skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, OpenWhisper is well-understood, which is the algorithm WhatsApp and Signal _claim_ to have implemented. There is no proof the server-side doesn't have a means to acquire the data. And when the context is proprietary software, chances are _always_ against the weak link in the chain, the end-user.
The US government model and the mindset of people seems to make it very hard to do massive mobilization in a short period of time, compared to countries like China. From which mobilization is very useful in situations like pandemics, or more straightforward, wars.

Of course, there are many advantages from this model. The comparison between these models of governments reminds me of 'the Prince' from Machiavelli. In that book, he compared France with the Ottoman Empire. French king has relatively weak power since the nobles own their fiefs. While the Ottoman Empire there are only province officers, and the sultan can easily move or fire those officers. The comparison seems to echo what the US and China's modern political systems and possibly the pros and cons remain the same.

PS: There's a documentary from the BBC named 'the Chinese Mayor' that might help people have an initial understanding of the Chinese political system from a mayor's perspective. Chinese officers transfer from provinces to provinces in a very frequent manner, in order to avoid the local governments have too much power. This feature remains the same in China for two thousand years.
It’s true that these exist but they are rare and not typically advertised. Studies have also shown that one doesn’t necessarily get better outcomes from the kind of objective refractometry that an autorefractor gives (because eyesight is a combination of the optical properties of the eye and things happening in the brain/optical nerves)
> On a higher level, some potential buyer will look at the companies financial statements, and figure out if the share price is too high / low for how the company is performing, from a financial standpoint. This is called "fundamental analysis", and you can easily find step-by-step analysis reports of such on various companies.

How does this work if a company doesn't pay out dividends? There's no investment to return unless someone buys from you at the same or higher price... right?
Basic probability. How come when I flip a coin it is just as likely to come up heads or tails even if it has just been heads 5 times in a row?

I understand the physical properties of the coin make it so it is an independent event but if I were to run the experiment multiple times the number of times it would be heads after 5 heads would not be an even probability, it would be unlikely since 6 heads in a row is a rare event.
Ask HN: What's going to happen to startup IPOs after Covid-19?
FWIW, I agree with you. I don't watch football, and I strongly believe that these kids should be protected.

At the same time you cannot _possibly_ be serious about equating the NFL drafts with the Corona virus safety measures in terms of their impact on other people and harm that can be caused!

That's like saying "Well, I might have engaged in risky behavior, but I won't practice safe sex now because these people I met last week didn't wear their seatbelts."
Show HN: An iPhone app that lets you pick colors and identify PANTONE colors
> So the alternative variants that go under that brand are probably a dead letter.

Government-mandated alternative applications will probably be excepted, too.
3 Crucial Strategies to Becoming a Programmer
People generally expect equality to produce either true or false. Not a tri-value pair.

That interpretation makes sense to me when I read the docs, but is way too easy to miss when I'm actually doing comparisons.
Weekly Robotics #88
- Dropped out of high school at 15.

- First job working at a blueprint shop for minimum wage, collating paper and running printers.

- Quit and got a job at Fastsigns, a sign shop, for $12/hr doing front desk/customer service.

- Applied for the same role at another sign shop for a few dollars more an hour. Started learning photoshop and illustrator and running a phpBB forum in my spare time.

- Started doing low-paid contract design and web dev jobs I found on Craigslist.

- Quit to work on my own. Failed to pay rent. Needed help from my parents.

- Got a job as an apartment manager, in exchange for free rent in a studio at the apartment complex.

- Continued learning programming and web development, taking odd jobs and barely making enough money to live combined with the free rent from apartment managing.

- Applied for a JS development position at a startup without knowing JS. They hired me after doing some free design work for them, and because I knew one of the devs that worked there. Quit my apartment management job. Continued freelancing on the side.

- That startup failed, but at this point I knew a lot more. Applied for another software engineering startup and got a job working as a full stack engineer.

- Fired from that job for being a dick and not working well with the team. (They went on to get acquired for 600 million and I missed out on probably 1 mil from that).

- Continued freelancing. Started doing contract work for a hedge fund my friend was CTO at.

- My friend left and I was offered VP engineering role there.

- Quit because I hated 9-5. Planned to move to SE Asia to live off savings and start working for myself.

- My friend had started a company and I thought it was cool so I joined as cofounder/CTO. Worked without pay for almost a year.

- We raised $1 million in seed money and continued working on that almost two years.

- I left because we were running out of money, I no longer believed in the vision, and was sick of SV culture.

- I’m 32 now. Moved to SE Asia to Yangon, Myanmar and now working for myself, writing an ebook, and focused on building a company that I care about that sustains me.

Along the way I learned PHP, JS, C, Ruby, Python, Haskell, SQL, *unix, management, marketing.

