skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don’t buy it.

First of all, there are very different rationales for healthcare workers and the general public to wear masks. Healthcare workers know they will be exposed, so the protocols must be damn near perfect. The general population does not know if they’ll be exposed, they’re trying to work in aggregate to put a drag on the viruses’ spread; even partially effective mask wearing slows that down. The general population can also practice social distancing, while healthcare workers must spend hours in close personal contact with positive patients by the nature of their jobs, vastly increasing their risk.

Second, this ignores the fact that mass mask usage prevents you from getting someone else sick. This is in fact exactly why surgeons wear surgical masks. Since we’ve known for months that this disease has asymptomatic transmission, the public health rationale for even cloth mask usage was obvious from the very beginning.
Saltwater Taffy for 6 months.
You have a depressingly good point.
First, is about simplicity, ASANA, for example, used to be very easy and straightforward to use, now got more complex than before. JIRA has tons of features, most of it we don't need. We wanted to use a simple tool that focuses on getting things done and enables us to make data-driven decisions.

Second, is we want to have full control over the data and build features custom to our needs.

Third, we don't have to pay per user per month.
Of course we are too busy.
Even the last century we didn't work like today.

No electrical light? Not working the night.

No subway? No work if there is snow.

No internet? No remote work.

etc
Because whether or not the virus affects them, they can still become a carrier and pass it on to others.
All of the images aren’t working on your site right now. Maybe the HN traffic brought it down, but it’s a little difficult to visualize without pictures.
I don't know anybody nor recall seeing more than a handful of mentions online of anyone getting their playtime via those services.
> what belongs and doesn't belong in Unicode

That's simple. The justification for most characters, including the exemplary one you mentioned, is that they were already encoded in some other repertoire. The consortium's task is to collect and unify them.
Google's just realised it's been asleep at the wheel eh? Used to be they'd fart out an internet changing mail service on a whim, now they pivot about as fast as an aircraft carrier in treacle.

Better luck next once in a lifetime pandemic, big G
I worked at a place one that had a style guide for the main front-end language used with links to terrible things that had happened as a result of breaking the style guides rules.

It was surprisingly effective, so I completely agree with you on the story-telling.
How often do you have to run adhoc SQL scripts in prod?
At my current company I lead the SRE team, but previously had been a developer and worked on a couple of products, one that ran in production for about 8 years (and is still running, in maintenance-only mode.)

The new development team has decided to write a new system to replace the old one and they frequently ask us to run ad-hoc SQL statements to clean up records and patch up issues caused by bugs.

In my ~8 years of working on the existing app, I can probably count on one hand the number of times we needed to run ad-hoc SQL scripts against production data (almost always after importing data from an other system), everything else was handled with migrations.

I'm seeing about 3-5 ad-hoc scripts needing to be run per-release. Just curious if this is at all normal or if I'm just expecting too much.

If you're wondering why I might have a problem with this at all, it's because at least 50% of the time there is also a problem with the SQL script and it either doesn't do the right thing or it has syntax errors. It feels like it was just "thrown over the wall".
The Many Keyboards of Past, Present, and Future iPads
Nodes aren't cleared until the next GC cycle.
Given the media industry's history, I'm sure if anyone relevant does see your post, that white space is simply going to be used as display ad real estate.
I would like to point out that in April 30th NASA will be announcing the commercial human lander awards.

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-to-announce-commerci...

Several politicians from the current US administration share the opinion to open up.

Maybe mr Musk would like to open up the economy. Maybe he does believe that's for the better, for the economy. Is that right? My understanding is that it is not, but I'm no epidemiologist.

Is he biased? Probably! Does a CEO waiting for a federal organization to announce if his company will win a contract from NASA looks OK when he doesn't wait a couple of days to tweet such a controversial tweet?

I don't think so.
> I'm not really excited that every meeting participant will be able to see my facial flaws in 4k HDR with dynamic surround.

Then you are a fool because high quality audio and video is not just a "nice to have" in video conferencing. It makes the difference between a phone-like conversation where you can just talk, and "I.. sorry.. after you. Ok so I was g.. no go on - what were you going to say? Sorry can you repeat that I can't hear you?"

That said, Zoom has been much better quality than Hangouts when I tried it. Do Meet and Duo use the same tech or does Google really have three different video conferencing systems?
What you describe would work if jobs were so commoditized that everyone could jump between them without any kind of onboarding or training. As it is, a new employee almost always provides negative value to the company for the first weeks or months, depending on the job particulars. So what would happen in many (most?) places is companies preferring to force the existing employees to come to work, rather than let them swap the job with someone else.
I too would love statics for this. However, I use Linux at home and Windows at work, and I generally read HN from my work PC in the mornings. If others are like me then this data wouldn't really be accurate.
> - No set up issues (visual programming is cloud-based)

Cloud-based has nothing to do with visual programming or no-code (you can also do cloud-based editing of conventional code if you desire). Counterexamples: LabVIEW, Simulink.

