skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't mean this in a vindictive way, truly I don't, but when we look back at 2020, I hope that we don't let governments off easily for messing up as badly as they did.

This was avoidable. Tens of thousands of deaths were avoidable. Multiple countries totally avoided catastrophe, and the U.S. did not.

We cannot just throw up our hands and say "oh well, we'll get 'em next time." The people responsible for the complete and utter fucking-up of millions of peoples' lives need to be held to the truth: that they could have stopped this.
Amazon sellers are moving to alternative ecommerce platforms during Covid-19
Oh? Then what is the reason?
Most of the time it converges on two parties.

Here's the "law": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law

So you might think it's possible. But it's a case of in theory, in theory and in practice are the same, in practice, they ain't.

And that is what FPTP is designed for. To over-reward those at the top of the leaderboard. It's designed to not be representative.
I have to agree. The goal here is to have someone audit the system and still take the high ground regardless of the outcome. It's easy to give them the benefit of the doubt but the more likely answer is that they are hoping to find a way to undermine Linux or find a way to sell it to others and keep the money, this seems like phase one of that rollout.
> So perhaps better advice is, start a business even if you don’t have a plan and someone may buy it anyway.

A better world for your personal pocketbook maybe, but certainly a worse world for the rest of us. I wouldn't characterize that as "better" in any general sense.
I wasn't familiar with this acronym, so I looked it up. AFAICT = As Far As I Can Tell. You switched two letters.
Funny story. I wonder why Bromkonvention didn't raise the price of bromine to just under what Dow was selling at? That way it wouldn't be economical for Dow to buy it and ship it back to Europe.
I have always used emacs inside tmux over ssh with <50ms latency to remote servers, I can barely perceive the difference in typing. As good as vscode remote capabilities are, it can't really beat having your editor local to your dev environment (in my case, emacs inside the server).

However, if you truly want your code editor to be local, vscode has truly become king for working with remote environments, nothing else comes close to it, it's really good. They have achieved this by installing a component on on the server that syncs with your local editor, which they won't open source of course.
People who complain about math notation and want something more verbose like programming usually don't fully understand the notation they're complaining about. In particular, there are fairly strong conventions for which letters get used for which purposes. Longer variable names that try to be more descriptive often aren't as necessary as they might seem, and in many cases would make an expression less generic than it really is.

And then there's the fact that what's easy to type on a standard keyboard without a specialized IME has little bearing on what notation is most effective for the reader, or for someone writing on paper or blackboard.
Most likely an S trap then. They are no allowed due to the probability of self siphoning. Not to say an S wouldn't, but it's improbable.
I imagine something similar was said after the 2008 financial meltdown, and the Iraq War, and the savings and loan crisis, and so on.
> You're moving the goal posts on me. I'm talking about debt collection enforcement not the morality or circumstances of why people take on debt.

Not all people chose to take on debt. From the linked article:

> Medical debt can be particularly devastating and accounts for more than half of all collections activity.

I don't think we can realistically characterize medical debt as a choice for most individuals. If someone is ill and and has medical debt, is it right to issue a default judgement against them for that debt? What if their illness is the reason why they couldn't show up to court in the first place?
How I become DevOps
Australian here, never met or heard of anyone in Australia with 'Suzy' spelled like that.

Looks like she changed her name to that: Siouxsie Wiles MNZM (born Susanna Wiles)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siouxsie_Wiles
Yes, that will happen if you have a multiple page long stack frame. In practice that doesn't happen very often, and the compiler can only insert the probe it needs since the stack frame size is known statically without dynamic `alloca`.

Go had a horrible, horrible bug due to an interaction with something related to this (stack clash mitigation), signal stacks, and the kernel vDSO shared object. https://marcan.st/2017/12/debugging-an-evil-go-runtime-bug/
Detailed stats on coronavirus in NZ available here: https://www.health.govt.nz/our-work/diseases-and-conditions/...
```

First of all, it does not take "that much machine" to serve a fair number of clients. Ever since I wrote about the whole Python/Gunicorn/Gevent mess a couple of months back, people have been asking me "if not that, then what". It got me thinking about alternatives, and finally I just started
writing code.

