skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How come ML and AI are not solving COVID19?
Hi, as data science graduate I think I drank a little bit of cool aid through past few years. Its been 60 days, I've seen dashboards, I've seen genome analysis, I've seen epidemiology models but I have not seen a significant and substantial effort or path done by any ML/AI models.

Where is AlphaGo now?

Is it one of those wake up calls? Like being in relationship with a cheater.

Both humans and viruses are essentially code. Are we doing something in wrong way?

Is Biology real Computer Science and we are studying it wrong way?
> SystemD

I don't know why, but it bothers me when someone's trying to criticize systemd, without even bothering to get the case right. It smells of not having looked at it any more than to form the run of the mill opinion on systemd, while looking at what came before with healthy dose of romantic nostalgia.

I don't want my init system to be a series of garage-quality bash scripts with slightly different error rate tolerances etc, systemd solves that. I don't want my system to just blindly shut down, even if it's not necessarily safe to do so immediately, systemd solves that.

What systemd critics often miss is that it's also a rather valuable resource manager in general. I know that many would say this should not be part of systemd, but the thing is while that sounds nice, nobody built anything remotely as convenient for Linux as systemd in this area.

It's nice to say what systemd got wrong, but I haven't seen anything actually built that can seriously compete with it.

I now actively avoid distros without systemd, because the admin experience of those distros has generally been much less consistent.

We can all talk about the right way to do things, but unless there's code that's clearly superior to what systemd offers me today, am not interested.
I worked with a company last year that consistently made poor decisions due to lack of resources, especially time. Sometimes "opportunity cost" was used as an excuse for a lot of things. Now sure if you have a few different immediate options and a lack of capacity you will be forced to choose certain options and ignore others. Scarcity is a real thing and I'm not arguing otherwise. But the bit that might be classified as stupid was that very little thought was given to hiring or any form of capacity planning. As such I think just categorizing this as "opportunity cost" would be missing a very important part of the bigger picture. People can make decisions that impact the amount of resources that are available and over a longer period this is especially important. If you consistently find that you are passing up on profitable opportunities it shows that you may have a very profitable situation to hire people, if you don't pay any attention to that you risk making opportunity costs a self fulfilling prophecy.
Indeed. Captions are not supported. Where do you publish your content to?
> Have no idea how those are at all comparable.

He was in the middle of organizing a movement for covid related safety improvements after multiple cases of exposure. Dropping that for two weeks would put him back at zero and he would return to the same risk he tried to have resolved. The order itself doesn't cause the risk, but it prevents an existing risk from being resolved.

Its closer to working on an active train track knowing that the train might come any time. Of course he could have taken two weeks vacation, but he would just be back on the same train track with the same uncertainty of when it would be his turn to be hit by the covid train.
I much prefer having a private area to work efficiently without distraction (rather minimal distraction) vs a large shared desk where the weakest attention-span “link” at the table would take everyone off task frequently.
I am not pointing out a flaw, merely a perceived difference.

Personally I don't really buy into the monetization-of-every-aspect-of-life. I did not take my education for its monetary value and I am more than happy to have been removed from that concern. That is a privilege I am more than happy to pay forward to current students.

Even if I had bought into that way of thinking and paid tuition up front, I am not sure how I could have used that information to decide on a major? Under all circumstances I would put myself in position for the highest paid role, regardless of tuition?

Anyways, this is a complex topic and one of the most fundamental differences in the European and American way of thinking. I don't see any right or wrong, just differences.
One thing I’m surprised about in the init wars of past decade(s?) is that in almost half a century of Unix nobody got up and said “why don’t we, instead of bickering about implementation details, come up with single format to declare desired system startup behavior, and then users can pick whichever implementation they like to read and execute that format”?

Can’t be impossible to distill some basics about service startup configuration and dependencies, can it?

Then make it extensible and cry about differences in extension support like we do about per-browser css options, but at least converge on some basics.
unless you think about types the way Haskell does.
> What if the opportunity cost is borne out of malice?

Seems to work for the labor party.
Syncthing-Fork is great, allows to adjust sync settings (i.e. network/battery) per-folder
I doubt there are any report of "serious long term damage even in mild/asymptomatic cases". First, because we simply do not have any data on long term effects for the simple reason that this thing is less than six months old.
As for lung damage is it mostly caused by ventilation, not by disease itself. I doubt you get artificial lung ventilation if you got an asymptomatic case.
An open source camera stack for Raspberry Pi using libcamera
Well first of all, literally everyone in the world sees everything through their own colored lens. It's called personal bias, and we all have it. It's part of why minorities get turned down for jobs for reasons other than their technical experience. Or why they get turned down in spite of their technical experience.