Lessons I wish I learned sooner: Be nice to everyone, don’t wait for tomorrow to do what’s in your heart or your dreams, exercise and eat right.
> tribalism sucks

Arguably tribalism is just the consequence of our species being social animals, and therefore at the core of our essence - for better and worse ...
It doesn't matter if it's legally enforceable.

All that matters is that they tried.
The Rwandans Offering Themselves as Mosquito Bait
Sure but the hard part to understand and accept is that ANY squiggle can be represented by a weighted sum of sinusoids...I mean, that's really an amazing insight, and I don't think it's obvious even after-the-fact. Forget about the details of computing coefficients - just the fact that it works at all remains counter-intuitive to me. (A neat visualization would ask the user to wiggle their mouse, producing a sparkline of some finite length, and then, in real-time, update a frequency domain representation of the motion, perhaps represented as a bunch of connected circles that rotate steadily but at different rates to produce an equivalent graph)
I'm no pharmacologist but I think we would be extremely lucky if one of existing antivirals also works here. I don't think that antibody drugs will be an important tool. They're extremely hard to manufacture (and hence very expensive). I don't think we could satisfy demand.

It would be great though if one of those studies found an effective drug!
Yeah, but 5 heads followed by 1 tail is also a rare event. Basically, after drawing 5 heads you have a choice between two rare events which are equally probable. The same after drawing anything else, not just 5 heads.
Read the accepted answer to this question: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2800964/benefits-of-prot...
Don't use an abbreviation BEFORE defining it.

Come on. This is tiresome.
The issue with wave-particle duality is that most of us think about it backwards.

The universe is actually made of quantized fields. Both particles and waves are imprecise models/approximations. There's no such thing as a particle, instead there are just excitations of this field which we cannot measure with complete accuracy.
If it makes you feel any better, you may regard yourself complicit every time you leave a scrap of meat on your plate.
spoiler: the deviation is insignificant
World Models is a good paper, but is definitely not the top three most significant RL papers.
Decorated Lambda Handlers
Yes. It seems like a fairly obvious idea and I have no doubt it will become more and more widespread and built into general purpose apps (such as maps)
I just could not agree with you less here, sir.

Your idea is a shortcut to tyranny, and must be peacefully opposed by all holding liberty dear.
You do "break the state of the whole freaking system". Once you've read the output, you're done. You have to set up your initial state again and run the computation from scratch.
> See, if my lifespan is 4.5 billion years, then I can just sit here and wait until Andromeda become a daily light show when it finally got close enough.

Well, not quite. It’d be quite static as the merger would take a long time on the scale of a human lifetime.
I guess some people feel all "leet" by using abbreviations without (or before) defining them and expecting everyone else to run around looking them up.

It's tired and lame.
Is there a pointer on where to read more about challenges like this - technical information on how space com systems work, and what some example CTFs are?
Additionally, many problems are can be converted to matrix operations, like graph algorithms.

Note that matrix multiplication takes O(n^2) time with a quantum computer, but O(n^2.807) time on a classical computer.
Excellent points. To add, and I’m not taking away from the technical effort, but the use of “native graph” is rather misleading. Existing computer architecture cannot represent a graph with sequentialized memory access (1-dimensional). So any representation has to make assumptions and use random memory access patterns. A longer discussion here (obvious bias aside, the other no longer works at DSE): https://www.datastax.com/blog/2013/11/letter-regarding-nativ...
Although the really nasty bugs (like this one) happen when the individual bytes are all sensible, but the meta-level structure of the file is toxic.
> But this is a global pandemic, that can only begin to be approached at the national level.

Why pick national? Almost any aspect of the response can be implemented on any level of governance except maybe individual.

It isn't at all obvious that centralising on the federal level is sensible. Realistically; the optimal organisational unit for the response might be the catchments around each hospital and so somewhere around the local level.
A friend of mine showed me this writeup when I asked a similar question, and it helps to clear up a lot of the "magic" movement:

http://www.righto.com/2011/07/cells-are-very-fast-and-crowde...

But in a nutshell, the animations are heavily idealized, showing the process when it succeeds, slowing it way, way down, and totally ignoring 90% of the other nearby material so you can see what's going on. Then you remember that you have just a bajillion of cells within you, all containing this incredibly complex machinery and... it's really kindof humbling just how little we actually know about any of it. Not to discredit the biologists and scientists for whom this is their life's work; we've made incredible amounts of progress over the last century. It's just... we're peeking at molecular machinery that is so very small, and moves so quickly that it's nigh impossible to observe in realtime.
It's more of a struggle with those sort of products. I've had feature requests that I implemented because they sounded interesting but it turned out almost no one used them.

I'm willing to bet tools like Photoshop are riddled with those as once you have added a feature it's almost impossible to remove it.
This article is in German but one could easily use Google translator (or another brand).

