skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is nice to see an alternative to Nginx. I am glad that Caddy took a stab at it.

It is good that the author is looking to have some kind of stable monetization too. It's hard enough to maintain OSS from time perspective. I hope that it works out for him.
That's roughly the gist of it. Three minor things:

The problem isn't producing the human monoclonal antibody (we know how to make mabs) but in identifying the right neutralizing antibody to produce, and this one that they've identified seems to be cross reactive to both SARS-COV-2 and to SARS-COV which is interesting. If this is to be developed as a drug, they'd need to test them in mice (currently difficult due to a shortage of COVID susceptible mice) and ultimately in human clinical trials.

Tocilizumab is another monocolonal antibody, yes, but it's not a neutralizing antibody against the virus. It's an antibody against the interleukin 6 receptor, and it's goal is to act as an immunosuppresant to shut down something called a "cytokine storm," which is often the actual damaging factor in cases like these sorts of viruses where the immune system's own collateral damage kills the patient.

And technically, Tocilizumab is a humanized antibody, not a human antibody. Fully human antibodies are the least likely to be recognized as foreign. Humanized are relatively less likely than non-humanized antibodies, but they aren't perfectly human.
My anec-story is from ~Nov 1. BA resident. Sickest in my life. At the ER with 106F (did not know it even went there) fever and bad cough. Complete delirium. Flu result came back negative. No sepsis either. Released with anti-pneumonia antibiotics. Fever > 105F persisted for at least 6-7 days. Coughing that was bad enough to cause spasm. Took a second round of antibiotics (21 days total) to get over the pneumonia. The doc remarked about my chest x-ray ("whoa what is that?!!") but could not give a good explanation.
I think most people actually remap to the ~ key, or if they're extreme they'll use tab. On my keyboard Escape already came as the ~ key and you have to use fn to access ~ or `.

The ergonomics of moving it closer far outweigh any benefits from it being physical vs touchscreen.
"however GitHub paused verifying applications in January. This really screwed me as the marketplace guidelines said I was not allowed to be listed on the GitHub marketplace if I offer a paid service outside of GitHub Marketplace."

Anybody knows the background on this screw-up?
They must've died of COVID-19
The universe no. The universe is a cold, hard mf.

But would it not be nice if it were society, us humans, who would provide the right to a safe job and dignified life?
What is the status of contact tracing apps in the United States?
> Is the source code of these apps something that could be FOI requested

There's no need for such a request. They themselves say "We intend to open source our codebase once the design is finalised" here: https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/report/nhs-covid-19-app-privacy-secu...
The main source would be the website of his own research center
https://www.mediterranee-infection.com/en/ (but it's mostly the content in French that's interesting)
He had a lengthy interview on French media last week.
As far as I'm concerned he got pretty much every part of that epidemic right from the beginning and the facts are now vindicating him.

But that's not really the point anyway. My point is: he went against the WHO and the French government. And at least some people, like me, find value in what he is saying. So who is to judge whether or not he should be allowed to spread his ideas?
I wonder if any people remap hjkl to jkl;. Having to shift my hands one key over always annoyed me.
Odd The Atlantic is publishing this. I guess a veiled warning to upper middle-income folks.
> I'd love to see the "little delay" when reconstructing a file qualified somewhat. Are we talking < 5s or < 10s?

I asked the engineers that work on that code, and they pulled a random sample from the logs (we time all of this) and said for files less than 1 MByte, it averaged around 250 milliseconds to reconstruct the file from the Backblaze Vault and get it onto the cache servers where it is then served up. In 95% of requests completed within 900 milliseconds, but there were a few up over 1 second (1.2 seconds was the highest they found). Those are live production numbers so it includes all the load on those Vaults.

A couple other notes just to add color. Any one Backblaze account is bound for life to what we call a "cluster", for example there is one cluster in Europe so all files are stored in Europe for any account in Europe. There is a load balanced array of "cache servers" in front of all the vaults specific to that cluster (the caching servers are physically located close to the vaults for latency reasons), and our biggest cluster has something like 20 of these SSD based caching servers. Ok, so the cache layer is not "shared", meaning each cache server only pulls directly from the Backblaze Vault. So if you were serving a file, and 20 separate customers got amazingly unlucky, the file would get the 250 millisecond lag every time for those first 20 fetches. The cool parts of this architecture is that then you have 20 populated caches that are completely unrelated to each other so you have 20x the bandwidth available to serve it up (and a rack of really fast 20 servers to serve it). Plus they are all totally independent so they can crash or be brought offline to upgrade the software without any downtime.

We can add these cache machines as we need them, they are these 1U units and we have "warm spares" for a variety of things. When we have had spikes in load in the past we toss some hardware at it pretty fast.
Internet video appears to be a natural monopoly given no one can even close to competing against Google.
Can you elaborate? On what are you basing the high rate of corona infection?
We probably shouldn't call them "contact tracing" apps since what they plan to do is so different than manual contact tracing. "Exposure notification" is a better term.

