skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Timing is a very significant factor, I believe - I couch that as a belief, because I haven't had the time to compare all lockdowns

Fair enough, and I agree. It's clear that countries who clamped down super early have fared much better than everyone else.

But going by that FT graph, Spain went into lockdown a week before the UK, and still did worse? Germany later than the UK, and is doing better? There's a crazy amount of uncertainty about what good lockdowns are once you've passed a certain point of community spread.

Sweden obviously missed the point in time where lockdowns would have worked very well, while NZ, Australia, Norway didn't.

The UK obviously missed it as well, but while they were debating herd immunity, it might have been too late anyway? We might never know.

And with all that uncertainty, I think it's wrong for people to argue that Sweden "obviously" would have saved lives by going into a hard lockdown earlier. Maybe, probably, perhaps. Would a stricter lockdown now do anything in Sweden? Unlikely.
What Trump is calling the "Russian Hoax" is the unfounded allegations of collusion between his campaign and Russia, and the misuse of FISA and other processes to attack him. Has there ever been any real dispute that countries such as Russia have sought undue influence?
Wish they had an example on data tables, real-time search and other dashboard-like functionality.
"I think there might be some risk that because all recipients receive the same encrypted text (encrypted by a different key for each recipient), a recipient may be able to discover other recipients' encryption keys."

If that's possible, it means you're using horribly broken encryption. So it shouldn't be a concern if you're doing things right.
Excuse my lack of knowledge, but I was always under the impression that websockets are not that scalable since you are opening 1:1 connections.
Interesting thing is ignore influenza and compare with other pandemic viral diseases. A lot of them are similar in that they can but not always involve multiple organs and result all sorts of complicated disease courses in a high percentage of patients.
My favorite in this category is Damascus. What makes it special is that the old city is mentioned in the Bible, including the "street called Straight." That street still exists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straight_Street

On a tangent: I love it when an article shows up on HN that is already greyed out, meaning I've seen it before.
I use C as a target for my own compiler and I agree that there are very few things that I miss. But the ones we do miss do stick out like a sore thumb. One of the main ones for me is a way to get an accurate stack map for precise garbage collection. With C you usually gotta go for a conservative GC, or you need to maintain a shadow stack. (Although I'll admit that the GC story with LLVM isn't super great either)
A close relative of mine had cancer surgery delayed by 1.5 months because the treating hospital refused to host the surgery. After they realized their hospital had been empty for many weeks, they called him and asked, "do you want to get your surgery three days from now?". He is recovering, but for him it would have been better to have had his surgery when it was originally scheduled.
And probably people are getting lost on mountains less and less flu deaths too...
Vietnam formed a task force called GK1 to research how to safely detonate those mines during the war. According to them the mines at Hòn La were detonated due to lightning stroke nearby.

Source: all 11 members of GK1 were from my university. I still remember the first day at school and they were talking about how they provided engineering effort for the war (bazooka clone, sea mines clearance, 2nd Mig pilot to downed a B52 etc..) but I'm sure some of them are just propaganda.
Each nation's strategy seems to come about due to its very specific circumstances. Leaders will defend (to death) their bullshit ideologies and false securities, and stick to a plan made in the heat of the moment.

Perhaps this mechanism is the great randomizer that ensures that every combination is tested, some risk distribution strategy.
They replied to the second person requesting this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22951757
> Is there reason to think that people in the past were more selfless and less economically motivated?

Perhaps, but perhaps not. The point isn't about some innate feature of humans that has only increased recently, but rather that throughout history humans (and the great classes therein) have faced material (not only economic) hardships. It is material conditions which drive history.

I think there is a huge dividing line between inventing to seek profit and seeking "other kinds of status". The only thing in common these motivations have is that they arise due to our relations with other humans. Likewise, many motivations, depending on the predominant point of view (which certainly does change with time and place) can be viewed either altruistically or selfishly. I'd wager that a cynical society, or one dominated by the totalizing logic of capital ("accumulate!") would have a tendency to see previous motivations as selfish, because it's very hard to empathize with people through history. In other words, we view things in a certain way because it is unimaginable to us to see it any other way, since we have no experience with those times and places and the motivations therein.