```

Another day, another questionable premise for a blog post. No, @rachelbythebay, the question is not "if not that, then what", and the answer is not reinventing the wheel. The question is just "what ___" -- what do you plan on doing, what does your software need to do, what does it need to support? Use the right tool for the right job. If you have a language you're proficient in and with an ecosystem that supports you developing something rapidly, it's borderline malpractice not to start there. When you need to optimize, optimize then. Maybe that means you carve out a subcomponent into a new service, and you choose a language purpose built for speedily doing what you need. Maybe it means a lot of things, but it doesn't mean you throwing out the baby with the bathwater and setting out to recreate the baby, the bathtub, and the bathwater from scratch to answer the question of why your tub is overflowing.

I wish this blog post was about solving real engineering problems instead of writing code to provide mediocre answers to poor questions.
It sounds like you were working in one of the industries where the employer was in a consolidated market, so they could absorb the cost of the union without becoming uncompetitive.

That can in theory benefit the union workers, but it comes at the expense of the company's customers, which at scale are ultimately the workers again.

It's also generally not a stable equilibrium, because monopolies are bad and everybody hates them. At some point the government gets around to smacking them with the righteous hammer of antitrust, or the Japanese start making decent cars and disrupt the US auto conglomerates, the internet comes around and destroys your broadcast radio payola system, and then it all turns to rust.

> Businesses have shown time and time again that they're willing to pay as little for as much labour as possible.

Well yes of course. That's what they're supposed to do, so they can charge lower prices and get more customers.

And then what you're supposed to do as an employee is to take the job you like the most based on working conditions and compensation etc. So a company can offer you $25,000/year for 60 hour weeks and no benefits, but if some other company is offering $35,000/year for 60 hour weeks and no benefits then you take that, until the first company starts offering 40 hour weeks and paid sick leave.

A company's ability to underpay people is limited by the willingness of somebody to work for that amount of money. No is a powerful word.

This is also why you get rid of the need for so much of this with a UBI. Because it allows people say no, which requires employers to make better offers.
No new community transmission cases for weeks, all new cases linked to known clusters, and we're trending towards zero active cases nationwide -- every day for over a month there has been a decrease in active cases.

https://www.newsroom.co.nz/2020/05/06/1101216/covid-19-in-nz...

many regions haven't had a new case in weeks
As someone who thoroughly enjoyed Swedish snus for a year or two, I'd love to say that it's the nicotine interfering by binding to the AChR receptors.

In reality though, I feel like in comparatively sparsely populated places like Sweden, New Zealand, etc. there's not a lot of difference at this point between a supermarket with significant social distancing imposed and a cafe with significant social distancing restrictions imposed.

It's once you get to the densities of London, NY, Madrid, Rio and Paris that the difference starts to become important.

From the perspective of reducing the spread, this should mean that many of the US states should have been able to emulate Sweden's approach (inform citizens and trust them to cooperate - up to the reader to decide if this translates between Scandinavia and the US), and many are trying to. I guess we'll see, but I think it's pretty clear that if you're New York you don't have that option on the table.

