skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Patent Office is “adjusting” to a Supreme Court ruling by ignoring it
> Income for this group did not shrink, it just grew more slowly than other groups

Another way of saying that it grew more slowly than other groups is that it shrank.
All that proves is that V8 is a beast, similar to the JVM. Here's what an alternative world could look like:

$ time luajit -e 'print"hello world"'
hello world

real 0m0.002s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.002s

But it's worse than that, because the time at issue is for the AOT-compiled native code binary.

To be fair, I presume that the included runtime is written in C++, and modern C++ coding styles are pretty inefficient. Lots of small, dynamic allocations. Too much of the wrong kinds of abstraction. It's what happens when you shoehorn problems into established solution models, rather than approach development, including boiler plate code, as crafting a bespoke solution model fit to the problem. But the latter makes onboarding new engineers more difficult--you can't start hacking without first grasping the larger architecture--and therefore frowned upon in larger companies, or in small companies that equivocate big company approaches to "best practice".
Any contract tracing system that is not time limited and disposable by design is a surveillance system being introduced in the guise of contact tracing.

My ideal tracing system would include disposable components, such as time-boxed smart cards, that are disposed of when an epidemic wave (cycle) ends. If the pandemic has multiple waves, each wave will entail producing a new series of disposable components.

Another important aspect of a genuine tracing system would be that it does not hook into infrastructure of surveillance capitalism behemoths.

The regrettable fact is that this contact tracing app will definitely become a requirement for getting a job, and very likely at some point a de facto identity and civil passport for being able to access modern infrastructure and urban areas.
It says history, so even if you had it say 2 years later (as its written its a memo so it can change fairly fast) you can't join without a waiver or probably physical exam to check lung functions.
Intermittently down, but points to https://lockdownsceptics.org/code-review-of-fergusons-model/
TBH I don't use sound, and the GPU there is very basic ASpeed chip, the primary "UI" is IPMI, it's a server motherboard after all.

But when you connect to a Windows VM via RDP, there's an option to pipe sound back to the client via a virtual sound card. On a gigabit ethernet, you can watch Youtube videos this way. :)
Show HN: Built a simple app for improving interactions with slack user status
So I built this app and it is doesn't do much beyond provide a few slash commands for interacting with user status changes. I plan on doing more but wanted to gauge interest / get some feedback beforehand.
I work with a similar setup, on my company-provided Mac. My IDE sits maximized on one vertical screen, with the other vertical screen divided up into two browsers and a bash console. The laptop screen is usually slack, a database app, or reacreational browsing.

Annoyingly, even at 1440p, the code window gets crowded, if I'm using both the file browser and builtin database client. Luckily you can double-click the tab for the file you're on and everything tucks away nicely.

Though I did grow up obsessing over Windows, so you're right about that.

And for the record, having to hold option to maximize is bullshit. I rarely use fullscreen mode.
>I can't imagine how anyone could read the story of plate tectonics and not understand it to be exactly what Kuhn was talking about

It was nothing like the shift from Aristotelean physics to Newton. The vast majority of what geologists had previously believed remained valid, and there was no change in the related sciences of physics and chemistry. And indeed it was findings in the previous geological science that lead to it.

Imagine, if you will, that plate tectonics had included that the Earth is flat and the abolition of the first law of thermodynamics and you begin to understand what a true paradigm revolution would be.
Yeah lets not forget this either: https://twitter.com/neil_ferguson/status/1241835454707699713

"I’m conscious that lots of people would like to see and run the pandemic simulation code we are using to model control measures against COVID-19. To explain the background - I wrote the code (thousands of lines of undocumented C) 13+ years ago to model flu pandemics..."

(the whole thread is interesting)
John Carmack replies https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1258192136744456199:

> It is disappointing, but not really unexpected, to see this take on the epidemic simulation code release: https://lockdownsceptics.org/code-review-of-fergusons-model/ If we accept it at face value, we have a retired software engineer making the case that non-determinism in a simulation shows incompetence. I am all for deterministic-everything, but issues with random seeds and parallel floating point reductions are extremely widespread, and a great deal of science gets done with non-deterministic simulations. Heck, professional software engineering struggles mightily with just making completely reproducable builds. I take no position on the mechanics of the simulation or the conclusions drawn from the runs, but implicitly encouraging scientists to keep their code secret if it isn't "perfect" is damaging.

Also later:

> There was a continuous integration regression test running a small model in single threaded mode on every check in, comparing for exact accuracy, at least when I was working on it -- I haven't pulled the public release.

