skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For those out there interested in DIY molecular diagnostics, in addition to qPCR, also check out this new technique:

"SHERLOCK-based one-step test provides rapid and sensitive COVID-19 detection: New CRISPR-based research tool delivers results in an hour in a one-step reaction, advancing the technology closer to a point-of-care or at-home testing tool." - https://mcgovern.mit.edu/2020/05/05/sherlock-based-one-step-...

"STOPCovid is an effort to develop point-of-care and at-home tests for COVID-19. Developed by scientists at MIT, the McGovern Institute, and the Broad Institute, our test relies on a number of enzyme innovations to enable rapid detection in less than an hour without any complex instrumentation. We are committed to providing simple and easy-to-use tests that can be used in any setting so that society can reopen. On our website, we will provide updates as well as live clinical data from within our collaborator network. We are committed to working with partners to validate and distribute test kits. Please reach out to us (STOPcovid@mit.edu) if you are interested in working with us!" https://www.stopcovid.science
"All your base are belong to us", Zoom CEO was quoted as saying.
That's not solved by adding a date. That's solved by blocking feature requests. I'm in a project with the same problem, BTW. It's incredibly demoralizing.
Oh, so that’s what that critter is called. I had been wondering.
It can work. There does need to be mutual trust between product leadership and engineering.

e.g. in the case you described, the engineers need to be able to communicate without fear that X1 and X2 are basically the same engineering work as X, and still can't be accommodated, and the other side needs to trust that they are not just being lazy.
That, or everyone uses the same login tied to a shared user.
If someone first makes a false accusation, then post a “correction” only to double down on a lesser yet still false accusation, I’d say it’s reason enough to conclude that they’re arguing in bad faith and attempting to slander.

You don’t need to spread false information to make a possibly valid point. People also increasingly use this sort of “yeah, they play fast and loose with facts but they have a point so cheers” to defend garbage journalism and I’m not a fan at all.
He uses population growth as an example, but the big point is anything that grows geometrically has a doubling rate, and when you're at 50% consumption your only 1 doubling away from catastrophe. Or if you want to talk about summations, If you want to double the availability of something (say houses) you have to repeat the entire time series of production thus far (not counting removals, like demolitions)

Same with the stock market. A stock is basically priced based on it expected future income flows compared to other investment options like bonds. Most things being equal, you need to build an entire whole new business of equal size if you want to double your share value (without dilution i might add).

This task of doing the whole sum again sounds (doubling) much more difficult than "oh just grow at 6% per year for 7 yrs" (rule of 42).
Tax rates are far lower for the poor than the rich. In fact, the wealthiest pay a majority of income taxes.
My point is none of the engineering classes I ever took allowed the use of imperial units because they wanted their students to be employable. Is this a new paradigm or did I just have a very unusual experience?
I wouldn't have expected that.

Thankfully the area I'm thinking about has since chosen to invest / had folks invest in wind power.
Coronavirus accelerated the trend.

https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/industries/retail/...
some benefits off the top of my head:

-More natural settings shown to improve mental health

-"neighborliness" scales inversely with density to a point - less neighbors means you're more likely to get to know them, while with more people there are too many so the crowd of people gets depersonalized to a degree, because 50 neighbors are too many to keep track of.

-you don't have to go to some crowded city park full of garbage when friends have yards with their own stuff like sandboxes where they can have some privacy from for example sheltered city people or park cops freaking out over the kids having nerf guns

-other activities become more feasible like bike riding (I wouldn't feel good letting a kod bike around NYC), ATV's, fishing

-more outdoors setting prevents aesthma

-safer setting for the kids overall

Your concerns just don't work oout that way in my experience. I was in single-home-only towns as a kid and there was no problem playing with neighbors or anything. Even when houses are a mile apart it's really not a big deal just being driven to them.

And since when do kids want to attend classes?
Why are Russian coronavirus doctors mysteriously falling out of windows?
> It seems that we live in an era where

This phrasing is sophistry: there has never been an "era" where this was not true. Humans suck; humans have never not sucked.
I'd go with 1080p if you're planning to run Linux. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23107338
System76 uses Clevo/Sager laptops. However, they don't "just" pull off the shelf computers and put an OS on them, they're involved with the design of the laptops from the beginning.

This thread has more information from someone who works at System76.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17039414
As someone who's paid rent for several years, I've found that landlords don't need a reason to raise rent and prices tend to go up irrespective of wages.
No, there is no support for third-party shared libraries on Android yet.
That is correct. Freedom and responsibility cannot be separated.
AMI BIOS?
At least we have a plan to turn that off at some point in the future (2038) now.

Something which can't be said about storing our nuclear waste for example...
I'm not thinking about this as an individual case, or debating an individual case.