> - Less of a discoverability issue (visual programming shows a lot of things all at once)

Wasn't "shows a lot of things all at once" actually an argument (marketing pitch) why conventional programming language overwhelm many people who are not programmers, and visual programming languages are "thus" better because charts have a lot less "intellectual density" than computer code?!

> - It's easier to see the difference between arguments and parameters

What is actually the difference?
In theory, with accurate passing / historical data you could build out strategies that could translate to the real world from this setting. Football has two parts to it, one being the strategy aspect of moving the ball and beating the opposition position, and the other of actually executing these instructions physically. While the Google framework lacks on the latter (no sports simulation game is really close to the real world in terms of player models), the former can probably be learnt via RL, and maybe open itself to some neat counters to traditionally established strategy.
IBM Model M Keyboard
Marketing speak is mostly drivel to me, but you'll have a hard time convincing most people that the language is somehow oppressive.
Your comment is about 0.000005 decades older than mine.
Patiently waiting for WebAssembly to take off. I cant wait to get out of JS hell on client side.

HTML+CSS is a beautiful thing for ui. Its JS thats holding it back. If we had, say C# on the client side, imagine the web landscape by now.
Venezuela, Russia and Ukraine all defaulted in debt in their own currency as recently as 1998. Argentina has had an ongoing partial default in peso denominated debt.
Well, one needs a browser to access them....
I'd tend to think that he's not a tragic figure. Maybe dramatic in a way. But since he had a full life and even free choice to do it on its own term..

In any case I hope you didn't feel attacked. It was half curiosity half critic :)
As silly as it sounds, it would probably resolve this issue perfectly. As I remember, I always got the login prompt at roughly the exact same time into the meeting, suggesting it's just set to expire after a certain amount of whole days.
It's so big that going from the number itself to the number of digits (i.e. taking its logarithm) is not even something worth talking about. It's like blowing a kiss to an exploding nuclear bomb.

You just get dizzy even thinking about it. The observable universe is just not really that big when talking about this stuff, there are not even 100 orders of magnitude in the universe from smallest to biggest. Anything that you can have a conception of (even stuff like the number of possible lottery tickets or possible books that could ever be written etc) is just indistinguishable from mundane everyday sizes when dealing with googology. You're trying to roar but it comes out as a whisper. You have to explicitly design these. Most of the time if you think "but wouldn't it be comparable if we counted the XYZ) the answer is no.

It's like an adult equivalent of a kid saying "I get that galaxies are big, but are they also bigger than really big houses? How about a house with its own swimming pool? Really really big mansion of a big movie star?"

Edit: Tone is difficult in writing, I don't mean to be condescending, I'm getting dizzy myself when thinking of this and remember my frustration and amazement when first hearing about these.
Unicode was designed to unify all existing character sets in use at the time. So there are lots of weird historical things which wouldn't necessarily be accepted in Unicode as new proposals.

If the "external link" symbol had occurred in some legacy character set, then it would have been included automatically.

But since it is a new proposal, it will be validated according to Unicodes policy for new symbols.
I don't know what spitballing is but it sounds disgusting.
It's plain hindsight. Everything becomes obvious after you have had enough time to analyze the situation.
I've got more respect for him after those tweets
This is written by a coder, for people like him. It's therefore no wonder that people are eating it up: it's telling them what they already "know", or believe to know, or hope to be true.

Does anyone still believe in that 10x coder cliché? I thought we had decided to only use that idea sarcastically years ago? And, even worse, do they all still believe (against basic principles of statistics and logic) that they are uniquely able to identify and hire these übermenschen?

The one distinctly managerial thing it does imitate extremely well is to be both superficial and contradictory: "Set aggressive but achievable goals". Yeah, no shit! "Be customer-focused." Who would'a thunk? Additionally: do weekly one-on-ones, write documentation, sit in on sales and marketing, do whatever "upskilling" may be[0], recognise that hiring is your most important job, and know as much about your software as anyone not doing any of those things.

But, in all fairness, some typical managerial cruft has been cut. Or, maybe, one of the introductory lessons of management at least in the US has so far eluded the author: to at least pay lip service to issues like diversity in hiring or enabling work-life-balance.

If you've seen some of the more successful companies from the inside, you know they have gone through the motions so long they ended up actually believing it, and are now reaping the rewards that come with teams that include people from different walks of life, in both productivity and enjoyment.

Considering we've seen some startups almost disintegrate due to blind spots with regards to privacy, security, or ethical considerations of selling surveillance equipment to dictators or AI to drone fetishists, these larger-than-the-next-release issues certainly seem to deserve mention, as well.

