skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unfortunately I have to disagree.

I tried to setup a simple NixOS machine this week. From this experience I couldn't manage to install any GNOME extensions via the browser plugin because of some Firefox manifest location that conflicts with the way the NixOS store handles it - there is some workaround in some tickets, but it made me wonder how many other applications are in need for specific workarounds. I then enabled flatpak via the OS configuration, but the first installed app couldn't launch because of some obscure error with gstreamer. I changed to fedora and could setup anything without any of those issues.

I really want to like NixOS (I still do), but I now consider it more for a server environment than a casual desktop environment.
Interesting estimations, but the phrasing of COVID-19 "ending" seems a bit counter-intuitive. I have read many experts claiming that it's more or less certain that the virus, due to its prevalence, will join the arsenal of commonly occurring flu viruses and come back on a yearly basis. WHO stated just the other day that there is "no proof" that being infected with COVID-19 creates immunity against a second infection.

With so much insecurity and no vaccine in sight, I think one should talk about the "end" of this virus in very careful terms, and perhaps talk about the end of the current pandemic instead.
I appreciate what you're trying to say. I believe a deferment balances the interests of the lender and lendee. If loans were frozen, why wouldn't everyone take advantage? You now need an approval process (an application, paperwork, etc) to prove a hardship or the banks are no longer solvent.

I would assume a deferment would be open to anyone and in exchange you would pay an extra few months 15 years from now--or pay it off early if you're able to sooner.

At least in the U.S. I'm not sure if the government could mandate any of this...although they often find creative ways to implement things after they decide they'll act.
I am not a fan of book DRM. I have one reader app that I prefer, and want to read everything on it.

I have absolutely no issues with paying for most books; especially if they are about my work. I do have an issue with “price-gouging” books, though. I think those are usually textbooks. The markup on them can be eye-watering, and I give them a hard pass.

When I write, I like to make it public and free. I have been approached about having my work behind a paywall, and have declined. Maybe I’ll consider it in the future, but I’m not doing it for the money.

As the author of the post mentioned, writing a book is a fraught process. It would have to be an Oprah’s Book Club special to make it truly worth it, monetarily, and that ain’t happening with geek books.

I do it mainly because I love writing. I’ve been doing it since I was a child. It also helps me to learn, and organize my own thoughts.

But that’s just me. YMMV
Yes, I understand.

And THAT is the reason why it is as it is. Why is Amazon then always the scapegoat?
No, it’s temporary. They’re planning reduced capacity for the metro as part of phase 2 of Italy’s coronavirus response - a careful reopening of the economy with some significant restrictions remaining in place. Eventually it’ll be safe to stand in packed train carriages again, but not yet.
Surprising way that China's tech startups are using to scale across Africa
Building macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android App with Flutter
Google is pretty good. Here are the things I find frustrating:

1) It tries to guess what I mean, and it's hard to make it change its mind. I was searching for a specific thing and Google decided I was looking for clothing brand in this colour. In the past adding or removing words, using the + (or "") or - operators would help, but I couldn't find the right combination this time.

2) Sometimes I want to search for results from a different country in a different language and I don't know how to do this. Google seems to really want to only push English language results to me. I don't know if /ncr is still a thing.

3) There's a bunch of heavily SEO'd content that's sort of okay but not great, and a bunch of content that's great but hidden.

4) Google really wants you to use natural language queries. So when you're fault-finding a problem you type a question into the search box. This will return many people asking that same question, but often they will not have got an answer. I don't need to be linked to a closed, with no answers, Stack exchange question, or a forum when OP says "never mind, fixed it" with no more details.

5) Google has decided to de-prioritise certain types of link. If you search for torrents Google has chosen to put other stuff in the first few pages. I think I'd prefer it if they just said "nope, we don't do those links" than what they do at the moment. Try searching for pirate versions of Pozner and Dodd's Cross-Examination Science and Techniques and you get a lot of links, but they're all terrible. They all lead to malware infested sites, or sites that are part of a weird complicated network that don't provide any content, but cause you to spend some time finding that out.
I can see why the blog post gives the impression that packaging is involved, because the author is creating packages! However, what's novel is that the author is packaging their own software (a blog). A Debian and Ubuntu maintainer isn't going to package Joe Blogg's blog.

NixOS also has package maintainers, which the author of this blog post relies on (see "nixos.graphviz").

Traditional distributions also allow you to package your own software.

The difference between a traditional distribution and NixOS is that NixOS makes packaging your own software (and config) easily and safely enough to treat as first-class citizens along with the distro's own packages. So much so that I don't think of NixOS packages as "packages". Rather, I just see them as config/code.
Keyscore: social control. Palantir: social control. Bluebird: mind control at scale.

