skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It might sound absurd, but here in Ireland everyone in the office got a strong cold early February, including me and my wife. Also my mum back in north Spain and my brother in the Canary Islands got sick as well. It is very interesting the fact that I have never seen my brother sick in some 30 years and we talk almost every day.
I think this post, and that people responded "seriously" to it, is a pretty good sign people are starting to lose their shit.

I'm not saying you should disobey the shelter-in-place/etc orders, but this is a bit much.

You're asking the sort of question practically every kid in primary school has asked or been asked, but you're making it "more real" because you can't just buy a house in 30 minutes.

For a follow up will you ask what everyone's favourite food is, and then respond and tell them why it's bad for them? Or perhaps ask what everyone's favourite colour is and then psychoanalyse the responses?

HN isn't reddit.. or a school yard.
I always enjoyed Laravel
I use php daily. Mostly Symfony/Laravel stuff. There are still some stuff it needs what other languages have. (Can't really right now remember all the stuff i stumble upon sometimes which gives me the feeling "damn if i could do this like i do it in rust/java/cpp/(w/e)")

Maybe the worst thing is the composer (it's slow.)
I haven't tried, but maybe it's difficult to make a sandboxed BitTorrent client?
I think a lot of this is linked to your gatekeepers' power dynamics. We start off thinking that through effort and talent alone we can change the world. Maybe we could but we bumped right into the gatekeepers -- the middle managers, the disconnected-from-reality CEOs, the people who only warm their seats without ever actually helping the company -- and the resistance from them is so strong that we eventually give up.

That's fine. I am not into religion but I quite like the Buddhist concept that there exist battles you can never win by fighting and the only way you can win is to never fight them in the first place.

Go and find your happiness elsewhere. That is very okay.

As for how to get back to technology, well, following HN is a pretty good way to get inspired for ideas. Just do them without the idea that you'll make money and you could find happiness practising technology again.
So you can basically get the virus shoved up your nose way faster and harder than we previously thought then? Especially if you're sitting towards the back of the plane?
Even though I didn’t play with Linux recently. Your last paragraph intuitively stuck a cord. What do you think are the problems that are worth solving and would benefit the entire community?
Take an average personal project you created how much time would it take you with Java/Spring Vs RoR taking into account you know both?
I have been coding in PHP for 15 years (not exclusively) and indeed many things had to improve.
Nevertheless, many other languages also had to. Just as an example, PHP had a much more mature vendor requirements system than Go and years before!
What I see many people tend to fail to observe is that a language is also good as the amount of value it can being to the business and in that PHP was and still is phenomenal.
Anyhow, I'm really happy to see how it has evolved.
Textile – Theory of Yarn Structures
> ...but I feel like as a society we’ve swung so far away from institutional trust that now nothing good can actually emerge.

I understand and completely empathize with your concern. I do think this lack of trust is and is going to cause very serious problems. However, this mistrust has been earned.

The incentives of large companies seem to be odds with what many people consider good for themselves or their communities.

We like to tell ourselves that a company’s goals must align with a community’s concerns or another company will come along and replace them. But this doesn’t seem to happen in reality and if it does, it can take decades which by that time, the damage is already done. Particularly if the company is above a certain size or retain a certain percent of their market. At scale companies can and regularly do act almost antagonistic towards their customers and the communities in which they live.

During some college research I found an older article from years ago and while I’ve looked repeatedly, I haven’t been able to find it again (If anyone knows it, please please let me know.) I’m running off of memory here so forgive me for the weak description. The author had researched and discovered how most very large companies used to require that every move they made would place a very high value on how it would impact their local community first and then place a high value on how the decision would impact their wider customer’s communities. These considerations played a massive role in whether or not they would move forward with the idea. If I’m remembering correctly this was written into these massive companies bylaws. Their first concern wasn’t regarding profit, it was about community impacts, and then profit came later in the decision.

I think we’ve gotten too far away from this and it’s going to cause even more damage than we’ve already seen. We’re so far away from this ideal and now an awful lot of companies will first decide if they can get away with something and if it will cause quarterly growth, then it’s worth moving forward on with little thought into wider impacts. This change has led to little if any thought going into the community wide second and third order effects. The fallout means we’re now dealing with a drastic diminishing trust in companies.

I share your concerns because I don’t think large organizations are inherently untrustworthy, and I know many (if not most) people inside these organizations have higher ideals and many companies have the best of intentions, but I think their hands are tied by systemic problems and these problems are eroding at fundamental societal trust systems.
C# (optionally using the ASP.NET framework) running on the fast, efficient, cross-platform .NET Core.

