skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
100% there is a shortage of reagents and kits. There are certain countries that are not letting reagents and kits ship out, and we are in no position to call them out on that.

>That doesn't stop the American press making it sound like not achieving those 500,000 tests a day is the result of some uniquely American political failing though.

I don't think we're unique in where we are in comparison with other countries as far as testing, but we are in a unique position in regards to being able to put some strong leverage on getting other countries to work together to respond to this pandemic. We're not doing that and as a result, other countries are having to "roll their own" response to this pandemic just like we are. The lack of coordination within our country is putting us at a unique disadvantage, even if we had better coordination world wide.

This pandemic is a exceptional global crisis in a way we've never seen before, and thus should've led to a addressing it at a global scale in a way we had never seen before. Instead the global response has been crippled in numerous ways at various different points in time.

The American political failing is in not being the true world leaders, and the world is, IMHO, worse off for it.
The quoted numbers are extremely likely inflated but feel free to use: $355.9 million impact on Austin’s economy / 146Billion in the metropolitan statical area = 0.24% as an overly generous guess. Aka including staff who then spend that income on other things. That’s still less than the shutdown costs over a few days.

In the end the overwhelming majority of people are not throwing down thousands of dollars per day at bars and restaurants.
Germany has about as many cases in total as NY, yet less than 1/2 of the deaths. The death rate seems high in NY, maybe because hospitals could not cope?
Ubuntu 20.04 arrives with Linux 5.4 kernel and WireGuard VPN
Ubuntu 20 desktop VirtualBox VBoxManage install script
The only good news that I am getting out of this, is that NYC seems to have avoided the dreaded 3-5% fatality rate that was the presumed worse case scenario (massive community spread, overloaded healthcare system). But the lockdown likely helped a lot, and it seems like they are seeing around 1% IFR, so I am not sure this really changes anything. Our understanding of the disease and how to treat it may also be getting better, but it still seems like if we let this thing run wild through the population (as some people on here are proposing) local health care systems will collapse and we will have a IFR orders of magnitude higher than the flu.

And as you pointed out, if the study came back with an infection rate of 50%, I am not sure I would consider that good news either. That means it would be nearly impossible to isolate vulnerable populations. So while a 50% infection rate would mean the IFR is lower, it also means opening things back up and only isolating the vulnerable would not work to protect them.
Even worse, assuming the high-grade brand is better to begin with - are you buying the real thing, or a counterfeit?
The Promise and Pitfalls of Neuromorphic Computers
I think that the relevant laws are those related to the phone/cable companies being public utilities (and thus explicit, by-design, state-permitted monopolies or duopolies). They aren’t allowed to wiretap them (because communications privacy was a bigger deal to legislators pre-internet) and have to provide service to all comers (ostensibly in exchange for being a monopoly-by-design).

From my limited understanding, this regulation forcing them to offer service (as a utility) to 100% of the market is coordinated on a state-by-state basis by the public service/public utilities commission.

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

(Fun fact, I learned this at a young age because my dad ran a paging/voicemail service out of the basement of our single family, suburban residential home when I was about 10. We were the only house on the block with dozens of trunk lines coming into our little bungalow; but by law they had to do it if you ordered it. Try that today with internet access from a cable company, ha! It’s all but impossible due to TOS to run an internet business at a residential address now. Hosting for-profit services with the internet you pay for or reselling the service in any way means you get instantly unplugged.)

Sorry I don’t have a direct link to the all-comers bit of PUC/PSC regulation, but this should give you a starting point for research.

The not-allowed-to-tap-phones bit is a federal law:

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2511

It’s sort of insane how provider-wiretapped has been the all-encompassing default for almost all of the largest DM/1-to-1 communications systems in the world: SMS, WeChat, Facebook, VK, Instagram, Gmail. WhatsApp and iMessage are outliers in this regard. Almost all popular new entrants like Slack and Discord are provider-tapped, too.

