skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think programming is something binary - either obvious or inscrutable - but there are certainly environments which make programming seem more like one or the other to the vast majority of people who would fall in between those two extremes on the spectrum.

One such finding by Cantwell Wilson and Schrock:

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.88....

Math background and formal programming classes before their CS101 class helped, but the dominant factor was "comfort level"

* how they perceived the difficulty of the course

* how they perceived the difficulty of completing the assignments

* how they perceived understanding the concepts of the course compared to their classmates

* asking questions in class, in labs, and in office hours

Students who felt "comfortable" in these areas compared to those who did not had a strong positive correlation with grade performance.

From my own experience you get a looooot of mileage when teaching others programming or even basic computer literacy skills out of:

* making "mistakes" yourself to show them the machine won't (literally or figuratively) break

* tell them that error messages are actually the wise words of a sherpa left behind by the developers to help you up the mountain

* Following all the awesome advice in Phil Agre's How to help someone use a computer ( https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/how-to-help.html )

I studied chess quite a bit, and one time I complained to my instructor that I was great at tactics but couldn't apply it in my games. He wisely pointed out, "That's because you know when you're in a tactical puzzle that there is a concrete solution."

For people who find computer science "obvious" I think it's in large part because they are "convinced" - by assumption, by proof, by experience - that the thing in front of them was designed to do things ... that you're in a puzzle, basically. So no matter how many wrong things you enter, bugs you encounter, hacks you endure, logic bombs you build ... there's an answer, and you can find it, key by painful key if needed.

And a lot of people feel more like they've been flung into the middle of a chess game, and there's no certainty at all that what's being asked of them can even be done.

"Convincing" people of that they're in a puzzle is the first step. If you fail it, they will always feel that computer science and software development and all things computers are "inscrutable."
Seriously? You know Twitch is a massive thing, right? Game streaming is already a billion-dollar industry, not to mention all the non-gaming live content like mukbangs.
Compulsory Figures
Show HN: stup – save, access and organize daily notes in the shell
Agreed, good point. The Feds should not set up a "whole new system", but also not expect much from state UI, which wasn't designed for this crisis. So what should the Federal response be?

To start with, the Feds should identify existing agencies with the capacity to administer payments. Like the IRS: one coarse-but-quick approach is for the Feds to instruct the IRS to eliminate SSI withholding. That makes it cheaper for every business to employ workers. Beyond that I don't know; this is where Federal leadership should step in.
Frustrated parents giving up on home school
I was doing stuff with the Johns Hopkins data and it has all kinds problems with it (not to mention the format is terrible; time series as columns?!). They also tacked on the retroactive New York cases to the end to the time series data. I did a post on it:

https://battlepenguin.com/tech/fighting-with-the-data/
A bunch of climate change protesters shut down a major city interchange during the last half term. Three main routes were closed for a whole week.

It was wonderful — who knows if there’s any unbiased truth to it but it certainly felt like there was a huge reduction in stress cycling around. Even where it’s perfectly safe to interact with cars — bike and pedestrian route in the park quickly crossing a road into another park on the other side — it was just such a relief not to have to eye roll at the traffic jumping the lights as they turn red or be glared at by angry van drivers who had to stop for the hippy on his push bike!

It feels a bit like that now. Even more so really with the grater number of cyclists I see at all different times of the day (I’m out on the bike more than most, doing PPE deliveries.)
As others have pointed out, many websites have evolved away from their old ways from the old days. Or maybe their audience changed as the web became mainstream.

Apart from these websites that still exist, I miss the sense of discovery from the old web, which felt more democratized then today’s web, where it feels most of the online experience is monopolized by a few big platforms. I liked chancing upon some roughly designed personal website and finding the gems therein, which was more special than the manicured template of platforms like Medium.

I don’t have an explanation for what the gap or difference is. I just know it exists. Another example is how AIM away messages felt special and personal, in a way that Facebook statuses have never matched. What changed? Maybe it’s just that we have.
Yet another not a website one: MUDs and talkers. MUDs are still around, but the talkers like Foothills are long gone. The Burbs was still around a few years ago, but there were only about 5 people on. Nothing like the heyday when there would be hundreds on.

Edit: Well, a bit of searching and I find Burbs and a few others still alive. Gonna have to check them out
COVIDSafe - Australian government COVID-19 tracing app
Or, you know, stop rejecting data that doesn't reinforce your view that the sky is falling. Because it isn't.

Around half of SF has been exposed to corona at this point, yet the hospitals are basically empty and the governor gave away 500 ventilators last month because we don't need many.

HN is about as accepting of scientific data as Fox news at this point.

If you're one of the sheeple that believes the falsehood that corona is the end of the world, please ask me some questions.

