skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting that it seems to suggest there is an optimal amount of distancing/lockdown/etc. to lower the peak, but avoid a big "rebound". I don't see a lot of discussion about how to find that optimum amount.

It has occurred to me that the planet is essentially conducting a gigantic experiment in virus evolution, by creating a novel viral selection environment never seen before. For example, how does it impact a virus if the strains most likely to send the host to the hospital, actually spread more than the strains most likely to be asymptomatic, because even asymptomatic hosts are in isolation?

Unless there is a vaccine or cure coming soon (there isn't), then the end result must be herd immunity, no matter what the policy. It would seem that we should be considering how to select for the healthiest segment of the population to provide that herd immunity, rather than trying to isolate as much as possible in the vain hope that it will die out prior to that point. If that was every possible, it has long since spread way too far to expect that to be possible.

There might be cases (e.g. MERS) where you can stomp out a virus before it spreads enough to cause herd immunity, but we have long since passed that point. I don't think most people (including policy makers) are thinking about the endgame properly (as this paper does).
People always pretend this shit is about "professionalism" or whatever while ignoring that if you have leftist political opinions you can run wild rubbing them in people's faces and nothing whatsoever will happen to you.

It's so utterly and transparently self-serving, it's disgusting.
Tesla isn't allowed to directly sell cars from their showrooms in Texas.
> The frantic reaction was prompted by President Trump’s suggestion on Thursday at a White House briefing that an “injection inside” the human body with a disinfectant like bleach or isopropyl alcohol could help combat the virus.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/24/us/politics/trump-inject-...
Affine Spaces in Ruby on Rails
Hmmmm. Cui bono on that claim, I do wonder. (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cui%20bono)
> I'm genuinely confused by the animosity

To me, it's because this stinks in the same way as Bezos playing cities off each other to extract concessions. He's even asking fans and shareholders to sue the county[1] and reach out to politicians[2]. A county has made a decision, presumably in good faith, in the interest of public health. You don't have to agree with their decision, but throwing your weight around as a billionaire to spite them for it is a bad look.

1: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1259165058426232832

2: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1259174414865719296

Edit: fixed reference link (thanks mft_).
Is it dangerous and toxic when the state government threatens/acts to confiscate more of your earnings?
It was probably indirectly explained here:

> I know a thing or two about long distance motorcycle travel, but [...] nothing that could generate affiliate income.
Full text:

> Tesla is filing a lawsuit against Alameda County immediately. The unelected & ignorant “Interim Health Officer” of Alameda is acting contrary to the Governor, the President, our Constitutional freedoms & just plain common sense!

> Frankly, this is the final straw. Tesla will now move its HQ and future programs to Texas/Nevada immediately. If we even retain Fremont manufacturing activity at all, it will be dependen on how Tesla is treated in the future. Tesla is the last carmaker left in CA.

I love how he says "immediately" and "Texas/Nevada" right next to each other. So he's moving right now... except that he didn't decide where?
California had republican governors for a long time as well as a strong republican minority in the state legislature.

But now the Dems have a supermajority in the legislature and a democratic governor so there is no longer a check on the wackiest policies.

Plus the fact that we’ve always had state propositions that come direct from the people, a system now being efficiently abused by special interests. The number of ridiculous propositions has gone way up, and most people vote just based on the title.

It’ll be interesting to see if there is a course correction in the next few elections.
I suspect that most people attempting to vectorize their ray tracer try the straightforward horizontal approach here and discover that it's not really any faster. I certainly did when I first started in this area.

The key to the vertical, structure-of-arrays approach is to move to a more data-flow style approach. Instead of generating a single ray at a time from your camera code you can generate them in small batches corresponding to a rectangle on the screen. When I was in grad school we'd call these ray packets. We'd also do things like organize them into little 2x2 pixel "packlets" within the packet to take advantage of SSE or AltiVec. (This tends to work great with coherent pinhole camera rays, and shadow rays towards a common light source, but not so well with path-traced indirect rays which quickly become incoherent.)

