skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've decompiled the app for android and had a look over the source and what you say isn't true.

The rolling ID doesn't work so 3rd parties can track you.

Source code has not been released at all.

It does not work in iOS I think is a fair statement. It won't until Apple do the update.

It does not check the 'proximity to infected people'.

All data processing is done by a human. The app just dumps all your info. All interactions with other phones with the app to a human. Then then work out times and if the person was 'close'

So this is why I've asked the question.

Surely someone on HN has made an android/iOS app and can comment. It would have to be around a phone Bluetoothing to a phone.
Ethereum by the Numbers – April 2020
I know, I do it to be cheeky.

Google doesn't mean big number, do you mean googol?
Interesting. Influenza is a Class C disease.

Dec 2017 - 93% of class C cases were infectious diarrhea, influenza, foot and mouth disease.
Dec 2018 - 93% of class C cases were infectious diarrhea, influenza, foot and mouth disease.
Dec 2019 - 98% of class C cases were infectious diarrhea, influenza, foot and mouth disease.

Dec 2017 - 10 deaths were class C
Dec 2018 - 16 deaths were class C
Dec 2019 - 18 deaths were class C

Maybe they've been misclassifying COVID-19 as influenza or this has to do with their misreporting.
> (1) You can convert cryptocurrencies but that doesn't change the fact your key remains a single point of failure, or your exchange's key remains a single point of failure. This is as designed. There is no remedy. It is intentional. It does not apply to an FDIC insured bank account.

There can be unlimited number of copies of the same key. For more secure storage, a key can be split into parts that allow reconstruction only if, for example, any 3 of the original 5 parts are present. You can't have such backups with cash. There's no single point of failure, unless the whole system fails and keys have no value anymore.

Speaking of which...

> (2) During the MtGox crisis and the QuadrigaCX [1] crisis (among many, many, many others), 100% of deposits disappeared overnight with zero recourse (aka SFYL). While neither this nor the Cypriot banking crisis are ideal, I know which one I'd prefer to have gone through.

I lived through the collapse of the Soviet Union when money became completely worthless. The photos of the Weimar Republic and baskets full of bills - I've seen that with my own eyes, and I'm not sure that was the last time for me to experience a complete financial collapse.

Cash isn't as long-lasting as people seem to think, with a few notable exceptions like the USD. Most currencies that existed in Europe 30 years ago are gone. If you tear down a wall during home renovations and come across a hidden stash of 1997 French francs, they're worthless and can't be exchanged for the Euro anymore: https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/euro/exchanging-na...

As to the exchanges - they a are a mirror image of traditional bank accounts (deposit money and hope it doesn't vanish) and should be avoided as much as possible. One of the aims of cryptocurrencies is getting rid of such blind trust based relationships and replace them with cryptographically secured ones that are bound to well-established rules that cannot be arbitrarily changed.
Maybe look at bonding more with your community and worry less about tech / work / business. Family and community are where you find joy in life.
The best online class I ever took had this thing called "muddy buddies." Basically each week we were required to post questions about something we "didn't understand" from the assigned reading, and your assigned muddy buddy is supposed to answer. The genius thing about it is I would be reading the textbook and trying to find something I "didn't understand," but I didn't want to post a question that was too easy. So any potentially confusing part of the reading I would think about more closely until it was no longer confusing. Basically I was motivated to read everything closely because I was trying to find something that was actually hard to understand.
It would make sense to me, at least with textbooks, that it also helps the cream rise to the top (outside of mandated ones for college classes). You can sample several, find the one you like the most, then buy a nice copy of it to keep. I've done that with several books, checking them out from a uni library or finding them by other means and then buying once I decided it was good and I was going to stick with it. I feel like others do as well, others who would never buy them otherwise.

Also, if people can sample textbooks, you can easily start to see which ones are the best (subjective, in a way) and they can rise to the top.
For us to be preppers on an individual level is immensely silly- it’s on a societal level that you want to build redundancy, stability, and disaster plans. If your big plan is to defend cans of creamed corn with a sniper rifle, then your plan is to fail.
Totally agree. Realized my earlier comment could be read as suggesting inaction or complacency, which wasn't the point I was trying to make at all. Everyone should be acting with their wallet where and when they can and pushing corporations to behave ethically while keeping in mind the sort of behaviors encouraged by the larger structures at play.
Interview with Taiwan Digital Minister Audrey Tang
I would also like to add that therapy is not just for the mentally ill, and nothing to be ashamed of. Navigating your career, and life in general, is tough and a good therapist can help put it in perspective. I personally went to therapy weekly for about six months to help deal with the impact of burnout on my life. I think I came away from it a more capable person.
because in the last decade or so, if not more, the common method of attack has been to shame. not debate on merits, in public shame. don't believe for a minute they won't resort to combining the information to find people. they will also pretty much write off any ip addresses linked to questionable IPs that supported the cause the paper needs supported.

