skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I think this is position is a bit naive. Like saying "but child porn is just bits, like any other type of file".

Everything has a domain it operates in, so I believe that statement has nuance. In particular when you look at how general or specific the domain is.

From the perspective of something uploaded to S3? It sure is like any other file.

From the perspective of a website dedicated to the dissemination of child porn? It clearly is more than "just bits" in that context.

How about from the perspective of a search engine, where that site may be indexed? Welcome to the grey area that all of these debates are rooted in. Technically it's just indexed strings or ngrams, so it is like any other type of file. But there's an argument that a search engine should "know more" than just the raw data, and should be able to understand that context somehow.

Palantir is in this grey area. The software isn't built for spying. It's built for managing and understanding vast amounts of data. Can this be used for spying? Yes. It can also be used for double blind clinical trials. Or maintaining insurance systems. Or coordinating disaster relief efforts.

It operates technologically in a very general domain, but their flexible user-defined ontology makes it very powerful at operating in more specific domains. So it's a lot less cut and dry than the dissenters make it seem, IMHO.
That is not a Neruda poem. It is apocryphal. Pablo,ever the communist, would have never written such a piece of libertarian crap.I am surprised that such a fan of Neruda as you claim to be did not notice that.
The barriers to remote work are falling fast
Install it on a secondary phone? Of course it all depends on how serious the government is and how hard you are willing to work to circumvent controls.
AutoHotkey can do this "caps lock as both escape and control" thing too. I use this, from http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Map_caps_lock_to_escape_in_Windows :

; Author: fwompner gmail com
#InstallKeybdHook
SetCapsLockState, alwaysoff
Capslock::
Send {LControl Down}
KeyWait, CapsLock
Send {LControl Up}
if ( A_PriorKey = "CapsLock" )
{
Send {Esc}
}
return
> In summary none of the patients who are put on ventilators survive.

That's simply not true. A very high percentage of them die (because you only put very sick people on ventilators), but to suggest that they all die is just absurd.
Ah! Now that you mention it I see what you mean. Whew!
That must be it. Thanks!
> 2. Most people at google care a lot about privacy (either in the secret kept between you and google sense or the more common sense definition people seem to use on hn)

When I worked at Google, I saw a lot of earnest efforts to keep data private, in a way that really was sufficient (k-anonymized with large k, for example), but in ways that have no outward proof that it was happening. Send all possible data to the server, then make sure it's properly clustered and scrubbed before it gets stored or analyzed. And it's not easy to explain to someone who can see the whole system that from an end-user's view this is identical to just scooping up everything.
Taiwan started checking every flight from Wuhan as early as 31st of December...
This x1000 is why I subscribe to a dozen publications (even though I don't read them all), and donate to non profit newsrooms whatever I can.
There has been some discussion about this in /r/AskHistorians: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/czl900/a_pie...

I'd encourage people to read the comments there.
China's infections disease numbers for December 2019 were unbelievably higher than prior Decembers

Dec 2017 - 700k cases - http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2018-01/29/c_136933793.htm

Dec 2018 - 712k cases - http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2019-01/27/c_137778435.htm

Dec 2019 - 1.71m cases - http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-02/01/c_138748020.htm
Yes, a vaccine MAY be possible, but the news reports I'm hearing are wildly optimistic at best. It will also take an enormous amount of energy/willpower to quarantine until then.

It might be more economically efficient (and convenient) for the strong and healthy to purposefully self-infect, and build up anti-bodies naturally. Herd immunity will eventually be built and corona will no longer be a problem.
This is SO cool! Amazing collection of features, really clean API design. I had no idea how much I wanted this.
At risk at piling on to something that's already being downvoted, this is an extremely facile take. Nothing in the article you linked was "mocking" tech workers for being worried in mid-February. The word you are looking for is "reporting" on that situation, and also including in that report that officials at that time, in mid-February, said that while there was "always a risk" that these fears were likely overblown. Dragging Vox for accurately reporting what many experts said at the time is dragging them for not being prescient enough to know that the experts were wrong. And to top it all off, that's something that Vox is actively concerned about, given that the last episode of the Ezra Klein Show was a conversation with NYT writer Charlie Warzel about the media's response to the pandemic and how difficult it is to handle this sort of situation.
I’m based in Contra Costa County, California and I’m enjoying the lockdown because the air is much fresher with the reduction of cars on the road. There is almost no smog and it’s wonderful.
Relevant: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/04/27/mo...
You know what they say...

"If You Want To Tell People the Truth, You’d Better Make Them Laugh or They’ll Kill You"

You are dropping alot of truth here man and I absolutely agree.