Nothing prevents anyone from using their phone's location history to remember what to tell the contact tracing people.
Also:

2. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34762552-algorithms-of-o...
I thought as much. I suppose I'm just contradicting myself here; running away from a centralised platform trying to create another one. It doesn't make sense. I agree, dcentralisation will benefit creators the most. Thanks for taking the time to provide the links.
I mean, you also lose your money if you lose paper bills. Makes it difficult to use as a store of value, but not as a medium of exchange.
I think what you're disillusioned with is capitalism.

Try building something you could never make money off of. Something useless, but fun. Try divorcing technology from the vultures and the dilberts.

Here are some technologists doing useless, joyful things:

https://twitter.com/MatthewRayfield

https://twitter.com/Foone

https://twitter.com/_naam

Best of luck.
Google have flat out banned any apps that have anything to do with combating COVID-19 if they aren't either funded by their government or are a registered health company. I tried releasing a symptom tracker app before Zoe released theirs and it was rejected for this reason.
> killed flying a fighter jet trainer

It's unfair to pin that on the Apollo program. Flying fighter jets is very dangerous, and pilots are put through a lot of rigorous training to handle it. Many died in those jets in routine flights, which that one was.
To be fair I know of people in private industry who have said some of the exact same things. It isn't limited to just government employees.
> I am surprised that so little has been done to combine the NFC capabilities of passports with the blockchain and hope that this field will be explored in the future.

If you are surprised about why a technology is missing, sometimes it means that you have come up with something novel. Other times it means that you have come up with another idea that was ruled out by others.

In this case, it's the latter. The utility of cryptocoins is due to trustless, decentralized storage/transfer of value. If it's not decentralized, it's useless. If it's not trustless, it's useless.
I meant something else entirely:

> It reads to me as if you're presenting the world as having a single equilibrium toward which the market moves.

The opposite. I hinted at that by saying "the system does what it does", though I realize it may be an obscure reference[0]. The markets are. They are a dynamic system that naturally reaches some sort of (meta)stable behavior, and this is what we call equilibrium. It's not defined, it's observed.

> this target moves discontinuously at least with each birth and death that occurs

Disagree. To a good approximation, markets moves continuously, because it takes time for individual preferences to manifest, and preferences aren't binary switches - they're communicated through many individual decisions over time.

WRT. the "death and suffering" part, I meant that large disruptions to markets usually involve events that kill and impoverish lots of people, and markets rebalancing themselves also cause that. I'm thinking of events like COVID-19, 2008, 1929, and quite often, discovery of new deposits of highly demanded resources.

--

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
Yes and it had little redundancy with limited up time and speed guarantee, with no S3 API compatibility. And if I remember correctly even that was $0.003 per GB, with lots of unit cost that a lot of people including me thought to be miscalculated, where it should be closer to $0.4 for it to be somewhat break even.

So may be it is cheaper, but not really comparable.
I've been reading The Psychology of Computer Programming recently and enjoying it quite a bit. One fun bit is each chapter ends with some questions for reflection -- both for programmers, and for managers. I laughed a bit at the end of the first chapter, where the first question for managers is: "If you are a first-line manager, are you capable of reading the programs written by your programmers? ... If you are capable, do you read them? If you don't, why not try it and see what you find?"

The next set of questions: "If you are a higher-level manager, are your first-line managers capable of reading programs ... ? ... Our surveys indicate that nine-tenths do not ... Do you think it is possible for a first-line manager to know how good his programmers are or how well they are doing without occasionally reading their programs?"

I'm glad to read your report to know that at least somewhere out there exist software managers that seem to 'get' that code is (or should be) the central artifact in all the crap we programmers produce. Not that the other stuff isn't valuable, but things can still work without it, whereas without the code nothing works. My remaining fantasy is to encounter a software manager who is familiar with Deming's work and has thought about how to apply it to software management.
Last company I worked at, the application stack, after lots and lots of trimming, and memory tweaking, ran 14 servers. Hot Failover doubled that, Disaster recovery ran 3x. So, that was 42 servers per customer. We had 40+ customer - so, at last count, were at 1600+ servers, just for production applications - not including development, marketing, sales, finances, etc... And it was just a run-of-the-mill data ingestion company - nothing special. 1600 servers is only 80 racks - that's a small data center as things go - there are hundreds, if not thousands of companies with data centers that large.