sadly in this inter connected world it is far easier to name and shame people which thwarts any useful discussion, it is no different than voter intimidation; which is why one side wants to do away with secret ballots in unionization pushes.

winning is all that is cared about.

what are we going to do when either the NYT or another organization links back those ids to private individuals, just hashtag apologize and ignore it?
MMR (measles is one of the M) vaccination rates are plenty high enough to get us to herd immunity for SAR-CoV-2 (we need something like 70% of the population being immune).

Even in states with the worst coverage. It's closer to 90% in most of the country:

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/imz-managers/coverage/childvaxv...

So what are you laughing at?
concatenation is associative while subtraction is left-associative. you're getting yourself in trouble defining subtraction in that way.
I like the button idea... you got a howto for that?
French contamination history? I'm sure the French have modern microbiology and virology techniques...

That said, I do agree that a seismological test of the patient would be more definitive, but sometimes you cannot contact the patient due to privacy concerns/ IRB rules. I don't know how French hospitals deal with patient data, but if it's anything like America, you are highly unlikely to be able to do those sort of things without additional approval.
I like it. Jean Paul Sartre but for coders.
Why web devs need to think Content First, not Design first?
interesting! nice site
You let government fire incompetent people, which is very hard to do with unions like AFSCME in place, in part because "incompetent" in this context is extremely subjective. I'm not saying unions are bad but they do make it objectively harder to fire these borderline folks.

Huge salaries? No. The agencies I contracted for topped out for senior folks in the $85-90k range while the same title in the private sector is going to be about 40-50% higher than that. They have pensions but unless you're already 15 years in you really need to work the system to get anything out of it. New hires (rightly) have to put a lot of money into the system so it's not much better than a private retirement plan in terms of returns, however it is guaranteed by the taxpayers.

There are exceptions, though. If you're retiring from any of the agencies I contracted for, and you worked there your entire career, you're probably getting a lump sum $80-100k vacation time payout and anywhere from $60-100k/yr for the rest of your life depending on your exact job. This is in addition to whatever personal retirement accounts you might have. Obviously no 401(k) with the pension in place, but it was not unheard to have some of the higher ups cashing in just enough vacation every year to fully fund their Roth.

So yeah you can set up a nice retirement nest egg if you're willing to commit to the state (at least where I live). But for short term stuff it's terrible. You don't even vest any pension benefits until I think 5 years now, and then you're getting something like 5-10% from age 70 on or something.
Unauthorized use of a computer system. Yeah, fits one definition.
Talking about Covid, France is one strange outlier. Something is happening with their numbers.
A $12 usb c DAC will fix this, unless you are already using all of your thunderbolt ports.
Why Scientists Think the Novel Coronavirus Developed Naturally
I won't pay you, but I'm guessing somebody would.

I guess you would have to establish credibility.

e.g. If someone wants to be a great actor, but you have no acting experience.

I guess you could play the matchmaker role. I know there are coaching services out there, at least one that is 'startup-y', but prob plenty more room.
I'm not sure about complete series but there are definitely some episodes. One I would say is the ST:TNG episode "Relics" where they rescue Scotty from a ship crashed on a Dyson Sphere. They even had the original captain's chair from the original series in it. And it was a pretty great episode too!

I think another example are the D&D or paintball episodes of Community. They even reference the other episodes and make fun of how fan service-y it is at points.
Yeah guess I should go and sleep
I like how certain anti-science folk are suddenly crying for science to save them.
Jumping in here because of a pet peeve, since we're discussing "in the US" things. It blows my mind how people have fallen for the trick of not having sales tax included in discussed prices, and continue to exclude it as if magically someone else is going to pay it, or you don't have to work for that money. On expensive things like cars, it's a large chunk of change. Yes, it varies from state (and sometimes city) to state, but it should at the very least be discussed. That $16k Honda Fit in Los Angeles is going to cost you an additional $1520 in sales tax, real money that you really need to work for and be willing to part with to drive said Fit. If $16k is a problem to pay, that additional $1.5k in sales tax should be a concern to you as well. This is basically meant to mentally trick you into visualizing a lower price, and thinking "oh yea, that money goes to the state, not the merchant" as if, again, somehow that isn't real money _you_ have to part with. It's dishonest and can push some people into making bad financial decisions by treating the deal as if it's ~10% cheaper.