I think you're being intentionally disingenuous. No sane person can look at those social control programs and think "well this is innocuous" or "compatible with the free and open society"...
I get neither with uBO. Seems that different people have different experiences, either due to outdated uBO filters or differences in YT behavior.
Chernozem
Planet of the Humans (Michael Moore) is free to watch for 30 days
In some cases, the placebo is a currently approved treatment.
> My second issue is that the files clearly aren't machine-editable. There's no sensible way to make a GUI that can edit your hostname if the hostname is defined in some Turing complete functional program.

For the times I need to do this, I define the values in a JSON file, which can be parsed by Nix's builtins.fromJSON into a Nix datatype.
> There's probably something I'm missing since I am not an economist.

What you are missing is that these countries are leveraging their positions as reserve currencies both for global corporations and also other countries.

This crisis strongly benefited the USD, EUR and JPY. The demand for these currencies (especially the USD) is in the trillions. In the unfortunate event that the European Union is dissolved and countries like Italy/Spain decides to switch to their own, most people/companies holding EUR will decide to switch to ... probably USD/JPY as they don't really trust their home currencies much.

That's why the U.S. has an (or multiple) air carrier around the world to project power.
I'd think so. If you were to install one of Tesla's early first AC motors, it'd sometimes do unexpected things or stop working intermittently, I suppose
I've argued about this numerous times: ISP's need to provide customers with an opt-in p2p license that adds a small fee to their monthly bill. This monthly fee is transferred to a central authority, the ISP does not make any profit from this fee. The license would allow users to torrent whatever content they want. Torrent trackers would be fully legal, their only legal obligation would be keeping track of torrent popularity and reporting this to the central authority every month or so.
The central authority that receives the money from the ISP's then forwards the money to the creators of the content being distributed, divided based on the popularity reported by the trackers. A minimum baseline amount is provided to each creator to subsidize indie and struggling creators. And obviously geoblocking should be illegal but as the media companies would be making more money if they didn't geoblock, it gives them incentive to not do that.
Euromomo shows data back to 2016, so you can see how 2020 compares to a bad flu year (2017) and a "good" flu year (2019):

https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/
Even so, there are uncomfortable undertones in comparing those people to neo-Nazis and the like. If you think that radical trans activists are in some meaningful way comparable to neo-Nazis and other violent thugs, or that they are mentally ill, then it may be you who has been taken in by online propaganda.

I guess it annoys me that you left this little ad-hominem in parentheses at the end of your original comment. If you have some kind of issue with trans people or trans rights, you should really just say what that is, rather than making these kinds of comparisons.
Nix itself prevents a lot of generalized recursion and side effects. If I recall turing-completeness in functional languages requires generalized recursion in ways Nix doesn't allow.
With centrally planned errands one could avoid all queues

Instead going to the grocery store, you report to the central planer what you need. It then creates an errand plan, when you should leave your apartment, when to arrive at the grocery store and when you have to leave the grocery store. Thereby making sure that not too many people are at the store during the same interval.
I call bullshit omn that map. The water in the us tastes like cholrine and is better rated than the one in germany and bosnia, which both don't have that. Also the water is not adviced to be drank from tap in portugal where i was recently, and it is rated with 80?!?!?
And that is a solid argument against Python, JS, and Ruby.
Can you explain this SARS-CoV-2 paper in simple terms?
The appealing features of whatever it is are still appealing despite the learning curve. To highlight what I object to, because I feel I may have come across ambiguously:

Not much about all this setup feels appealing.

The good features about, say, OS X, are not made less appealing because of the rest of OS X. They're still appealing properties.
Exploring API / Client Co-Evolution [pdf]
I’d argue that ‘index.mjs’ is a relative URL.
Ie the small particle pollution from cars is making pedestrians and cyclist sick.

It's making car drivers sick as well, they have to breath the same air and often air intakes are close to the exhaust of the car in front.
Do you have a more detailed example of this?
Wasn't there a mod or something for one of the regular Worms games that created similar multiplayer craziness, with lotsa rope? I remember seeing a couple of tournament videos—and I think it wasn't Liero or any of the inspired games.
Author of the article here. Ask me anything!
Credential Harvesting: DIY
I thought he implied that the publisher agreed to a free online version after a delay of two or three years. (Although I don't think he said so directly.)
I clearly remember teaching the resolution proof method, adversarial graph search (games), the state of automatic language translation, Bayesian spam filtering ... maybe you weren't paying attention.
There're billions of people using software, divide 5 by that.
Are there really any legal protections? Parliament has not even been sitting, right?
Same for me, when i use youtube on my mobile i am flabbergasted by the amount of ads and 20 minute promo programs. Why and how can you watch that without a add blocker?
> nightmare logic. Nothing makes literal sense and everything makes perfect sense.

