skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At least in Europe it wasn't a major part of decisions. When it was published, it mostly corroborated what people here were already seeing, that urgent care facilities got - or were going to get - overwhelmed in a few weeks if contact tracing failed to contain close to all cases.

There is also a "control" group of sorts in us Swedes, as the Swedish health authority choose to act differently, initially. Their recommendation as of now is essentially equivalent to quarantine, except for non-adults. It's important to understand that it is really to instigate anything like a curfew in Sweden, at least unless we get attacked military by another country. The laws as they stand don't really allow that. So the government is also somewhat limited in what they can do.

The situation here is that urgent care has been overwhelmed for about a month, and a lot more people have died or been gravely ill than during even really bad flu seasons. We're also probably far from done yet, as it's much easier to get people to stay indoors when it's cold and rainy outside, and as its been getting warmer more people have been disrespecting the recommendations.
> Zoom does not and will not proactively monitor meeting contents, but our trust and safety team will continue to use automated tools to look for evidence of abusive users based upon other available data.

> Zoom has not and will not build a mechanism to decrypt live meetings for lawful intercept purposes.

> We also do not have a means to insert our employees or others into meetings without being reflected in the participant list. We will not build any cryptographic backdoors to allow for the secret monitoring of meetings.

One court + gag order and all of these promises are out the window.
It's addressed in some detail on the page but also here https://scs-architecture.org/vs-ms.html
I'm aware of several places in my team's codebase where you can change a couple of characters and break the entire company if you didn't test the change.
AKA a K8S cluster?
> The title is pretty clear.

The complaint is that the title is in fact unclear. If someone comes up to me saying they are going to talk about the evolution of monkeys they have two strategies:

(1) Developed protein complex A, cell mechanism B became vestigial, a sequence XYZ came from a disease which became part of the cell structure, etc.

(2) When they migrated from A to B abundant food sources meant that selective pressure caused C. Then flooding destroyed the habitat and killed off all the monkeys that weren't D and that trait can still be seen today. Etc.

(1) focuses on technical mechanisms and (2) focuses on pressures and adaptions. This article has a mix of both, but it focuses in on the mechanism and a lot less on the adaptions within Emacs. Not the interpretation of 'evolution' that I was hoping for.

Take the section on concurrency - it leaves open the interesting question of "why was there pressure to make a text editor concurrent?" and "what did they want to do with that concurrency?". The article notes that use appears to still be limited - so why did they feel pressure to implement a feature people aren't using? Are there issues with Emacs' document model that make it a royal pain to use the feature even though it is technically implemented? These are very interesting questions that fall well within the scope of the evolution of Elisp that are, sadly, not tackled by the article.

The authors haven't missed their mark, but when discussing a text editor there are more ambitious targets to aim at - like 'how does all this stuff link back to text editing?'. Few of these changes are being made because anyone sees Elisp as the future.
Tying celestial mechanics to Earth’s ice ages
> The pay well and have great benefits but it's just not enough people out there to take these jobs and manage a full on-prem infrastructure.

I’m from a small province in Canada and we have similar problems here sometimes. One of the questions I sometimes have to ask clients when they make a statement like that is: “do you pay well for the area? Or do you pay well enough to attract talent from out-of-province?”

This often leads to them arguing that “but the cost of living is low here!” And inevitably I have to mention my friends who left the province to go to the Bay Area for 10 years and came back with $500k USD in stocks they collected, on top of what they had left over after paying their high cost-of-living rent.

I feel your pain. Companies running in less desirable areas have to somehow pay a premium for top tier talent. One way, as you mention, is to outsource, whether to cloud providers or part time contractors.

This isn’t meant as a brag at all, but I do the independent contractor thing here and make “pretty darned good for the area” money. Inevitably clients will ask me to come work full-time for them, and we have a painful conversation where I tell them what my taxable income was the year before, as well as the investments I made into equipment and licenses I use to provide the services I provide. The result so far has always been to continue being happy with me as a part-time contractor!