I'm talking about a business model whereby an agency systematically buys "no show debt" at a tiny fraction of face and mass produces personal bankruptcy. As the article shows. This business model (subsidised by the state, which provides the court), in 2020, is civil law.

That business model is not something the courts should play ball with. Lawyers and judges will stay within the legal rules.

In any case, I think there needs to be a debt regulator...
Thanks, this is really useful. I just used Keybase as a reliable location to store and share my public keys.
I wanted to like Svelte so bad, but the lack of tooling made it pretty hard to debug.

Hopefully they will get there one day but so far it gives me the feeling that I could hit a dead-end with it at any time.
To some degree, I agree. I've been playing with Doom Emacs[1] recently and it has been pretty smooth, the configuration and such more so than my regular Vim setup.

1: https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs
Haha I know this wasn't intended as a joke, but this answer made me burst out laughing. Very true!

On the other hand, that's not such an easy problem for humans to solve either
https://archive.md/4weWH
I honestly don't think so. Companies have finite resources and need to allocate their use efficiently. That's hard to do when you don't know how long it will take / how much it will cost.

If you don't think you have the money to meet the estimated project time you need to find ways to reduce the time. Sadly that leads to problems as described in the article.

The is an impedance miss match between software development and real world business reality.
What's constantly left out here is that a large portion of Sweden are in fact self quarantining anyway.
> which org does exist purely to make the world a better place?

I think the idea that one organization existing to make the entire world a better place is utopian, but governments are much better equipped to bring positive change than private companies are because citizens are the direct beneficiaries of government resources. For example, a municipal government’s purpose is to administer public services, and a municipal government answers to its citizens. A private company, on the other hand, has a fiscal duty to its shareholders.

I’m not arguing that any organization is perfect because such an organization does not exist, and that’s true for companies and governments.

> how are those orgs doing in terms of impact and scale?

Let’s use various governments response to the coronavirus outbreak as an example. The US government opted to defer much of it’s responsibility to private companies and state governments, which has resulted in less testing, less access to PPE, and more reported deaths than any other country. Testing hasn’t scaled, and there have been numerous reports of corruption and interference in the medical community, some of which was alleged to have come directly from the White House.

Contrast that response with countries like Taiwan, who moved quickly to provide necessary resources and communicate effectively to mitigate the transmission of the virus.

The US has operated one of the most private-industry focused responses to this outbreak, and we’re likely to see 3k deaths per day by June. That’s a 9/11 death toll every single day.
Exactly the inspiration for my post! I had thought the take away from that was “use the global standard units” rather than “double down on american-unique units”.
I think that you missed the point a bit.

There is no need to do some wierd complicated scheme regarding social benefits of people who are working.

Instead of that, if you think that people aren't getting paid enough money, then you should probably just advocate for increasing the minimum wage.

I think you even kind of admitted this when you said "And that's what the minimum wage does".

If this is the case, then that is the solution. Just advocate for increasing the minimum wage.

> When Wal-Mart pays poverty wages, they are reneging on the cartel agreement.

This agreement is called the minimum wage! They are not renaging on that.

If you think the minimum wage is to low... Then the proper response is to advocate for increasing it.
Exactly. People are terrible at estimating things on long time scales. If an engineer isn't overly optimistic with estimates, management will force them to revise until they are. Unrealistic optimism despite heaps of evidence is a major human flaw. Adding pretend timelines is a stressful exercise in futility. But planning itself is not.
Harding. What a wonderful appointment to such a post.
It is much easier to build reliable distributed system when each component consumes (pulls) input and then publishes results.

This is mainly due to the fact that consumer knows when it is ready to consume.
Can someone suggest an alternative for encrypted git?
Are kubernetes namespaces this well isolated? I wasn't aware it was at the point where you could put untrusted tenants next to each other in the same cluster.
yes, it's called a "forcing function" and management is full of similar techniques
Leaking into the Future
I second this - pay off any non-mortgage debt (student loans, cars, etc) before investing.

https://www.daveramsey.com/dave-ramsey-7-baby-steps
And by doing so, we produce twice as much CO2 per capita as France or the UK. While having one of the most expensive electricity in Europe, because we pay a huge "renewable energy tax".
Personally I find more screen real estate doesn’t do anything for my productivity, which is rarely mechanically limited.
PE is very cyclical and rates have been very low. Massively levered PE transactions are usually tied to the business cycle. When the economy is doing well you're able to get away with larger and more levered transactions than normal. If you add on low rates to this, you can get away with larger transactions.