AMA.
That would be awful for a keyboard. With sound, either the CPU wakes up to process sound very frequently or it processed sound in big chunks with high latency. Neither choice is reasonable for a keyboard.
The other side of this is that actual science happened. Admitting error is science being done right. The search for the truth is fundamental and detecting when it wasn't found is contributing to the greater truth.

Questions around methodology abound but at its core this is science walking tall. Not hobbling along loaded down with sugar-coated lies about to collapse into a coma. That this is seen as an exception or extraordinary is quite illuminating in itself.
You might be talking about notpron/notpr0n? I found it both unsettling and fascinating at the time.
Not especially simple to buy contraband using dollars electronically, over the internet. If we assume those contraints, there are existing solutions that actually work without as much immediate interference.

A dollar replacement with zero additional benefits (like those mentioned above) seems like the exact "solution without a problem" that existing "blockchain" tech was pretending to not be. TL;DR - this won't work!
Any known issues like spyware or tracking with this app. This is a tracking app, is it not?
Why would PAR be tricky to use efficiently? I just see it as a file encoding.
The reasons that the cruise and airline companies should not be bailed out are:

1. Cruise companies are registered off shore, do not pay US taxes and do not employ US taxpayers. Their "industry" is exploitative, polluting, and dangerous to public health.

2. Airlines have spent the last 10 years using excess cash to do share buybacks, thus "juicing" their share price and providing tax effective "dividends" to their shareholders while literally not saving for a rainy day.

3. These bailouts have not been tied to the government receiving equity or to any sacrifices/haircuts by existing equity or debt holders. This is unconscionable expenditure of taxpayer funds, socializing losses while privatizing gains.

4. Large corporations already have sufficient lines of credit and other sources of funds. Small businesses are both the primary employers of the majority of the workforce and also the primary location of both supply and demand of consumption in the economy.
I wouldn't use one if it was given to me for free.
As they say, you don't need to out run the bear, only your partner
You aren’t answering the question. Sure, keyboards don’t currently report a mapping from button to label, and software doesn’t expect such a report. This doesn’t mean it has to be this way.

A keyboard could tell the host “here is how I think I’m labeled”, and the host could make use of this information.
Also, the FATF seems utterly incompetent at writing well-designed regulation.

It is for example very hard to make sense of their definitions. Here is their definition of "virtual asset": "A virtual asset is a digital representation of value that can be digitally traded, or transferred, and can be used for payment or investment purposes. Virtual assets do not include digital representations of fiat currencies, securities and other financial assets that are already covered elsewhere in the FATF Recommendations." [1]

Some nitpicking: Taken literally, Bitcoin falls through this definition, because a Bitcoin is not a "digital representation of value", it is a "digital value". It does not represent anything, it is the value itself. But that's the least problem of all. The FATF commits the sin of providing a negative definition, basically saying every digital representation of value is a virtual asset except for those already covered elsewhere. No biologist would ever define "tree" as every plant not already described elsewhere. It is not something you can meaningfully work with. But let's see what they already covered elsewhere. For example, they cover "funds" elsewhere. Funds is defined as "every kind of asset". But if "virtual assets" are "assets" and therefore also "funds", they are already covered elsewhere and thus no "virtual asset" anymore. One should also note that FATF frequently uses the term "funds or other assets", indicating that they don't really know the meaning of the word "every".

Edit, just to add another point: you would think that the 134-page strong document "INTERNATIONAL STANDARDS
ON COMBATING MONEY LAUNDERING AND THE FINANCING OF TERRORISM & PROLIFERATION" in which the expression "money laundering" is used 284 times would somehow provide a clear definition of what money laundering is? You would be wrong. "Money laundering offense" is tautologically defined as "References (except in Recommendation 3) to a money laundering offence refer not only to the primary offence or offences, but also to ancillary offences." That's all. No further specification about what money laundering actually is.

[1]: https://www.fatf-gafi.org/media/fatf/documents/recommendatio...
> where I can live car-free and hope more cities accelerate plans like this.

You seriously want to live in a car-free society after COVID19? The subway in NY was a major source of infection in the city.
Doodie.com

It’s not exactly XKCD, but the regular (daily?) update felt like something new and special. More so than the new content posted on slashdot, though that was just as popular.
Absolutely. It is incorrect for me to say that Congress lacks the authority to write the law the cancels rent. Congress has the authority. They lack the art to create that which would not have its authority challenged.
Would be good to include [Tyk](https://Tyk.io) in there, as far as OSS gateways go it's one of the more popular ones (caveat: I'm the founder) :-)
Oddly, it doesn't look like Chapter 1 exists in the book, despite its mention in the index. Even the 2017 version is missing it.
+5 Insightful

...is something I still say out loud to myself occasionally. For example if I hear a good point made on the radio.
If you let losers in, eventually you'll only have losers. That's because losers drive out non-losers.
but it would go against everything we know about viruses and our adaptive immune systems. I know there are some vaccines with lower take rates. Hep B requires 3 injections and only has a 60% change of generating antibodies.

