skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For futures on physical deliverable objects (well, I guess most futures are such, but anyway) -- would volatility and speculation be dampened/improved if the clearinghouse forced everyone (or the seller) participating in a trade to certify that they had rights to the specific thing being traded? Could actually produce the contract -- like the oil producer is certified to have <xyz> barrels allowed to be sold?

My notion is that if much of the trading (and it can be shown by futures volumes) cannot possibly be on actual physically deliverable quantities, then most must be "speculation" by people who cannot actually produce the asset. Would this be a help to stabilize the market?

I know it all has to get settled in the end by the expiration date, but just an idea.
I’ll accept your analysis.

I found Apple Music worse than Spotify: the catalog changes more often, so you can’t guarantee music you tried to “keep” (with likes or downloading) will stay where you left it. Apple will delete music from your device (or otherwise lock you out of it), if you move to a geographic region they don’t have a licence agreement covering that music in that place. It’s also got terrible UX for those times when you want music but don’t know what you want. It’s playlists are rubbish and the way it promotes them gets in the way of real discovery.
Hardware has layout constraints just like data have alignment constraints.
I don't think I've ever seen a "Verified by Google" badge on a website. Looking into it, apparently you're under a different set of API usage policies and only a limited set of uses.

I'm guessing according to this https://developers.google.com/terms/api-services-user-data-p... slimbox falls under the following

1. Native and web email clients that allow users to compose, send, read, and process email via a user interface

3. Applications that enhance the email experience for productivity purposes (such as applications for customer relationship management, delayed sending of email, or mail merge)

Interesting stuff! I don't see where that badge comes from though. It implies to me more than "I accept the Google policies and have followed a couple hoops to allow usage of these APIs" and more of a relationship with Google
Good point.

But for the age groups at issue the difference isn't half. For example, for the age group 65-74 31% are obese. See https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/episrv/2019-ol..., p23. And if you adjust for race, poverty, etc, the gap probably closes even more.

I'm simply taking issue with the characterization of these supposed co-morbidities as representing "high risk" patients when in fact in the context of Americans generally (and to a significant degree at-risk NYC population), these conditions are typical, not atypical. I'm not sure what's to be gained, either in terms of our understanding of pathogenesis or in treatment, by distinguishing these conditions from a hypothetically healthier population. At the very least, we should be careful about imbuing the confluence of these conditions with too much meaning beyond the simple and obvious. Such conditions are co-morbidities for most causes death across the spectrum of illnesses, infections and otherwise.
Show HN: Matters.ai – Keep track of company emails
I converted to some other coin and bought an AirVPN subscription for a year, donated $15 to the Tor Project, and I have about $40 left now.
Hi HN,

We built an easy-to-use system to organize and search email correspondence.

While running a consultancy, we noticed that companies struggle with keeping their emails organized. They send and receive up to hundreds of emails a day, and they needed a simple solution to keep them organized.

We thought of creating a system where emails could be logged simply by sending it to an address. For example: If you receive a new invoice, you can simply forward it to invoices@company.matters.ai (or your custom subdomain), we handle the rest.

Matters.ai started as a consulting project for law firms. We couldn't find a simple solution to fit their needs, and the only options were expensive complex document-management solutions.

We already have a number of clients on the platform. It’s still in beta and we just made it public: https://matters.ai/.

We’d love your feedback, experience, and thoughts!
I'm Sick of “AI Influencers”
Appreciate this comment, and I'll try to explain a bit more of what takes place under the hood.

The codebase of Slimbox can not read the content of your emails. Slimbox does not look at the content of the email or the header in fact to determine what is clutter. We instead use the Gmail API to effectively search for clutter.

In a traditional IMAP-based environment, you're right that one would have to process email headers, but the Gmail API allows us to find clutter more efficiently – hence the bold claim regarding the speed of our service.

The only user data that we store in our encrypted database is the user's email address, name, and a list of the senders. We only store this list of senders in order to allow for a UI to enable the user to easily manage senders (the only "read" operation).

I agree it would be ideal if we didn't even have to store the "from" address, and we've looked into obfuscating this as data as well.
To clarify: This is the original Doom engine implemented in hardware
What do you mean by "normal users"?