Likewise, don't go all the way down to single primitives in the leaves of your acceleration structure. Instead, try to group them into small blocks of the same primitive type that are clustered together spatially. For example, you might have triangle mesh intersector code that has a BVH specialized for large numbers of pure triangles (generic programming can help here, e.g., BVH<triangle> for meshes and BVH<sphere> for point clouds). Since the leaves may have different numbers of primitives, a typical approach would be to pack all the primitives into a single flat array and then have your BVH leaves just give you the indices of the range within the array. (The nice thing is that this typically also shrinks your acceleration structures since you have fewer nodes due to the leaves not being so fine-grained.)

If you're curious to see some vectorized ray/triangle intersection code that was fairly state-of-the-art in its day, I have an old paper[0] on the topic. I'd also suggest having a look at Intel's Embree[1], especially the early publications. The library is open source (Apache licensed), well organized, and not too large.

[0] https://www.cs.utah.edu/~aek/research/triangle.pdf

[1] https://www.embree.org/
I've lived in the Bay area for the past 5 years and am leaving in a week. But one reason for leaving is because business is so wildly successful here that it's very crowded, stressful, and income disparity is massive. Which seems like the opposite of what you're implying.
Should attempt to build facilities around categorizing the list so all fruits and veg show up together, all meat, dry goods, etc.
California regulation and taxes promotes innovation. Electric car incentives helped Tesla. Ban on non-competes allows employees to start competing businesses. Taxes allow the funding of the best higher education system in the nation.
brew install sdl2
I wouldn't be surprised if freshly negotiated financial incentives for Tesla are announced by Texas shortly. Tesla relies pretty heavily on the public purse, and perhaps strings have been tightened too far in California.
I'm pretty sure the point is that distillation for fuel doesn't remove all the aldehydes (and other stuff?) that distillation for rubbing alcohol would normally entail. One more trip around in the still (or however the heck continuous distillation works) would probably make the product work fine.

One assumes they're trying to sell alcohol that was originally destined for use in fuel (since we're idiots and we put alcohol in gasoline) for another use, since the demand for fuel alcohol cratered and the demand for rubbing alcohol skyrocketed.
This is a common misconception. Viruses mutate, sure, but most do not mutate very quickly or very much. This includes coronaviruses. Influenza, on the other hand, mutates at a prodigious rate in meaningful ways.

The reason we don't have vaccines against any coronaviruses is because there aren't very many that infect humans and all of them other than SC2 are so mild it isn't worth spending the effort to eradicate them.
Looking for reliable servos for a quadruped robot
Hi everyone, I'm working on an open-source quadruped robot starting from the Spotmicro design.
I've made some progresses simulating gaits (using pybullet) and and writing a CLI application for the knowledge transfer. All the code is open-source and can be found in my github (nicrusso7).
However, the servos I'm using (MG996R) are very cheap and unreliable.. They don't sustain the robot weight during the gait so I've decide to put my hands on the robot platform design in order to integrate more reliable servos. I'm not really sure which ones I should buy..
any suggestion?
Yes. Thank you for correction.
The success of Tesla as a business will have far more impact on our progress against global warming than CA’s regulatory goals will. Maybe some don’t see it that way, but I’m quite certain Musk does, and frankly I agree with him.
The WHO has a protocol for preparing hand sanitizer from ethyl or isopropyl alcohols; they recommend adding glycerin to protect skin.

[1] https://www.who.int/gpsc/tools/faqs/abhr1/en/
It worked for Boeing /s

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/how-boeing...
Introduction to Next.js
That sounds a nightmare of bureaucracy to calculate!
As with most things in life, it’s a multi-layered problem. Mass media tends to simplify the issue to a single headline that’s usually along the lines of “we can fix everything if we solve X!” because that gets you clicks. Everyone wants to believe that there’s a magic bullet to solve Y.