The article thesis basically is that the elderly in French retirement homes (EHPAD) have nearly no access to costly medical treatments.

The article cites several people including Michel Parigot, a French scientist and several respected investigative newspapers.

I think the situation is similar at least to what is reported to some other EU countries but is at the opposite of the official narrative of having an excellent welfare state or that hospitals are well staffed or have enough equipment.

Often retirement staff has to lie on age when they ask an hospital or SAMU (emergency medical service) to care for an elder, as there are regulations that mandate that for various diseases such as cancer, above 80 yo someone could not have access to the same care as the younger people, or at least a derogation authorization by ARS (the healthcare supervisory body) is required. Regulations have changed with different administrations but since a few years they are more drastic.

Some numbers to support the article:
In France twice the number of people died at home or in EHPAD than in hospital.

https://www.lejdd.fr/Societe/coronavirus-pourquoi-la-mortali...

https://www.lejdd.fr/Societe/environ-9000deces-adomicile-sel...

https://sante.lefigaro.fr/article/faut-il-integrer-le-criter...
Gitlab vs. GitHub – What Are the Key Differences and Which One Is Better?
Ask HN: Could someone please create a GNU GPL contact tracing diary?
I have seen several people on this site asking how they can help, well...I have put a lot of thought into that question and have come up with an answer.

Please create a decentralized tool framework that will allow "people" to record the people that "they" may have come in proximity(Close Contact) to.

Yes Apple and Google are developing tools that will provide this, but do we really want to put the fate of our societies and lives into the hands of "for profit" corporations? Or worse government bureaucrats?

I am not capable of developing this, my technical skills amount to flashing a SD card and stuffing it into a SoC computer. BUT.. I know there are several people that frequent this site that ARE capable of developing this tool. Beyond that I am the poster child for dying from this virus, I don't think I will be able to avoid catching the virus and when I do, the odds dont look good for me. So in a final attempt to make my troubled life not be all in vane, I am humbly asking for you to create this framework for the betterment of mankind.

The only way to ensure privacy and in turn convice people to trust and engage is to make the tool open and transparent. Put the control into the hands of everyone and give society the opportunity to succeed without being under the thumb of big business or government.

Ideally I would think a system with the option for user developed plugins would allow for the fastest launch and distribution. Beyond that I don't really know.

I know this might sound like I'm asking for you to come up with a cure for the common cold...but really thats what were all waiting for in the current idea of a vaccine.

Thankyou for taking the time to read my question and please consider development of a free for everyone contact tracing personal diary framework.
False dichotomy, one can tweet with a link to the full blog post.
I'm the one that made the original composite that set this whole thing off[1]! By "whole thing" I mean it's been this amazing meme-like recurring wave that's ebbed and flowed continuously in the 6 years since I made it. It's so wonderful to see. I'm not even an astronomer, I just used to like looking at Nasa's Astronomy Picture of the Day[2], which gave me the very simple idea to paste Andromeda into a picture of the moon. I'd seen a composite of the moon pasted next to Andromeda on APOD, and just wondered what it would be like the other way round. Of course my original image has been corrected many times since then by people with actual astronomy credentials. This is my favourite, corrected for both size and to be in the true colour spectrum: https://i.imgur.com/2pbfvJa.jpg

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/spaceporn/comments/1u0dxs/andromeda...

2. https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
Amazon's marketplace and delivery service have a "captive" market due to the closure of bricks and mortar retail.

The general move to the cloud rewards AWS/GCP/Azure with the two primary "winners" currently being AWS and Azure. This will continue as companies move to the cloud, but expect there to be a flattening of growth.

As for Facebook and Google, they rely on advertising, which relies on consumption. When there is 10+% unemployment and 20+% underemployment, consumption is highly likely to at least flatten if not fall off a cliff, particularly in elective consumption like high end electronics.

The share market is not indicative of the economy and is a lagging indicator of company revenues.
This! I participated at couple hackathons and solved the challenges of the sponsors. Basically free idea generation for corporations. Low networking value, only innovation managers and HR for graduate recruitment. Afterwards I got invitations to hackathons where I must even pay for participation. Thank you, but no!
As someone newly reading about this proposal, I'm curious to know which element of privacy is most of concern to people -- to educate myself on what tradeoffs some policymaker might understand and make some judgement call about. (wishful thinking)

(Suppose someone in charge of virus response is totally naive and says the old phrase, "what does anyone have to be worried about losing privacy, in the face of this public health crisis?" Or, "why wouldn't we want to know exactly when and where the transmission happened, to identify some trouble spot and stop it?")

Are we more concerned about one's location every 5 min being revealed? What if coffee shops/bus stations/shopping centers broadcast beacons and essentially became fixed known users -- doesn't that defeat this? And doesn't your phone already reveal location to anyone with sufficient access / authority on cell networks?