For my parents it's simpler to go with OSX.

For working on print, Inkscape and Gimp pale in comparision with adobe's suite. Not to mention sharing files with the "de facto market standards" world .

For working on audiovisuals, no cigar.

For working on development, well, none of my external hardware was supported (my last experience was Ubuntu 18+) but ok, the IDE worked.

In any case, going to the original question: normal user who?
(For those unfamiliar: there's a tired annual joke about DEF CON being cancelled, the scene's equivalent of trying to sell the freshmen elevator passes, so expect lots of jokes about how the conference hasn't been cancelled. It has, predictably, been in fact cancelled this year.)

Along with Black Hat (the "professional" version of Defcon) and B-Sides Las Vegas, this is "security summer camp", the weeks at the end of July and beginning of August. None of these events are likely to occur on-site this year.

Later

And, on cue, in-person Black Hat is cancelled as well:

https://twitter.com/BlackHatEvents/status/125883283428810752...

Black Hat is still going to happen virtually (we just finished selecting talks).
FOIA, Inc
Not a big deal in terms of having been normalized. Ofc it's bad.
That's a good point; past a certain point I think it's less about the single threaded performance and more about interconnect constraints— slower RAM speeds, slower PCIe lanes, slower SATA, USB, etc.

There's a funny series of LTT videos from this past fall where they bring up a 2008 Skulltrail mobo and try running some modern games on it, with and without overclocking:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNo7qoLRtkQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hl7Dx895ND4
Maybe you could explain where the paper contradicts the above?
Reminds me of the new Chrome UI. Not a fan of this soft, rounded-off aesthetic that seems to be spreading about.
Future will tell, but I do think this is a good strategic move by FB.

FB is now seen as an app for old people and not fun at all, and probably one of the reason is because of how it looks. With the new design, things are more shiny, and the product now looks cool. How a product is perceived has a big influence on how people use it, (for example why people use snap when they can send the same videos on insta).

I wouldn't be surprised that this is a beginning of a lot of changes on FB
For myself, I was furloughed March 23, had about a week of paid Vacation that I used up until March 30th. Filed for unemployment on the 31st. My health benefits continued until April 30th at which time I would be laid off.

Employer got PPP and I was un-furloughed on April 27th and they have enough runway for us until June 30th when the PPP runs out. Everyone got a sizable paycut, myself 37%.

I work in corporate events / trade-shows / experiential advertising and this whole industry won't survive.
Bezos' current estimated net worth (143B, per Forbes) averaged over the entire 25-year history of Amazon still comes out to well over half a million an hour. Why quibble over a measly one or two orders of magnitude when the amount we're dealing with is so outsized?

Also, in what sense does Bezos still bear any financial risk for anything at all? All of Amazon could crash and burn tomorrow and he'd still have enough tucked away under his mattress to last the rest of his life. A few billion at the margins either way is completely meaningless to him.

Amazon is an "easy target" because it is incredibly powerful and pervasive. It's reasonable to hold powerful parties to a higher standard because they have more ability to enact both positive and negative change. And most labor activists want worker protections to be not just company policies, but laws, which would also affect all those under-the-radar companies.
Wreeto v2 – open-source note-taking, knowledge management and wiki system
Sure, but there is no country in the world that satisfies the platonic ideal, in which you are totally immune to attack by the court.

No country on the planet is absolutely free. The US just happens to be the most negatively free country.
maybe "all day" on mbp was an embellishment. but i'm reading things like 3 hours of web browsing time on the latest thinkpad displays! i've also seen comments in here it's not that bad. maybe a batch of bad batteries? i really would love to try one and get away from the mac ecosystem (mainly because of dongles, although one must ask, is an AC brick better? and why can't anyone else make a brick like apple, with tidy cables!)
But if it’s never happened before, and you’re some random programmer making this stuff, I’m not surprised there are all kinds of assumptions being made when choosing data types and validating inputs...
Thanks for checking it out! Here's the link for anyone else:

https://miscdotgeek.com/building-direct-conversion-receiver-...
To be clear I'm not advocating for React on every possible use case. In fact I've grown weary of it over the years, but not for the reasons the comment I was responding to pointed out. My point is that React makes the process of organizing frontend code easier, not that it's the only way to do so.
My parents are both 75+. They both still work in the service industry. They would not listen to me when I told them to self isolate before our lockdown.