Taking your experience, you’ve run into a different layer of the issue. If you’ve heard about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs[1], then you might recognize this as being an issue at the psychological level (esteem needs). It sounds like this child has their basic needs already met (not poor). So your anecdote provides a useful data point but doesn’t disprove the need to solve for the problem of basic needs.

A lot of people are trying to tackle the resource need simply because it would have the largest visible impact. However, it would be really nice if the media acknowledged that the problem isn’t so simple and that this is just step 0.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs
One, I didn't say that, so I'm not sure why you think it's my job to argue the point. Two, you are not coming across as a guy who's seriously looking to understand why people might reasonably see something as sexist. You can't really be surprised that nobody's willing to take the time to educate somebody who doesn't want to learn.
Close proximity to a large volume of people with $100k salaries and who strongly signal that they value reducing their carbon footprint was not factored in when he first started selling premium electric vehicles nearby? That's an interesting hypothesis.
If Tesla can execute the plan for getting the country off fossil fuels in Texas, it makes sense to move it to Texas.

"Supporting" one state or another is irrelevant to that goal.
I disagree, I think people underestimate the social cost of uprooting your life, leaving all of your friends and families, and moving into an area that often has beliefs counter to your own

There's already examples. Epic will pay you top tech level salaries in the middle of nowhere, where you can live like a king. Superstars seem to be staying put.
Making literal what I suspected: Elon’s ‘Free America’ posturing was about keeping his factory running.

All the polls I’ve seen show that less than 20% of people believe everything is safe. The only ‘open up now’ constituency in America (besides political cranks) is people who wouldn’t have to expose themselves to the virus if they had to go back to work or send their kids to school tomorrow.
Musk likely believes that Tesla's successful production of cars (and success as a company) is a priority to achieving his long-term environmental goal, regardless of what state benefits from Tesla's employment and tax revenue.
The problem here is that the restrictions have been broadly lifted by California and many other states, but Bay Area counties have stricter rules that still forbid manufacturing.
So there's no GUI toolkit? Everything is drawn with Simple DirectMedia Layer?
I thought he was originally from South Africa, which would disqualify him from the presidency?
You raise a good point. We'll have to anecdotally study why that's the case. For instance, many women in the law and medicine fields end up marrying men in the same fields. So those women can then later on decide to either reduce their work hours or to outright stop when they have children.

It's more difficult to negotiate your hours in tech. How many people do you know who say want to only work 2-3 days a week for 5 hours a each day? The medical/dental field (especially if you have a clinic and don't do procedures or complex operations) tends to be "independent". Meaning, each case you get is a consultation, and your "productivity" is in how many patients you see in a given timeframe. This is much harder with programming.
I haven't had an IP change in the last year since I last restarted the router. There might be a lease time, but it is long. I also have DDNS setup
It seems like their simulated model makes certain members of a population less ‘active’ and so at less parametric risk of infection/transmission than in a model where everyone is active. This is useful, and/but doesn’t appear to be Covid-19 specific.
That's a fair point in two ways: most media outlets can't really deliver much more than a soundbite, and people experienced in communicating with them know this and simplify what they say to a soundbite. That's also true for all the memes, what can you fit into a GIF?

It's also affected by what motivates people to share something:

"Natural products produce fewer side-effects." Interesting.

"Pharmaceutical company disparages a study about negative impacts of their products." Also interesting.

"Big Pharma conspired to shut down revolutionary natural cures and push poisons!" The us vs them aspect is an implicit call to action, as marketing guys put it.
The funny thing is, Tesla still isn't legally allowed to sell vehicles in Texas. All sales to Texans are legally structured as out-of-state transactions. Although Texas is generally more business friendly than California it still has some weird restrictions.
> Why would Musk want Tesla to support Texas over CA? That seems backward unless his goal is the success of Tesla as a business, rather than progress against global warming.