The ancient world is filled with proverbs and sayings and stories of heroism for some kind of greater good, certainly without looking for some kind of profit, and more often than not, without looking for some kind of recognition. As to whether these are just stories we tell or whether there is some truth to them is an important question. It's probably worth asking anthropology, or at the very least sociology. The latter has discovered huge changes in public consciousness since the industrial revolution.
Draconian labors laws? Oh dear.
I live in the US since 6 years. I never felt like I never had a proper contracts. All at-will stuff with no long terms commitments on either ways.

Try France if you want to see actual labors laws.
Benchmark’s Bill Gurley Won’t Join Venture Firm’s Next Fund
One of the best uses of portals I've seen was on The Stanley Parable game with seamless brainfuck moments like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_UcYPaQWrI
Thanks, John. I tried to do something a while back with wireshark but I couldn't get the thing to scale. Gonna give this one a hard look.
"so it's not just limited to a couple of small sized bitflag style things."

The examples I gave are integers you may have to compare or manipulate not just bitfields to copy.

I also disagree this is aimed at large integers based on the examples of the syntax in the article commonly being <16 bits, sometimes <8, while the examples I cited had non power of 2 use cases up to 48 bits.
"smallest type" doesn't go far enough for HDL languages - consider a 4-bit counter in verilog

reg [3:0]r;

r = 4'hf;
r = r+1;
if (r == 0) ....

if r is really 8 bits r+1 will have a non-0 value ....

However all the LLVM people may be saying here is that they're providing the minimal support for arbitrary size math and expect language implementers to generate the masking where required (ie that r+1 above is really (r+1)&4'hf )

I'll note that for Verilog in particular the standard Verilog C-level APIs for accessing data imply that integers are not stored contiguously, instead they're stored in 32-bit chunks with a min size of 32-bits for 1 to 32-bit values - a 33-64 bit value will be stored in 2 non-contiguous 32-bit words ('packed' values are different from this). To be useful any back end support needs to be able to understand stuff stored this way.
This is what concerns as many people have acted like the economy only effects rich people, or any move that trades the economy for lives is inherently immoral.

Food falls under the economy, the economy isn't just the stock market or things rich people do rich people things in. The economy is the vast network stretching across the globe that works to supply goods and services in the places they are needed, when the economy starts shutting down so do a lot of things we need for daily life. All the government stimulus in the world isn't going to help anyone if there aren't goods to purchase.
> I failed in taking math study seriously at that point as everything was so easy. When things did get hard at some point in high school and I had to learn new things, I no longer had the discipline to really commit.

oh god.. I failed because of this too. By the time I got to college I was so weak I sunk to the bottom in less than 3 weeks. An .. interesting experience.
Well... I designed the course for the school, but only taught it once. Frankly, it was not a roaring success. One reason was that I was asked to deliver it online. With my recent (obliged) experience in online teaching, I think I could do a better job if I did it again. I incorporated much of the material into other courses, to some success.

Here are my course notes, which include assignment descriptions: https://www.dropbox.com/s/m3s83x036makvhu/Creativitity.pdf?d...

To answer your question directly, like all teaching, it requires that the assignments and exercises be appropriately designed. No matter how much I tried to design an assignment that embodied the ideas I was teaching, students would still come up with really un-creative responses. I came to the conclusion that the only way to guarantee success was to mentor them individually.

Most creativity courses just deliver the 'received wisdoms' (i.e. they are theory courses). Very few actually try to foster creativity. The book inGenius: A crash course on creativity (Tina Seelig) was written by someone who did.