But it's also about the relative danger. Hospitality staff in South Australia right now, were that state to return to "business as usual", probably aren't being asked to risk their lives. That is and has been a different story in different states and cities around the world.
You pretty much need an extension that runs in a separate window. You can already use Emacs through the Secure Shell[1] Chrome extension, but if you run it in a tab the browser eats too many key combinations for it to be useful. If you launch it in a separate window, then very few key combinations get intercepted and it works quite well.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/secure-shell/iodih...
Indenting by four spaces gives you preformatted text on HN. It's for code.
It's also about 98% of "agile" - I don't mean the big deadlines, but the endless meaningless little ones. Why are N days okay to finish a thing, N+1 days not okay, and you have to endlessly salami slice it contrary to common sense until you fit in N?
Matrix's anonymity comes from the fact that anyone can create an account on a public server on the network using an arbitrary username that doesn't have to be linked to a phone number or email or any other identifier. However, the server they use can see their IP address and their access patterns, and the other servers in their rooms will be able to see what rooms they are in and the metadata of their message history in those rooms. This could theoretically be used to deanonymise users - after all, the rooms where a user hangs out, the members they share rooms with, and their message frequency in those rooms is all sensitive metadata. As tptacek points out, Signal doesn't track that and just passes messages from A to B, whereas Matrix by design is about syncing conversation history between users & servers, and to do that it needs to record the conversation history (and thus its metadata).

We're mitigating this with P2P Matrix (https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/dip_p2p_matrix/ etc), where there are no longer servers where metadata pools.
if you're going to serve static files, nginx absolutely leaves this in the dust (think 50k rps on a beefy machine)
> Many of its users were using terminals

Perhaps an example will be more vivid. In the eighties most people who were on the internet worked on a 24 line by 80 column terminal. Some people used Emacs buffers as a predecessor to multiple windows on large screens:

- Edit your code, perhaps splitting the screen in two buffers to look at different files or places in a large file.

- Split yet again one buffer for compilation error messages.

- Split the other one for a shell subprocess to run the program, check mail, etc.

Basically all-Emacs all day. Not my setup, but I saw it done often enough.
So sue me (SSM1.0)
> The non-determinism that page talks about is coming from bugs like memory corruptions, ..., initialisation order bugs.

Source? I haven't seen these specifically cited anywhere.

> floating point inaccuracies,

Combined with (safe) race conditions, this will cause non-determinism that would probably be considered OK.

In general: John Carmack looked at the code and thought it was OK for what it is (decade old simulation transpiled from Fortran at some point). Some ex-Google guy thinks its horrible.

I looked at the code myself briefly. I haven't formed a strong opinion about the code myself beyond "it's ugly and I don't want to work with it, glad it's not my problem." I am however objecting to some of the comments here that make it sound like it is obviously broken for reasons that they just don't understand.

I think a comment on the GitHub is relevant: https://github.com/mrc-ide/covid-sim/issues/175#issuecomment...

> To add to this, please read report 9 properly. The 500k UK prediction was if governments did nothing whatsoever - we never believed governments would do nothing but we modelled it as a base case, because that's part of what you do when you model.

> With the full social distancing the report suggestd it might be possible to reduce deaths perhaps to 20k - a death count we have already exceeded. Nobody here is laughing about that. The report was also very frank about the uncertainty involved in trying to predict what might happen at that stage
Fun fact about the Eclipse name, thanks.
I haven't heard of the decline or rise of the popularity of emacs, but from personal experience it is holding up quite well!

I think par-edit is superb for anyone building stuff in some lisp dialect. org-mode is unbeatable and I saw quite a few stories on reddit of people getting drawn to emacs because of org-mode. Recently I picked up rust development and the rust-mode is working very well for me, much better than VSCode or the Intellij plugin.

Around university I see many lecturers using emacs too.
This sounds like a waste of energy to me. My favourite highway concept is autonomous electric vehicles connecting to each other physically and forming "trains", where the large factor of air resistance is reduced greatly and cars would negotiate with each other who's expending and who's recouperating energy depending on each car's distance to its target.
I use vim for quick tasks because of the difference in startup time
> I got my X1C for about 50% of retail price

Wow. What was the original price? ~$2k? Where did you get such a big discount?
I know, that's why I was surprised it managed to somehow not suffer from the same performance and functionality problems that I observe on the rest I mentioned.

I didn't say that all electron apps have to suffer, at the same time it seems to me that there is a strong correlation.
I disagree. I tried to learn F# a few months ago and the experience was horrible.

