skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If my company announces WFH for the rest of the year, I'll be moving out of San Francisco in a heart beat. The office has been the only thing keeping me here for a long time now.

I imagine SF natives might say, "Good riddance, don't let the door hit you on the way out," and I completely agree. I don't have issues with the city itself, but the value you get for your money here is completely abysmal if you're a renter or potential home buyer.
Yes, people around me with young kids are struggling. Those with older kids are mostly able to have them self-entertain for long enough stretches that it works for them, though it seems to depend on the kids.

I've also seen a couple of people without kids really struggling due to the lack of social interaction. For most this isn't an issue, or if it is, it's not a big deal, but for some, it's really hard to replace the in-office dynamic with video calls.
Wow, very interesting. We were hoping the badge would bring more authority, but super helpful to hear otherwise. Thanks.
+1, good tests are by far the biggest long-term productivity win, in my experience worth much more than any other tooling or process improvement.

Unfortunately I've gone in the opposite direction as you. I recently moved from a company that had a good automated test culture, to one that has a culture of manually testing things, often in production. Everyone, even the senior engineers who've been around for a long time, regularly lands changes that cause prod incidents.

There's actually quite a good canary/rollback system in place to deal with this, so a lot of people think everything's fine. But they don't quite realize how much more efficient things are if you can just make a change and run a test suite, and quickly have confidence that you didn't break things.
You're comparison implies that T1 is faster than 3G, but that's probably not the case except in really poor coverage areas.

T1's maximum data transmission rate is 1.544 megabits per second. [0] While 3G's theoretical maximum is 21.6 Mbit/s for HSPA+. [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-carrier#Transmission_System_...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3G#Data_rates
Bedrock (Framework)
Get a larger, higher resolution monitor. And when you can't do that get another monitor.

My main one's 5k2k and I could still use more space.
22ms here. 22ms there. "Focused on human perception" here, "Focused on human perception" there.

And suddenly we have what is basically a supercomputer unable to perform anything without lag.
Here's what I don't get about the robotaxi stuff - did the company and the investors ever actually believe that the robotaxi stuff was even close to viable, or was it just a scam all along? To me it seems obvious that fully self-driving cars are almost certainly, at best, several decades away - and, if it turns out that fully self-driving technology really does require artificial general intelligence, it's quite plausible that humanity actually will never build fully self-driving cars. This isn't something that I've just realized recently - I've thought for several years now that full self-driving is almost certainly at best quite far away. How did it happen that thousands and thousands of rather smart people fell for the delusion that there was any realistic chance of implementing full self-driving any time soon? Of course it's not just Uber in question, it's also Tesla, Waymo, and so on.
> You have no right to endanger me or my family.

I can walk outside and practice social distance. That doesn't endanger you or your family. I think that's what's so weird about the unreasonable risk-aversion some people are advocating. It's like healthy people have become complete OCD agoraphobes. The air isn't poison and humans won't be exterminated. Have a sense of proportion: the consensus upper range of the IFR (1%) means an overwhelming majority will survive, and beyond that, most of the deaths will be older people and the unhealthy.

I'm not proposing that all lockdowns be abolished completely across the country. I'm arguing that there's severe consequences and precedents set with lockdown and that reasonable precautions and practices could effectively mitigate disease spread and allow economic activity and reasonable freedom.
Oh wait, I know this one!

>Why does the school district need to spend $100k on brand new iPads?

Because the school chose to use Epic Books.
I’ve seen this idea suggested on HN several times as a way to reduce unemployment while enhancing contract tracing but I was surprised to see a state is actually going to give it a try.
Learn to touch-type properly. I'm not a shit hot typist or anything, but it does make hours on a keyboard more pleasant. And (hate me) I do judge other devs on it. If someone can't be bothered to invest a few tens of hours on such a key productivity enhancement then what does that say?
I've always grappled with why you call something a "metaphor" if you have no other word to call it. It always seemed to me that metaphor was something you used instead of the common term for something, for poetic or rhetorical effect; if there is no common term, why does a homonym become a metaphor? For example, what is the non-metaphorical term for the legs of a chair?
The question though is about a "new normal" where people work from home a large chunk of the time--and, yes, if your apartment isn't just a place you sleep I think that affects the decision-making of a lot of people about where they live. I don't really see coworkers videoconferencing from closets but, then, most of us aren't in unusually high CoL areas.
Oil and gas also have the benefit of published prices for most pipeline transport, although you still need a buyer/terminal that's physically connected to the network to take delivery.
Yes, but since the time in shared spaces is much shorter the probability of transmission is also much smaller, also for them, as ther is less density at home. I do not mean is is 100% safe, but comparatively safer.

If there were more people at the office, I would not do it, as I could be exposing my family.