But an immune response from an actual virus should last for at least a few years. There are situations where you can get reinfected later in life if you're not exposed or given booster shots (likes Shingles).

Is there evidences that our adaptive immune system only generates short lived antibodies, and for what families of viruses?
Kensington and Chelsea don't like segregated bike lanes. One upcoming bike lane of CS3 quality is from the borough border (Olympia) towards Heathrow.
You're not the only one who the writing drove crazy!
> I live in Tokyo and I can assure you that living car-free is lovely

So you really enjoy packed subways that make you feel like cattle pretty much every time of the day? Sorry but Tokyo is the best example of "best in class public transport" being completely over capacity for the amount of people they have to transport every day.
The federal government issuing funds via the inadequate state UI mechanisms adds unnecessary friction.

The way for the money to have been issued is that each Social Security enrollee be sent funds from the Federal government, irrespective of income or employment status.

Those who have immediate needs would immediately spend. Those that do not would either be forced to invest/deposit the funds or otherwise continue economic consumption by spending.

Either way, the issuing of funds would have been much more efficient and fast than the mishmash of state UI programs and the IRS.
There are dollars that only exist as digital entries in the Fed's books and don't correspond to any physical printed bills. There is no fundamental "physical" backing for USD anymore.

USD is already a digital currency.
It’s certainly not. The money multiplier is a very basic macroeconomic concept. Almost very little of all the “money” is actually grounded in a tangible form. For all intents and purposes, almost all money is indeed digital.

It’s not digital as a cryptocurrency, but more as rows in database tables.

As a simple example, if everyone wanted to withdraw their money, all at once, very few people would actually be able to.
Yahoo, when it was a single page with a couple of dozen links. I think that was before there was a browser for Windows -- I was using the Omniweb browser on a NeXT Color workstation. I still miss the original Wired and later Wired News.
Users can still choose not to install native apps. For as long as the web remains free, I’ll happily support newspapers, magazines, YT Premium and Patreon with my dollars, while absolutely not using the apps with ads in them, in favour of using 3 different content blocking extensions in Safari, and Strict privacy mode in Edge with uBlock Origin on desktop.

That said, because ads are inserted by third parties, you can often block ads with DNS and/or VPN. It’s a shame that iOS has never allowed changing the DNS while on mobile networks, though.

Really though, I miss when we were building open standards for content though, like RSS and podcasts.

Feels like a different era of the Internet, as we never saw an open standard take off for ChromeCast/AirPlay2 or the mentioned-on-stage open standards for FaceTime. Even the RIAA is trying to lock down music again by promoting MQA (Tidal) over FLAC (HDtracks, Amazon).

Closest thing to “open” that I can think of recently for content would be HLS streaming, which optionally supports encryption, but is otherwise open to use or implement.

Given recent history, I think it could go either way, but I doubt users will ever fully accept a closed web, so as long as the web provides open alternatives on every platform, we’ll still be in the clear... for now. :)
Some landlords have mortgages to pay too - so in that case "rent holiday" is basically "landlord pays for tenant". But commercial real estate seems to be a different beast. I've witnessed a large amount of commercial property being empty for years at a time (5+) in a fairly expensive area of NY. Commercial landlords in this case probably owned the buildings outright and were in agreement to keep rents high even if it made it longer to find the next tenant. It probably is not like that everywhere, but I was really surprised that half of the building would just sit unoccupied for so long.
Corbyn was elected Labour leader in 2015, reelected in 2016 and subsequently lost 2 general elections and torched 8% of the Labour vote. It's abundantly clear that his unpopularity extends to a much wider group than the Labour establishment.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_history_of_Jeremy_...
Visual studio can show a call-graph, containing both callers and callees to/from a function. "Who calls this" is standard feature of any IDE worth it's name, it's usually called find usages or find references.
Yeah? I haven't looked in years...
Though I think I've probably lost some of the feeling of wonder exploring those servers 20 years ago engendered. For a young coder, from a small town with basically zero tech resources - they seemed like the library of Alexandria :-)
Our trickle down economics philosophy in the US does not let the government do this. The onus will be on propping up businesses, when all they need to do was support employees. Instead we bail out whole companies and that usually means paying a lot more than just employee salaries.
I wonder to what extent this has effected their public policy around healthcare? Were doctors afraid of warning about severity for fears if they got it wrong and their advice was used to close schools/businesses.
you might like https://freshcode.club/
If we let the US Postal Service die, we’ll be killing small businesses with it
Giving people money isn't going to restore consumer confidence. People are afraid to leave their homes. Even when the government starts easing restrictions, they'll still be afraid. They will buy groceries, pay for rent and Netflix, and save the rest of their money.

