skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Google and Apple have web browsers, and they can be used to build quite a bit. Presumably, Apple and Google browsers won't block a website. The Web is probably the most open and permission-less ecosystem there is, among the widely deployed ones. And it supports more and more features that let you replace native apps:

Push Notifications (engagement)
Web Payments (monetization)
Contact Picker API (virality)
WebRTC (peer to peer data, files and video)
ServiceWorkers (caching and more)
Crypto (peer to peer encryption, auth)
PWAs (add to home screen)

Wordpress has been a smashing success for indie Web 1.0 (with tons of hosts and their one-click install). We also have Drupal, Joomla etc.

But what about Web 2.0? There has to be a sort of "operating system" of reusable components the same way that MacOS did buttons and menus and windows.

We have amazing hardware. But we rent our software from Zoom, Facebook, Telegram. Why? Because it's very hard to replicate everything we've come to expect from Facebook today, and not in 2004.

Well, there are projects out there on the front lines doing it. Like Inrupt (née SoLiD) from Tim Berners-Lee. I met most of these guys and teams over the years. We started before everybody, in 2011, so we have had a bit of a head start. Nearly 10 years and over $700K spent from our revenues. I'm not proud of how long it took. But it has been a long slog. But yes, we want our platform to be the next Wordpress and liberate the Web from Feudalism to a free market:

https://github.com/Qbix/Platform

(Here is the larger vision, not realized yet: https://qbix.com/QBUX/whitepaper.html#Distributed-Operating-...)
Millions of email addresses leaking to advertising and analytics companies
‘One important trend to notice is how often Google Analytics, Google’s DoubleClick, Facebook, and Twitter are ingesting the user emails — these are organizations that should be receiving deletion requests en-masse and they should all have processes to handle this type of effort already (Facebook likely has this tech already based on conversations on this research and additional research from a private report from several years ago).‘

‘This type of email user data in a URL bar synced into Javascript pixels is most typically blocked by a regular person through “Ad blockers” or through browsers like Safari, Brave, and Firefox — those browsers use Javascript/cookie blocking as a default features to protect users (each browser handles it slightly differently). This breach and research included here would impact all Chrome users of these websites who went through these specific user flows and who didn’t proactively block all Javascript (a rarely used option) or use a Chrome “Ad blocker” extension that blocked this type of Javascript. Some people using the other “safe” browsers (Safari/Brave/Firefox) could have been protected from the leak due to their 3rd party Javascript requests being blocked.’

Original title too long. It was: The 2020 URL Querystring Data Leaks — Millions of User Emails Leaking from Popular Websites to Advertising & Analytics Companies
It doesn’t look like anyone bought it, masks still sold out quickly and health care providers are still reusing N95 masks. And in exchange the CDC spent a large amount of their credibility; a real lose lose.
A lot of power is derived from and dependent on pretending there is division where there is not.
> Twitter is not a platform where official stuff should be on. That is what press releases are for. If people believe Twitter, then where should I go (as the new imagined Tesla CEO) to just say whatever the hell I want?

It doesn't or didn't have to be. Tesla were the ones who stated in their Annual Reports that they considered Tesla and Elon's Twitters to be official sources for Tesla information.

This wasn't forced on him as a matter of censorship. _He_ chose that, his bed to lie in.
Awful Amazon Interview Experince
I just wanted to share my recent experience interviewing with Amazon. I hope it helps everyone.

About myself:

I am a Ph.D. candidate in computer science, work at a financial company as a senior engineer, and teaching part-time at my university courses such as compiler, algorithm and data structures. I live in the midwest, USA. I love doing interviews and solving algorithm questions.

Background:

I interviewed at Palo Alto, CA office about a year ago and although it went well and I answered all the questions I was told: "this position wasn't a best fit for me" ...