It is all about reducing density and contact.
Where are you seeing "only through April 1" ?

The tables say 2/1/2020 to 5/2/2020 and shows 5 weeks of data for April thru May (the page is updated as-of today, 5/8/2020).
Oh, no. Police rarely escalate the situation immediately. They waiting until sufficient back up arrives before they draw multiple guns and shout conflicting orders.
See #ORCΛ on twitter for examples
California voters to get mail-in ballots for 2020 election
Amazon and Microsoft have announced similar plans through at least October already as well:

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/local-business/many-bu...

https://www.geekwire.com/2020/microsoft-updates-wfh-policy-a...
And self driving cars, and augmented reality, and personal assistant robots, and so on and so forth.
> ...and repeat, until the model is as tiny as you want.

Cool! So if I repeat long enough I can get any network down to a single neuron (as long as I really want to)? That is awesome!
Same. Learn to type ~100 words/minute, I was surprised by how much more productive it has made me. Using a touch type trainer for a minute or two can also be a little mental break from writing software for hours.
> Therefore we should expect that, with the passage of generations, the desire to have one's own biological progeny will spread and come to dominate the population.

Yeah, but this will only happen over the course of millions of years... not in 2050... Not to mention this is already the dominant desire...
Businesses Struggle to Lure Workers Away from Unemployment
This pandemic has hastened my plans to move to Tahoe. The lockdown takes all the benefits of city living away.
Submitted title was "Money is not meant to generate money. Welcome to Auroville". Submitters: please don't do that - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Well, it's worth keeping in mind that the risk of death from a coronavirus infection is comparable to the annual risk of death from all causes. Coronavirus infection though is a once per lifetime risk, whereas all-cause mortality occurs every year.

Just as a random comparable, the annual risk of getting cancer if you're 35 years old is around 0.1%, and the annual risk of having a heart attack is around 0.5% (higher for men, lower for women). All of those diseases would have similar average lifetime lost as covid, but the risk is continuous, not a once per lifetime occurance.
For `cp some/long/path/to/foo.txt some/long/path/to/foo2.txt` I always liked brace expansion, for example

`cp some/long/path/to/{foo,foo2}.txt`

(Though foo{,2}.txt is even shorter)
This comes off as pretty heavy victim-blaming bootlicking.

Do you see an alternative way the corporation could have handled this that would at least given the impression they valued the lives of their labor force?
This is definitely not optimal and would be a overkill setup, but OBS Studio + VirtualCam plugin let's you basically screencapture anything and turn it into a webcam device. So if your python app can display a video feed, you can capture the window and show it as webcam (with OBS as overhead).
Perhaps its just semantics, but can you truly "own" a copyrighted work, unless you are the copyright holder?

In the US, first sale doctrine and decades of case law says I can re-sell the spinny plastic disc I get when I buy a movie on DVD, but I'm greatly restricted in what else I can do with it. I cant make copies, I cant show the content publicly, I cant sublicence access to the disc remotely - these are all things the actual owner of the content can do.

I'm very sympathetic to people losing access to digital content, but it seems its fairly clear that wording aside, all copyrighted content is licensed, not sold. The only difference here is that you can use physical media until it wears out, where as digital content can only be used as long as it is made available to you (which in some cases, may be much less than an equivalent physical copy).
Ask HN: Are people interested to get cashback from their in-app purchases?
Counterpoint: I'm a parent and I very much care. I won't be moving to the suburbs tomorrow but it has us asking questions about our ideal life: if we're not taking the subway into the office every day then maybe city life isn't quite as worth it.
Yes, but it hasn't been written yet.
This is what the NZ government says: https://www.govt.nz/browse/work/workers-rights/your-options-...

If you need to get legal, it says “It can take a few weeks or a few months for an application to be processed, heard, and determined by a member. The length of the process will depend on things such as urgency of the application, whether parties have tried to resolve their problem at mediation, the availability of parties, representatives and the complexity of the case.”
One of the numerous problems with the very concept of Bluetooth-based contact tracing is: it doesn't work.

Due to all the hardware and environmental factors, it really works as a large spreadsheet of all devices in Bluetooth range over the last 21 days (in the case of the Australian COVIDSafe app).

All it can do to grasp at the environmental context is to record the phone model, and the RSSI over time.

In a dynamic, real-world environment that will vary hugely, especially on public transport, as human bodies could be in the exact same close spot, but due to phone position and rotation the RSSI will vary wildly (as mentioned in the video), making two people close to each other actually look 20 metres or more away.

The huge amount of contacts each have to be manually contacted and interviewed to determine whether they're epidemiologically relevant. That also relies on the recall of the infected and the false 'close contacts' who are at risk of having to isolate for up to 14 days regardless of test or symptoms (according to a reading of the Australian rules).