Is Tesla can continues to increase sales like they did for almost a decade, then we have a good chance to completely switch the transportation industry from fossil fuel to renewable energy. If Tesla believe they would achieve this faster from TX than CA, then the move is justified because it better serves the mission of the company ("accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy"), not for business success. CA can perfectly continue to push for the energy transition, with or without Tesla.
That's why you don't give out your channel name, but your web site. And from there you can link people to whatever you want them to see without any worries about where it is hosted.
Very nice; some basic user's documentation would be helpful.
Intel moved their sizable R&D operations to Oregon in the 80s and 90s. It is a well-trodden path to move manufacturing-heavy companies out of the Bay Area.
i somewhat dislike this idea. it seems like it treats scientific papers as independent, isolated containers of reliable facts which can be reliably and authoritatively cited without any need for context.

This is a really common way of reading scientific papers, but I think it is ultimately harmful: I believe it contributed to the replication crisis as well as terrible scientific journalism in the popular press. Current scientific papers certainly do not meet this standard and I'm not sure it's even possible or desirable to require that they do.

Ultimately, I think we just have to accept that scientific papers only really make sense as part of a large body of scientific literature, to which they are responding and which respond to them.

The problem is a lot of people would rather just pick one or a few papers, cite them to justify a claim with total certainty, and then move on. I worry about encouraging this tendency.
In fact there is opponent reading (literally) in Blackjack. The opponent (dealer) must check his hand for blackjack, if the dealer's upcard is a 10 or an Ace, after having dealt the initial two cards to every player. "Hole peeking" is a technique where a teammate stands behind the dealer so they can see the hole card when the dealer checks for blackjack. They then signal this information to the player so he knows the value of the dealer's hand. Hole peeking used to be so common that casinos now have card readers built into the blackjack tables so that the dealers don't have to expose their hole card to check for blackjack.

It is/was also possible for a player at the first seat of the table to see a sloppy dealer's hole card when checking for blackjack. This is called "first basing" while using a teammate is generally called spooking.
Is it doom complete?
It's the county government he's mad at here, but yes, that's also bad. Alameda County should let him run the factory unless they have some reason to believe they're in more danger than the rest of the state.
Fair enough. Re-reading your comment now and I understand your point better.
Can Elon even make unilateral and rash decisions like this?

Probably not. He's not chairman of the board. Robyn M. Denholm is. The board has some strong figures on it, including Larry Ellison and James Murdoch.
Progressive Web Apps: The Future of Web Apps?
I like to compare it to taking a test based off of memory vs an open book test. And since this 'test' is something we want everyone to participate in (and give them the best possibility to make an informed choice), I believe mail-in ballot voting might be the best possible solution for voting.
I've said this in other threads before, but Musk's behavior is very consistent with Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_personality_disor...
Nothing here you've said is true.

The background rate of death in this "sickest and weakest" group is already high. C19 is no higher.

Please do some research, there's an article on the BBC with a graph demonstrating this point.
Yes, exactly. I hope a) those vaccines yield useful results b) quickly enough before people lose interest and funding.
>A county has made a decision, presumably in good faith, in the interest of public health.

This can be debated, right? I'm not sure what's the problem with the management of a company saying they're moving a headquarter because they believe they can better operate elsewhere, or asking other people who feel negatively impacted to consider a legal actions (unless you don't trust the legal system, but that's another matter I guess).
> Well, no state has been stronger on this issue than California, who sets fuel efficiency goals that are the most stringent. The same cannot be said of Texas and Nevada; if anything the opposite is true. These are states where people take pride in driving big gas guzzling trucks and the government supports them in that.

How is this anything but a non-sequitor? CA law only covers cars sold in the state, not produced. How does moving to a state that may be more favorable to the business for other reasons (tax purposes, operating during the pandemic, etc) change anything in that regard?
Senegal is worth looking at (end of vid): https://youtu.be/iBma_0oAiMI
> Is it dangerous and toxic when the state government threatens/acts to confiscate more of your earnings?