A few weeks ago I was reached out by an Amazon recruiter about an opportunity in the Seattle area and I was told the previous recruiter did not find a best match for me and she apologized for wasting my time. She said they would like to do a another round of interviews. As I love challenging myself, I said yes and I did a screening which I was given 2 algorithm questions and about 2 hours and I solved both of them and all my unit tests passed.

For the second round of the interview, it was all online for 4 hours and I solved all questions and my code passed all unit tests for all their algorithm problems.

Today I got a call from the recruiter saying that I was rejected because "my technical skills were lacking". I didn't want to argue with the recruiter so I accepted the feedback. I just wanted to share my story because I always saw these interviews with Amazon and Google as a challenge but now I feel like they are a complete joke.

People who interviewed me were so arrogant and clueless. They had no clue how to calculate time complexity. No clue why provided unit tests were not enough and etc. They were just looking at the solution and thinking they know everything.

I am so disappointed at Amazon and their interviewing process.
Once we reopen, we aren't going to regain capacity in hospital beds overnight. How are parts of the US going to avoid being to be on lockdown every two to eight weeks for the remainder of the summer? I feel if everyone understood that this cycle is inevitable, we could constructively benefit from people arguing the threat of reopening vs the threat of continued exposure. Instead, it's a game of chicken who wants to open up the economy later than June—just in time for cases to spike in July.
Tesla should have considered that before announcing in their Annual Report that they considered @tesla and @elon to be "Official Company Statements", then, no?
Your mention of prolonged/repeated exposure being "much deadlier for all age groups would possibly include health workers? You know, those who tested positive and likely had to face a much greater number of exposure vectors than any typical civilian in the general population.

Well, even among them, the mortality rate is shown to be quite far from "much higher". In one recent major Italian analysis of its health workers: sitting at 0.4% if one includes elderly doctors as well, and at no more than 0.1% if clinical workers above 60 are excluded. For medical workers under 30, the mortality rate at zero, out of close to 2000 who tested positive. This in general out of nearly 17,000 Italian medical staff that were almost certainly often living and working under severe immune-compromising strain and frequently becoming exposed to patients with Covid... Yet... Well, the numbers show what they show.

There is indeed dangerous optimism with aspects of COVID among some people. But masturbatory pessimism also exists, and it seems to be endemic in comments here among people who keep ignoring steadily more evidence of a virus that's not showing itself to be near as deadly as it seemed just a month or so ago..

Also, yes, young people do die of Covid as well, but at such an exceptionally low rate that they're extreme outliers that grab plenty of media attention. Repeatedly focusing on how you "might" die of the virus even if you're young is an absurd exercise in ignoring proper risk perspective for the sake of cheap fear-mongering points.

Link: look at the table: https://www.epicentro.iss.it/coronavirus/bollettino/Bolletti...
I initially started following the WHO, CDC, and a few other health related agency Facebook pages when this pandemic actually started to take off in North America (mid-March).

I had to stop following the WHO and CDC Facebook pages because the value of information they were posting was so poor, I was IMHO better of not having access to it.
I think Netflix is just in there because FAANG sounds cool.
How we can bring back the open Web
Yes, my favorite thing about Tao is how well he explains concepts on his blog [0] and on mathoverflow[1]. He does not put on airs of being an unapproachable genius. I guess he knows he has nothing to prove

[0] https://terrytao.wordpress.com/
[1] https://mathoverflow.net/users/766/terry-tao
They said there was no evidence, but to a lot of people, "no evidence of" is basically the same thing as saying it "it doesn't transmit human to human". At least to me, saying "we don't know if it transmits human to human" seems more clear. "There is no evidence" to me implies that they checked and didn't find any evidence, not that they hadn't had a chance to look over the available information.