As you can see people hate it. Because they want to protect their golden chains.
The strong and healthy are also dropping dead and we don’t know what the chronic, long term effects will be
Have you read the article you keep linking? Tom Wheeler wasn’t behind the decision that article is about. A panel of federal judges were. Tom Wheeler is directly quoted in that article saying he hopes to appeal the decision because he (and the FCC, at the time) disagreed with it.
not really sure what point you're trying to make here.
You don't believe in biology?
This is the only one I use:

https://www.reddit.com/r/oisd_blocklist/comments/dwxgld/dblo...
The greatest investor of all time, Warren Buffett, has never used hedging. That’s proof how unnecessary it is.

In the long run retained earnings drive market valuations higher. I don’t know how long this bear market will last, or how long it will be till the next one, but I know remaining fully invested beats market timing by the end every time.
Fan creations frequently do this. Plenty of fan made pokemon or sonic games are either competitive with or better than the official games. Alot of the time a fan is willing to put in the time and effort to make something that isn't large enough to try and sell, a good example being https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCFMtdiQILuTZr22sKUeAOOA where a fan of Warhammer 40k spent two years making a 15 minute video series. I guess if your definition of working extraordinarily well is making a huge profit then fan creations can't usually try to do that, but they can still make great things to please existing fans.
If Apple wanted to they could force your phone to install an Unremovable app or just add in the software in an update.
> Don't underestimate the absolutely jaw-dropping incompetence from even senior "tech" folks employed by governments.

How do we replace them with folks that know what they're doing? It almost sounds like it would be better for the government to outsource to a tech firm.

These people have huge salaries and pensions, too, right?
The browser just reads the TOC-ish stuff from the first chunk. Trust me, it works. I regularly load plain old multi-hundred-megabyte mp4s in my browser, off a web server, and skip around without problems. The default keyframe interval from x264 is fine. You don't have to do any horrible things to the encoding, you just have to start loading a few seconds before the seek point. Which the browser does automatically.

Do browsers even support embedded subtitles?
So your asserting that without understanding the specifics of the situation that a "lesson from history" should be applied and should guide your opinion about a particular situtation? It isn't important to you what the nature of the particular situation is? How are you deciding which "lesson from history" is applicable or is there just a single universal lesson about "big corporations" that should be applied irregardless of the facts?
Exactly.

You need to seek new fans every generation or so - the trick is balancing 'new' vs. 'old', how you retire certain characters etc.

You are screaming into the wind if you expect something to stay relevant for your entire life without major cyclical upheavals.
Reminds me of a song (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajVIiS65TFY) "Don't ya know that the smart bombs are so clever? They only kill bad people now."

It's rather amazing the mental gymnastics people perform to get out of cognitive dissonance. I'm much more sympathetic with people who know exactly what they're working on and the full effects of that work, why some will find it distasteful, but nonetheless can at least make a case for why those people are wrong and the work important, rather than agreeing with them but hastily adding some transparent excuse to avoid being lumped in the distasteful category.
Do you have any evidence of these more mundane reasons? Otherwise, you're just speculating. And since Bray did a very good job of linking to sources for his stated reasons, I'm inclined to take his claims seriously at least until other evidence indicates otherwise.

(On the other hand, I highly suspect that you yourself have "other" reasons to cast doubt on Bray's claims. I have as much reason to doubt your motives as you do to doubt Bray's, right?)
Independent Bookstores and Patronage Possibilities
I can't imagine that working out in China.

EDIT: Nevermind. Looks like this only applies to apps using their new contact-tracing framework.
Sure, I get that. And I think it’s a position shared by a lot of people. Probably the majority of people. But it’s an ugly necessity of modern politics.

We could absolutely stop all weapons production in the US, I’d just ask for some time to learn Mandarin first.
I can understand his frustration with our lack of preparation, but he's used the term black swan to describe economic recessions that were also predicted by many people.

Wikipedia says Taleb gives three criteria for black swan phenomena:

1. The disproportionate role of high-profile, hard-to-predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, finance, and technology.
2. The non-computability of the probability of the consequential rare events using scientific methods (owing to the very nature of small probabilities).
3. The psychological biases that blind people, both individually and collectively, to uncertainty and to a rare event's massive role in historical affairs.

Given these criteria, how could a San Andreas earthquake NOT be a black swan? (And by "San Andreas earthquake" I mean The Big One, not one of the many smaller tremors that occur all the time.) Because we know that, one day, The Big One will eventually occur? Or because we can prepare for it to some degree (though I'd argue there are magnitudes that The Big One could hit that even the most earthquake safe of buildings aren't prepared to endure in CA).
If people are interested, I'll give my opinion on this paper:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/03/190312103717.h...
Anyone want me to comment?
I hate them too.

When someone does an overhaul and introduces role-based areas, the library (where you really are allowed to tell people to shut up) are immediately more popular than the few stand-up desks on the floor.

At one place I worked (big bus. w/ offices all over) my floor was full of fake alphas who were always talking to their laptops on video conferencing. I'd take the internal stairs up a floor where it was crickets and productivity bliss.