Second, it's my personal observation that 'many companies' don't end up with 'incompetent minorities', because, anecdotally, I and everyone I know who has worked with 'minorities' at multiple jobs has found them as competent or more so than their 'majority' peers. But a 'colored lens' is what takes your personal experience and turns it into whatever you want to see, not necessarily what is actually there. So who knows if either of us is right if all we're doing is looking with our personal biases?
yes, indeed. Too late to edit now though :(
“A Map is not the Territory”
I don't think many people take it into account, but many companies look up to tech giants and replicate their actions.

When company the size of Amazon can get away with this kind of heavy handed employee treatment, the results are affecting many, many more people that it might seem on the surface.
This statistical analysis does not account for the fact that there is such a thing as 'nervous cough' which is anxiety-related. Stress hormones are likely to spike during stressful moments around the time a question is asked which may trigger a cough reflex from audience members.

The analysis seems to focus on the wrong things. A proof of cheating should focus more on identifying specific and reliable patterns in the coughs. I don't think generic statistical analysis of this kind makes a strong case at all.
A service to test if you can load web pages over IPv6
Personally, I'm against "all strings should be f-strings" just because it would cause changes to source code that I don't find necessary.

When Python 3.0 came out, u"" prefix was abolished and every u-string had to be changed. That change was found later to be a mistake and was reverted (I'm not sure what python version reverted it, somewhere around 3.3 I think). This proposal reminds me of that: change that seemingly sound good at first, but is simply not worth it.

Yes, there will be breaking changes and I'm not against them. I'm just against this one.
All models are wrong, some are useful, others not so much. There's no need to treat me with these banalities. The job model ought to have died with Upstart. It did not. Oh well.

> The core problem has already moved to a different area and that's why it really doesn't matter if they are doing a bad job.

Yes, I agree.

Still, the losers of history deserve their voice, too.

"Nobody" is a significant overstatement. A lot of (certainly not all) daemons that used to only support double-forking and PID files were fixed in the wake of daemontools. systemd and other init systems benefited from this work when they appeared. Still, PID files are subject to TOCTTOU regardless of what you use, so that's a given.
Open floor plans make concentration nearly impossible. Headphones and music is a must. It's also deeply unsettling to have people walking behind you 24/7. I think human evolution makes you not happy about this.

A coworker of mine left for a company where all employees have offices and according to him the gain in productivity was wild.
And ban meeting rooms, boardroom-style tables, lunch rooms, etc.
Find a course sequence that you think is important to know from a university website. You can find these on (under)graduate requirements pages. Download the syllabi in order and do the hws/projects/tests. Try to stay on some regular timeline. Use the course calendar and set goals according to it. Check your work and grade yourself. You can prefer to choose courses/schools with their materials online and that use books/solutions freely available online too. Since you say you already chose books, find a course with the appropriate prereqs that uses them, otherwise you may have chosen the wrong book. Many reputable programs have professors that post everything online. When a link is broken you can supplement by buying the material on coursehero or the like.

A motivator is to think of some people who have some education you don't, and you want to be like them. They followed these syllabi like orders in the past, so so should you.

I take the procrastinating on youtube to mean you are intimidated. Maybe from analysis paralysis. So having a schedule to follow for some self assignments that you will grade will be a motivator I think.
You got me on an imprecision. UK is definitely also an Anglo cultural country in this regard. I reckon they also pay most of their own tuition?
Calling ReasonML from TypeScript (or Flow), the easy way
> Very few people would have the courage to walk away from big sums of money purely on principle.

I think assuming this is revealing of one's own attitude more than anything.

I also feel like big companies have people convinced that they're being paid a lot because they're exceptional or special in some way. Really, they're being compensated for either stress or location or working more than 40 hours or giving away their morals.

I say this because I know a few people who made this kind of decision. And speaking with them about it, it wasn't difficult. They just had a more complete compensation model to evaluate against.
I spoke with her after her talk at the Future of Web Apps in London in 2008. She even agreed to give a talk at a conference I was planning for the next year, but soon afterwards the world started falling apart and it never happened. :(
The appropriate place would probably be the python-ideas mailing list:

https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-ideas.python.o...
No evidence of something is not the same as evidence of (not something).

No evidence that Person A is the murderer does not mean there is evidence that he is not the murderer(e.g. alibi). Evidence may turn up later on that he was indeed the murderer.