Now, at my current gig - we have 43 nodes - but each node can run 100+ k8s pods (and, they are beefy 768 GB nodes). Our administration overhead, in terms of people/effort/auditing is a fraction of what it was at the last gig. Also - Disaster and failover is just a matter of bringing up the clusters and persistent stores in another region. No need to keep compute on standby. This week, we're even doing a migration of a cluster from GKE to Azure. And it started out on AWS (though not in production) - I'm not in the sysadmin world anymore, but from what I've seen, things like k8s have made it a heckuva lot easier to do big things with fewer people.
Oh wow I had no idea Palintir was involved, I feel like I've finally turned in to the paranoid old fool that people laugh at, but this really upsets me to think of the millions of people who are going to install this without so much as a thought.
Great question. If an outbreak of smallpox happened in Atlanta, 10 miles from the BSL-4 center, would you be so quick to call out any questions regarding said center as 'conspiracy theories'?
My response to this was to just recognize "I will have no control over outcomes unless I start playing corporate politics". I stopped reading up on the newest frameworks and started understanding finance and org behavior. Then I went and got an MBA.

Ultimately engineering is an entry-level job. Yes there are more senior engineering roles, but they all involve progressively more political involvement the higher you go. Turns out technology organizations are basically like every other hierarchy in human history.
Does the Indian app use the contact tracing API? I was under the assumption that it used the regular location/Bluetooth APIs in android.
Somewhat inevitable that the briefing will begin tomorrow against Apple and Google that American big tech firms are deliberately frustrating attempts to fight COVID and wouldn’t it be better if we just taxed them out of existence.

Shame, as a UK citizen I’m entirely supportive of the stance Apple and Google are taking.
The most important information: Some old samples analyzed for SARS-CoV-2 in April, finding one positive who spent two nights in hospital from Dec 27, after admitted as emergency:

"taken from a 42 years old. ... One of his child presented with ILI prior to the onset of his symptoms. His medical history consisted in asthma, type II diabetes mellitus. He presented to the emergency ward on December 27 2019 with hemoptysis, cough, headache and fever, evolving for 4 days" ... "evolution was favorable until discharge on December 29,2019."

---

ILI == Influenza-like illness

Hemoptysis == coughing up of blood
Contact tracing is a wet dream for five-eyes.

I don't even think it will even be effective given the anticipated number of cases.
I remember the desperate efforts of Theresa May to pass the snoopers charter for such a long time. And when she became a PM it was on the top of her list, and she did it. And now with that unethical filthy blob as a PM, I only expect the worse of him and his lackeys..

IMHO Apple and Google should have finished the job and "volunteer" to make the app as well as "donate" some of the storages for the data. Not that I trust US companies to respect anyone's privacy, or to the fact that a gag order stapled to a subpoena would give all that data to the "5 eyes"(now 14-15).

I like my health as much as the next living human. But there are so many governments that will jump on this opportunity that it makes me want to avoid this app.
> The fact that Amazon is so cheap

you mean the company that pays high wages?
So GPS for me but not thee?

"Privacy experts have warned that any cache of location data related to health issues could make businesses and individuals vulnerable to being ostracized if the data is exposed."

Apple and Google already have that data in-house, it's just as vulnerable as any data.

How is this not an absurd stance?
I don't think it's whataboutism if the argument is about whether The Other Guy will also end up being responsible for the death of thousands (or more) from some other event (planned or unplanned).

Not making an argument for either side, I just don't think it's whataboutism to argue that the variance of the incompetence of US presidents isn't very high.
I want to concentrate for at least 3/4 of my working time, but 2006 was the last time I had semi-private space for it.
I mean, imagine the repercussions of allowing third party apps to do this. It's tragedy of the commons for health info.

i.e. A crappy mobile app that spams notifications when you're around someone who was in contact with Covid infected. One which doesn't have any oversight and motivation other than mobile ad views.
This is also a problem with incompetent engineers. They fail to understand the difference between building relationships and transmitting technical information.
Funny you should ask ... https://www.hsj.co.uk/story.aspx?storyCode=7027564
In western states such doctors get censored and threatened with being fired, in Russia they still fall out of windows.
An old Russian custom. Thought those times were over.
> It's hard to imagine what could spark a cultural shift that would unite workers in today's world.

It would have to be a huge cultural shift away from profits being the #1 goal of companies. We need something to replace it.
Many people do this, especially since ordering anything remotely non-trash on Amazon is a lottery nowadays.
This is why I mentioned the time frame - this goes into trial EDIT:TOMORROW* (still don't think that gives much time to audit the source code) in Isle of Wight, and ITV news said it is going out to the rest of the UK Thursday - so its being installed without any code being shown yet.

https://www.bbc.com/news/explainers-52442754
>It's just how the particular web framework is written?

What about the framework leads to this, and how could it be changed to get better performance?
If Apple had released computers with the touch bar above the existing physical function keys, everyone would love it and other companies would provide a similar feature, the same way that they have all converged on the same industrial design as what Apple pioneered 20 years ago.