I know people who have not left their homes for weeks. Consumer confidence is at absolute historic lows with no clear path to restoring it. This means there is likewise no clear path to a restoration of the parts of the economy which are currently disappearing.

The tools of economic policymakers are mostly ineffective in the current situation. The only way a recovery of any kind will happen, and it will likely be slow, is if people start venturing out of their houses again and looking for places to spend money. The government's role has to start with literally encouraging people to step outside of their front doors and walk around.
> Conversely, as I will show, data show that local infections were negatively correlated with subway use, even when controlling for demographic data. Although this correlation study does not establish causation, it more reliably characterizes the spread of the virus than the intuitions and visual inspections that Harris relies on.

https://marketurbanism.com/2020/04/19/automobiles-seeded-the...

> New York and other subways

> In multiple other countries, one cannot see the transit cities in the virus infection rates. In Germany the rates in the largest cities are collectively the same as in the rest of the country. In South Korea, the infection is centered on Daegu; Seoul’s density and high transit usage are compatible with an infection rate of about 700 in a city of 9.5 million, about 1.5 orders of magnitude less per capita than in most Western countries and 2.5 orders of magnitude less than in New York. In Taipei, the MRT remains crowded, with weekday ridership in February and March down by 15-16%. In Italy, car usage is high outside a handful of very large cities like Milan, and Milan’s infection rate isn’t high by the standards of the rest of Lombardy.

> However, rest-of-world evidence does not mean that the New York City Subway is safe. The Taipei MRT has mandatory mask usage and very frequent cleaning. German U- and S-Bahn networks are a lot dirtier than anything I’ve seen in Asia, but much cleaner than anything I’ve seen in New York, and also have much less peak crowding than New York. New York uniquely has turnstiles requiring pushing with one’s hands or bodies, and the only other city I know of with such fare barriers is Paris, whose infection rates are far below New York’s but still high by French standards.

> So the question is not whether rapid transit systems are inherently unsafe for riders, which they are not. It’s whether New York, with all of its repeated failings killing tens of workers from exposure to the virus, has an unsafe rapid transit system. Nonetheless, the answer appears to be negative: no evidence exists that the subway is leading to higher infection rates, and the paper does not introduce any.

https://pedestrianobservations.com/2020/04/15/the-subway-is-...
I go a little further on my i's. i for the imaginary unit looks very different from i for indexing.
I use Kiwi browser, which supports all chrome extensions.
its attention much more than time, attention is compressed time.
Thank you for that. Would you happen to know if Hunspell (I think that this is what firefox uses at least on linux) has something similar or if I can use this dictionary with it?
First, each patient coughed directly upon a petri dish 20 cm away, not once but 5 times.

I don't think anyone would rationally believe that a non-fitted mask would have a high probability of providing protection to a person directly coughed on by an infectious mask-wearer, all at a distance of 20cm. If they were going to test under those conditions, they should have used an N95 mask. Doing it with a surgical mask under such conditions was a waste of time and no surprise at all.

The argument has never been that non-fitted masks prevent 100% of all viral particles emitted by an infectious person from escaping into the environment (which is what that tests, since it only takes a few virions to start a colony in a culture).

The argument has been that wearing a non-fitted mask can significant decrease the amount of virus-laden droplets floating around in the air, and falling onto surfaces.

The more we find out about asymptomatic carriers, the more this makes sense. These carriers aren't going around coughing their lungs out, they transmitting disease by talking and breathing. A mask likely helps a lot with that.

I've really like to see the same experiment repeated, but with the patient wearing the mask and talking, and the petri disk held ~2 meters away. These are the conditions under which the disease is being transmitted now, outside of households and healthcare facilities.
On Android you have DNS66 (non-root) and AdAway (root), both can kill ads in browsers + webviews + native apps.
I got a rack full of Dell and HP blade servers of Ebay years ago - nice gear - dual quad core xeons with 48G ram, SSD, and gigabit networking...

Thing is, running all 16+ blades pushes my electric bill over $500/month, and sounds like a fighter jet getting ready to take off :-P

Having silent gear is totally underrated!
This isn't how science works.

"there's no reason for you to continue with the messaging when all evidence points to immunity being conferred for some duration of time."

You must have a reading problem since the WHO has said there's no evidence. None. That's crystal clear, but it doesn't align with your opinion that this is just like the flu in seriousness.

There's no reason for you to continue with the messaging when your opinion is continually shown to lack even the slightest rigor in thinking. You're continually cherrypicking the most favorable reports and dismissing anything that conflicts with your opinion. As Marcellus Wallace once said, 'that sting you're feeling? It's cognitive bias.'
I remember Other Space! I watched it when it came out and really enjoyed it as well. One of the actors from Other Space is on Avenue 5

https://m.imdb.com/name/nm2654481/