For background, he was pulled in to do a bit of work on the simulation code a month or two ago.
Do you know why the decision was made to rewrite rather than do an incremental migration, given the increased pain to users? I have some guesses from looking at the codebase, but I'd love to know the actual answer.
By Ukrainians, sure. It's pretty common for people to refer to their own speech simply as "the speech", and have more specific labels for other people. Ukrainian (and Russian, and most other Slavic languages) also uses a word for Germans that literally means "mute", for similar reasons.
Reusing my old comment, holy crap, David Bowie was incredibly prescient.

> ”The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it’s not going to happen. I’m fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing.”

> “Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity,” he added. ”So it’s like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You’d better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that’s really the only unique situation that’s going to be left. It’s terribly exciting. But on the other hand it doesn’t matter if you think it’s exciting or not; it’s what’s going to happen.”

If only we could hurry up and abolish intellectual property so we could get on with restructuring the economy around the inevitable.
When Recurrent Models Don't Need to Be Recurrent (2018)
I might be thinking of the word anti-authority different in this context. I was talking about people who could protect themselves by self-isolation forcing others to self-isolate. I don't believe that is as justified as it was when this started.
Carmack on ffmpeg
The path forward for Python typing
I'm using Waitress in production: https://docs.pylonsproject.org/projects/waitress/en/stable/ It's main thing is that it's really simple, worth a look if you're using Django.
"This falls somewhere between parody and possibly documentary, as James Bartholet portrays the same character in all four scenes, who is referred to as either Mr. Weinstein or Harvey. That, and the still photo of the real Harvey Weinstein that appears during the ending credits, pretty much cements the intended identity."
> It is remarkable how many tech companies have managed to stay mostly up with very few outages, given this whole pandemic situation, where everybody is online.

I must admit that it was very gratifying watching all our engineering decisions pay off when our system started seeing record high traffic every day and scaled effortlessly and with no outages - the traffic that came with lockdown is, even on our slower days, twice our planned for and tested for high water mark.

But it took us about 4 years of consistent effort in changing our organisational mindset all the way through, devs, testers, product managers, c-suite members, to get here. 4 years ago, we would've been waking everyone up and going without sleep for a couple of days trying to get something back online, then fixing the next system down the line that failed because of the load, then the next one, and then writing long post-mortems for our business team.
Pros and Cons of Investing in Bitcoin
Location: San Francisco

Remote: Yes please

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: React / JS / TS / Frontend / Browsers

Résumé/CV:https://docs.google.com/document/d/19DCGNhFuLzqabjsujIMQRDSE...

Email: slightlytyler@gmail.com

Hey y'all! My position at Airbnb was eliminated as part of the layoffs on May 5. I’m looking for a frontend engineering role either remote or based in the Bay Area. I’m an expert frontend dev with experiences across the spectrum. I’ve got a knack for developer tools so anything in that vein would be wonderful.
List of employees laid off from Airbnb (2020)
The internet is at least as much dangerous as it is useful. Technology changes social power dynamics, often the people that enable it will design it in a way that benefits their own power dynamic.

Think of it this way, let's say a fascist genocidal group become rulers of that city/country, or let's say Google's intentions change and Google becomes many times more evil than it is now. Will this technology preserve the power of the people to nit just freely express their opinions but to take action based on their beliefs. Who controls access,surveillance and information? Even if the majority approve, will this preserve the liberties of the minority?

It's too late to ask these questions after the fact. I think it will work really well at first, my fear is actually that it won't stop at Toronto, and it will in the short term make a lot of people happy.

Technology has changed a lot but human nature has remained consistent. It would be foolish to fail to take into account hisorical lessons about humanity and social power dynamics when considering such drastic changes. Unfortunately, those who should make such considerations often lack technical knowledge and those with technical knowledge are blinded by immediate benefits and possibilities. I think this is the curse of living in relatively free socieites, you lack the perspective of seeing how fragile the ground you stand on really is.
I'd like to see some evidence on that because your claim seems baseless.

Look at actors, screenwriters, and musicians. These fine folk have been gig workers since before the term "gig workers" was coined. They belong to guilds, not unions, but the difference is semantic. There's no monopoly, and the industry is ticking along just fine.

There are tons of unions you've probably never heard of. TAs at your local university -- is your local university a monopoly? No. Costco isn't falling apart -- is it a monopoly? No, they compete with walmart, amazon, etc and show no signs of slowing down. Boeing -- awkward; bad management, not the union, is to blame for that downfall. Longshoremen -- no monopoly there, and no signs of business drying up. I could keep listing examples, but do you have data or just a hunch?
I did not say they are stupid. I'm saying some communities build on pseudo-elitism. It's not stupid to enjoy using a text editor. It's stupid to argue that because it's hard to use (and hard to master) "you're just not getting it".

