skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ugh. This is dreadful. Chock full of fallacious arguments. This is a very nuanced problem, but as described this approach is deeply flawed...

I'm cannot determine who is supposed to be the target audience for this "messaging". The narrative starts out trying to build credibility by telling stories from history, trying to build support for being able to track the source of a problem. I should note right here, that electronic surveillance did not exist in either the Middle Ages or the early 1900's when Typhoid Mary was alive -- so tracking the source of infection did not really incur other costs or "side effects".

There is then a middle fluff section, pontificating on the two models: decentralized, centralized. Yup, there is an agenda here...

The first kicker is "stopping the spread" -- there is an unjustified statement that the "decentralized" model doesn't work -- no explanation. There is an appeal to the non-relevant stories. Then an appeal to "balance" with the public health authorities having the minimum information necessary to manage the spread of the virus.

Then there is a "dive" into the Crypto... Partial postcode (so "rough" geographic location data)... the model of your phone. Seriously -- WTF -- Covid-19 doesn't care what the model of your phone is, this is irrelevant, unless you want to profile and track individuals -- period. The system also ends up agreeing a few cryptographic keys, including a key used to authenticate your installation... and some system parameters. Sorry, this creates highly identifying information. Covid-19 doesn't care about these. Why are these items important or relevant?

There is a fabulously contradictory paragraph that starts with "now let's say you wake up with a cough". I should note that the previous paragraph ends with "At this point, nothing has been sent back to the NHS". In this paragraph it explains that analysis will result in a list of (ahem, centrally recorded) installation IDs that have been in your proximity. Congratulations -- by reporting yourself as sick, you've filled in part of a social graph by identifying other people you came into contact with.

There is a paragraph about downsides, but it is fallaciously incorrect. If you identify as being sick you are no longer anonymous. You reveal your contact graph.

There are perspectives / options that a very large number of people will eventually get Covid-19 -- large % numbers of the population in every country. This type / style of app will leave behind a non-anonymous, persistent and connectable social graph.

In summary, the pitch and story was based on and contained fallacious arguments. The crypto "measures" irrelevant things. There is an appeal that this is the best that can be done.

Could this all have been developed with advisors that "helped" with the design and how it should be sold? If not, then this suggests that the developers are naive and need additional assistance regarding privacy, anonymity and forward secrecy.
This sounds so American to me. I grew up in Eastern Europe and general attitude towards work, life, and friendship is so much different. Some of the best friendships I've made were at the companies I worked for. I've seen cases where people make so good friendships at work that it even makes them postpone switching jobs to move up the career ladder.

Work is not everything in your life. Work is important for sure, but there are other sources of joy in life. I can't help but think that Americans miss so much in life because of their obsession with work, money, and social status. Hence such posts on HN.
Choose based on what you want to do, not what other people want you to do.
Is it really that difficult a concept? Comcast charging Netflix for access to Netflix's customers, when Netflix's customers are paying Comcast for Internet access, is bullshit.

Reword it to be generic, and dress it up in more polite language, but that's what it is.

Comcast, nor any other ISP, doesn't get to shake down Netflix or Google or Facebook nor any service providers, big or small, on the Internet.

Sure, behind the scenes there are backbone providers and peering arrangements and BGP, but those are technical details. Network neutrality means as a consumer I pay an ISP and get connected to the Internet.

Whereas Comcast is a cable TV company, the game between companies of consumer chicken is not theoretical, eg

https://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/local-news/why-you-sti...

https://mynbc15.com/news/local/att-and-directv-have-removed-...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/cbs-blackout-on-dire...
Ask HN: Starting a hackerspace in my city. How to reach local hackers?
I recently founded a hackerspace in my city (Hakierspejs Łódź). We've built a community of a bit over a dozen of people, but I calculated that we need to reach about twenty in order to formally register and be able to rent a place as a formal organisation. Thing is, I feel that we're starting to exhaust our ideas for marketing. How could I find hackers (people passionate about free software) in my city that hadn't found out about the hackerspaces movement yet?
You cannot claim copyright on data you have no copyright on. They are not even claiming copyright on any of the files in the repo.

So, yes; this is a clear case of DMCA abuse.
I somewhat agree. Not with the sweeping that declarative query languages can't work, for every case where faulty statistics cause a bad plan there are likely to be many cases where a statistic based plan choice correctly switched plans due to data distribution changes.