All debt deals have covenants and covenant protection is at an all-time low right now; investors have decided that it is worth giving up this protection for whatever the potential investment happens to be. Covenants on the amount of leverage a company can take on are common but there's no universal formula for calculating leverage. It is not atypical to have multi-page definitions of how a company calculates EBITDA. Some firms are known for being very aggressive with this and are also very aggressive with issuing dividends shortly upon the close of a transaction. Aggressive dividend policies help PE derisk transactions substantially. The more money you are able to take out of the company (and sometimes able to issue debt to do so), the more you derisk your initial investment.

I could go on for days about whether any of this is good or bad, blah blah but as far as your observation that this seems to happen with all PE deals, PE is a multi-trillion dollar industry. Just think about how the world would look if that happened with all PE-backed companies.
Losing their independence was from the beginning the most likely outcome of building something that's hard to monetize like Keybase on the VC funding model. FWIW, I doubt Keybase offering a paid plan would have raised revenue that's significant compared to their burn, so Chris was probably right to not spend resources figuring out a paid offering. For raising their next round, having $5K in revenue from a paid plan few people buy might well have been worse than having $0.

The VC funding model is terrible for most open source projects. With a few exceptions, you end up with an acquisition that ends or repurposes the project, or an Open Core project. And a VC-funded Open Core project will end up trying as hard as it can to have everyone need to buy the paid version, since that's clearly the way to optimize revenue and eventually the slippery slope will get you there. I don't blame folks for taking VC; it was easy to get, and there aren't a lot of alternative funding models that can pay the multiple fulltime staff that might be required to create what one wants to create.

I don't think VC funding as it currently exists is consistent with running an open source company according to my values, which is why we're not taking venture funding for Zulip. Obviously, being scrappy, applying for NSF grants, and spending my own money have very real downsides both personally and for our growth, especially when every competitor has VC funding, but it also means that I can ensure Zulip continues existing as a real open source project for the long run.
Reading books in the bathtub.
Why would you though?

I don't see the point in working all-nighters for a company unless you have a stake in the company (shares or owner). For my own company, sure I'll pull an all-nighter before an important meeting, for a company where I am one of hundreds? No thanks.

Labour laws tend to be more protective here in the EU though so no fear of being fired by refusing rediculous requests.
I recently made a similar implementation for SHA256. Unfortunately it suffers from gradient vanishing. Source code: https://github.com/calebh/differentiablesha256
I worked at OkCupid long after Chris Coyne and Max Krohn abandoned it. From the vestigial remains of the founders' code and features it was clear what their main objectives were: have fun with cool tech, on the dime of VC funding. As soon as they got bored, they moved on to the next thing. KeyBase is the same pattern. I mean, good for them, they're successful by any measure - how they spend their time and how much money they have. But this outcome was to be expected.
the XPS I had felt like a laptop from the past, the X1 feels like a laptop from the future.

The XPS's keyboard would multi press, the touchpad didn't work great, the hinge made it difficult top open the screen, the speakers kinda sucked. Don't get me wrong, it was a nice laptop, but felt very over hyped. A death by a thousand cuts. I felt a bit let down from what I expected after reading a bunch of reviews.

On the other hand, when I finally got the the X1C, I couldn't believe that there was so little hype about this laptop. All I would ever see online is stuff about macbooks and the XPS line, nothing about the X1C.

The X1 is such a solid machine. The interface is completely uncompromised, yet it is so light, it feels like I've just got a spiral bound notebook in my bag when I'm carrying it around. Feels like a leap ahead, rather than two steps forward, one step back.
It's not, at least not now it seems. It's just seeing if you can use an S-box design to create a "universal" hash.
And it's also a one-off, in a national and international sense. It's like judging consumption levels in the Muslim world by Dubai.
Deep networks of bookmarks.
Or we could look at Germany. Our welfare system is largely unconditional. You're asked to find a job to pull your own weight, but you're not pushed too hard. You'll get an apartment, TV, utilities, health insurance and a few hundred euros a month for food & what ever you want to spend it on.

If we did cut out the theoretical work-requirement and possibly stopped paying the rent and instead paid out money (but then quite a few people would fail to pay rent and we'd need another social program to cover them), this would be UBI.

So far, I haven't seen the explosion in creativity, entrepreneurship, volunteering etc that's usually promised. On the other hand, we're up there fighting about the top position in OECD countries for total tax rate.
this is a well-known issue in market research, and survey design in particular. stated preferences are nearly useless in understanding customer segments and behavior. respondents have hundreds of different reasons for not answering with their true preferences (in this case, to not to pay more/separately).

instead, you want to reveal preferences using techniques like conjoint analysis (not always feasible), which better simulates the actual choices respondents might make in real situations.
I've had a good experience with Zare.com. Support is very fast and the pricing is fair.
World's worst investment: why urban highways destroy wealth (2015)
Coal has waste that doesn't just go away too, not the same as nuclear, but way higher volume and it doesn't go anywhere... let alone all that carbon dioxide dumped into the atmosphere.
You’re disregarding the site guidelines here.