[0]: not killing your higher-ups, hopefully, but also not teaching, because it would be silly to forgo such a common word, wouldn't it?
I have a model from 1989, I still use it every day.
> You could nit-pick all morning if it was strictly "true" in every which way, but this kind of selective simplification is what drives understanding.

That it fundamentally isn't true is the basis of the 51% attack which is hardly a "nit".

Overall I find this explanation too vague and abstract to be useful. A blockchain is a computer? Sure, you could perhaps squint and say that it is so in an abstract sense, but it doesn't really tell me anything about it. More concretely, you could say that it's a distributed append-only data structure where conflicts in additions are resolved using a consensus algorithm. You could then go on to explain how this data structure can be used to implement something like a public ledger or a contract protocol.

I realize that the full article somewhat touches on these subjects between talk about "commitment computers" and "idea mazes". By going for a more concrete explanation, the weaknesses of the network would be evident and such simple falsehoods as the idea that a blockchain "removes the need to trust anything other than code" would not be propagated.
emacs is nice too in that if you are using tramp mode (/ssh:blah) to open a remote file you can create a remote eshell too. you can do diffs and merges between remote machines also. in the pre container/k8s days i worked at a place that did horizontal load balancing between 20ish remote VMs. the ability to have many eshell tiled on screen was so helpful. i also had some elisp that took advantage of tramp mode to very crudely do VM orchestration across the 20. i will shut up now because i don’t want to be that emacs guy.
Knowing the architecture and tech stack should be a stretch goal.

Depending on the people and the size of the team, people management and communication can take more than 40 hours a week.
> Plus, why not have people choose themselves whether they're healthy enough to take chances and go out to work?

Three reasons immediately spring to mind:

1. It's a very well established fact that C19 can transmitted by asymptomatic people. "Healthy enough" does not mean "safe"

2. Ignoring that fact, I know can personally name several people who would absolutely go to work sick.

3. I've have several employers who would say "Do totally have a choice...come in or you're fired and I'll find someone else who will do it". This includes a very vivid memory of a manager telling one employee that she doesn't not have a valid excuse to miss her shift while she was still weeping because her grandmother had died.
Previous (quite lengthy) discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16112163
I think those two examples are a bit over-the-top, but I wonder if there might be a benefit to having such a visible convention, partly just because it's such an obvious reminder to be explicit about tone. Seeing it communicates tone and communicates that the reader should also go through extra lengths to communicate their own tone.

Though specifically for "praise:", I'm a much bigger fan of the :+1: thumbs up emoji instead which accomplishes about the same thing.
Of the sources I read for coronavirus news is a daily chart posted on RealClearPolitics.

Per today's chart, the US has the most confirmed cases, the most tests taken, and one of the lowest deaths per million.

It's tough to judge which countries are doing well and which aren't, even given stark contrasts in policy. I don't think it's possible to harshly condemn (or praise) anyone at this point.
African fintech firm Flutterwave launches SME e-commerce portal
Abba Kyari, who tried to clean up Nigeria, dies of Covid-19
The term "collapse" isn't used correctly there. The accurate title would have been "somewhat strained locally".
Because "healthy enough" doesn't mean not contagious.

Because people go to work sick otherwise they can't put food on the table, especially in a country where not going to work massively means losing your job in a country without a sensible, humane healthcare system.
Well, that is true. I misread that.
Not if you use an internal resolver.
Kanye West Is Now Officially a Billionaire
Aaaah the only Ig Nobel Prize winner in Lithuania!
Not that well picked over. After about 100 years of work and several volumes being published, the work on producing the complete collected works of Euler is not done.
> developers in China were using a hacked version of XCode

Can you give us more details on this? Interested.
Top Zoom Alternatives for Video Conferencing
Why doesn't Zuckerberg make his goal the core functionality of his platform?

> My goal for the next decade isn’t to be liked but to be understood.
The kind of investors who are really, really, really rich right now.
Detecting Explicit Content in Songs
https://grist.org/climate/the-world-is-on-lockdown-so-where-...
Cloud Adoption: OTT Platforms
JSON formatted state boundaries for creating maps of the US
sed-style works in discord too without the leading /

s/search/replace

Bothers me that it won't trim a trailing / tho.

FWIW it's usually faster just to press up (another shortcut to edit the last message) and word jump to fix.

Also FWIW I've always seen the asterisk apended.

“appended*”
There is a causal relation between more energy and more prosperity, not pollution. Pollution is a byproduct of how we have chosen to produce that energy. There is no fundamental reason it has to stay that way.
Good for you! :)

But bad for us :(

Love your work.
You would just run the power cables under the road. But it would be expensive and cause disruption.
This API is an easy way to get US zip codes in JSON format
It's not free to write documentation and getting people used to it though.
But then all banking apps stop working (including the 2FA apps "required" for using credit cards from some EU Banks; for EC cards you luckily still can use ChipTAN).