And I'm guilty of being the annoying person in the area (ok, one of the annoying people). Sorry everyone! I've learnt and promise not to be that guy again.
and since we are talking operating systems, also emacs :)
Company claims exclusive rights to using smartphones to trace Covid-19 contacts
Sleep Is Your Superpower
Then refactor 50% of it.
Here in Australia our Covid tracing app is already out.

It uses Bluetooth proximity logs and local storage unless you test positive and are asked to upload.

I had a look at whats in the apps DB and it seems it just keeps a log of unique ids it bumps into. When you test positive and upload I'm guessing it publishes those unique ids if the logs show over 15 minutes of contact.

The government already have our locations via cell towers so they just have to match the data if they really wanted to.
Ask HN: Why does HN has no dark mode?
> A virus endemic to bats from southern China was first transmitted to a human in the wildlife market in central China where no bats are sold, presumably through an intermediate host such as a pangolin.

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. The disease was passed to humans via civets. And in Wuhan the carrier seems to have been pangolins. Seems completely believable, given that it happened once already.
Btw the petition needs to on the parliament petitions site for a chance to have it debated
Kubernetes is a robot made of cats. Not robotic cats like Voltron. Actual, you know. Cats.

You can learn the basics in a week. It will take a very very long time to learn to be comfortable in it.

Kubernetes The Hard Way is the usual answer to "how do I learn this?"
Febreeze man.. the air is saturated with it. Plus it’s dry. Also Vegas has really good ventilation. Hotel rooms have independent HVACs.
If you look for the kubernetes code labs on google cloud, they’ll get you deploying stuff to kubernetes in a few minutes.
> Still a majority compared to renters.

I'd noted it was higher so that would follow, yes. I left out the precise number because I saw some variation in the across sources and couldn't be bothered to dig into the details as it didn't make a difference anyway.
Somewhat off topic, but I was reading up recently on the lives of folks involved with Tetris early on, and one sad outcome was the murder-suicide of Vladimir Pokhilko, a friend of Pajitnov and co-founder of a company together. It seems like the stress of financial difficulties with the company (and who knows what else) pushed him over the edge, resulting in a brutal killing of his wife and 12yo son, and then himself, in San Francisco. Just sad all around.
> (1) Fees are irrelevant in the face of overwhelming volatility. Who cares if the fee is a couple of cents on your million dollar transaction when BTC regularly flings up and down 10%, or more? How could you willingly risk $100,000 on a million dollar transaction when your bank would charge you between $25 and $0 depending on your account size for the same transfer?

The same thing is an issue with traditional international transactions, but settlement systems like Ripple offer very fast transaction times (seconds instead of days) and reduce exposure to exchange rates, which makes them much cheaper to use.

> (2) Fees only appear low because nobody's using it. The minute people start using it, as we've seen, the fees absolutely skyrocket. BTC transaction fees hit $35 last time around.

BTC throughput is artifically capped by its developers to 7 transactions per second (globally), which causes ridiculous bidding wars for transactions. This is not an issue with most cryptocurrencies that have large throughput as one of their main design goals.

> (3) Fees only appear low because they're being socialized through inflation/dilution. A single BTC transaction consumes 700kWh of power -- enough to drive a Tesla from SF to New York. That's currently being absorbed by the system in the form of inflation/dilution ("block rewards"). But make no mistake, each transaction actually costs about $0.08/kWh in China = $56.

Cryptocurrencies do not have to rely on Bitcoin's way of doing things. There are energy-efficient ways. A single Bitcoin transaction may consume 700 kWh, but a Visa transaction consumes 0.006490 kWh and a Ripple transaction consumes 0.0000113 kWh (http://papers.netrogenic.com/sid/eco-friendly-money.pdf).

> (5) Before you start on international transactions, those are really really cheap too. The cheapest option for small transactions is TransferWise, charging 0% on the USD-INR corridor up to 0.85% or so. Most credit cards charge nothing on forex.

These are not actual transactions. TransferWise can offer cheap rates only on well-balanced corridors because then real money doesn't have to move. If USD->INR payments have a volume of 1M per day and INR->USD also has 1M, then they don't have to move any money and can bypass the whole international transactions side of things and associated fees and locally pay out the same money that was deposited into their accounts.

If international transactions were cheap, there would be no need for middle-men like TransferWise.
If the law sufficiently formalizes and enforces a societies moral compass, acting under its umbrella would be, by definition, moral.
I laugh at conspiracy theories which revolve around the Government paying special attention to normal individuals.

Dude, Governments have the power to tax millions of people. They don’t need your piddling bribery money. It’s too much work for too little reward.
And when the Government is on the other side with requests, warrants, and subpoenas, they aggressively push with little regard to cost, complexity, or even feasibility.