WHO said that there was no evidence of human to human transmission. They did not say they found evidence that it is not transmissible from human to human. That's a world of difference.
Learn the Story of Some Superyachts
I'm also very satisfied with Fastmail. Cost is the same as Google's paid tier but they do email really well.
With our current technology, yes. But we're talking about an alien race capable of traveling light year distances. I'm sure their planet searching capabilities would be far ahead of us as well.
Set up your own. iredmail and mail-in-a-box do most of the grunt work for you.
Why corona apps and privacy are incompatible
While students do pay ridiculous tuition at private universities, very few universities in the US are actually "for profit". The administrators might make insane salaries but there are no investors profiting except in the case of hedge fund managers playing with multi billion dollar endowments.
> his content proliferates

This is the root of the problem. The fact that his content is on YouTube does not imply that it will proliferate.

> How are we going to solve it

Critical thinking skills are apparently undervalued. This is a problem that is hopefully solvable by education and public debate. Even if not, the situation in which a small part of the population believes in David's ideas seems preferable to me than one in which a small group of (non democratically chosen) people decide what is acceptable content and what is not.

> It's implied in the concept of a marketplace of ideas that some ideas will have value over others.

I agree, but different people will have different definitions of value.

> And so it seems implicit to the concept of free speech that one should have the freedom to accept or reject an idea, or try to disabuse someone of an idea you deem fallacious.

I agree, but censoring someone goes much farther than to disabuse. Too far, in my opinion.
Nothing much.

I'd have to find a replacement for Google Maps and YouTube, but I guess I could just create a new account for that.

I use ProtonMail and iCloud for email and calendar respectively. DockDuckGo for search, Firefox for rendering web content.

I backup everything to multiple locations/services, so I'm not too worried about loosing access to things in general.

Guess the most annoying thing to loose access to would be Facebook as I have a few contacts on there that I wouldn't immediately know how else to contact, but I'm sure I'd find a way if I really had to.
> When I start a tmux in a graphical session and click log out I want the system to stop my things completely.[] The distro never advertised this, etc.

The graphical environment could advertise that you have launched something that will persist upon disconnecting the session, and give you an option to terminate it entirely instead. (It's after all easier for graphical environments to offer these sorts of "user friendly" hints than for terminal-based workflows.)
Top tier universities offer both. Proof that you can get in, and once you’re in, a network of others who also can get in.
f.uc!3k y(o.!u.
From what I’ve heard, they seem to occur about every a hundred and fifty years, so one could happen any time. However, we don’t know if it’s an event that becomes more likely over time or if it’s completely random chance.
Quantum Devices: Simulation, Supremacy and Optimization
Now this is interesting.

All of the reasons provided for open plan offices have been disingenuous; the reason why open plan offices are a thing is that it drastically lowers the land cost per employee. This is why they were popularized in NYC and SF; two cities with famously high land costs.

But of course, abandoning the open plan office is expensive. Companies will need more space, driving up the cost per employee. One can’t help but wonder if this’ll push for more permanently remote positions.
Withings move ECG is another popular fitness tracker with ECG functionality sold €130.

https://www.withings.com/no/en/move-ecg
Custom Search Engine for Develpers
You don't seem to understand any piece of software that is running between two computers, means you no longer own your machine and they can do whatever they want to it, you are running corporately hacked software. The level of stupid comming out of HN commentariat is alarming.

You're literally buying internet dongle enabled software, aka something someone stupid would be doing. Imagine in the 90's you bought a PC and windows required a second disc and an ethernet cable coupled to the back of a staples store you bought it in.

That's "software as a service", aka something morons would do. Whenever you don't get a complete piece of software you are literally being robbed, the fact Hacker news commentators think themselves "hackers" while supporting defective software, means your brains aren't working.

The idea that having microsoft and big companies ability to spy on everything you do is somehow enlightened is nonsense, you're an idiot building a turnkey tyranny, if politics ever goes south all these companies will have all the data they want about you and your behavior and you'll morn the day you gave away your basic rights to privacy for stupid consumer convenience.
Guide to setting up OAuth2 in offlineimap:

https://hobo.house/2017/07/17/using-offlineimap-with-the-gma...
When will resizing be triggered in Java HashMap?
I wonder if they can use a linter to catch it.
I still do not understand how EAGLE attained its 'golden-standard' status. Out of the cheap or OSS EDA tools (DipTrace, g-EDA, KiCAD, Eagle)* I thought it had the most difficult learning curve. My best assumption is that it is riding on historical momentum.