Here is the course description to a creativity course delivered at the University of New South Wales. Its not bad, but for a creativity course, the assignments seems a bit un-imaginative.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/mnbw3v4qzrtpx14/D52C5C9E-1043-4261...
Add life hack back into the title and now it’s perfect clickbait.
I have a standing fake meeting "Busy" at around the lunch time every day. It's purpose to show me as busy and deter folks from dropping meetings at inconvenient time.

When I'm pressed for time, I'm changing it to whole-day "Out-of-office" fake (I'm in the office, obviously).

Very effective tool!
That's an attractive thought, but I'm less than convinced it's true. For example, I doubt there's much scientific evidence behind Sweden's zero-tolerance drug policy that literally equates heroin with cannabis [1], or their policy of criminalizing all sex work [2], with the admittedly unusual twist of making buying, not selling, illegal.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Sweden

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_Sweden#Current...
Yes, if this is in fact true and not a rumor I would expect so. No one else other than folks pirating and running the leaked code is affected.
A previous post in the series tests a Parchive utility called MacPAR deLuxe:

https://eclecticlight.co/2020/04/20/file-integrity-5-how-wel...
couple of years ago when I first saw the Magic Leap, it's kind of magical to me, their tech is great and they advertised it to do big things to help the world (aquarium or 3d painting, I don't remember exactly what it was)
Last year when re-visited their website and see their showcase with Spotify and NBA sport, I was very letdown. Why do I need VR app for Spotify? Why do they think it's importance to do something like that instead of make a bold product. So disappointed.
In fact, government stimulus will just cause hyperinflation as more money chases less goods and services.
For those devs the solution is that DBAs provide stored procedures and predefined views and block them from accessing anything else. Or address it on the app level, have someone knowledgeable create repositories with all the queries, and mandate the rest of team to stick to using only these predefined methods. Either way, people who don't care about infrastructure should have their access to that infrastructure maximally limited and wrapped in safety nets. For both sides to sleep better.
Lots of people from good families work in JVM backed solutions as a choice, I understand that this might come as a shock.
Amazon AppFlow
I don't know why people think this. After much thought, it's because they read chronologically which isn't how SQL works. It doesn't 'execute' in the written sequence.

The entire statement is a logical one like a mathematical equation. You wouldn't think that the meaning of (a + b) * (c + d) implies that (a + b) has to be done first. Maybe in some computer languages it may like early C compilers.

Given that: "select ABC.XYZ" is perfectly well formed, it's like a forward reference declaration where ABC is the alias for a table-like thing and XYZ is the alias for the column-like thing. I mostly read my SQL inside-out, starting with uncorrelated subqueries.

Another pet peeve: using the keyword INNER or OUTER is just noise.
I agree totally, but I don't think that provides guidance here.

The meat plants have largely stayed open as essential businesses, only closing or even putting in controls when there's a number of employee cases that can no longer be ignored. So in this case, we're not looking at the trade-off between closing companies preemptively to save lives and economic output, but instead the trade-off between closing companies in response to severe sickness throughout the workforce vs. whatever economic could remain in these conditions.

I -do- think in a lot of jurisdictions, e.g. the SF Bay Area-- we are going too far. We've had slowly declining ICU occupancy for the past 3 weeks (a trailing indicator behind disease) and now even case counts are falling noticeably even though testing has improved. We should be -slightly- easing controls and seeing if we can keep the disease load constant or falling. Instead we won't even talk about it until May 4th, and I worry we'll either take too much of a step at once or make a tiny movement much later than we should have tried it.
You're missing some key facts.

1. Meatpacking, and its supporting supply chains is an essential business. No state in the US has lifted a finger to shut it down.

2. These plant shutdowns are caused by people working in meatpacking plants getting sick, and being unable to work.

I don't understand how you can blame this on an economic shutdown. If anything, without the shutdown, the meatpackers would have gotten sick sooner, and in greater numbers.
“The best programmers started out as system administrators.”