Or Java/Scala/Kotlin. Or Go. Or Python. Or Node + Typescript.
Mental Models: The Best Way to Make Intelligent Decisions (109 Models Explained)- https://fs.blog/mental-models/

Also, mind mapping is life saver ie. https://whimsical.com/mind-maps/
you can run PHP pretty much anywhere, even the cheapest VPS probably has PHP, as well as all managed hosting. For python, go or other languages it can be more tricky if you're looking for cheap hosting / VPS
Let's go further with it and read "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind".

Not to spoil too much but those people working land were cripples as well. Hunter gatherers had perfect life because unlike peasants they could enjoy their life instead of returning to the work in field.

Now think about how hunter gatherers were exposed to risk. What kind of stress they had everyday. Look at current animals how they live. It is some kind of freaking horror.

You an see I am not a fan of Harrari's book because it is "earlier it was so much better" without any real stuff in it.
Something I've always wondered about that maybe you could help me with. What does it mean to say that "Jesus died for our sins"?
This is not the opposite of nothing. It's not that phone tracking hasnt been tried, indeed it did not work where it was tried in e.g. in singapore, korea and no other country made it work. What did work, in multiple countries, is "bring the cases down to very low numbers, interview new cases, isolate aggressively". Perhaps they should focus on the latter 2.

> to automate at scale

If you need to track circulating viruses "at scale" you have already failed, as the apps are going to be popping up false positives left and right and you end up with the entire population individually quarantining themselves.
Show HN: Bestoflaravel.com – Place to find quality Laravel learning resources
Building, Running, and Benchmarking TiKV and TiDB
I wrote my very first webapp in PHP when I was a teenager, and my first dozen paid apps shortly thereafter as a consultant. PHP was a lot worse then, but still has a lot of the same fundamental issues that it won’t ever be able to escape without becoming a different language.

I think it’s a good first tinkering language for people around that age: sort of like BASIC, but for the web.

I am glad PHP is still around; it is a very useful signal on the resume or CV of someone who uses it a lot.

It’s sort of like c# in that regard (exception granted for vertical-specific devs who work professionally to ship commercial apps with Unity), or Visual Basic before it.

Same goes for heavy Java outside of Google/Amazon backend, or outside of Android.

Most of these people are desktop Windows users by choice, too. It’s a very specific type of techie. Perhaps one day I should make an ishkur-style taxonomy. :D

I think this is also why almost all forum software is written in PHP.
Well, if the roads would be optimized for autonomous cars then any signs on them would be used as a fallback.
Autonomous cars would mostly rely on something like road databases, active "stop beacons" or passive "stop markers" (like reading a passive RFID tag)
Try Prestissimo, which enables composer to download packages in parallel

composer global require hirak/prestissimo
> How likely is it that a virus endemic to bats in southwestern china was first transmitted to humans in a wildlife market in southeastern china where bats are not sold? Well that's exactly what happened with SARS-1.

Patient zero in SARS-1 was a farmer from Guangdong, the same area where the novel coronavirus is suspected to have emerged among bats, where farmers have been found to carry bat coronaviruses. Wuhan is more than 600 miles away from that area.

The initial outbreak of SARS-1 was literally where you would expect it to be, among the population where you would expect it to occur. Civets were suspected as transmitters, but that link is neither proven nor necessary to explain the initial outbreak.

> Seems completely believable, given that it happened once already.

I'm not asking if it is believable. Both scenarios are believable. The "pathogen escapes from lab" scenario happened before as well.

I'm asking, which of these appears more likely?

Which of these would you be more inclined to believe, if you want to be as far away from right wingers as possible? Which scenario caters to your pro-environmental and pro-science stance?
Good, that you can confirm your skill level, so maybe PHP suites you very well.

For me, having no standard HashMap and having to set strict mode params in functions - is an instant no go. There is no lack of better options.
Looks like you misremembered or misread the map? "Lake Lahontan was a large endorheic Pleistocene lake of modern northwestern Nevada that extended into northeastern California and southern Oregon." It was mostly in what's now Nevada, and there's a clearer map here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Bonneville#/media/File:La...
Any service provider in the US will be required to comply with a DMCA notice, it doesn't matter who.
I kind of disagree with this. If a company publicly claims to follow certain principles and vows to have mechanisms in place to protect user privacy, people on the inside are able to judge if those principles are being followed. The larger a company is, the lower are chances that everyone would stay silent in case of a (systematic) breach of those principles. So in a sense, it's much harder for larger companies to secretly do things simply because larger groups of people are worse at keeping secrets.
Unconventional SaaS Marketing Strategies Feat. Tim Soulo of Ahrefs
Modern TVs actually reached such low prices because almost all of them are paying for production post purchase with user data. So that's generally a great idea to lock it up with pi-hole or to not even connect it at all and use an external streaming box.
I think this already made the round on HN https://phys.org/news/2019-02-tvs-cheap-smart-tv-extra.html
With docker containers and the numerous PaaS/FaaS runtimes, does that really matter? You can run anything just about anywhere these days, cheaply or even for free.
This has been my experience too. Ten+ years ago I had already concluded that the biggest problem PHP has is the community. Googling for "php mysql" you still end up on w3schools and the like where SQL injection is still not emphasized. Everyone was making their own frameworks and software from scratch. My last foray into PHP, and my realization that it's not actually all bad, was working in Zend Framework (iirc this was also when Ruby on Rails was fairly new and gaining popularity fast).