If you're talking about taxes, that's an awfully entitled phrasing.
1) Probably, 2) possibly, and 3) they should use a method that doesn't rely on estimation.
KDE disables compositing when SDL apps are opened to improve performance. It should return once the app is closed. You can disable this behavior in System Settings > Display and Monitor > Compositor and unchecking Allow applications to block compositing.
My personal experience has lead me to believe yes, it's broken. Or at least severely damaged. Thanks in large part to the SEO/marketing awfulness.

A week or so ago I noticed I've begun to adapt to this poor state of search results by almost immediately navigating to the second "page" and beyond. Not all that long ago, searching beyond the "first page" was almost taboo. Nowadays it's become the norm for me.
The authors of Marginal Revolution are two well-renowned economics professors.
Yeah, it definitely did, re-learned to touch type in Colemak and also upgraded to ortholinear split keyboard. Yet it's takes quite some time after ~20 years of touch typing on Qwerty.
I agree with Elon (from his latest interview with Joe Rogan) that billionaires get a lot of shit (which is why he’s going minimalist nomad supposedly, to deflect criticism by eliminating anything ostentatious in his life). Almost all of them deserve it, but Musk, Gates, and Buffett don’t (all for various yet obvious reasons). They are in a different class.

Arguably, we still want those billionaires to succeed, but we also want taxes paid and workers protected across the board. I don’t think that’s unreasonable, but complex problems and their solutions are hard to discuss at scale because of entrenched interests, sound bites, the twenty four hour news cycle, and people acting in bad faith.
Exactly, people don't seen to get that and read too much into it. He ramps it up usually around new announcements and whatnot.
Of course it can. Is there evidence of bad faith on the county's part? I'm open to updating my beliefs.
Should’ve said “more easily die”. It’s definitely no methanol though.
From what I've seen - income disparity and burdensome regulations go hand in hand.

Being rich, I can afford the regulations. A new immigrant? Not so much. And if my poorer immigrant competition starts climbing up the ladder by ignoring the regulations, I can report them and have them shut down.
I disagree. Although I'm not in the business, my understanding from wide reading in the topic is quite the opposite.

Casinos make money from "whales," who may or may not end up ruined to a man, but who are certainly losing enough money to ruin an average bettor.

The guy losing $500 at BJ once in a while (and once in a blue moon winning some back) is the "economy coach class super saver" flyer. Yes, enough of those small fry help defray the fixed costs of the flight. But it's the last minute business class flyer that brings the margin.

Similarly, the real money for the casino is in some mix of 1. problem gamblers, almost by definition, and 2. money laundering.
Tesla prepared to move out of California amid fight over factory shutdown
Said HQ in the tweet, guess we’ll see how serious he is.
> He has built a $150 billion company from the ground up

Are we talking about Tesla? Because Elon didn't fund Telsa.
My understanding of quantum physics is miniscule; so a question: would it be potentially true to say that the concept of "emptiness" as we define it is essentially meaningless at the quantum level?
Due to Fed, a Covid-Depression May Not Become Great Like the Great Depression
He's seems pretty much the same to me too, but that's only because I have personal experience with high-functioning narcissists, and I can spot a tiger king from a mile away.
Yeah, it's a common trope. Everyone can create a Twitter/Facebook/Instagram clone in a week or so of intense work. But that's not actually the hard part. What's hard is getting millions of users in the first place and scaling to that magnitude. In that order.
I have reviewed it and most of it is questionable. The level of research is - we do not know - more research is needed.

Btw. did you realize that the second link you provide supports the opposite conclusion?
Maybe instead of slapping the kids we should be slapping the parents.

(Unfortunately this idea wouldn't work, since many of the slapped parents would doubtlessly slap their kids in retaliation.)