for a DE/WM that's light on resources, I can definitely recommend tiling window managers like i3 [1].

I'm not sure what other changes would be in your sightlines given that you were happy with Ubuntu, but I usually go to the Arch wiki in those times to see what fat I can trim off of my setup.

[1] https://i3wm.org/
Just switch to LibreOffice. The dependency on .docx/.xlsx is an overblown propaganda.

I personally had a business in 2007..2011 that replaced windows for Linux. All that time I heard that same old song again: "But but MS Office is so essential!". Turned out, not so much, on over 5000 PCs in several dozen companies.

Update: business eventually failed, for one simple reason - Ubuntu Linux is too freaking stable. The idea was transferring customers to Ubuntu, and have them pay a monthly service fee to do maintenance and fixes. And we have soon discovered that a properly configured GNU/Linux desktop PC can run for YEARS without maintenance at all. Customers had it figured out too and opted to do one-time fees when something goes wrong, and it just wasn't sustainable.
I'm a full-stack Typescript dev (React, Node.js, etc.). Lately I've been more intrigued by functional programming. I feel like I've gone pretty deep into OO and classes, inheritance, etc. Looking back, I feel like there is a better way to structure that, and the glimpse of functional programming that I've seen seems to help with this boilerplate.

I've heard only good things about Elixir/Phoenix, so I'm thinking about picking it up for my next project. One thing about JS/TS is that the ecosystem is well developed, especially on the deployment side. For side projects especially, I like to minimize my dev ops configs and utilize "serverless" type stuff (i.e. Zeit/Vercel, FaaS, etc). I haven't seen much of this in Elixir-land, but hey, maybe that's an area I can help innovate in.
Create Short Videos in Minutes
While I would agree it's certainly not insignificant, fractional means, say, 1.5.x. A nice high-resolution display will be 2x, which will generally result in a nicer experience (largely due to how software deals with it or not). Now many people do indeed have displays where a fractional multiplier works better, but as a buying rec - try to avoid them.
Whenever you have trouble compiling something, just look at how gentoo approaches it. They're the last bastion making sure OSS is actually buildable.

Them are their users most likely are the #1 source of build documentation, bug reports and fixes in OSS