I think the expirement is over and conclusions can be drawn : emacs represent a tiny proportion of text editor's users, not because of a lack of features (is there's one thing missing it won't be for long), but because of what it is and the people and community around it.
The point is that reading code from top to bottom is not a reason to need or prefer a mouse. Other people prefer using a keyboard and find moving through pages more intuitive than scrolling.
In 2004 we had eDonkey servers handling 1M concurrent connections.

Code, changelog and a bit of history: https://lugdunum.shortypower.org/kiten.html
First time I've seen CodeMeta - does anyone have any experience and opinions of it? Looks like it's optimized for citations and doesn't really help with how to execute the code.

Maybe Dockerfile is becoming the programmer's version of what this codemeta.json file is doing (I guess for researchers)?
When you hear "Engineer", you often think of calculus, statistics, formal testing, requirements gathering, documentation, repeatable results, etc... along with a fundamental understanding of the problem space and possible solutions.

I think this is akin to NASA working on the Apollo program vs. someone in their garage attempting to build a go-cart for the first time.

When you just slap things together and see if they work - are you really engineering? Can you exactly repeat the process and achieve exactly the same result every time?

I think we often cross "research and development" with "engineering". Exploring a problem space and tinkering with concepts isn't engineering. Taking what you've learned, planning out and executing a solution to a precise set of requirements, and being able to repeat your steps and achieve those results again and again - is engineering.
Long time XPS customer. My last one had the very famous battery swelling in just a few months and Dell refused to replace the battery. On previous models for other customers they replaced it for free for what it is: a manufacturing defect. The keyboard and touchpad are also finicky, but that's not a deal breaker for me because I'm mostly on external.

My next laptop will be a Lenovo.
I have never heard of this concept, but I kind of like it on its face. Can you elaborate?
You're right in your assessment of the risk of trolling etc. There is a model already in place, but it's worth noting that it's got quite an interesting design.

In the "Google/Apple" decentralised approach, someone who is infected submits a list of their own historical identifiers, and this is broadcast to everyone to check against their own observation list.

All you can really do is, on the client side, count up the number of occurrences of "infected" identifiers, and trip a client-side threshold for "after X contact instances, alert the user". You could get fancy and make X tweakable by the health service via that routine check-in for a new infected person list.

This is basically calculating the risk to someone.

The issue with this approach is that you have to create an public(ish) "infected" register. And even if it's not officially public, it takes 2 minutes to extract the API keys needed to fetch it, and a further 2 minutes to write and post a cron script to check the list into a git repo hourly.

In the NHS approach, there's no big "infected list" you can look at, or publicise. If you spend time with someone, you can't get an identifier that will let you (forever more) determine if they test positive from the "infected list". This raises the privacy for someone who is infected. While some may think "well, I am not infected, they can lose privacy", the system only works if people feel willing to report symptoms or infection without repercussions. So privacy of the infected is important!

Since the "upload" you make if infected or experiencing symptoms is of a list of other users you (the suspected infected person) saw, this makes it possible to look at the "risk from" aspect of infection - the hypothesis is that you can give advice to the potentially exposed users, based on their risk from you. And that can include how many infected people you were exposed to.

When someone has symptoms and is told to isolate, some people they were in contact with might be told to as well. The NHS app approach will survey them regularly (daily?) about symptoms. This data is fed back in to determine, based on those you might have infected, whether you actually have the virus. When you have a meaningful sample, and none have symptoms after a certain date, this allows you to let people out of self-isolation sooner, at least in theory.

The final point that is relevant is that the NHS believes it is essential to gather "self reports" for an app to work - if we assume an approx. 5 day mean/median incubation period, and if the research suggesting someone is most infective a day or two before symptoms is true, this means at the first sign of symptoms, you need to isolate someone and those they may have infected. Waiting for a test + result would mean you're potentially leaving people in the community, unaware, at their "most infectious" day or two.

Clearly there's risks of "Sybil" attacks. But as per the NCSC paper, there's been quite a bit of thought put into this design. More than I think many realise.
That Lotus and all associated products should be purged from the planet.
Great way to learn more about Zork and the Z-machine:

Eric Lippert wrote an ocaml implementation and blogged about it

https://ericlippert.com/2016/02/03/north-of-house/
I think you've misunderstood why someone would prefer Scrivener or a word processor: a rich-text ecosystem that "just works", in terms of WYSIWG / rich text editing; being the de facto standard for many non-technical user; and being more than "as simple as Markdown", but actively providing a tight ecosystem focused on writing.