This reality is extremely divorced from the Oxford University paper, which imagined a system that could accurately determine proximity of users and instantly notify them to isolate. This rapid notification and isolation was, in fact, the central proof of the impact of a digital contact tracing system.

So we have a centralised system that:

* only 'works' in a 'mandatory install' context

* can't determine proximity in the real-world (too much variability)

* would introduce huge numbers of false positives into a system that has to manually follow-up every one

* normalises carrying a tracking device of all nearby people (which in future would be far more useful as a societal monitoring system than as an epidemiological tool)
I already spend more time than I should in considering how to prove that math exists. So if you're talking about physical things in your first paragraph, that's one of those things that I have to prohibit myself from contemplating for reasons of self-preservation.

I will say, though, that acknowledging that math exists independent of its observation makes it more difficult to argue that possible arrangements of atoms do not exist prior to their physical manifestation.

History is, of course, replete with examples of things that we got wrong for thousands of years - the existence of zero, the existence of negative numbers, "real" numbers, as distinct from "imaginary" numbers. These things are now considered trivial, and are taught to children.

I can't imagine Wiles's proof ever being understood by 1% of humanity. I hope, and believe, that there are no catastrophic errors in it, but I wouldn't bet more than $20 that there aren't.
I Have Reviewed Ferguson’s Code – It’s a Joke
Please don't gatekeep.
Yeah, the original work this paper follows up (by the same group: https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.03635) received a lot of attention in 2018 when it was uploaded to Arxiv & spawned a lot of followup work. Even though it's been demonstrated that these lottery tickets - sparse trainable subnetworks exist and can approximate the complete nn arbitrarily well, their properties are still not really understood. What is understood is that these subnetworks depend heavily on the initialization of the network, but that training the entire network together is necessary for generalization. These findings generally advocate for two-stage pruning approaches as opposed to cts regularization/sparsification throughout training. The question is how best to find these lottery tickets, and encourage them from the get-go.

A lot of this work is also related to training adversarially robust networks. A composition of ReLU layers corresponds to a piecewise linear function, where the # of 'pieces' is like exponential in the # of neurons. It's well known that standard training of networks results in a highly non-linear pwl that is easily fooled by adversarial examples. The robustness of a neural network against adversarial examples is typically characterized by its smoothness. One question is how to train the network or prune neurons to encourage smoothness & reduce the complexity (i.e. # of linear pieces) of the nn.
Yes, starting off with your friends just being in chat is very useful. Itll attract more people, and if you show that you have a good little community, then they will stay, bringing more people.
Are you like that?
If it's inlined into another static resource, why not just cache that? HTML with an inlined script is just as valid a cache object as the plain script itself.
Those sensible precautions include not going to work where it's impossible to follow proper social distancing.
None of that is real. But it seems posters want to parrot what cnn told them without doing any research themselves.
You can attempt to understand the pressures that lead people into "self-selecting", for a start.
>>the news media needs to look inwards and wonder

What news media? Here in America? There's no news--there is just Democratic Propaganda... which only cares about two things (1) Stop Bernie because, well really, do I need to explain how he would have destroyed the economy? (2) Stop Trump.
How well does such a bridge work in practice? I realize this isn't the case for all bridges but the matrix.org->freenode bridge is rather infamous for failing in strange ways (asymmetric message forwarding, intermittent lag, etc.)

And I'd assume such a bridge would lose some interactivity features proprietary to Discord.

sigh
Texas is an at-will employer state. You can be fired for pretty much any reason, or more precisely, without any reason.
Funny I read about this place in r/india a few times and they seem to regard it as a racist hippie colony.
It's not just on iPhone, that demo is not very good, I think it just takes a single frame and makes it grayscale. Try these: https://huningxin.github.io/opencv.js/samples/
We don't have those numbers because of the lockdowns, which were obeyed in part because of the media coverage. The alternative would have been China's approach of physically locking people inside their homes, or much lower compliance and higher infection and death rates.
> You can take sensible precautions and not catch it.

A bit nitpicky, but significant: you can take sensible precautions and reduce the risk of transmission - but there's no reasonable strategy to not catch it.
Rich people coming in and living easy, and other, very poor people moving in because maybe they need a job is not 'self-selection' it's 'a priori selection' based upon the economic systems they are coming in from, not the one they are in.

These places make great sets for fun movies though ...
Although it's getting harder and harder since many platforms try to blend their ads in with the actual site content, I can avoid them reliably well by checking metadata such as the poster, some indication that it's an ad, or if the content is clearly different from what I was expecting.

I wouldn't say it's as bad as potholes on the road, since ads are more predictable.
I think you're missing the point by assuming I'm making a statement about Facebook. I'm talking about the fact that this incidental complexity is necessary to do what Facebook does. I don't think my description of it as a website is relevant, it conveys the point that ultimately it's a tragedy that to render obviously simple content to users you are stuck building all this crap to make it work.