It would be great if we could start discussing real prices, maybe agree on an average sales tax rate which can be used in most discussions, with the understanding that it will vary a bit for you. Or maybe just add a 10% flat sales tax estimate, so that at least you know that most of the time you can expect to pay slightly _less_ than the discussed price, versus the unpleasant surprise of thousand(s) of additional $.
I've been using Lockdown[0] on my iPhone. It blocks everything for me, and is open source.

[0] https://lockdownhq.com/
The idea that a vaccine could be mandatory. But thank you for agreeing we are heading toward herd immunity.
Brief notes:

His self introduction is interesting of itself considering how different he is from other ministers around the world ( at least I think so ).

The main topic is how Taiwan has overcome the mask shortage and how they distribute them fairly.

There's also brief discussion about privacy issues, open data, and 'social hackers'
Short version: you find very small things that you can write tests around (pulling messy logic out into testable functions, writing tested utilities that replace dirty hacks, etc.) and start building your testing framework starting with that.

Long version:
Working Effectively with Legacy Code
Book by Michael C. Feathers
The FOIA request was probably not denied because the FCC lacks the technical abilities to fulfill the request. In my experience it's likely that no technical people were consulted on it. A FOIA office simply looks for any excuse they can use to deny a request if they want to deny it. The reason doesn't need to make sense or be their true reason.

Here's an example from my own experience:

I can recall a FOIA request I made for the results of searches in an internal government database in spreadsheet format. To my knowledge this can be exported using existing functionality in the web interface for the internal database. The request was denied, and I appealed. They claimed that the information was publicly available, which is absurd. In the appeal I showed that actually almost none of what I wanted was publicly available and the independent appeals office agreed (after a long delay). Then it became clear that the FOIA office thought the request would be burdensome and they tried to deny it on those grounds. I insisted that no, it wouldn't be burdensome.

When it finally went to the person who would actually do the work, apparently it took only a few hours to do, and they declined to charge me anything for it. I assume the majority of that time was writing some useful comments in the headers of the spreadsheets. They didn't need to write the comments, so clearly they weren't pressed for time.

In the end, the FOIA office spent far more time trying to deny this request than it would have taken to fulfill it.
Mostly guessing, but I think I'm like halfway between you and the commenter you're replying to. I've been where you are, not from the exact same path, but what you're feeling is familiar to me.

My two cents: I find joy doing challenging work on products that are useful to a bunch of people without needing to be "the next big thing". But what I find more joy in is my life outside of work, in spending time with and taking care of my extended family (including my close friends). The most success I've had with this so far has been at a big tech company. This is for a number of reasons: the product I work on is more likely to be useful to lots of people that way (because a lot of the marketing work has been done already), which also makes the work challenging (because scale brings challenges), and compensation and work-life balance are good so I can spend a lot of low-stress time focusing on family. I personally find the most joy working on things that mostly make money through charging people money for services because it feels like the most honest way for my salary to be paid, but I'm not sure how much that relates to this, it might just be a personal preference. Reading your post, I wondered whether you misinterpreted your big-tech coworkers. They might not have been checked out, they might have just been doing their work while having other interests that were more important to them. That is my interpretation of the people I work with (and of myself). I think it can look pretty lame to excited young people, but it's actually the opposite; what's lame is being super into working rather than other better things.

But as a follow-on, something I've been thinking about recently is whether I can take the useful skills I've built through a career in tech and apply them elsewhere, supported by the savings I've been able to build up. I'm not sure what that looks like, but being able to gather, process, analyze, and operationalize data seems important for lots of things, and that's something I know how to do (and I'm not alone here, software is largely about processing data). But I don't know what the most useful thing is to do with those skills; right now what seems important and in demand is epidemiology, but it's probably too late to become useful to this moment. Probably something in the broad sustainability space is more forward-looking. I'm still looking around.

I guess the two points I'm trying to make are: 1. You may be able to find joy by having more modest expectations, and 2. There may be other useful things to do with the skills you built, you should keep your eyes open for them.

Hope this helps a bit, cheers!
pretty reasonable thing to wonder, honestly.
The blog needs to make text black. It's hard to read without highlighting text.
Availability bias.

The infection fatality rate of someone in there 20's or even a teenager is basically a rounding error. The strong and healthy dying are the exception, not the rule.
I hope they find the textbooks unimpressive as well.
I think I understand what they're trying to say.