But I do agree that PostgreSQL has way too little tools to nail down the performance even though they have downsides. Tools like pinning execution plans would be nice, as it has less severe worst case behaviors. As would be the ability to just pass the execution plan directly, although that would have severe cross-version compatibility implications and security will also be hard to nail down after the fact because of all the "can't happen" assumptions sprinkled around in executor code. And even just plain plan hints would be great to have, be it the heavy handed "join in this order", "use this index", or the more graceful "this clause is way less selective than you think", "this clause is functionally dependent on that one" or "assume there is correlation between ordering and predicates".
Who on earth is using PHP in 2020 ;)
Because music videos are free.
Defining what represents a change-of-control is probably the trickiest part of moving this from an interesting idea to a real proposal. Probably, the key factor should be whether or not the senior management and/or the board membership stays essentially the same; new management should be required to earn their own trust from customers that might not follow company news.
What hardware supports shared memory record-and-replay in the presence of data races? I'm not aware of any widely available hardware that does this.

UndoDB's design is similar to rr but they use binary instrumentation at record time, so it's higher overhead than rr and a more complex implementation in some ways, but they don't depend on performance counters so they work on more architectures (AMD, ARM) and in any virtual guest.

It's certainly true that it's hard to get people to pay for debugging tools. On the other hand, some big-name companies spend tons of money on internal tooling, so at least some companies are willing to spend on developer productivity in general. I think certain classes of tools have "traditionally" been free and that mindset is hard to change, and the majority of companies are reluctant to spend money on developer productivity in general. I don't have great ideas to tackle this other than "keep making tools better and better until the wall cracks".

If you want to talk more off the record, feel free to contact me.
One of the main benefits of PHP for web serving, is the "shared nothing" architecture.

By operating as a non-threaded application, entire categories of bugs and security holes are avoided.

Are there situations where threads could genuinely help? Sure, there is always an exception to any rule, but for the vast majority of projects where PHP is used, I don't believe threading would achieve much in terms of performance gains.
In Defense of Inclusionism (2009-18)
PHP has a lot going for it. It is popular, fast, has a nice syntax and a ton of useful functionality baked right into the language.

The main weakness I see in PHP is the lack of modules. PHP provides namespaces to avoid name conflicts. First of all, that does not completely root out naming conflicts. The developer who puts a namescpace into their code can only hope that it does not clash with someone else's.

Secondly, it makes it necessary that both, the code that provides reusable functionality and the code that uses it have to deal with the issue of namespaces.

A module system like Python and Javascript have is superior to this. Then only the user of the reusable code decides where to put it into the namespace.
So I take it all the things in this article (https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/) are no longer relevant?

For example "foo"==TRUE, "foo"==0 and TRUE !=0 are logically consistent now?

Or json_encode no longer returns null for invalid input?
Inflation has been about 2% all year. Because demand has dropped, most prices have not gone up.
https://inflationdata.com/articles/charts/annual-inflation-c...
I'll answer this one in reverse --

It changed my heart.
Our actions stream outward from the motivations of our heart.

Prior to turning to God the motivations in my heart were shaped by societal constructs of success as a man. (Ephesians 2:1-3) Particularly influenced via hip-hop, tech, and stoicism.

My actions stemmed from that. I was moderately successful in material terms but the emptiness persisted. Moreover, my actions were hurting relationships I cared about because the motivation of my heart, however outwardly altruistic, ended up being self-centered.

Accepting Jesus as my savior started a change of heart. The motivation in my heart is now loving God and loving my neighbor as I love myself (Mark 12:30-31) and acting accordingly. It's a gradual process and I still have things to work through. But He has helped me overcome materialism, lust, and is (strongly) helping me overcome pride.

I don't want to speak for outside observers, but my dad and many old friends have commented on the change. Walking with the Lord is a completely different life for me. It's freedom.
> It's such a difference when you live near a airport, or even remotely close

Housing near airports have environmental and noise issues factored into the price
Generating Pythagorean Triples
Is there a special designer school you go to, to learn how to draw those colorful, generic human figures (behind the search)? Reminds me a bit of the "Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell" style. Seems like I see this pop up as a design trend everywhere recently. Does it have a name?
Insane Engineering of the Blackbird
Sadly the ability to detect WiFi network is under the background location tracking permission.
NASA is counting on a lot of unproven rockets for its Artemis plan
Study: Could dark matter be hiding in existing data?
I would really like to be in 150 years in the future to see what assumptions we are making today are totally foolish like that was the case is sun as coal ;)
To be clear, the claim is if there was earlier community spread, the current virus in France should look different because of presumed mutation rates, because right now it looks similar to China?
> What other kinds of namespaces are people thinking about?

I would really love to have something like a device namespace, i.e. being able to split up exclusive device ownership to different namespaces similar to network namespaces.

It would allow a container to see a subset of devices and the root of the containers user namespace would actually be allowed to operate on them while other device namespaces no longer see those devices.

This would also allow containers to create their own loop back devices and loop mount things (as root user of that user namespace that is mapped to a non-root user in the parent).
PT doesn't get you close to what rr can do, which is reconstruct any program state at any time in the recorded execution.