Instead, Jony Ive insisted on the touch bar replacing the function keys, and here we are. At least the butterfly switches are finally dead.
If they ban it, my next phone will be an iPhone.
Inkscape 1.0 is here [video]
They are arguing that finding data that's in log files is creating new data (because they have to write a script to parse it) which is specious. Logs are designed to be parsed and searched. You might as well claim that running an SQL script to query data is creating new information.
An old solution to new challenges: The rebirth of the cargo bike
Not launched yet.
Leaving aside the organizational bullshit issues, a big frustration with IC work is that to be productive at it I have to essentially shut-off my brain during the rest of my life, as I simply don't have the mental energy to do deeply technical things outside of work while being productive at coding for work.
We have decades of evidence where companies that opted for lower labor costs were more successful than their competitors. There's a reason all manufacturing moved to China, and there's no more mid market retailers left in the US.

And labor supply elasticity shouldn't matter over a span of decades, any mis-pricing would have shown itself, at least in the context of maximizing profits. If anything, the comparatively overpaid US workforce is/was the "mis-priced" part of the equation.

Also, larger businesses can afford to pay more, especially by way of tax advantaged benefits:

https://www.ivyexec.com/career-advice/2015/do-big-companies-...

My argument is that ideology has nothing to do with how much people are paid, it's supply and demand curves (over the long term). If people had better options for employment, they would be paid more. If employers had fewer options for employees, they would have to pay more. The rest of the up and coming world would have taken a bite out of US workers' pay no matter what.
Clearly only liberals care about airplane defects killings hundreds of people. Did you even click on the link?
I coughed like never before between late July to mid-December 2019.
> I think the bigger question is, let's say it did arrive much earlier that we think, does that mean the virus grows at a much smaller rate than current models?

This absolutely makes sense to me and would explain a lot of weirdness in the statistics. Less infectious, with a longer incubation period and circulating among the population for longer.
It would probably be better to just disallow editing to any comment with replies.
in Russia speaking freely is a deadly disease.
by the way, between north korea, china, russia, iran, turkey, saudi arabia are some of the most appreciated countries by some leader of a free country
I’m genuinely suprised that an implementation came out so quickly ... one would think the pandemia must have been advanced before the government even considered doing this ... and here we are with Android and iOS approved apps, with bluetooth and permission solutions made by a team of available engineers, implementing goverment documented requirements ... hmmm
Interesting. I wonder if countries will try to force them to re-enable it
Informed skepticism is the opposite of “blindly anti-crypto”: hawkers have had years to make the case for their systems but most of them have failed to produce anything of value. If you can talk knowledgeably about a system and a real problem which it solves, you won't have a problem.
Is it possible to win Pulitzer Prize with just 1 submission - (e.g. amateur submission in 1 of the categories)? Or does one require a track record of some sort for the year?
> I don't know why people do it.

Because it's the most common and consistent gateway to actual wealth, which is also non-coincidentally the gateway to independence (at least from a singular boss, there's always some dependence on the system in some way).

This is slightly upended by startups and getting shares for signing on early, but that's really not all that different of a situation (partial ownership for partial risk), it just happens that at this particular point in history it's also applying towards people with a lot of prospects and/or resources so there's less on the line for them if it fails.
Thanks for the advice. It's really good.

> Think about all the food stands that you have walked past in your life, within each stand is an immigrant family who slave away for decades hoping for a better life. Have you ever thought about them and gave them time/money for their suffering?

I know what you mean and know what you're getting at. But I feel compelled to point out this particular example isn't quite the same. I never sought the immigrant family out, then told them that my motivation is to support amazing cooks rooted in authentic traditions. I just bought the food.

VCs will lie, literally. They explicitly say they will act in a particular way in a specific situation, and then, protected by nuanced 300 page contracts, will do the exact opposite of what they said they'll do. Assuming you accept that lying to people is unethical, people act transactionally with immigrant vendors, but not unethically in the same way.
I trust a democratically elected government above a duopoly personally, and I'm not convinced the decision of how far to trade off privacy concerns against public health is one those corporations are competent to make.
Is there a study that actually convincingly showed this? Both pollution and infectious disease spread are clearly correlated with population density, so the fact that you see more covid deaths in places with a lot of pollution doesn't mean much unless you statistically control for other effects.
Russia is waaay freer than every other country in your list.
The contact tracing API hasn't been released yet

It's scheduled for "mid-May"
Can you give an example of some of these, because I'd love to learn more.
Trusting others: Source and message credibility among news reporters
The alternative of gc is not malloc and free. It's custom memory management, i.e. the code that decides when to execute malloc and when to execute free. Even a gc will ultimately call the equivalent of malloc or free. The difference is gc needs to do it generic enough that it works for all possible programs; whereas a programmer needs to do it in a way it works for this particular program.