I haven't touched it (beyond very basic edits on my website, wordpress etc) for over a decade, but recently I inherited an older codebase at my new job. The existing codebase is an absolute mess, worse than the shit posted in those tutorials I mentioned.

But as part of the job (beyond rebuilding the application), I also had to add a big new feature to the application, a REST API. Keep in mind that due to constraints on the systems we install on, it had to be made in PHP 5.2 or 5.3 - one difference being that the older version doesn't even support an array creation shorthand (`$var = []`).

I could keep interactions with the existing codebase to a minimum. The rest was... actually surprisingly all right, thanks to me knowing what a REST API is and how to structure an application properly.

I did have to basically write my own framework (sigh) because pretty much nothing is still available that works on pre-array-shorthand-versions of PHP, but it was fairly minimal; an off-the-shelf router and URL matcher (can't be arsed with writing that myself), middleware for authentication, and a simple class structure to encapsulate different output formats (json, csv, streaming plain text).

Granted, this old version of PHP is seriously rough around the edges, and at the time it already represented great advancements in the language. I mean before 5.4 the language didn't even have a function to set the HTTP response code (you had to write the header manually).
Would GitLab resist DCMA better than GitHub?
Interoperability of decentralized proximity tracing systems across regions
Biconomy – Stripe for Web 3.0
At the same time, being able to install new or change existing software just by uploading some files to a cheap webhost is not to be dismissed as easily.
You can’t hide excess deaths, at least in the developed world. Japan has not had 20,000 deaths.
Show HN: A new, B2B podcast host (bCast)
One illegal download leading to a legal purchase proves this ridiculous statement wrong.
Yes, you can, and there's nothing the victim can do about it. Many service providers won't even give you the details of the person who submitted the notice so you can sue them (Google, for example).
Weird. At any rate, it doesn't seem to be an issue that deters companies from issuing those things to employees, and looking at the Windows machines some companies issue, that's probably fine; at least it's not a gargantuan brick with a super outdated Atom CPU and Windows 7.
Reading the other comments, even some devs are happy with Airs.
Does php still use $ for variable names in 2020?
Thank you for your work on Caddy! After a false start during the beta (mainly because of the missing documentation) I upgraded my personal websites from v1 to v2 RC1, and since then I have been a fan of the new version. Caddy 2 makes somewhat complex configuration more consistent and easier to express in the Caddyfile. The only thing I miss from v1 is the default handling of when static files are not found.

I am very interested in the prospects of Starlark in Caddy 2. With an integrated scripting language Caddy could on its own be a replacement for OpenResty or Apache with mod_mruby. The preliminary implementation was removed in the beta phase with a note saying it would have to wait for when the project was financially stable [1]. Do you still plan to integrate Starlark if the project is a financial success?

[1] https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/commit/8b28c36d480070c8...
TLDR: the gist of it is that one of Apple's XML parsers treat XML comments wrong and would advance a char pointer only two bytes when it should advance three bytes (eg. past "!--") such that this invalid XML comment passes

<!--->

whereas another parser correctly rejects the invalid XML comment.

I don't see how this is a reason to hate on XML. A similar bug can surface in any property file parsing routine for a format having commenting syntax. It's amplified, though, by Apple (according to TFA) using four different XML parser implementations for parsing entitlement and other property (.plist) files, and the lack of testing/dilution of efforts that goes with a situation like this. I'll add that .plist files (or other simplistic property files for that matter) IMO had never a good reason to be XML. XML/SGML is really for delivery/authoring rich semi-structured text in a plain text editor (and is second-to-none for this use case). To me it seems that in this case using XML in the first place because it's already a widely (mis-)used format for general-purpose data serialization, and then not actually using an industrial-strength XML parser (such as libxml2, expat, or xerces) but coding your own ad-hoc XML parser instead is particular bad practice.
I generally agree with your comment but this part is IMO delusional:

> These people would be in this fight regardless but now they are able to operate from a safer distance instead.

I sincerely strongly doubt US would be fighting 5 wars with boots-on-the-ground in Afganistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and Iraq, if it weren't for remotely-operated drones.
London just the same

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/sep/29/tube-chat-ca...
And you are not alone. I admit I did the same, exactly because it was so good and I wanted to give something back.
Show HN: Automate Unreal Engine Workflows Using Blueprints, C++, and Python
Hacking is not always about useful solutions. It’s about experiments that may work out or not work out.
> How does increasing the mining difficulty affect the time it takes to scan a passport in line at the airport?