Edit: sorry for the typos, written on mobile with the swipe text thing
Results of Finland's basic income experiment
SEEKING WORK - Remote, travel possible in better times depending on location and duration.

Location: North-east UK

What I do: I take MVPs that you’ve outgrown and upgrade them to support the next stage of your growth.

There could be any number of reasons why your current system is holding you back. Wherever you’re starting to feel the pinch, the price of ownership is that you don’t have the luxury of saying “that part’s not my problem” or “I don’t get involved at that level.”

You won’t hear it from me, either.

20 years handling a wide variety of IT roles and projects mean that I can help through the whole process from high-level strategy right down to code, all based on a deep technical foundation.

In the past I've been a network engineer, run large-scale Debian installations doing devops before it had a name, and been responsible for servers in Antarctica. I have experience with a wide range of different Unix tools and technologies, at various levels of the stack. This gives me the ability—and the perspective—to pick the best combination of tools for any particular project, rather than simply treating everything as a nail because all I have is a hammer.

Buzzwords: Debian, Ubuntu, AWS, PostgreSQL, Clojure, Elixir, Perl, Raku, Common
Lisp, Rust, Ruby, Go, Arduino / AVR, FreeBSD

Got something you think is a good fit? Drop me a line at mike -at- lambdafunctions -dot- com
> Do you have a better plan than what a group of public health experts have come up with?

Sweden's response is also based on public health experts. And in Sweden, the apolitical public health agency is fully in charge, politicians meddling with their work is against the Swedish constitution. And the Swedish public health agency has stated that their response takes into account comprehensive long-term public health and not just short-term.

Is Sweden's response wrong? Maybe. But do you have a better plan than what a group of public health experts have come up with?
Given the security concerns around Zoom, and the apparent lack of QC that might have prevented those concerns, this news is appalling. I love Keybase, it's used by many people, but I suspect it will now die a quick death. More accurately I suspect it will slide into a coma - not quite dead, but not in wide use anymore either.
...and it also helps, when you get out the other end of the ego tunnel. Lets you be truer, and freer.
A Critique of React Hooks Addendum
I'd like to see some source for this nonsense - especially since competitors somehow manage to still put USB-A and HDMI ports on similarly sized laptops.

E.g. I have a Razer laptop which has all the build quality and properties of a MacBook... except that they somehow managed to do the impossible: install 2x USB-C and 2x USB-A. How would have thought something like that is possible?!
Have you considered researching the subject matter yourself?

The parent articulated that this is psuedoscience, preached by a man who has advocated self-serving psuedoscience before.
> What evidence do you have for this?

they stated that their experience with CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework) was instrumental in their decision.

VSCode (built on electron) was probably the main PoC for them.
Why? Keybase's product is team chat. Zoom wants to kill Slack. Seems perfect.

(Keybase's crypto stuff is nifty, but we all know there is no money in that. They tried to make money by integrating cryptocurrency, and people did NOT seem to like that. So here we are.)
I guess that pertains to number 7 but that is typically the best practice of microeservices, as with unix philosophy, do only one thing and one thing well.

The arrangement of the services should be considered separate from that, as you can never control what pipelines or use cases might pop up in the future by users of those services.
Oxford dictionary revised to record linguistic impact of Covid-19
Looking at the TileDB docs, I like the idea that you can store and manipulate array efficiently. It works like a columnar storage, but organized in tiles. I am not clear how it could scale to multiple nodes and how to do queries. Maybe it should be integrated into postgres.
It sounds like the technology hasn't evolved much in the last 20-30 years then.

Around 1995 I was involved with a project where an engineer designed and built a multi-kW CW (I don't recall the exact value) pre-amp out of transistor based modules. There was a plan to apply the same approach to a later project at much higher power levels (100's of kW's) where the conventional approach would have been to use a klystron. I left that team (and the field) though so I don't know if the larger version was ever successfully implemented.