This is a relatively recent development in our society’s relationship with electronic communications. Reading content by the provider used to be illegal as fuck.
Maybe we need another number like 1.42.2? I have no idea if this can be relevant for languages.
Thoughts?

https://www.straitstimes.com/world/united-states/coronavirus...
One critique was that the segment of the population who would respond to the ad and actually test may be more likely to have experienced COVID-like symptoms.
What is the android app? Is it an apk from outside the play store?
I think he would have yelled at an engineer to fix it while he took ayahuasca in Big Sur.
Keeping America fed during Covid-19
That's how it sounds when someone's compensation depends on user conversion metric!
A rental/lease model could also encourage collection and proper recycling of old hardware.
Gah, I've passed the editing window. If it's confusing to read, it is supposed to say:

> the specific construction lets you pinpoint the people who come up positive
Fast Ventilator Designs Volunteered by Engineers
That's a different argument. I'm saying that "lockdown until we have a vaccine or great treatment" might mean "lockdown until 2030". We already see heavy economic damages, civil unrest and riots after 4-8 weeks. Make that 40, 80 or 200 weeks and the world will be very different.
I should have clarified: I called the number back (from the caller ID)
Facebook did not "fail."
> If a library is compromised on apt, they'll push the update and your applications will be updated. With a Snap, every single snap developer must somehow come across the error (which could be in a sub-dependency), find the fix, then deploy again.

Snaps compete with third party apt repositories, not distribution-provided packages (but see below). I've seen a general trend in complex upstreams _bundling_ their dependencies even in builds destined for apt/deb -based distribution via third party apt repositories - because handling differing dependency versions across every distribution release is too complex. In this case, your distinction is moot. In both situations it is up to the upstream developers to update their dependencies. Only that with snaps, their sandboxing security model provides some mitigation.

It is true that some packages traditionally shipped by the distribution are moving to snaps, such as Chromium. This is because these packages are moving to bundling anyway, because updating them during the lifetime of a stable distribution release has become impossible any other way, due to the same dependency pain.
Dave Abrahams interview, contributor to C++ and Swift [audio]
HP laptops use spring ethernet port too, even very cheap ones.
They could be doing a lot of road work esp on the interstates.
It's a bit like C's:

#define MAC_TRAIT(i) trait T { i }

MAC_TRAIT( fn foo() {} )

Except that in Rust macro arguments are typed and can dictate their own microsyntax. Macro output is assembled in the syntax tree, not as text find'n'replace, which also avoids many surprises.
> The high-dpi support really is a big deal.
I honestly don't understand this. I owned a Retina MacBook Pro (2015) for a while and my current (Lenovo) laptop has a 4k screen, but I don't think I've ever actually cared about the increased pixel density. The only thing it's ever done for me is increase heat production, decrease battery life, and decrease compatibility (there's Mac software that isn't Retina compatible too, and it looks at least as bad as on Windows).

I use 24 inch monitors at 1080p all day and I can see the pixels if I look, but images still look plenty good and text is super readable. I switch between this pixel density and my Pixel 3 XL and while I can definitely notice the difference in density if I look, my productivity isn't affected whatsoever by having a less dense screen. Is everyone else putting their face 2 inches from the screen every 5 minutes just for the sense of satisfaction they get from not seeing the pixels?

> Apple has done a great job with their window manager
I think that's a pretty massive stretch. I haven't used a Mac as my primary machine for a few years now, but I've been watching the window management get worse and worse over the years. It used to be you could have a grid of Spaces and proper intuitive window management, but now Maximize is hidden behind the Fullscreen button. Virtually everyone I've watched use a recent version of macOS either has everything fullscreen, uses one window at a time with 4" of spacing around it because it's a pain to properly size the windows, or has 7 different apps installed to fill in missing features that have been around in Linux for as long as I can remember and in Windows since Windows 7.
I recently missed a bill due to an error on behalf of my utility company. It ended up at a debt collector, who when calling me insisted i share my date of birth, address and full name before they'd tell me what the call was regarding. I refused, they got mad and acted as if I was trying to avoid paying the bill. I assumed the call was fraud.