The value of a variable with type "non-nullable 32-bit integer" is an element of the space {-231, ..., 231 - 1}. The value of a variable with type "nullable 32-bit integer" is an element of the space {-231, ..., 2*31 - 1} U {NULL}.

There's a "main space", and an extra singleton space tacked on, containing the "NULL" element.

So NULL isn't a value in the "main space", and therefore in some sense "isn't a value". I think it's wrong for the same reasons you stated, but I think this is what they were trying to describe.
"Nonviolently showing up"? I might or might not agree but let's face it, most of us won't even bother to show up at a voting place on election day. People just don't care. Maybe they'll kvetch to their acquaintances about how bad the other side is, but overall there's a lot of complacency. Similarly, you don't need to arrest corrupt politicians, you just need to not vote for them. Support a primary challenger if they're incumbents. That kind of thing. But of course that's not going to happen either.
I am a total emacs noob given my relatively shallow exploitation of it, and my absolute ignorance of lisp. This is absolutely the first time I've provided an emacs answer someone found useful in a technical forum.

I'm gonna need a minute.

(heh)
Thoughts on Using Classes (Or Not)
It looks like you won't have to petition for it. According to https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/files/NHS-app-security-paper%20V0.1....,

"We intend to open source our codebase once the first release is finalised. The documentation accompanying that release will supersede this paper."

and from https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/blog-post/security-behind-nhs-contac...,

"The Secretary of State has also committed to making the source code open source. That may not happen immediately on release because the fabulous NHSX development team are all working hard on getting the product ready. But it will happen."

Sounds like there is an intention to deliver on the source. Bigger question is whether the server side is open sourced (as clearly that has limited value for verifying what is happening remotely).
Right when I was first learning about libertarianism and it was really appealing to me, I was also listening to a whole bunch of Martin Luther King Jr speeches. MLK was extremely smart and well read - a genuine philosopher of great value. As much as he valued community based power, and as much as the democrats stifled and blocked his movement at almost every step of the way, he still believed there was a time for government action. When a great mass of people are starving or struggling to merely get by, the government can and in his opinion should help. And it's hard to argue against that. The state is a cause of a great many problems - mass incarceration, the obstruction of black freedom movements, drone killings, and more which must be stopped - but at the same time, the state is an institution we have now. We must build our own resilient institutions to replace the state, but I think it ignores the suffering of millions to say the state should never be used to help the less privileged. I get really frustrated with libertarian types that would dismantle useful state programs before we've got something to replace them. They seem uninterested in the suffering that might cause, and I think they would do well to focus more advocacy on building the replacements before dismantling government systems.

Interestingly I've learned that there is a big difference between "left libertarians" and "right libertarians". I think the left libertarians and the socialist anarchists could actually be allies if they could get past all their language differences and knee jerk reactions. My roommate is a knowledgeable left libertarian and it's amazing how similar our end goals are but how different our language and conceptual frameworks for getting there can sometimes be.
True. I just haven’t been following this. I’m glad to hear it’s completely voluntary.
It's very common for the founders and early employees to be friends prior to the startup. He may have very well lost friends. He didn't elaborate, so we really don't know.
The CT scans could be checked with today’s knowledge. I presume they still have the images, right?
Awesome work, the Jupyter notebook support is really appreciated!
It’s not about the money and it’s not about “normal individuals”, whatever that means.

Law enforcement and intelligence agencies find this sort of information useful to further their agendas.
Suspicious how?

The agencies I worked at routinely had employees' shifts ending at various times, anywhere from 2:30 until 5.
This is how you transfer to a software role when nobody knows who you are and you have nothing in production to show for it. You learn everything about company app X, and then you start at the bottom as 'customer support engineer' or even lower as 'customer happiness' or w/e they call it these days.

When you are not putting out fires of angry customers, you learn everything you can from the developers that work there even starting to write features, starting to find bugs, optimizing the software, creating new tooling, whatever. It's simple to transfer around internally, impossible to get in externally. Then from there you transfer into a developer role because now you're not just some unknown guy they don't want to risk hiring. Once you are no longer junior, meaning you put in the work at that imaginary place moving around roles internally you jettison out of there to the higher paying positions because now you're an experienced developer and probably have a little network you can use, in other words no longer a risk.
A 70% vaccination rate is one way to get to herd immunity.

There's not much question about getting there eventually. The path we take is the question.

You are apparently laughing that 10% of people will refuse a working vaccine and expose themselves to future risk? Fun.