You can describe _a lot_ of David Lynch's work with that phrase. Lost Highway. Mulholland Drive. Much of Twin Peaks.

Any director could splice up some random images and say it's surreal. What's _disturbing_ about Lynch's work is that while your rational mind knows that what you see doesn't make sense, something inside you is meanwhile saying "oh yes it does".
It is indeed about context, and the context is front-line research in an established field - so the chance that your effect is as prevalent as the standard number of fingers an toes in humans and yet undiscovered is what should give you pause.
A software library for the Exidy Sorcerer
Investigating whether and how devs understand open-source software licensing
Your book is excellent. Downloading and reading it made me feel incredibly guilty for not paying for it, so I bought a hard copy.
Joy: Web framework with Clojure syntax, fast startup and low memory usage
>> You’re writing down a mathematical formula that describes the program’s behavior and using some sort of proof checker that’s going to check the correctness of that statement

The obvious flaw in that approach is that clearly the 'proof checker' can itself be vulnerable to human error. Any complex program is going to have many 'proof checkers' which depend on each other to verify different parts of the system; if any assumption about what constitutes a valid proof for any segment of the logic is wrong, then that would introduce a vulnerability in the same way as a regular programming bug would.

So then the real question about the effectiveness of formal verification would be; given the same amount of development time, are incorrect assumptions introduced when writing the 'proof checkers' less likely than bugs introduced when writing regular programming code?

Aren't programming bugs always caused by incorrect assumptions? What is it about formal verification which frees a complex system from the evils of incorrect assumptions?

Incorrect assumptions about the proof or incorrect assumptions about the logic, what is the real practical difference?
I read that the government said it would be then back tracked.
Mythili
In some countries the excess deaths are higher that during a worst flew year in the last 5 years.

But also, since the virus is growing exponentially, differences in countries is by 10-100x, while the differences in the number of tests performed seems to be closer to 2-10x.
Material for homemade face masks may be a combination of two fabrics
At least this one doesn't include the case fatality rate which is the biggest bullshit number of them all. If nothing else, this pandemic has shown that bad data is so much worse than no data.

Edited to add: The daily statistic by population ratio is very spiky, and gets spikier the smaller the country is, which makes it hilariously useless. A rolling average would improve that a bit, but remember that some countries might be off with a factor of 2x or 3x when it comes to reported deaths, which is an insane level of uncertainty.
The Prisoner Trade [pdf]
I would reckon that overshoot (the mouse cursor moving "backwards" after over-prediction) is significantly worse than undershoot in terms of user experience. We can easily compensate for mouse acceleration not being constant (ask anyone with enhanced pointer speed). But the pointer doing qualitatively different movements than what you input is annoying.

In the limit I guess this boils down to "do no prediction" (which I also suppose is what the linked site's conclusion is).
On the other hand, I'd much rather read a technical book written by an expert on the topic than an professional writer.
Yes. Read this instead. Says same, better.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/03/science/coron...
Dissection of COVIDSafe (Android): Australian government's contact tracing app
Yes! The archive still lives at ntk.net if you're craving nostalgia.
Thy for sharing will also try that out
Even in some first world countries sometimes you don't necessarily get much of the content, or so I've heard, and can't pirate either, because illegal.

Anecdotal, but atleast here in my poor country I'm less inconvenienced than when I was in Germany. I do sometimes feel guilty not being able to support the creators that make this content and often wish there was a way to donate, much more than I wish that the distributors covered my country - because they're shit.

The piracy world that torrents/hosts for free, in my experience, seem to do a far better job.
I mainly nix-ified my blog build to make a docker image that is as small as possible.

Compare my super-optimised dockerfile results:

$ docker images | grep xena
xena/christinewebsite latest eb8c27a1a5d2 12 seconds ago 121MB

To the naiive nix results:

$ docker images | grep xena
xena/christinewebsite latest b087ad7fb924 50 years ago 102MB

This image ends up only including my blog (statically compiled), ca certificates (because of the patreon integration), time zone data files (because of the go time package), iana port numbers (something to do with the go net package) and mailcap (for some reason). It's puny!
I'll take a stab at the simpler questions here:

> do you actually, you as the patient, choose which medication you receive for disease like that?

No, but I imagine patients liable to the advertising might mention a specific medication in a conversation with their doctor. Whether that has any effect depends on the advertisement/patient/doctor.

> Does your opinion override that of the doctor?