I found it was in fact not fraud when my credit monitoring service informed me that someone reported I refused to pay a bill. One call to the utility company later, it was resolved...unfortunately i'm still trying to fix the credit report.
I might be underestimating their ability to lie, but I'd imagine they think the statement is true even if it's still a lie of omission (that it's not the main reason).
Ok, so you're suggesting always running the browser in a VM, and using the GPU from within the VM (via the host OS of course).

I believe significant work has been done on the browser/graphics sandboxing problem. Whether browsers use techniques comparable to virtualisation, I don't know. I'm afraid I don't know much about how that's done, or how effectively virtualisation is able to contain the operations of VMs, or how high the performance penalty is.

Going with guesswork though, it seems to me virtualisation doesn't offer particularly solid guarantees here. If the host OS has a buggy graphics driver, it would presumably be possible for it to leak data back to the VM. Any facilities the GPU can offer to help contain semi-trusted graphics contexts, should presumably be available for use directly by the browsers, without running a guest OS in virtualisation.
I am posting some information here in case someone encounters this.

This seems like a type of DDOS attack to hide an email from a financial service.

All of these emails are essentially meant to hide the order of 850$ in the flurry of other emails.

Some information from a Google thread: https://support.google.com/mail/forum/AAAAK7un8RUCTPjR3thcdQ...
Yeah, just take a look at the financial sector. Your typical big investment bank has insider knowledge of a sizable percentage of the companies in the economy and separately, makes tons of trades. The two businesses are kept separate, no information exchanges between the two groups, no winks and nudges. If they get it wrong, they could go to jail.

If it is possible to create a so-called firewall [0] within banks to avoid unfair advantage via insider trading, it is possible to create a firewall between the platform and seller divisions withing Amazon for a similar effect.

[0] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/firewall.asp
That chart shows government spending at about 35.8% of GDP in 1980, and 37.8% now.
What do you think your edge is? ELI5 please.
There’s a very weak association between viral load and symptoms once you’re infected.
I've managed to "charge" mine with a Nintendo Switch adapter. Showed the charging symbol but still depleted battery over time. Just slowly.
Mistakes you are going to commit if you don’t teach personal finance to your kid
Broadcom orders its software employees to return to the office
Another way to look at it is that 20% of people most likely to contribute to a high transmission rate already have had it, in turn flattening the curve by a considerable amount
we have absolutely no clue regarding the long-term impacts of exposure to this virus for asymptomatic people or otherwise.

we cannot gamble with our future so carelessly on the basis of preliminary data. here is a vignette to explain why.

once someone is infected with HIV, most people experience flu-like symptoms for a week or two which then resolve either with or without treatment. in some people, the virus is cleared so effectively after the initial infection that they will test negative for HIV. then, over the span of months and years, their immune system is silently and entirely asymptomatically destroyed, leaving them none the wiser until they progress to AIDS and get extremely sick.

COVID hasn't given us any indication of similar activity. but we know so very little that we can't take the risk, especially not with millions and millions of people. i will also note that we are unlikely to rule out these kinds of hypothetical risks anytime soon. so caution is our only defense against disaster.
Seems like a pretty clear violation of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act.
At the very least, they own your IP traffic. From there, every single value-add service you use gives them an opportunity to eavesdrop your data. Take, for example, https://aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing. All of the sudden your URL traffic is 'fair' game.
Its hard to buy that the ISA really has anything to do with it. As you mention apple has a fairly narrow market target for their cores. Both intel and AMD are basically building server cores (can you say threading?) and selling them as client devices. Mostly because that is where the real money for them is. Apple OTOH is building a client/mobile core, and they benefit from a number of "features" that they enable, which are known performance problems in the desktop/etc space but continue for legacy reasons. Combined with Intel basically standing still for the last ~5 years, and the tables have reversed as far as who is ahead on process+microarch.