EDIT: I should note that this wasn't in the microwave regime, it was 500 MHz.
Passion aside, how do you plan to monetize?
Either way, he's amazing. So few can get to the point that the songs come to them. Celebrate him for that, then.
I'm seeing a certain pattern here, aren't we all just fooling ourselves?

Isn't this just all inevitable? Aren't all these startups just lining up all in the hopes just to get acquired?

I guess when we see VC Funded™ on any startup what it _really means_ is that:

"We are prioritising a return for our investors even if it means violating our mission statement".
Our business has had greatly increased load due to COVID-19. It would have been very nice to buy a 128 core EPYC bare metal server to run our SQL Server on at this time, to buy us time to rearchitect to handle the load. Instead we are stuck with 96vCPUs because that is the most Amazon can do.

Its also very very expensive to have a 96vcpu VM on amazon!
How much do you think a competent System engineer should be paid?
Both push and pull are used in graphics. Creating the classic z-buffer is used when pushing a lot of polygons is the fastest option even if that seems wasteful. Face culling on the other hand is classic pull technique where you first figure out if you want something and only then compute the details.

PS: 256x256 is 1/16th 1024x1024 so your wasting 15/16 pixels.
This is a complete disaster.
Yeah holy crap. I've been a big fan of Keybase since they launched, but this is a deathknell. I guess I'm not too surprised, Keybase didn't seem to have a business model, but still, disappointing that they're going to go into death this way.

Attention people starting businesses: VC funding is fun and all, but please, have a business model. Your users and employees depend on it.
The new iPhone SE at $399.

Or, Apple sells the XR at $499, which I think for some folks could be a better deal. It gets you a more modern form factor, should have a better camera, and will definitely have better battery life than the SE under heavy load. Also, in my opinion, the gesture-based system found on iPhone X-style iPhones is greatly superior to home button equipped iPhones.

The XR (or the 11) is on the larger side, though. The best thing that Apple sells that’s as small as possible is the iPhone 11 Pro. You could pick up an Xs or X instead to save money - but the 11 Pro has much better battery life than those. Still, all options will get you to the end of the day with light usage.

Don’t forget to buy any storage upgrade you need up front. Don’t forget to check Apple’s own refurbished store, which sells devices that are essentially new with the same warranty at a discount.

I don’t even think Android is a decent consideration for what you want unless you specifically shop for something that works well with custom ROMs. Android software support is just too short. And it really sounds like you want a phone that doesn’t eat up your time with tinkering and tweaking, Apple fits that bill. And you want to take pictures - with Apple you basically just can’t go wrong with the cameras. They’re always simple and fast, with unopinionated results.

For small-ish phones, probably the only decent Android choices are the Sony Xperia Compact line or the smallest Google Pixel phones. Almost everything Android is huge. I believe this is due to their poor battery optimization where every device needs a 4,000 Mah battery just to get through the day.

The Pixel 3A could work for you but it isn’t sold with more than 64GB of storage and it’s a lot slower than the new iPhone SE.

Apple will get you at least 5 years of software updates (which is on an increasing trend) with their phones since their release date. They have a high resale value and migrating from one to another is a breeze. Even when you lose software updates, the App Store and most apps continue to work for a long time. Apple even recently patched FaceTime so that it wouldn’t break iOS 9 compatibility (which is 4 versions ago). In contrast, the original Pixel just lost software updates, while its Apple contemporaries remain supported.

While the idea of owning a long-lasting phone like a ThinkPad is appealing, I don’t really think it ends up making a lot of practical sense just given the fact that phones aren’t really sold that way. I think that, on an economic level, the best way to have a reliable supported phone at all times might be to simply buy Apple’s 2 year old phone every year, and then sell it the next year in favor whatever the next 2 year old phone is. If you do it that way you essentially avoid the frontal depreciation and you’re probably spending $100 a year or less on a phone after you sell the old one, and never losing software support or running with a busted up phone.
That’s a pretty extreme example of CI infrastructure, but okay... so what?