I followed the tutorial using the aspnet CLI tool and got nothing but errors. I Google’d for a while until I gave up.
They just said "non-burner phone."
I think you hit the matrix.org server being completely overloaded immediately after we enabled cross-signing (https://twitter.com/matrixdotorg/status/1257695491497897988) - now fixed. You hit other teething bugs too where it didn't recover sufficiently from the overloaded server. Apologies :( The bug is open and on our radar, as you can see.
> Oh and the tile cracked.

That's what I would call pure satisfaction. Thanks for adding that detail. You made me smile.
> Modern science is accurate enough to produce technology

I would argue that this is better called "engineering" rather than science. In this sense engineering is a design discipline which applies science-made theories to create technology and tools.

And so engenireeng is not strictly creative (it does not create novel ideas) but refines and pushes the practice (of the theories) to more sophisticated levels.

In any case engineering does create novel technology which then can push science forward by providing better and more dieverse empirical data for science to continue.
‘Sustainable’ Development Ravaged the Congo Basin
I took a shortcut through my local Neiman Marcus last year (I wanted a Five-Guys burger), and looking at what they had for sale and their prices, I couldn't help but think "Even if you're super rich, you'd be nuts to shop here."

They had a black t-shirt with some rhinestones (presumably) on it for $5000. It was probably from some famous designer, but still .. $5000 for a t-shirt that had been gone over with a BeDazzler?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9m766NNpwVg
> empty statement

Sorry, it's your cite.

> explain

Simple. People sharing living arrangements deciding to not share anymore. Fewer families with children, more single professionals. Confusing Detroit the city with Detroit the metropolitan area.
I think the other side of this coin is particularly glaring as well.

Since we decided to blame those workless people, and punish them if they don’t find work. They _have_ to find work. Which means more competition for consumption, you _have_ to consume their stuff to keep them fed. Which means more senseless competition to produce shit no one actual my need, more ads, more tele marketing, poisonous food, exploiting of addictive behavior, more jealously guarded trade secrets and “intellectual property” walls instead of cooperation and peer production.

In essense by insisting that all people must be employed at all time, we force the market to produce anti-value.
> How hard is it to get up to speed on any other tech stack?

If I find myself debugging python tools, I usually just add debug statements to figure out WTF it is trying to do, and reimplement it in bash. It invariably is less than 10% as many lines of code, and also more debuggable / readable than the original.

Granted, most of the python scripts I see these days are build processes or cluster coordinators.
Running Kind Inside a Kubernetes Cluster for Continuous Integration
> the UX was horrid, the key verification just didn't work at the time. Hopefully this is fixed.

This is what we've tried to fix in this release :) Meanwhile, as you note, first time user experience is our single biggest project now e2ee-by-default is shipped.
I wish my company would organize and unionize
So why do the drops in rejection rates line up strictly with new Patent Office guidance? Remember, Alice was in 2014. Rejection rate didn't drop until 2019, where it suddenly collapsed after the guidance was issued.

Individual inventors are already not applying for meaningful patents. That's political folklore to tell a warm story around patents.
Yep same on the Gen 1, it's an awful machine.
Oh, hmm, I don't think it's actually wrong. I mean, it's valid to say that the cost of this bag of sand is US$1, or that the cost of the bag of sand is US$0.05 per kg. It's valid to say that I went 100 km of distance, or that I went 100 km per hour, of distance. It's valid to say that I poured 15 kg of flour into the bowl, or that I poured 1 kg per second of flour into the bowl. It's valid to say that I have 120 mph of groundspeed, or that I am accelerating at 1 mph/sec of groundspeed. It's valid to say that I'm at 22 meters of altitude, or that I am gaining 0.1 meters per second of altitude. Would you reject some or all of these as ill-formed?