For prescription drugs, no.
Apt user name. TIL, thank you:

> Making The Shining, Stanley Kubrick announced Eraserhead was his favourite film and showed it to his cast and crew, “to put them in the mood”.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/mar/22/david-lynch-era...

So I was actually thinking of Lynch's later works (Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, Twin Peaks) that definitely came after "The Shining" But yeah, they share things big and small, from tone to camera angles.

There's a scene in The Shining, about 3 /4 of the way through, where Jack is walking down a corridor in a rage, and it's _just weird_ (1), so reminiscent of The Man from Another Place in Twin peaks, and it's hard to say what's wrong, to unpick what's going on technically.

I only noticed this on the rewatch last week. I'd guess it's a combination of the acting and sound, camera angle and framing, lens choice, and the camera moving with him over the patterned carpet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzZP-OXA-zY
Apache OpenMeetings 5.0.0-M4 is released
That's why most cars have a cabin air filter though.
A determination was released under the biosecurity act https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/F2020L00480/Html/Text
Project Reactor (Java Spring)
Advertising isn't sales. Advertising is presence. If you're cognizant of an ad at all, then it worked, whether you buy the product or not.
Fun fact: iOS app icons are not rounded rectangles (rectangles with 90 degree arc corners) but squircles, which are roughly superellipses with n=5. The linked Wikipedia articles also remark this.
You are right, hence Number Words returns different versions of the approximation: 'more', 'less' and 'around'. More nuanced versions could be added to the list.
Importantly the choice of the approximation version to use would be with the user of the library. Wonder if the algorithm to choose appropriate approximation can be devised.
I agree. This is the best one I've seen and I love that I can add/remove countries and switch between linear and log scale. Definitely add log-log.

(Thank you, this is great!)
Same. I'd rather be without than paying another subscription. I have to vote with my wallet, it's the only way i can influence the situation. Subscriptions create lock-in and dependence. Just sell the product and charge for big updates.
Indeed. Having slept on it, I do recall someone mentioning that my performance discrepancy could be related to busy load/store ports. If the issue is that it doesn't have free reg-reg load/store capacity but reg/mem and mem/reg is otherwise available, then it makes kinda sense I guess.

But in that case the performance could totally change again if just one more instruction is added.
GeeCON Prague 2019: Nikita Lipsky – Escaping the Jar Hell with Jigsaw Layers
Ask HN: Tool to create a mirror of GitHub repository in local Gitea?
Hi there,

I have a local Gitea installation and I want to use it as backup/mirror of my current work on Github (code, issues, wiki, ...)

Is there already any tool to do that?

Thanks
It annoys me even more that Mozilla ended development on Shumway, their browser extension with the javascript flash runtime. Sure, it would never be perfect, but it'd be so nice to be able to play simple games and animations.

In the same vein, IIRC there's at least one incomplete Java VM written in javascript, but I never managed to get it working for javagameplay.com.

On the other hand, the death of browser plugins means it's that much harder to escape the browser now; it was quite simple for any Java or flash applet to browse the local filesystem (I bypassed the local library's restrictions with a Java file manager in order to save files to my flash drive)
I wish more people and outlets would correctly use the terms "misinformation" and "disinformation".

I understand that they've come to mean the same thing, but the latter term makes the intent behind the content these refer to much more clear.

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/163857/what-exac...
It's interesting to see these tracing app discussions crop up all over the world at the moment. In Germany it quite literally took dozens of public interest groups, two weeks of media attention, EU guidance and an open letter by hundreds of scientists to make the government switch from central data collection to an acceptable decentralised approach.

The amount of misinformation put out by lobby groups in the process was frankly astonishing, is that similar in Australia or is this app primarily driven by the government itself?
The idea of formal verification of code is kafkaesque. Its popularity is proportional to the inefficiency and irrationality of the economic system within which it exists.

Code is an expression of pure logic. So if there is any incorrect assumption or flaw in that logic, it can be verified by simply reading the code.

Given that premise, the usefulness of formal verification can be disproved in a single English sentence:

Formal verification does not remove the element of human error from a system; it removes it from the code and adds it to the system of proofs which verify that code... Proofs can be written with incorrect assumptions (human error) in the same way that code can be written with incorrect assumptions. As one of the people in the article acknowledges, writing good proofs is challenging; "challenging" inescapably means "prone to human error".

Formal verification proponents seem to have conveniently forgotten to apply formal verification to prove the effectiveness of formal verification.

The great irony of this article is that it attempts to rely on exhaustive proof (which is the basis of unit testing) to prove the effectiveness of formal proof - I.e. we tested formal verification with that helicopter that one time and the hackers couldn't hack it for 6 months, therefore formal proof is effective - That's a lousy unit test case and it doesn't prove formal verification.