It'd be like if I said that "there is currently no evidence of global warming", just because I personally hadn't looked over the information.
Your take on his values is insulting.
Even if we can't eradicate it, an effective vaccine should be able to get it to the same state as tuberculosis, where the average person in a country with a good health system doesn't have to worry about it.
If the the training encourages you to ignore signs and signals, that's much more than a UX problem.
Leaked Fortnite Skins – The latest leaks revealed
what? that's a far different thing from gp's claim
This class of problem is interesting and well-known because it doesn't have a great resolution within the most popular access control schemes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confused_deputy_problem
Interesting. But I hate getting random endpoints, that means I need to keep updating configs. I'd rather use a self hosted solution, there are some easy ones out there.
Counterpoints:

- before Coronavirus, there was a shortage of people to work in software (if you believe BLS)

- software employment represents a very small portion of the labor force

- there are many problems that have just happened that will require software to solve

- while there are undoubtedly industries that will be hard hit, there are many software-intensive sectors that will see growth as a result of the crisis (ecommerce for one)

- the world in 1999 was much different. the internet was a curiosity, now it's essential.

- and finally, companies that are looking to implement efficiencies (read: lay people off) turn to .. software

edit, one more:

- many software positions over the past decade+ have been filled by immigrants. Going forward the US is going to be much less friendly to immigration, so competition for jobs will go down for US workers
It looks cleaner but it is important for js devs to learn how promises work and hiding it away is not good
Ventilators in High Demand Are Spawning Scams Across China
Elon Musk slams “fascist” social distancing measures
It was brilliant. I blame the emergence of flat design on the death of Fireworks ;-)
Yeah, I can agree with "this depends on the kind of work culture etc.".

Asking also seems dishonest if I'm not truly inviting a discussion.

I think it's really worth emphasising this. Further: If the reviewee understands that feedback can be discussed, then the reviewee can discuss whether they're asked or told. If the reviewer has more authority than reviewee, then asking really ought to be asking a question.

...then everybody is stepping on egg shells.

I think the intention behind rephrasing from "this is wrong" to "can it be this instead?" is to try and take the ego out of it. Except people are complicated and 'taking the ego out of it' isn't just down to a question of phrasing.

The reason code reviews are done is to try to catch mistakes earlier. (Mistakes are more expensive to once more development has been done on a task).
I like the term "psychological safety". It strikes me as 'unsafe' if a review comments are a matter of the reviewer's ego over the reviewee's. It should be fine to make mistakes, and to have those mistakes corrected. Because people are complicated and emotional.
A rolling stop, dropping to under 5mph, would be quite safe here. The problem is blowing through at a steady and significant speed.
> Shotwell rarely comments, but when she does, it's taken rather seriously

That's for sure. Elon can spout whatever he wants and space reporters, etc, will be like "Ok, Elon says this, but temper your expectations". When Gwynne Shotwell says something, the response is usually pretty much "Ok, this is happening."
Presumably because they would have customers who weren't quarantined at home unable to purchase goods and services -- any cure is a profitable one for companies not specifically invested in healthcare as a service.
Ryan since you have asked for comments here are some from me.

1. The true IFR is hard to estimate at this point, but looks to be around 1%. This is a very difficult question to answer with the data we have and all the limitations.

2. There is little evidence that we can reach herd immunity levels of infection with a Coronavirus like SARS-CoV-2 as both the unconstrained R0 is too high and the immunity too short lived.

3. The IFR has a threshold where it dramatically increases when the number of new cases overwhelms the hospital capacity. We have seen this to a certain extend in Wuhan, Northern Italy and NYC.

4. As treatments improves the IFR should fall. This mean if we can shift an infection to the future we should see less people die. Flattening the curve is more than just avoiding overwhelming the hospital system, it is also about shift cases to a time when we have improved treatments.

5. Sweden has shown that it doesn’t matter if you have an official lockdowns or not, most people will self isolate on their own. There is little extra economic damage from imposing official lockdown policies since all the damage is done by people avoiding infection on their own.
It's the wall street journal. They want to blame government...not a lack of leadership by the party they best align with.