Is it possible to recreate some of this functionality in emacs? Definitely. But, it requires a lot of patience, exploration, and determination.

Your editor wants to add track changes and inline comments to your manuscript draft. How do they do that in your org-mode file?

You've received a .docx draft from a friend, or copy for your book blurb, or a press release for your upcoming publication. How do you edit that .docx and return it in better shape than you found it?

You're writing a novel, and it has extensive research notes, background material, and miscellany you're keeping track of. How do you quickly navigate between these multiple sources of content, marking things up, merging different aspects of documents?

I'm a die-hard emacser, and I do a lot of personal and academic writing in LaTeX. But honestly, have you ever had to reformat a LaTeX manuscript for journal publication? It can take hours just to get the damn file to compile.

emacs is worth the time, if you're inclined to tinker and invest the effort to get it to work—but for me, at least, that's a hobby. It's disingenuous to present it as a real competitor to industry-standard workhorse word processors. And most writers with a day job can barely find time to write, "investing time in emacs" is a nonstarter for getting things done! In fact, I tune my own org-basaed PIM system as a way to avoid getting real work done...
I use an x1 and this is my biggest issue with it; mine is from 2017 maxed out from the factory at 16gb and it’s amazing the ceiling has not been raised even three gens later.

That said, the forthcoming x13 mentioned in the linked piece goes up to 32gb, looks like. It’s only 0.25lb heavier and looks to be much less expensive. The catch is a smaller screen :-\
> why not look at the problem the other way around?

Because no one ever buys or hires a conscience. If you thought a conscience was worth having one, that implies you would already have one and thus wouldn't need to outsource it in the first place.

Ethics always rolls downhill. If Al Capone goes out and hires Mr. Rogers, the power imbalance between them means Mr. Rogers is going to get dirtier than Capone will get clean.
"A huge percentage (maybe 30-45%)? of people that I see wearing masks seem to be putting them around their chins or wearing them over their mouth but with nostrils exposed or hanging around their neck. Or I see people pulling them down and only pulling them back up when they walk by someone or go into a store (most stores have signs on the entrance requiring masks but state that improvised is OK). It's incredibly frustrating seeing people wearing PPE incorrectly and/or treating it as optional outside of stores."

This fixation on masks is puzzling to me. The evidence for their effectiveness is weak (particularly for non-medical masks) at best, and people have turned "social distancing plus masks" into "masks plus social distancing", which is exactly what public health experts were trying to avoid.

As you've noticed, a huge percentage of people don't know how to wear masks or don't care to know. Even if they do know and care, it's incredibly inconvenient and difficult to wear a mask properly, so people generally don't. Moreover, as you've also noted, people are consuming medical equipment that really should be reserved for professionals. It's exactly what researchers said would happen when the mandatory mask idea was floated, and it's why the CDC didn't recommend masks in the first place (and why the WHO still doesn't).

More and more research is calling out mask laws as a questionable idea:

https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/covid-19-masks-on-or-off/

https://www.dora.dmu.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/2086/19526/Face%...

https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/5/4/e006577?ijkey=24b32ab627...

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.01.20049528v...

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/04/data-do-...

https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m1422

And yet, every day, I see comments judging people for not wearing them, not wearing them properly, etc. Again, there's little evidence for doing it, they're misused/misworn in practice, and they seem to lead to a false sense of security. Why are we doing this, again?
No it doesn't. Neither does it include some of the configuration values you need to build the mobile apps. It looks like this was a last minute political decision to open source the code in the face of growing public disquiet rather than a co-ordinated effort.
Lunch by the sounds of it.
> Don't assume it's an easy thing to avoid.

I'm really not sold on this attitude. Ordinary exception handling may be a lot of effort, but if you don't do it, that means your work is sloppy. Same here.

More generally, a program shouldn't ever outright explode, regardless of input. That's not quite the same thing as exit-with-error, but I suppose the distinction is ultimately fuzzy.

> The JVM for example can only kill its process once its memory usage exceeds `Xmx`, but it can't prevent that from happening in the first place

I don't see that the particulars of JVM memory-management have any bearing here. A web server should be capable of detecting when it has reached capacity, and to reject additional requests as appropriate. There's no reason this couldn't be done in Java. From a quick search, this is indeed how modern Java servers behave.

If there are many communicating processes, I can imagine that could complicate things greatly. That's a downside of using many communicating processes.
North of House (2016)
This. What's base rate I should compare with %66 percent? Until I know that, I can have no idea whether to be shocked!