Are we more concerned about revealing who you associate with? Again, isn't that already possible through cell locations?

Are we not losing something by giving up recording the location element of the transmission event?

What are some examples of how this technology (if implemented wrong) could be misused, that are not already available?

And here's a related public policy question -- if we think ridiculous the people who are jumping to reopen businesses (and states) at the cost of putting people's lives at risk, why is privacy so important versus saving lives if a more effective (but slightly less private) information gathering mechanism could be implemented?
All I can say as a speaker of non-US English is that “Metallica is” and “Nirvana is” still sound completely wrong to my ear.
re: Qualia

I can't say this will necessarily assuage your curiosity about consciousness, but I mostly stopped being overly curious about this once I realized that, it's likely only a manifestation of the aggregation of all of the individual sensory experiences our bodies have.

In other words, when you think about planet-scale phenomena such as how humans more or less all feel "connected" and non-hostile because civilization (in the most advanced countries) has reached a point where hostility is no longer essential for survival. That "experience", for each of us, is ours alone but it seems to be so ubiquitous that we can't take credit for that experience or insight as individuals. It leads me to believe a large part of our conscious experience of the world is shared and independent of the brain's capacity. More precisely, humans are (universally) experiencing phenomena that are independent of our brain's capacity to process and understand them.
As soon as I saw this I felt the urge to deploy like a hundred workers in some cloud engine to spam commits.

Unfortunately, I have work to do. Just discovered this at the start of a monday here in CEST.
This is a very long, debate-fueled, page.

It reminds me of the page on Toilet Paper[1].

It is 35,330 bytes

Meanwhile the page on Toilet Paper Orientation[2],
of which there are two choices:

- OVER

- UNDER

goes on and on, and manages to weigh in almost 50% larger
than toilet paper at 49,667 bytes.

Amusingly, "vertical" is actually mentioned, but how
a hero got that in, I don't know. Probably killed
or captured.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_paper
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_paper_orientation
I haven’t but I’ve wondered about them, too. Thanks for posting!
Google Meet call with Googlers see exec's son praise Zoom
The fight with Huawei means America can't shape tech rules
Which is why the article about GTA4, for instance, specifically mentions it is written in British English: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Grand_Theft_Auto_IV
Do Online Courses Together
Since we're mentioning Jonathan Haidt I just wanna chime in with an additional recommendation: _The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion_. In this book Haidt digs into the roots of human morality; it changed my perception of the world. Haidt has a TED talk [0] which is basically a tl;dr of The Righteous Mind and it's only ~18.5 minutes long.

[0] https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_the_moral_roots_of_...
StarGAN v2: Diverse Image Synthesis for Multiple Domains (CVPR 2020)
The problem is really that you're using the wrong equality type here. You get the right semantics if you use `= : A -> A -> Bool` and then apply it to a `Maybe A` and a `Maybe A` by lifting it: you end up with `Nothing` if either input was `Nothing`, and `Just answer` if both were known.
There are multiple ways to do this analysis, and not all of them come from evaluating them as investments. Stocks represent an ownership stake in the firm, and you can use any method you want to give a number to what the firm's "value" is. This could be by reading financial statements, comparing it to other existing companies, seeing how much their operating cash flow is and so on.
Funny how far things have gone. "Basic cable" had ads, but it was "free," as in included with your base-level subscription. But then basic-cable channels like MTV decided to try to charge for their viewership, AND have commercials. So now you're supposed to PAY to watch commercials.

But let's face it: The stupidity of the public seems to have no bottom. Look what Apple gets away with.
What happens if the stock sees almost no volume of trades, and we have a situation where the lowest sell is at $90 and highest buy at $100 (i.e. both parties are overgenerous)? Does the stock exchange make them split the difference, i.e. makes the trade at $95?
Why did the RSS feed die?
This is an entirely uneducated guess, but look closer at the spin over time, and consider the objects low density.
Think timeline of a highly elliptical orbit, but with energy and work concentrated on angular momentum.
It looks like it dies down shortly afterwards but the next day someone gets unblocked ...

00:09, 23 February 2006‎ Tykell talk contribs‎ 11,705 bytes -1‎ No, we can't. Don't you know when to quit, kid? undo

23:42, 22 February 2006‎ Alex 101 talk contribs‎ 11,706 bytes +1‎ now that I'm unblocked and this page is unprotected we can change it undo

I think if you're all-caps screaming you've lost the argument, and seeing this I'm actually quite embarrassed for the guy. Personally I think "$band is good" or "$team is winning" does sound a bit silly, but I've seen it so many times that I'm kinda used to it. Besides I suspect the same is true for an American hearing "$band are good" or "$team are winning". Either way it definitely doesn't warrant losing your cool like this.