* Although not really in the list, last year Cadence was selling OrCAD for something like $430. Hopefully we get more < $500 USD offerings.
Analyzing pitches to find what gets VCs interested in a meeting
I'm with OP on the non-profit route: if you're a relatively healthy retiree who's concerned about the future your children are going to live in (a recurring theme of his blog posts) there are a lot of activist organizations which can use serious talent which they can't pay market rates for and he'd have the luxury of picking the one whose views most closely align.
Imagine a situation what something is broken and you need to figure out how to strace in production while a service is down. This is my main argument against Docker, it is black box computing and you are going to figure this out the hard way. Of course you can prepare, yet, I do not necessarily have the bandwidth.
College has never gone through an event like this at the scale it currently is at. The idea that every American should attend college is a relatively new one; during the last pandemic in America only a tiny percentage of Americans went to college.
It doesn't matter.

TLDs are cheap and replaceable and there's no evidence that - if this TLD was sold - there'd be significant changes to begin with.
People often think "engineers are those people that can build stuff" but at least in the nordics it is "engineers are those that studied math about building stuff" which is why an engineer here will get a computer science degree not a programming degree.
On the other hand this is a far more effective policy in combating inequality than simply handing out foreign aid.
The main thing MOOCs do well is a solved problem with or without MOOCs--namely lecture videos.

Discussion boards are mostly a tire fire; they're mostly useful for dealing with platform problems. They can probably be better when you restrict access to a qualified class but they don't really scale.

>Automatic grading sucks, especially for programming

I'd probably say automatic grading sucks, "even for programming." At least automatic grading can evaluate outputs of non-trivial programs. Programming is one of the few areas where autograding works for non-trivial, not multiple choice, questions.
Well back in 2008 US universities actually saw an increase in applications for programs. It was (and still is) fairly easy for students to get federal and private student loans (which could be deferred for 1-3 years), so the line of thought was if they could not find a job anyways, they might as well use the time to ramp up their credentials.
> if you lose $1M by quitting but you already have $10M+ in the bank

Losing money is hard, but if you reframe it as being rewarded $1M (with pretty low marginal utility after $10M) by losing your freedom, then such a choice is only rational.
Based on his recent Twitter activity, no, I don't think he does.
If we can't ever perfectly adhere to an ideal, then I guess we ought to go full on with the connivery and deceit, then.

Regardless, I did have at least some expectation that people would actually focus on the original post and not brawl in the comment section over tangents that often aren't even part of it.

Oh, well. And hey, if other people down the road read this and it makes something click for them, I'll be happy with that.
TheyDo | Amsterdam | JavaScript Engineer Node/Vue | REMOTE
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Mission for this role:

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- Process: Maintaining and extending our tech stack: Node, Koa, Apollo, GraphQL, Vue, Postgres, TypeScript, GSAP, websockets, Cypress, Jest, Heroku.

- Product: Make sure new features for our platform are well documented and bug-free (yes we know, it's a mission not a result).

- Roadmap: Collaborate directly with the founders improve our product. Our roadmap has a strong focus on realtime collaboration features.

Read more and apply here: https://www.notion.so/Remote-JavaScript-Engineer-a513312e93b....
More likely that they'll just normalize RDP-ing into cloud desktops. I know someone that just joined my company that has to do this while his new work laptop ships.
The "hosted" part is not quite right. Clojure is hosted, but what I think you are referring to with the "parasite" metaphor is called "embedded." (Distinct use of the term embedded from its use to describe small systems hardware).

Clojure was definitely designed to be both embedded and hosted, but those are distinct axes.

There are lots of languages designed to be embedded as scripting or automation runtimes in other systems. Tcl, Lua, Python, Guile (a lisp)...

Why embedded- pre-web, there used to be a practice of writing your infrastructure in systems language (C/C++) then writing your application tier in a scripting language. Countless games and GUI line of business tools on Windows were written this way.

Java in this case was considered a "systems" language, and there is a long history of embedded languages for Java. My favorite JVM-embedded language was called Beanshell.

This embedding was/is a use case for Clojure, important for "sneaking" Clojure in to the enterprise.

The "designed" part implies that the scripting runtime plays nicely with process-owned resources like threads and memory, and has a well defined interface for exposing your infrastructure objects to the scripting layer.

Post-web, if you squint, you can recognize this architecture in the DOM the browser (written in a systems language like C++ or Rust) exposes to its scripting tier (Javascript).
These are very broadly defined categories and everything can be conveniently rationalized to fit into them. For example I expect this be downvoted and filed under 3 or 5. (tl;dr: systemd broke a "debug" kernel parameter and handwaved it away with "Generic terms are generic, not the first user owns them." )

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=76935
The sad part is, Bosnia once had an incredibly dense narrow gauge railway network throughout the country and region but it deminished and closed down starting in the 1960ies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrow-gauge_railways_in_Bosni...