A watt is just a joule per second, and a joule is a measure of energy, so I think that, in the same way, it's reasonable to talk about both "3100 joules of energy" and "200 watts of energy". I think it would probably be better to say "200 watts of power", but the other one isn't wrong. Is it?

Nearly every quantitative statement has an implicit denominator somewhere. Your server serves 50,000 requests per second, you say? Is that per core or per machine? Or maybe per rack? Occasionally there are implicit numerators as well: maybe those are 50,000 one-kilobyte requests.
So who actually loses money in the end?

Edit: Or is this one of the outliers and most of the other times all the participants make money?
Sad. Very sad. It was such a great approach to associating GnuPG keys with social media. And their chat etc were also pretty cool. But Zoom is beyond the pale.

So what now? Maybe someone could clone the GitHub repos. And/or are GnuPG keyservers safe enough again?

For chat, Session looks most interesting. It's got the Signal messaging bits. Plus anonymity via the Loki onion network. And it's available for all platforms.

However, it's very new, and often buggy. And the Loki Foundation is Australian. So at some point they'll likely get pressured to backdoor stuff. And they probably won't be able to disclose that, unless someone leaks.

There's also Tox, where each user runs a Tor onion client. That's secure enough in Whonix. But the Whonix user base is miniscule, and I wouldn't trust an implementation in Windows. But then, maybe Session in Windows is too iffy as well.

Anyway, I'll be deleting my Keybase account, as soon as I've negotiated alternate comms with my contacts.
Field-testing your comedy there buddy?
1. If you delay college for 7 years, your post-college earnings timespan shrinks from 43 years to 36.

2. The average 18 year old does not have the money, the connections, the skills, the experience, the family connections, or the grit to start a successful business. If you have been blessed in a number of these factors, sure, go ahead and do it. If you're average, just go to college. Most people are average.
I think that while both countries have the technology to facilitate censorship and oppression, the US is much more careful about how they do it. China isn't afraid to use their control over information to assist the oppression of Uighurs in 're-education' camps for example.
of course it does !!
A looong time ago I worked at a comic book store and the owner had a table of freebies at the front of the store. The distributors were always sending marketing material with cool artwork, so instead of throwing it in the trash when it piled up, he figured why not give it away?

No one touched it. Then he started packaging it into $5 “grab bags”. That crap was gone in a week. The lesson? “You can’t give shit away, but put a price on it and it’ll sell”.

Maybe that says more about comic book store patrons than pricing, I’m not sure.
An unfortunate headline, considering that we have yet to eliminate Covid-19 in New Zealand, as the article itself discusses.
That's DisneyWorld, not DisneyLand. They have an entirely different pricing structure because they have so much more space there, they can just build more park to meet demand. So they are built to the peak and then need to incentivize people to come off peak.

DisneyLand can't build any more park, so they could charge even more than they do now and keep the park full.
Get Lamp: The text adventure documentary
I submitted a miniscule patch to tcl-mode (or font-lock) a couple decades ago. It was to speed up syntax highlighting for a particular style of commenting. Maybe a 3-6 line patch, tops.

I spent 20x more time back and forth on copyright assignments, including getting a release from my company, etc to get the patch in. I pushed through because I felt like I was always "just one more yak shave away from finishing", but if I knew at the start how much time it was going to take, I'd have kept the patch on our own private site-lisp. That's a problem, IMO.
Good point, but this sounds like a solvable problem. You would a primary doctor (at a known rate) who would say "You need X, Y, and Z now" and then refer you to a reasonably priced location.

He could do that because now even he can see the prices and that doctor doesn't have too much of an incentive to send you to be fleeced by someone else

There are some details where this would need to be worked upon, but it sounds like the kind of thing the free market would figure out.
I would expect so, but did you mean 500k or something? "50k rps on a beefy machine" sounds like about the same as, or maybe even a bit slower than, 20k–30k on this 2011 laptop, which was how fast httpdito was last time I measured it.