Basically a lot of apples advantages are:

1: Complete vertical control of compiler+OS+hardware
2: Plenty of margin to spend on extra die
3: More advanced process @ TMSC
4: Very narrow focus, apple has only a few models of iphone+ipad, where as intel has dozens of different dies they modify/sell into hundreds of product lines. So everything is a compromise.

Any of those four give them a pretty significant advantage, the fact that they benefit from all four cannot be discounted.
Hard to say. It's easy to identify safe investments, but if you look at markets, money has flooded there already. People get paid to think about this sort of thing day-in-day-out.

People need food, shelter, and medicine, so those are well inflation-protected. But housing prices would collapse if everyone is unemployed for long. Food producers may get sued of COVID19 outbreaks which are happening at plants already (essential workers, no PPE). And hospitals may be overloaded for a long, long time in ways which are quite complex.

And you can't eat gold. It's as fiat as anything else.

We're looking at a potential major collapse. It's hard to shield yourself from that.

Education is always a good investment, I guess. Schools are desperate for students and tuition, and not a bad place to weather a crisis.
Seems like a good thing. I have wasted time at looking photos, now I can use that time to do something slightly more interesting.
Really, it's worth pointing out that this issue wasn't resolved within 5 hours?
People often forget that memory allocation is very expensive; the C/C++ default allocator is very inefficient.
I've been with ProtonMail a couple of years now, and recently made the step to buy my own domain to use for personal email. What I'm hoping is that whenever I want to switch provider in the future, it won't be any more trouble than to switch some DNS settings :)
Since this is a US-centric article it's worth noting that the US spends half of all federal discretionary spending (i.e. everything except Social Security or Medicare) on the military. Almost a trillion dollars a year.

If even half that money were spent on an actual industrial policy we would be in much better shape. I maybe shouldn't be surprised the Vox article doesn't mention this.
Ancient Egyptian pregnancy test survived millenia because it worked (2018)
Google collecting IP addresses is exactly my problem. I don’t mind you having access to them (and in fact you do in your server logs), I just don’t want a malicious third-party knowing what I’m doing on your site.
> we have just enough regulation to prevent healthy market dynamics, but not enough to have a single payer type system

this seems like a very concise summary of the problem. and insurance companies see the profits of this no-mans land
Except that Spain and Lombardy have been attributed to a soccer game and New Orleans has been attributed to Mardi Gras.
Yeah, every time my credit card provider has needed to contact me, they send me an recorded message telling me to call the number on my card.
Since doctors in other countries sacrifice similar amounts of time to become doctors, what makes US doctors so special? (We all know why)
In my opinion it is more likely that the main cause is that the infection got here very early, and that the mitigation and containment measures started very late in comparison with cities of similar size and density (Seoul for example).
Linux laptops are a mixed bag, to say the least. One-off "precision tuned" (vs commodity) hardware is often to blame. In general, if you want a stable linux laptop experience, you should be buying old. It's not very attractive, but it is sustainable -- which is it's own kind of attractive! :)

In general, my experience using debian-based distros as a laptop driver have been more or less frictionless. I use an older lenovo thinkpad (x1 carbon, 1st generation, purchased for like $200 secondhand a year and a half ago).

In general, thinkpads have a reputation for having a plug+play linux experience, once you boot for the first time. I'd recommend giving them a try before throwing in the towel, if you have any patience in reserve.

You can get pre-owned (older=more stable linux support) t-series thinkpads with very nice specs, especially if you're willing to trade off display resolution. Plus the parts that die (batteries, ram) are all commodity and replaceable, you could presumably run with the same laptop for a decade, if you're in to that sort of thing.
It's a problem of lack of STEM education, unfortunately. More specifically, of metrology.