Also mobile payment will stop working, normally I wouldn't care about that but currently paying without touching anything is nice.

Then some apps you need for work might stop working.

Not even speaking about hounded of other apps.

The problem is to many app depend strongly on Google services which are not part of Android itself but shipped with every Google Android phone.

And to many institutions except you to either have a Google Android phone or a iPhone.

I could get away most of the time with a non Google Android phone but I will would need a second Google Android phone like 5 times a month or so.
Skype for business uses Win-F4 to mute. No kidding.
The Case for Digital Legal Tender: Central Bank Issued Digital Currency [pdf]
How Long Will a Vaccine Take?
Wish some hotkeys like m or f in youtube would be universal.
I never said it was a massive failure, but many people have switched over the years to some form of Android after getting fed up.
It sure has been a crazy passed few weeks all around the world. With social distancing, lock downs, closed schools and everything else going on, staying productive has been more difficult than ever.

With that said, to help productivity, I’ve decided to make Thought Train pay-what-you-want until the end of April.

My own primary use for Thought Train in the last month has been to take notes while on Zoom, Skype or Hangout calls, so I thought that since almost everyone is going to be working from home, I want you to have the same option to streamline your workflow.

Thought Train is a small app with a small audience of loyal users, so it’s really the best I can do in this climate to help in a small way.
I don't think you understand that article or how the new tax bill ripped off a million Californians by making them pay tens of thousands extra in taxes. I paid an extra $30k in taxes this year because of that bill. Only being able to deduct $10k taxes made Californias pay more federal taxes. We didn't get anything in return. Thanks for making my point how California pays for everyone else but get nothing in return.

Also for 4 of the 5 top employers in Texas are oil companies. Oil production is subsidized by the feds. Texas is a taker. They also will all go bankrupt unless bailed out with California tax money.
Yes, but the permission is per-app. Let’s say I approve location for the app because the app’s function requires it: the third party spying SDKs embedded in the app send that location data off to third parties without notifying me or permitting me to stop it.

Apple permits this behavior in the App Store.

Furthermore, IP address is coarse location even if you don’t grant the app permission, via GeoIP databases.

Long story short, Apple allows apps in the store to embed silent, nonconsensual spyware that you can’t disable.
A List of Free Online Tools for Web Developers
dig it! thanks so much
The imperial college recommended interminnent lockdowns - lock, release, lock, release and so on depending on how you keep it under control. Does that count?

Germany is having this discussion and Czech republic too. In both cases, epidemiologist recommend slight release of rules (not a big one, but still lowering lockdown).
Except this isn't the first time happening; Google Store was fulled with malware forever. The techies will of course say it doesn't mean anti-malware solution, while greater masses will say it's deff an anti-virus of some sort by looking at it.
That may be true but it's not that much more effort to create a hosted Wordpress site or to create a blog on Blogger. Arguably, those still lock you in a bit more than self-hosting Wordpress with your own domain, but the data is exportable and there is some migration effort associated with moving no matter what you do.
> I’m a software / site reliability engineer

okay, thanks.

Seriously, the list of scientist and medical organizations advising through this period is so long, I don't know why anyone who isn't at equally experienced tries to counter-claim their insights.

I'm not saying we shouldn't do our own research and arrive at our own conclusion, but if you arrive at a different conclusion, you're almost certainly the one whose incorrect. It's so likely that you're wrong, that you must question the logic and data you used to arrive at your conclusion.
Here's a blog post from a friend of mine that explains my viewpoint pretty well. Skip to "Issues with Creative Commons licensing" (or read the whole thing, it's not that long): https://blog.wolftune.com/2011/07/brain-parts-song-video.htm...

edit: I'll add on (my opinion, not from the post) that commercial use that actually respects the share-alike requirement is actually a good thing.

Say I take a photo and share it cc-by-sa, then a company adapts edits it to use on their website and releases the edited version cc-by-sa (as they are required to). Now anybody else can use their edited version, too. In effect, we've taken commercial dollars and put them towards adding to the commons. I think that's a great outcome, in a world where currently most FLO[1] works are extremely underfunded.

The type of commercial use that I'm opposed to is where a company takes something I (or others) make, embeds it into their proprietary product, and contributes nothing back to the FLO ecosystem (money or time). That's exploitative. But the share-alike requirement already prevents this, without creating incompatibility among otherwise FLO licenses.

[1]: https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/about/free-libre-open#flo
Watchsmith: My New Favorite Apple Watch Complication
Besides what other comments noted there is the problem that sometimes Google knowingly tolerates software incompatible with their AGBs and through this endangering the privacy of users.

If I remember correctly TickTock was such a case.