It doesn't. The idea is not to change the actual passport, is to change the software that uses the passport to perform these calculations. That software would have to ask the passport to do 10000x operations instead of 100x. But each would take the same time as before.
It's pretty hard to know the path not taken. I used to work at the FDA, and let me tell you, they're basic reason for existence is to slow down innovation. Many think it's worth it, but I personally believe that their risk aversion has hurt much more people than it has helped. But from a political perspective, it's the right move because no one is going to blame you for hypothetically preventing some life-saving wonder drug from existing; they're going to blame you for approving some drug that kills a bunch of people. In the first case, the harm is almost impossible to quantify or even reason about, in the second case the harm is direct and known.
I don't really see this happening. Chinese industry would still be a lot more cheaper both when it comes to needed machinery (like robots) and the cost of the needed space for the factories.
> Scripting and command line automation is executed better by Python and Ruby, which excel for writing Unix scripts and tools.

Python has a ridiculous time it needs to start up, it is not suited for any batch task that requires a lot of process creation.

> PHP has one of the most abhorrent language syntax designs this side of Perl and the standard library is wildly inconsistent.

At least it has a standard library that is both usable (in contrast to the JS ecosystem, remember left-pad?) and actually not that inconsistent if you have experience in developing C - most of what is described as "inconsistent" comes right from there.

And: the stdlib of PHP can easily be expanded upon by a rich variety of Composer libraries that can easily be deployed. Let's compare that to... Java, for example. Three popular dependency managers (and build tools): Ant, Maven, Gradle. Plus classpath worries if you're using Tomcat or other application servers which means you also have their libraries in the mix.

Changing code in production? In PHP it's as easy as changing the file using rsync and automatically all new incoming requests will use the new code, vs Java where you have to restart the server (which for large project means minutes of downtime).
I think burnout is about reducing the perceived world to a shallow mental model, getting locked in it voluntarily and getting depressed as a result. But it's a 3 wall prison cell: it works so long as the prisoner doesn't bother to look around to notice the missing wall.

My approach is to find curiously unexplainable things. The moment our mind spots a glitch in the matrix, an odd difference between the well known mental model and observations, it becomes excited and tries to fix the model.
Archive is classified as a library in the United States, as far as I understand it.
They're testing app on the Isle of Wight now, we'll soon see how effective it is. If it doesnt work, then I'm assuming they'll fall back to the Apple/Google option?
Think of a simple landing page with a form to save data from a form and send out an email with confirmation.

In PHP you just need to add to your HTML page a few lines of PHP code and copy it using scp to any share server hosting that costs 4 dollars a year.

No "automation", no "cloud", no REST APIs, no WSGI/Gunicorn, etc. just plain Apache with mod_php enabled, which is available everywhere. I don't think anything can beat PHP productivity for such simple usecases.
From https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-52441428

> The UK's coronavirus contact-tracing app is set to use a different model to the one proposed by Apple and Google, despite concerns raised about privacy and performance.

> The NHS says it has a way to make the software work "sufficiently well" on iPhones without users having to keep it active and on-screen.

> That limitation has posed problems for similar apps in other countries.

> Experts from GCHQ's National Cyber Security Centre have aided the effort.

At the time, I definitely saw people assuming that this meant that some kind of exploit was being used to achieve access to Bluetooth while the app was inactive, even though regular APIs do not permit this. The new technical information doesn't directly address this point, though the Register article does suggest a plausible alternative, whereby one user with an actively-running app can cause the app to wake on other users' phones by sending out a Bluetooth LE broadcast. I've no idea how this would perform in practice.
I really hope this isn’t how they estimated the age of the earth. It’s so.. uncertain.

Like crash testing a car by using a representative model where the only commonality is the external panel dimensions and total net mass.
https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/malware-apple.html
There's still the risk of losing server hosting and/or network uplink. So it's prudent to use anonymously linked reverse proxies, which are ~disposable.
These seem like very weird complaints to me. What are you trying to do with the Jetson? Build some kind of AI-based web service or something?

They're made as dev kits for people building "autonomous machines like delivery and logistics robots, factory systems, and large industrial UAVs". Deploying with Docker and running devkits in production isn't what I'd call normal in such applications. Usually you need to deal with that "giant pain" of properly integrating with your hardware. Flashing would usually happen in the factory as part of the process, either by flashing the flash before soldering/inserting it or through some exposed contacts on the board.
I mean do they? Isn't it just as simple as installing Ghostery? Anyone who cares already doesn't see ads and already isn't being tracked. If you don't spend a minute of your time installing a free extension in order to protect your privacy, than the logical conclusion is that you don't really care (which is fine, you do you).