As Keno says in his blog post, the promise of rr is that if you have an rr recording, you are almost completely assured of having enough information to figure out the bug. That is what we see in practice, and it has big implications for developer workflow.
I can add one data point to support this (not that it is worth much).

I had the normal story of being sick in January in London with the "worst flu ever" and suspected it might have been COVID. But I recently had a lab-based IgG antibody test and it came back negative.

Everyone else in my family was also negative. Also, friends who have family members who work in the NHS with similar stories of being sick were also negative. No one I know directly has tested positive yet.

I can't speak to the overall accuracy of the test, but the one I took was the private IgG antibody offered through the company 'Qured'.
> However, the people designing this system aren't morons

I don't think anyone insulted them as such. Bur smart people can sti make unwise decisions under the pressures of time, politics and conflicting requirements.
I haven't used it but apparently there's a `sonic-pi-cli` project that has a command line interface to Sonic Pi [1]. It's unclear to me whether the Sonic Pi IDE has to be running to use it, though.

I agree the documentation could be better but, in it's favor, there's a built in tutorial/examples along with built in documentation in the IDE that gets you most of the way there. I find it hard to track down what some of the options do on effects and other functions but these are minor complaints of mine.

[1] https://github.com/Widdershin/sonic-pi-cli
I'm a PHP dev and I'm pretty happy with the language, especially some of the things introduced in recent versions. I think it's a fine choice for anything that doesn't fall in the "low-level, high-performance" or "mobile/desktop app" categories.

For web applications, I think PHP's idea of a clean slate for every request also makes a lot of sense and immensely simplifies development. I can write a simple PHP application that handles thousands of concurrent requests without even thinking about threading, synchronization, memory leaks or anything like that because handling that stuff is basically built-in.

PHP has a really good ecosystem. A framework like Laravel can do just about anything you'd need in an application out of the box. Routing, rendering HTML, generating URLs, handling sessions, logging, validating requests, an ORM, translations, encryption, sending emails, queues, schedules, caching - it's all there. I've never seen anything quite as fully-featured in any other language. On Packagist, I can find packages for pretty much anything from clients for obscure SOAP APIs to libraries for handling GraphQL. There's also a lot of great tooling, with a good package manager, static analysis tools like Psalm, code formatters etc. Also, PhpStorm is a fantastic IDE.

Outside of PHP, I mostly have experience with Java and JS.

If you know Java, modern PHP isn't all that different. Java has some nice stuff that I hope we'll get in PHP some day (generics is the big one). I built an application using the Play framework (Java version) a couple years ago and it was quite similar to modern PHP frameworks. However, there was always a bit more complexity with Java. Everything was just slightly more complicated. So with the trade-off basically being performance (which is better in Java) vs. ease of use and developer experience (which I think is better in PHP), I'd choose PHP most of the time.

Now, when comparing it to JS, I'm really glad I mostly get work with PHP instead of JS. I know this might sound strange coming from a PHP developer, but holy shit, JS is a mess. When writing JS, I'm constantly going between "oh, nice, this is really easy to do with Vue" and "what the fuck does that error even mean, how am I supposed to find any problem buried under several layers of bundlers, polyfills, loaders, transpilers and reactive frontend black magic?". If JS wasn't the only thing that works in a browser, I would avoid it like the plague.
The parent comment is referring to https://news-web.php.net/php.internals/70691 (found via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6919216). Quoting from that link:

Well, there were other factors in play there. htmlspecialchars was a
very early function. Back when PHP had less than 100 functions and the
function hashing mechanism was strlen(). In order to get a nice hash
distribution of function names across the various function name lengths
names were picked specifically to make them fit into a specific length
bucket. This was circa late 1994 when PHP was a tool just for my own
personal use and I wasn't too worried about not being able to remember
the few function names.
Show HN: Snap Blocks – Build whatever you desire with colorful blocks in VR
CSS Icons, Customizable, Retina Ready and API
I love rust, it's great once you adapt to it, but I don't think it'll be anytime soon people would convert to Rust (although I wish they will).

The paradigm and the workflow are alien to most, the discipline needed to write with it needs learning.
> it's gutsy for you to post this,

That comment seems completely neutral. Not being able to post that comment without worrying about consequences sounds absolutely dystopian.
For a DMCA claim to be valid you have to own the copyright on the files you refer.

For none of the files referred in the claim they own the copyright to. So the claim is bogus.
> However, the people designing this system aren't morons

That is exactly the problem. I fully trust the designers and implementers of this system to know how to exploit the data for "unintended" purposes at any point.
Pop quiz - what do you think people will be laughing this hard about from our time in 150 years?
‘Not the World’s Number One’: Chinese Social Media Piles on the U.S.
Vim TypeScript Setup
It saddens me to see some of the (largely baseless and otherwise largely historical) hate for PHP. I use Hack in my day job, which has at this point diverged from PHP, and I like it for the most part.