"90% of elementary school teachers" is not directly comparable to "90% of veterans". You have to multiply them by their respective populations to get numbers that can be compared. In general, a thing of the form "$amount of $something" is not comparable to "$amount of $somethingelse". That amount being a fraction with a '%' sign in front of it doesn't change anything.

Unfortunately, schools aren't beating people with sticks until they internalize that point, while at the same time a good part of sales and marketing relies on people not being formal enough in their thinking.
Perhaps the interstate highway system is a federal issue, but a metro subway or bus system isn't. Seattle's mass transportation system has no impact on Miami's; I doubt either has an impact on Portland's.

What resources and knowledge does the federal government have that the states don't? If the federal government has such knowledge, it should probably publish the papers, so that state and municipal experts can determine how to apply it to their region.

If the federal government lowers taxes, the states can raise theirs, and accomplish whatever objectives they need to. It's a many-billion dollar state issue in many states, which looks like a trillion dollar federal issue when you add up all the states, but there doesn't seem to be any economy of scale which makes the federal government better suited to solving the issue than any given state.
Interesting, reminds me of the steady "Chrome-ification" of Firefox, something I've never asked for.
Thankfully a few things have been reversed, like the silly tab shape.
It'd be a ban of any mixture of vertical integrating with not vertically integrating. Which in turn makes it tough to transition (either direction) between the two.

So, Apple would be allowed to vertically integrate and make the chips, hardware, operating system, and applications for their products. But they'd have to stop selling Belkin chargers alongside Apple chargers at apple.com, and the iOS app store would have to contain either only Apple apps and no third-party ones or vice versa.
Cool, great information, thanks!
> You can call me too incompetent or whatever but I’ve been running into stupidly obscure bugs that even stumped some of my Linux guru friends.

No, you're not incompetent. As usual, manufacturers are putting weird features into their laptops that the Linux drivers and userspace can't keep up with - e.g. the debacle that is the Nvidia Prime gpu switching tech for low power vs high performance modes. Simply doesn't work most of the time, leaving you scratching your head. UEFI related woes are also common as we finally deal with having to give up on a decent experience with legacy boot.

At this point the wise person buys a laptop with official Linux support out of the box. It helps you and it helps the community (vote with your dollars!).
> Far cheaper, and the power / UX of a mid-range 2020 desktop blows my 2019 Macbook Pro completely out of the water for my usecase.

Which laptop do you use? I tried to switch from my just-post-Intel MacBook Pro to the Lenovo X220 several years ago, figuring Linux support + IBM quality (they had been fairly newly bought out) would give me a solid machine. Turns out several stuck pixels on the monitor and a keyboard on which some keys didn't work were officially regarded as within acceptable quality range. (Plus, I hated the trackpad, but that's my preference rather than a hardware issue.)
Yes, it's modular and the difference in names is mainly marketing. At the end the packages are hosted by the same infrastructure and switching from one DE to another is just a single apt install lubuntu away, and a single selection in the login screen.
That's what we call the magic impossible holy grail parallelizing compiler.
ProtonMail will become an extremely important company in the next decade. Their one risk is being bought.
you are quite incorrect in thinking that I've done a complete 180.

https://twitter.com/maxharris9/status/946098382501593093
https://twitter.com/maxharris9/status/946092172301934597
https://twitter.com/maxharris9/status/946086949034401792
https://twitter.com/maxharris9/status/1193024005390778370
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5956471

Congrats on your gains as well! And I don't think it's fair to either of us to call it luck.
I'd imagine Apple are likely a big enough part of Adobe's userbase for them to release a native ARM version.
Free access to UK's National Archive records
With those $800 you could have a bought a really good 802.11ac WiFi router for the lab?
Depends on ones measure of success.

Mine is, does this product and/or service represent a net benefit to humanity without egregious side-effects?

the answer isn’t always so clear-cut