The pervasive use of passive voice is a dead giveaway.
This argument against "the proliferation of platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Medium, Google and many others" would be more persuasive if the surrounding page weren't embroidered with share buttons from Twitter, Facebook, and many others.
Thanks! And yeah, a part of me wishes I waited for Google verification to post.. I'm too impatient for their "4-6 weeks"
There's a top-level tab called "Mark as Read" in the preference pane.
I recommend the Just Read add-on. It does readable formatting for you and sometimes even removes paywalls popups.
Last year I was told that we were at risk of, or no longer had, herd immunity due to that. I don't recall if it was specific to our university, city, or other geographical region.

I stopped getting the flu shots in my 20s because I would always get sick despite the shot. I was convinced in my mid-30s to start getting them again. I still get sick, but it's not as bad as when I skipped the shots.

(I know at least a couple times I ended up getting the shot that prevented a variant that we didn't get. There's enough of a time gap that the shot isn't causing the symptoms.)
Mike Pence Slaps the Faces of Decedents, and Friends and Family of Covid Victims
Why tmux instead of the screen?
I'd take the Vietnam numbers with a grain of salt. 0 Deaths seems suspect.
Coming up with this chart from a generic ticket like "impl notifications" is one of the hardest parts of being a developer.

Code is generally the easy part once you know exactly what you're doing.
people from Phoenix are called Phoenicians
I have literally never been on that site. Maybe I should though
If you're interested, there's a paper on a more "extreme" situation that mainly related to Soviet mathematics developing solely within USSR apart from the rest of the world (see the "Luzin affair").

The paper examines the aftermath.

https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/127/3/1143/192...
> He’s not an epidemiologist. He’s not an engineer. He’s a businessman. And by pissing so many people off, he’s definitely not being a good businessman.

Sure.

But you're pointing your ire at the wrong person, I'm not in the 'Cult of Elon' and here to defend his antics; I'm responding to someone asking why I accept it for what it is, and how it benefits the things I care about. I forgot to mention Starlink, too.

But, last I checked he is actually the Chief Engineer of SpaceX and Starship [1].

I don't entirely disagree with your assessment, but as I said, its a means to an end.

And the truth is he actually can piss off who ever he wants, and still be a good business man so long as he gets the Best Talent in the World lining up work for him (for little money) and people falling over themselves to give him funding and politicians letting him prototype stuff underground in one of the most seismically active places in N. America (SoCal/San Andreas Fault line) because he 'gets things done.'

1: https://www.spacex.com/news/2019/09/30/starship-update
On this intersection the cyclists that got hit were on the main road, meaning they wouldn't have to stop.

If a cyclist on the minor road had a clear view, slowed down down, and looked both ways, they wouldn't need to come to a complete stop. A cyclist treating a stop sign like a yield sign is pretty only endangering themselves. A motorist plowing through a yield sign that should be a stop sign, or plowing through a stop sign, that is dangerous to other people.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

edit: Also not exactly the most sane places to compare :D
Schools are open here and I would've thought they'd open sooner than six months in Victoria?

The problem with treating it as a holiday holiday is that campgrounds are closed, restaurants and attractions are closed. So it's a home-bound holiday heading into winter. Otherwise I'd happily get the kids out of school again and drag them around AU or even just SA.