“The best system administrators started out as programmers.”

Optimally, have one foot in each grave. They call that devops, these days.
> they perform an almost negligible number of tests in Sweden

According to https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ , they have about 9k tests per 1M pop, which is lower (half of Denmark or 3/4 of Finland, but higher than France or UK), but definitely not negligible.
Not clear. Demand has been pushed way down for things--- perhaps even more than production has been. Stimulus could improve the match of demand to production.
This too confuses me. Why that name?
100% correct.

I love the Carta philosophy on hiring - every person you need means you've failed to execute: https://carta.com/blog/how-to-hire/

Unfortunately they didn't heed their own philosophy given their layoffs with simultaneous massive fundraise.
Facebook Invests in Jio Platforms, the Building of Jio, Understanding the Deal
The syllabus where a grade is broken down by percentages is (at US institutions) considered to be like a contract. If the course originally had it at "70-80%", then it cannot be changed mid-semester without being acceptable to you. It's fairly incredible for this to happen (at a US institution).
What you mean by FTC, and what you mean by herd immunity is not relevant. The graph on Tao's blog is misleading and that's all I was pointing out.

Yes I was mistaken about where he died, and can't edit the post because it was too heavily down-voted. The point stands that the graph posted by Tao has cost lives.
Implementing solid incident management processes for remote teams
What’s surprising to me is that no file system (even ZFS) or database utilize error correction controls. Well aside from 1 bit/byte ECC style codes or raid. There are a few forms of forward error correction [1], which are already widely used in hardware [2]. There are some projects trying for long term fixity of storage [3], but nothing default or built in, afaict.

I assumed RocksDB or some other modern KV engine would include FEC, at least the meta-data. Using DB’s on embedded devices reveals how easily (and regularly) a whole DB of data can be corrupted. A few bytes of error and an entire IoT DB can be lost. FEC’s can be cpu expensive but not that expensive nowadays.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_error_correction
2: https://www.electronicdesign.com/technologies/communications...
3: https://github.com/lrq3000/pyFileFixity
The data is in – stop the panic and end the total isolation
yes there fucking is, and it has ZERO to do with Religion or Secularism.

Treat others how you would like to be treated.

If you wanted to get more complicated its, "consider the well-being".

I'm so outraged by the causal acceptance that religion has ANYTHING to do with a proven successful moral guidance in society. You people need to stop buying the bullshit marketing of religion (and politics).
Email Spoof Test
You can get that experience today with the C compiler for the EZ80 chip. The short is 16-bit, and the long is 32-bit, so logically the int is 24-bit. You can use it as int24_t if you prefer.

An EZ80 is used in some of the TI graphing calculators.
They sentenced him to death to force him to leave the city. No one expected him to decide to die rather than leave.
Boy I just don't think that's a fair summary of the general view on "the economy."

The markets have cascading effect, even if individuals don't own equity. Unemployment is a huge factor in what people generally refer to as "the economy."

It's all intertwined and I think most people realize that.
I think the biggest mistake that Magic Leap made is that they compromised on their hardware. Like you said, they tried to go general purpose which means low "enough" cost for devs to pick one up and build an app, for enthusiasts to try em out etc. But the thing is, they didn't have best in class hardware. I've tried one and its marginally better than a hololens 2. They could have gone all out with a vision prototype that wowed the world with its capabilities, instead they increased the field of view, slightly and made the form-factor slightly better.
I think it "continuously inhabited" is a blurry line. Jericho (listed) has notes about how it was destroyed a number of times, and lists the time it has been definitely continuously inhabited since.

But I'd certainly expect Carthage to be listed with notes about it's destruction and reconstruction - although I'd note there must be lots of cities founded ~500BCE+ that have been continuously inhabited.
I still think the US/The West model won this battle.
Anything might be true, but as far as what's probable, I'm not following your logic.
Does it mean that my years of job of analyst writing SQL queries might be a valuable treasure if I were to apply for some dev job?
Nit on #2 --- usually these shutdowns are caused by too many people getting sick at the plant, and local authorities pressuring it to shut down, or the plant shutting down out of fear of liability to employees.