The thing that PHP does right that so few languages do is having a stateless core in the webserver. This is an incredibly efficient approach to serving HTTP traffic. Consider the startup cost issues with Java, or Rails' single request at a time model or even Python's startup (and GIL).

The second thing PHP does right is it request scopes everything. Simply throw away everything you created when the request ends. No dangling references and memory leaks (pretty much) like you get with stateful Java services (eg whatever servlets is now).

And the third is no multithreading in the core API. Starting and synchronizing threads is incredibly difficult to get right and adds a huge overhead to everything with little gain when you're just servicing an HTTP request, almost all of the time.

Hack has 2 things PHP7 doesn't quite have that I'd miss:

1. A better type system; and

2. async/await for cooperative multi-tasking.

I still hate the backslash for namespaces though.
> What if they start reading it but just glaze over because of the sheer volume of it?

Write concisely and in order of importance. The Inverted Pyramid model [1] is helpful. Key points answering questions Why, What, When, How, Where go up front. Then, important details. Finally, internal musings and background info go to the bottom. This way, the reader can stop at any time and they won't miss anything crucial.

Another important tip is to refine the documents you've already written. Think of it as refactoring. Rewerite unclear, long sentences. Be consistent in describing the same procedures. Delete parts that aren't necessary anymore.

Just like maintating the old code, it takes time and may seem as a waste of efforts. But it's well worth it.

> I've got nobody to check my work either.

Are there any other stakeholders that may be interested in what you're doing? Interns? Vendors? Ideally, your documents should be written so anyone can understand the main points and follow them. They don't have to gork the gory details and that's fine. Ask your collegues anyway, even if it's a first few paragraphs.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism)
What is there to see in a post scarcity interstellar civilization of powerful, interventionist AIs and their pet drugged, mostly apolitical humans?

Ah, I see it now.
> The best stuff is always produced by very small, tightly-knit teams...

This line hints at both the key problem and the path forward for the disillusioned engineer. Things go sideways when we realize that we are not building “the best stuff”. When we are working on the best stuff we realize that the sustainable joy comes from the team dynamics rather than the output of our work.
No, you meant to feel good about complete human failure in an avoidable prediction that we didn’t avoid. Predictions aren’t fact, we accomplished nothing. You are applauding air while 800 million starve. Seriously, stop and give your head as shake.
They very soon will no longer have this data. Unexpected massive data loss is scheduled to happen in the coming days.
Not the only alternative. There is also wonderful Traefik and hard-to-config Envoy for example :)
Molecular Basis of Extended Healthspan in Bats
Regarding communication from Android devices - BLE connections may be difficult, but as I understand it, BLE broadcasting is a workable alternative.

I'm by no means an expert, and would refer to the TCN Coalition's current explanation of their approach to cross-platform device communication:

https://github.com/TCNCoalition/TCN/blob/37add39f7ddb91fade9...
The Army Wants a Wearable Covid-19 Detector
I've moved on from PHP some 5 years ago. I'm not missing the language. But damn I'm missing Symfony!

I prefer Scala to PHP, the language is much more expressive. When you want to replace a bit of core functionality, in Symfony, you extend the desired class, add it to the dependency injection container, and you're done.

In the Play framework, I once wanted to make a one-line change to the routing. When it turned out I'd have to touch 30+ files which have hardcoded dependencies on each other, I quickly gave up.
It is that high now, it would not have been that high early on, especially considering that mortality is most likely closer to 0.5%.

It simply would not have registered among the usual deaths from viral pneumonia, which has a year over year variance of a similar magnitude.

The actual death numbers are also highly dependent on the age groups affected, in Germany for instance there is no discernible excess mortality because most of the infected are below the age of 65.
PHP -> much better that people often give it credit for

I've hardly ever used PHP over the course of my 20 year career, being mostly on C, Java and JavaScript, but on the few times that I have, I have always been really impressed with all aspects of the experience.

Whatever academic semantic deficiencies PHP might have, there is no more accessible language for making web site backends with and its sad that so many people are discouraged from using it.
log_warning_msg is a function which is wrapping 'echo'.

if you 'echo' it will go to the console.

Your distro can/does log everything that goes to the boot console.

The function 'log_warning_msg' is provided by the sourced bash file: /lib/lsb/init-funtions ; you can find a copy here: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/7.0/scripts/apds02....

It's just doing echo.

If you add "echo" it will print. I promise.

And anything printed goes to whatever your distro is using to log tty0 console output. (usually /var/log/dmesg or /var/log/messages)