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Are you interested in address the core of my argument, or only those two words in isolation?
That is a poor argument and not even really correct. He is advocating for higher taxes on the wealthy which would indeed take away from his own wealth. You can't expect people to sacrifice themselves completely to help others when the necessary changes are systemic and not individual.
I got the 1080 screen for battery life considerations. Totally satisfied with it, however I haven't spent much time on retina screens.
I guess moving to Matrix?
Perfect hedges are impossible.

TIPS are a far better hedge for inflation than Bitcoin.
Thank you for the banal correction of Google vs Alphabet

And comparing website dev to community planning

And ignoring the argument that communities are stuck focusing on profit generation which is acting as a block on their agency to collectively improve their communities

Did you actually read the post or get stuck on the alphabet not google part and fill in the rest of the post with non sequitur?

Food delivery existed before “tech companies”

I’m not sure you are living on Earth. You do know society existed before the year 2000, yes?

We’re ridiculing tech companies for capturing our agency. It has nothing to do with their technology but the social aspects of curving the masses attention to profit generating fiefdom a minority control

Religion and monarchy before that operated on basically the same pattern in the abstract

We don’t talk of sky wizard but we do talk of appropriate behavior that aligns with economics models of men paid a lot to make those economics models. We rejected God but replaced him godly men of industry. Right back to literal fetishizing a minority of real men like they’re kings. Oh and look at what’s up in the Oval Office. Coincidence?

The bias is deep in the limbic brain which heavily influences our agency response

It’s why I don’t curate an online identity. I don’t need to fetishize some profile that goes away if the servers shut down

Stop importing other peoples semantic objects and applying your agency to their study and care. We still need tech but we don’t need Google

Invent your own
i sold my xps because the trackpad was glitchy. go to dell and count the number of driver revisions. its like a perpetual beta product. the nosecam lol. the bezels on xps are purdy tho.
But it was 22!, not 32!.. if you wanted to boot SINTRAN-III at least :-)
My sanity requires it.
By what metric was it a success? Drinks, even non alcoholic ones, have phenomenal margins, and if you're stuck in a theme park or sports stadium, for hours, you basically have to purchase one. I'm a bit surprised this makes financial sense unless they really went for it.

For similar reasons, restaurants are hurting extra hard right now because people don't order drinks as often with delivery or takeout.
It's been a long time since I saw it last, but Fawlty's racism is meant to be backwards even for 1970s standards, so you're meant to laugh at him for idiotic prejudices that often backfire on him. I guess a similar American example of that time period would be Archie Bunker. Fawlty is a little bit less overtly boorish than him.

I guess there are a lot of cheap jokes at Miguel's expense and they don't really fit with what I've seen of Spanish culture. But also Spain was under Franco in that time so a pretty different place too.
> "Perhaps we should implement a mode that puts cosmetics on Emacs so it will appeal to those who judge by the surface of things."

I'm sorry to react to first quote, but as I kept reading I kept coming back to it. My thoughts on that : how you present yourself is how you want (and are going) to be judged.

In general I think Emacs has been user-hostile, as said here, just by its terminology. Nobody outside a minority of devs (a minority even among programmers) refers to Ctrl+c as C-c.

> Yes, make Emacs appealing and user friendly. But don't forget that a masterful tool in the end requires mastery, which can't come for free.

And the old "I have suffered therefore the others have to suffer".
I'm hitting a paywall or registration wall.
Can you post a link to the torrent? Posting the link will not breach the Economist's copyright, I'm sure.
Related: http://www.sansbullshitsans.com

If you ask me, Sans Bullshit Sans does a much better job at blocking really offensive content than this one.
Exacty! The build quality on this thing is out of this world. Any time I unplug it from the dock and use it in more of a laptop mode, I get little dopamine hits all around.
Yes, 1999. I didn't imply it was the first time Bowie ever talked about the Internet.

The skepticism was high in 1999 that the Internet was going to be as large as it has become as a social and economic force. The Internet was economically miniscule at the time that BBC interview occurred. Bowie saying what he was saying even in 1999 was still considered very outlandish, which is why the interviewer reacts the way he does. At that point the Internet still had practically no tangible impact on or reach into the day to day lives of the vast majority of people everywhere. A mere 3%-4% of the world's population used the Internet at the time, mostly sparingly.

You have to go to after ~2004 before it became broadly accepted that the Internet was going to sustain as a major socioeconomic force and get far bigger. For example, circa 2001-2004 the media, analysts, et al. were still celebratory dancing on the grave of the dotcom bubble, slapping themselves on the back for their cynicism. It's why a story like Amazon.bomb got so much traction in 1999 (and was so celebrated in the years following), the skepticism was extremely high and broad for many years after 1999.