Too many people in this thread seem to be projecting that I'm somehow saying this complexity speaks poorly of Facebook's product or engineering. On the contrary, my point was that it's tragic that brilliant minds at Facebook are forced to build all the stuff described in the post just to achieve simple goals like "the page loads quickly", instead of focusing on other problems.
I understand, but I must state the obvious - the lockdown is not forever.
IIRC they had this and only guys used it (because only guys were naked on chatroulette to begin with) so nobody used it.
I think you missed the part where the employee was notified of a coronavirus case on their floor by an email they could only read at work.

Read this again, and comprehend that the HR unilaterally and knowingly subjected them to risk of contacting the virus.

Subsequent self-quarantine at home benefits the company as it reduces the chances of spread. It was the right thing to do, and there's not much to negotiate here given the initial screw-up.
Growth in general has fallen, yes. The issue is momentum going in to 12bn people or so. I don’t think that things scale effectively at population levels like that. Not to mention the environmental impact.
Really? I've never been in a group where one is sent, does it block it or just mark it as NSFW?
Honestly if at this point Zoom hasn't lost all credibility in your eyes I don't know what to say.

Zoom already has end to end encryption according to some of their other press releases and public statements (we know they don't), so why on earth would you believe this one?
I don't know, I'm not the author, just something I remember seeing related to TempleOS, I'd guess just a hobby kind of thing, we're on _Hacker_ News after all, so tinkering with technology just for the fun of it should be the priority.
> Why would I pollute my [concepts] with these fuzzy misleading stories that are completely unrelated?”

> And I definitely wonder this sometimes! I really like explaining things in straightforward ways.

Pollute, misleading, unrelated are not words I associate with merely "being aware". An overly charitable reading I think.
I even used network throttling to do Fast 3G and it's still taking like ~3 seconds at _most_ for everything.
Rarely !

But what regularly happens is that I stumble on my own comments and/or helper methods, which saves me a ton of time.

Turns out that having a clean code structure with clear places to have those 5-liners that you need all the time is really useful, and by now I've got so much of them that they compose quite powerfully ! And old comments are like gold nuggets when the time comes to debug.
> I don't think OP argued that this was a bad thing

Maybe, thought it wasn't clear from her initial article. I see she's now re-worded it (she removed Maggie's quote about frivolity), which indeed makes it clearer it's not a criticism, just an exploration.

Indeed, language is a heap of metaphors and idioms. It's interesting to consider which ones occur in different languages and which ones don't (in Spanish you are not "moved" by an emotion, for example).
If you're serving 100K+ impressions/day, you probably make a lot more than $5/month from it.
Other bad names for variables and database coloumns: type, kind, val.
If you have to look something up or solve something and it takes more than 2 minutes then write the solution down in your notes. Lots of times you'll need that again and you won't have to search for it again.
As I was staying in Pondicherry for a month so I a visited Auroville a few times in 2018. It's hard to describe. On the one hand it seems like a cause for good, on the other you occasionally discover some out-of-place clearly expensive and wealthy buildings for residents dotted around the jungle which forms the site. Seems to have some strange contradictions.
For what it's worth I've been a native mobile dev for the past 10 years, barely touching any sort of web stuff (maybe updating my resume here and there). I was able to pick up Svelte very quickly, about 2-3 weeks tops.
https://archive.md/8cE95
Have a sharpened pencil and stack of paper handy always. I can't say how many times it's saved me a lot of trouble programming some behavior because I was able to draw a picture of what I wanted it to do.
1. That's pretty damn good, especially given the size.

2. Since it's all in git, I'd consider `make && ./flash.sh` fine; that's not really any more difficult than a config file.

3. I particularly like the potential for switching architectures without needing a whole new device.

4. Awesome

5 & 6. I've been refusing to buy new portable electronics unless they have Type-C ports and support USB-PD, since it's simplified my life a lot--one charger for everything. That being said, I'm normally making that decision under the assumption that I won't be able to upgrade what I buy today, and I don't want it to hold me back tomorrow. That's not an issue with your device, but I'd definitely love to see USB-PD down the road, even if it's an external accessory or a DIY guide.

7. That's definitely something I'd love to learn more about. From my perspective, the integrated-yet-fully-hackable HIDs are key selling points.
the effects were by and large positive, regardless of the pandemic

I generally hate the phrase "check your privilege", but in this case it fits perfectly.
That's the thing. Science is a bit of a different language from English. And they get conflated all the time. The strain doesn't exist until it does, and then everybody gets mad and thinks the scientist was lying.

It's speaking different languages that have a high overlap, but key words may have completely different meanings.

And, when you're talking to a regular person, being able to speak English will help you convey your point.