There has been slowed production due to inadequate workforce, but I don't think many plants have -closed- for this reason.
1. We would need to print quadrillions of dollars to get hyperinflation. Hyperinflation is a boogieman, unless this administration completely loses its mind.

2. Recessions cause the destruction of money (Due to defaults, and lack of new loans). This causes deflation. If the new money created by the printing press does not exceed these deflationary pressures, you won't even get inflation, let alone hyperinflation.

3. Deflation is horrible, and is much more dangerous than mild inflation.

4. The printed money is currently chasing investment assets (Mostly stocks), not flour and ground beef. Our previous experience with QE did not result in the prices of commodities inflating - only the prices of investments.

Inflation is not the problem.
I don't see how JOIN is like flatMap. It's a subset of a cross-product. It's more like do-notation:

x <- ..
y <- ..
return (x, y)
Dvorak's time in the US is not often mentioned. He spent 1892-95 in NYC as the director of the (defunct) National Conservatory of Music of America. The 'New World' was written at that time. (Victor Herbert also taught there.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National%20Conservatory%20of%20...

Here are a couple more quality articles:

Timeline: https://www.dvoraknyc.org/dvorak-in-america

More details on US travels: https://www.americanheritage.com/dvorak-america
Ramadan is starting just in time
> Ideas are easy to find, it's just that the bounds that we have been limited to work within, both economically and societally, have become tighter and tighter.

An idea I've been having lately, and one that might be unpopular on this site, is that we've found all the low-hanging in electronics, networking, and software. So the main reason why it seems like there are no new ideas is because we're only looking at places where there are few new ideas to be found.

If we stop equating "tech" with computers, and instead search the vast parameter space of new technologies, we'll quickly find lots of interesting new ideas. Unfortunately, that also means we've more or less reach the end of the growth era of Silicon Valley, and from here on out SV just becomes another old fashion industry with minimal avenues for new growth.
There's certainly phases of progress in particular fields. e.g. in physics, we had relativity and quantum mechanics... and no further revolutions for quite a while. If Einstein's genius made some of it possible... he also didn't make further progress. He was older yes, but also perhaps there was less to find? Other people were smart enough to find what he found, but weren't bold enough.

Looking at the bigger picture, Einstein had unexplained empirical evidence (speed of light constant in all directions, inconsistent with waves in an ether). So that was a driver.

Looking bigger again, even with better equipment, that senses further, we can only discover new things if they can be sensed with that equipment.

(Without evidence) my opinion is we will have periods of slow progress and periods of rapid progress. We are currently in a period of stagnation. We need empirical data, intelligent analysis, and boldness.
Relevantly, Richard Stallman used to use a Lemote YeeLoong (notebook with a Loongson MIPS CPU) before he switched to a librebooted ThinkPad T400.
How to Recondition Batteries – Car,Laptop,Lead Acid,Nicad Battery
Funny, I literally just posted an Ask HN about how to attract investors for something that's in a vertical niche deemed "safe" / "growth" even though it's mostly bootstrapped services business and not really a venture startup.

Trying to figure out if that's appealing to angel investors these days with all the uncertainty
This is everywhere in life, luck is incredibly important. Everyone that is successful only see when they worked hard and were smart, not all the luck. Sure you need hard work and talent, but there are lies of people with that and no luck that fail or at least less successful.
> with the admittedly unusual twist of making buying, not selling, illegal.

The twist is probably based on the supposition that for selling to be illegal would mean endangering the the lives of sex workers, who (I assume, as the reasoning goes) are likely to be financially vulnerable. When selling is illegal, there is more risk for the person rendering the services.
also the output is an order of magnitude lower than a decent solar storm from that raging ball of hate that we circle...