20 t2 mediums costs under a dollar an hour at list rates, and if you’re using a lot of AWS infrastructure can cost a lot less.

How much is the confidence that that PR will not break master worth to you? How many hours of engineer code review time would it take to achieve that same level of confidence in your build that spinning up 20 ec2 instances and running regression tests wins? How much would a failed deployment into production cost you, per minute?

Before you assume that it’s wasteful for any organization to throw cloud at a problem, realize there are many orgs for which a few hundred dollars of cloud compute spend per production release is an entirely reasonable trade off, not a firing offense.
Is this question rhetorical? You can’t imagine a situation where one can’t afford their mortgage? Job losses, life changes, catastrophe?
Seems a rather poor cultural fit, to say the least.
Wait, what? People gave Keybase their private keys?? Isn't keybase just some glorified modernized web of trust infrastructure?
-Additionally (while on the subject of computer history and norsemen), the first ARPANET node outside the US was located in Norway; NORSAR (The Norwegian seismic survey) was hooked up in June 1973 - presumably the seismic activity of interest to the US was Soviet nuclear tests.
First, a huge congratulations to the founders of Keybase! Running a self-founded messaging company can't be an easy feat.

For me personally, this is of course worrying news. I'll suspect that Keybase will die a rather quick death, as most of it's users are security minded that wouldn't ever trust Zoom.
Keybase' post about the acquisition: https://keybase.io/blog/keybase-joins-zoom

> What the Keybase team will be doing

> Initially, our single top priority is helping to make Zoom even more secure. There are no specific plans for the Keybase app yet. Ultimately Keybase's future is in Zoom's hands, and we'll see where that takes us. Of course, if anything changes about Keybase’s availability, our users will get plenty of notice.

> So, our shortest-term directive is to significantly improve our security effectiveness, by working on a product that's that much bigger than Keybase. We can't be more specific than that, because we're just diving in.

So, yup, keybase is dead.
https://keybase.io/account/delete_me
This is horrible news.
This 100%. The vast majority of websites (not webapps) don't need anything more than HTML, CSS and some JS/JQuery.

> Or name me one person who can, from memory, correctly configure the rails sprockets asset pipeline

I feel that one, it's insane that the most basic "I need to execute a few lines of very specific JS on this specific page" must devolve into a DRY absolutist abstraction madness, previously with sprockets, now with webpacker.
Or, maybe Keybase needs video, and Zoom needs chat and security, in order to compete with the new wave of “productivity” suites. Why would Keybase suddenly be a failure or get worse in the security department because they are owned by a successful video conferencing company?
Something like Wolfram's vision has to be true if materialism has any hope of working. The universe is finite and discrete, so a Turing machine is an upper bound on its capabilities. The original thing that started it all has to be really simple: have a large(ish) probability of occurring by chance and a very high compression to get an orderly universe.

Therefore, if materialism is true, then in the beginning must be some simple, but potentially Turing complete substrate, such as a cellular automata or graph thingamabob.
ND also had a Unix System V port running on their machines (the ND-4000 but not ND-800 series if I recall correctly).

Source: worked for ND 1988/9 (not in Norway, though) when the end was nigh and they were looking for a plan B as customers moved to open systems (= Unix)

Edit: didn't recall correctly; was ND-570 not ND-800 and ND-5000 not ND-4000 (in late 1980s these series were basically the same at the CMOS level and an ND-570 could be on-site migrated to 5000 by merely cutting a wire on the board with a knipper to engage additional instructions or address lines)
Its some sort of Western nonsense, that we're all Kings and must keep up on politics, current events etc. Something about being right, or being the smartest person in the room, or something.

So much satisfaction from living your life, right where you are. Trust that it all won't come crashing down without your input, and go back to your garden (or whatever you cherish).