If we replied to a lawful order with "This demands 'research' instead of simply a 'search'," they would tell us tough-shit.
I think so. Graphing death rate by latitude shows tropics and southern latitudes (summer during cov2 outbreak) have substantially lower death rates than up north. My best guess is sun and heat is the cause.
Many of us work with people whom we have never met in person, building products that are not real, to fill the needs of strangers whose jobs should unquestionably not exist. Furthermore, sometimes it feels impossible to do creative work on the side, as every input and output that is part of the process becomes a commodity to be tracked and sold. The Machine has not stopped. And it won't.

I think we are all sprinting towards an ambiguous neurological disaster. The more you think about the signs and symptoms, the harder it becomes to envision a future scenario, a future Self, where you stay in tech and do not burn out intellectually, emotionally, physically, and spiritually.

The longer I work online, the more I understand how a digitally mediated life insulates us from the human experience. The question we all have to meditate on is whether the lifestyle benefits of working in tech, working remotely, outweigh the longterm negative effects on the psyche and the soul.
You seem to be asserting that all that is needed to determine who is right or wrong in any particular situation is to assign some sort of "power" metric to both sides and then conclude that the powerful entity must be wrong and the weaker entity must be right without actually considering the particular issue at hand.

This seems like pretty lazy thinking to me.
Tech, Media and Democracy
Agree on all counts (I am in the US), but what does it have to do with crypto? And with this coin in particular?

Whatever the solution we end up with, it won't be decentralized. No one wants to lose their money because they lost some token or paper, and their computer broke.

It will be great new distributed world -- but it would also be licensed, insured, centrally approved, KYC'd, and free of chinese cryptominers and people stealing your passport numbers.
> Honestly I think most people would rather save $200-300 than have the touchbar.

This is such a silly comment. You actually have no idea.
Re: #1 The quality of their location data is pretty easy to audit personally by looking at ones location history.
It makes me think that maybe what’s so toxic nowadays is the expectation that the job is glamorous and exciting. For me the reality is still the same as 90’s dad’s enterprise software company, but with a big shiny layer of marketing.
I've set it up for most of my close family and friends, added a physical button to the top of the Raspberry Pi case that disables it for x minutes (x changes depending who they are and their needs), so if they're having issues they go press the button to access the problematic website.

I keep reading about people having to disable the Pi-Hole so much that it becomes annoying, or constantly butting heads with websites that don't work with Pi-Holes, but I can honestly say that I, and the people I've set them up for, BARELY EVER need to use the Disable button. Not for online banking, not for online shopping, not for any regular content consumed. I can't personally think of the last time I needed to disable the Pi-Hole for anything at all. It just sits there blocking ads invisibly, plugged into the back of my modem/router, and is one of my absolute favourite parts of my tech stack.

What websites are people visiting that the Pi-Hole doesn't work with? I'm genuinely curious, because I've been running mine for a couple years now and can't think of anything off the top of my head, and no one in my family group have ever complained about it, with most telling me it's been flawless and they barely every touch the button.
> But the success is chased by increasing bureaucracy and involvement of stakeholders, and it quickly becomes all politics.

And then quickly becomes colonial revolution.
I am out of China at the moment, but I can say from Chinese media buzz is that it is now almost certain that China's SARS numbers already passed hundreds by early-mid November.

It appears that by late November, the government first took a notice of the outbreak, and by early December it was already a complete freak out.

How the government knew? China has built a nationwide electronic infectious disease reporting system after the first SARS outbreak with specific intent of spotting SARS recurrence. Hospitals in China are required by law to report anything with a remote semblance of SARS into the system. China also holds nationwide drills for infectious disease specialists annually with SARS comeback in mind.

Any claim that China was caught unprepared are hard to believe.

Given that first reliably confirmed info on Beijing dispatching orders to provincial governments on handling a "disaster" also comes onto first days of December, it seems very, very likely to me that they already knew of it being SARS in December.

I also heard of what I have no ability to confirm, like the talk of huge pileups at HK border crossings in first days of December, and a spike of private jet departures.
Stop Zoning Out in Zoom Meetings
Especially as Dark Souls 2 actually has the highest rating on metacritic from the trilogy haha.
The link between TrueCrypt/VeraCrypt and former programmer, drug dealer, snitch
Pneumonia deaths had an unexpected surge in Italy October 2019.

A lot of people in this thread an to be clutching at the assumption it couldn't possibly have been anywhere else before it was detected. One case in France not spreading is fairly lucky if it's true.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-italy-...
> Plus it’s dry.

Some viruses, like flu, prefer dry air. That's actually the reason flu spreads better in winter -- because colder air is less humid.

https://news.yale.edu/2019/05/13/flu-virus-best-friend-low-h...
But they were claiming that a single monolithic file would break too, which is not the case. The browser does a range request to get the first part, then a range request to get the part you're playing, and it works.