That said, you could just do 3-6 months of mucking around at home. Cooking, gardening, stay up late, informal learning, projects. I don't think kids would be catastrophically worse off from something like that.
Help Feed the Vulnerable
Help wrest away control from the BigCos. Switch to DDG, self host some stuff, and get on the IndieWeb and the Fediverse. And while you’re at it, throw some investment money into projects along these lines.
Mosh would be so great if it worked with the mouse.
Even when the R0 reaches 1.0 those who are infected will still infect one more person (on average). Infections continue to happen after the R0 is below 1.0.
I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I’m certain that lying to the public about what they can do to stop the virus was a bad call and will have lasting harm.
That´s pure kaka. That´s how it has worked for the past 50 years at most and this revisionist history in favor of some high and mighty self-serving position is a no-go for me.
Cool. Then please write that prominently on your website :)
And yet the Chinese community in Italy didn't suffer much from Covid outbreaks https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-italy-..., neither did Chinatown in San Francisco https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/17/us/san-francisco-coronavi...
That's because the lies were so transparent. In the US we were told (by our wonderful Surgeon General) that citizens who wore masks were actually more apt to get covid than persons without masks.
Totally agree. Appreciate what we have and ensure it continues to be healthy for what it already does. I love that we have an open HTML document rendering engine where anyone can make things available at a URL and people can experience those documents. Amazing!
The 20-ish demographic is actually the worst case with respect to asthma, representing a larger than average proportion of asthma-positive COVID hospitalizations because they don't really have many other co-morbidities and they're young. It's all in the link I provided. 20-ish is actually to your advantage, not mine. I'm not trying to "win" anything, just provide some perspective.
This is unfair. The WSJ editorial page is bananas but the reporters are top notch.
1) No idea

2) You found the article I was about to link actually. Basically, for a PCR test, what you're doing is making a lot of a particular sequence of DNA if it's present. You set up the reaction conditions so that if a particular sequence of DNA is present in your test tube (actually a plate but same difference), that sequence of DNA will make a lot more of itself. If there isn't that sequence of DNA, nothing will happen. You don't get to pick the entire sequence youa re looking for. You basically hae to pick a start region and and end region for the piece of DNA you want to amplify. So if the nucleotide sequence for a coronavirus gene was atcgctatagc, and you are using 3 letter long end regions (in reality you use longer length sequences and regions), you might pick your targets as atc and agc from each end. Therefore, any sequence of dna in your sample with atg and agc will get amplified and you will get a signal telling you that a dna sequence that starts with that first target sequence and ends with that second target sequence is there. If you don't get a signal, that means no coronavirus.

When picking that sequence (known as a primer sequences since it primes the replication reaction), you have to be careful. Lets say that in your body you have a gene that goes gtcatcagctga or something. Inside of that sequence, your primer sequences are present. If you run a test for your desired sequence, you're going to get signal from non-coronavirus DNA.

In order to make sure there are no overlaps in your primers, you, well, this is the part that's hard to believe. You type in your sequences in to a website and hit a button. Hence the following excerpt from the article you found:

“I just put the primers as input into this program and within seconds it tells you there’s problems with it,” Altman said. “It’s freely available. It’s not hard to use at all. It’s one of those things you’d do as a basic quality control check. It seems like they hand-designed these primers and it seems like they didn’t use computer tools to check it.”

So, yeah. Everyone's still having a hard time wrapping their head around it. All it boils down to is that you want to find sequences of dna that are present in coronavirus but not in humans (and also maybe the reverse for some types of controls). It's, I mean. I don't have words for it. Designing primers is like the first thing an undergrad who joins a lab for a research project or internship is taught.

And I had it rough when I was designing primers like 3 years ago. In those ancient times, I had to design the primer by opening a whole new tab and going to a whole new website! (The site is https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/tools/primer-blast/). So much work. Thankfully the lab I was working in implemented an electronic lab notebook (I think it was benchling?) that had the feature built in. Now i don't have to open another tab.

I'm being flippant but also, common, this is the CDC. The WHO had no problem doing it. Private labs had no problem doing it. It's not something weird about this virus. It's just, i don't know. There must have been deeper issues.
So they should comb through auditor's reports, and recognize when the funding entity has been improperly seconding pension contributions over to the general fund such that it will run dry in 23 years instead of the mandated 42?

If we're lucky, we find out about these things when a government changes hands and an audit is conducted - typically years after the fact. Also, one can start one's career under a sound system that is eroded through mismanagement.
If you're creative you can get away without conditional branches: http://www.jucs.org/jucs_2_11/conditional_branching_is_not/R...