Definitely leave facebook memes behind, forever.
We have this concept in software engineering of accidental vs. essential complexity. I feel like what you're asking for is an explanation from physicists that strips out all the accidental complexity, such that the essential is left in a comprehensible form. But it seems totally plausible to me that there is no such essential core small enough to be comprehensible to us without "a phd's worth of understanding". At some point simplifying analogies are not enough, because the critical differences between theories that determine whether they are the right or wrong direction are too deep within the subtleties to show up in analogy.
Thanks for posting that.

@OP: So let's get this straight, you created that GitHub issue within one hour of seeing the repository, rallied whatever Discord server that is to join your cause and put it on HN for reach?

As an academic and software engineer, please point me to where I can file an issue for you to retract your issue.
Zoom trading at ~1,700 P/E which to me seems absurd. Wonder if the acquisition involved much stock! Seems like a good time for Zoom to make transactions like this.
Android WebView does sandbox the browser and renderer processes since Oreo - https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/06/whats-new-...

There is no reason Mozilla could not do that with GeckoView.
This is part of why I am not confident about any economic upside of us opening up.

We've had numerous meat processing plants close down or run at reduced capacity due to workforce illness and people refusing to work due to the concentration of COVID-19 cases.

And I think about how in the restaurant business how a rumor of someone catching food poisoning can kill your business... what's going to happen when a review lands on your Yelp/Google page that a customer took grandma to eat at your restaurant and 2 weeks later she died from COVID-19? Your reputation will be absolutely trashed.

Just seems like everyone is getting set up to fail... except for those who are already able to work comfortably from home.
Why all landlords? Business arguably is also ruining the world and people’s lives, should all business owners also give their assets away for free in these trying times?
This is really cool, and great to see Lua project on HN, I think it's a woefully undervalued language. If someone knows LTUI 2 questions:

1. I tried to find api docs, but it didn't leap out at me. Is there one?

2. i wonder how you can include LTUI with an existing event loop. (hence why I was looking for #1) app:run() is great if the UI is the standalone app, but if I'm doing async io or any other more complex lua app, I have to combined the two event loops.

If only my system was big enough to have ncurses this would be super cool and I'd use it right away. <shigh>
My conspiracy is that people who have my private keys can read my encrypted communication. No need to drag China into this.
>The problem is that he's a pretty good science communicator.

Disagree. I bought one of his books, Idea Makers, knowing that he is a bit a jerk/kooky, because it looked interesting. Every chapter about a different important scientist/thinker in history, what could go wrong? What went wrong was that actually every chapter was about Wolfram and/or Mathematica. He can't help himself!

But, all that said, that doesn't mean he is wrong!
Piketty’s solution is that we move beyond private ownership to some blend of private, public, and temporary ownership. (Total abolition of private property, à la Soviet Union, for Piketty, was an ill-advised failure.) Since many societal goods are often already owned publicly, like electrical grids, highways, or parks, and some are owned communally, like worker cooperatives, it is easy to imagine this realm expanding.

1800 words into the article and finally we get the grand plan.

Like the rest of Piketty's work, yell real loud about a real pain, make interesting allusions to economic history, and offer no real solutions.
why not look at the problem the other way around?

I don't have much respect for zoom's security practices, while I do have much respect for the keybase team.

Perhaps this is Zoom's way of admitting that there is no way they can just solve the problem internally by keeping doing what they're doing and they need to get some fresh blood and build upon good practices designed outside their current culture.
We need a new type of company that can never be acquired.
Oh I like that one! Its like the disabled Scout who sold more popcorn than anyone in the district, when asked "How do you sell so much popcorn?" answered "I go to the houses where the lights are on!"

Sometimes we jump right past the simplest, most direct solutions. We're looking for a shortcut or something. But all successful journeys start, not with a single step, but by facing in the right direction!
Facebook update crashes TikTok and other rivals