Their reasoning was that other people their age were still visiting their business.

Edit: are you downvoting my parents decisions? Or my anecdote?
Turnaround: Whatever Happened to “The Chronicles of Ara”
SPAs have to do quite a bit before they're ready to start doing what the SSR page was doing as soon as the last byte landed on the client.

Old-school AJAX shipped HTML to be dumped straight into the document. I suspect that was much faster than the modern approach of sending, typically, JSON, which then requires deserialization, a bunch of transforming, memory allocation, shifting data around, template application, et c before any DOM changes are handed over to the browser engine, at which point you've just finally caught up with the approach of shoving HTML into the DOM directly.
It likely will settle the markets by driving spreads through the roof and costing buyers/sellers of the physical items.

The underlying theme here is that speculators are not providing utility to the market, which is wrong. They are bridging time and risk.
interesting, where would I find information on that?
SaaS stocks defy gravity amid pandemic, record job losses
Normally, bright developers acquire a new language* within a few weeks, if they already know the paradigm from another language. Hack is OOP, and so are many others, so I would expect a bright developer to learn hack in 2-3 weeks, not months.

Heck, I just read the docs of hack for 2 hours, and I already got a good sense of what the language can do. I worked with PHP internals, and a bunch of other languages in my career.

* as language we define the language, its syntax and semantics, not any other library or the ecosystem. And yes, the standard library is still just a library. Knowing a list of functions and parameters does not mean knowing a language.
Project Treble and Modular System Components are that stable ABI, but it doesn't help if Google doesn't put on the Play Store license agreements that OEMs are obliged to push updates.

https://source.android.com/devices/architecture
I'll gladly own my words for 5 years. Lets meet in 5 and see.

I have been accountable for my words for a long time now, more than 5 years. And I have still to see any of your claims come to fruition. Go back 5 years and you will see people claiming what you are claiming now.

It's just not that simple.

We are talking at scale here not just some Tesla projects for the 1st world or a few pilot projects paid for by governments.

Density is a serious issue for any serious storage of energy on top of that getting the energy from the renewables into the storage.

If it wasn't we would be living in a very different world. Economics isn't the problem here, feasibility is and the fact that we don't have any serious examples of what you claim is no problem kind of illustrates the point more than claiming it's a quesiton of conservative utillity execs.

You have zero base for those claims.
> It’s pretty well known that commodity futures contracts are a game of hot potato

Very much so. I wrote software for financial traders in the 1990s, and I heard tell of a couple of clerks (in this context, sort of "trader intern") who thought they were smart enough to do a little commodity metal trading on the side. However, they didn't quite understand the details of contract expiration, and so supposedly they ended up with 25,000 pounds of copper delivered to somebody's parents house. Oops!
That's a really good point. Accessibility is super important and a shame that many devs (including myself) forget about it.
From a very quick cursory look, Japanese seems to have some sort of commas and periods. Shouldn't it be just simple to adopt spaces, (and proper commas and periods and parentheses, which they actually use already) too?
I like your table analogy. I would think that a more ergonomic hammer would also have tangible benefits like the ability to work longer and faster, creating more tables per day and lowering the overall costs of production resulting in cheaper tables.

Would customers be willing to buy a cheaper table that's wobbly vs a more expensive table that's not?
Ha! Too true on both counts.
A classical particle (think a pebble) exists in 6 dimensions, 3 positions and 3 momenta.

Nothing (in the classical, non-quantum) setting is solely determined by position coordinates.
Yes I do. The reason I own those stocks can be traced back t the Milton Friedman's dictum that

"The only corporate social responsibility a company has is to maximize its profits."

So it is amoral. Big deal. I am saving for retirement.
You can absolutely do this (and it would be quite interesting to try with a VR headset, e.g.!); the idea is a special case of the projective transform [0] in 4 dimensions. It may make for a cool demo.

-----

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homography
Better to replace windows already broken than to hoard spare windows in a convention center, then just throw them away.
> Hopefully, we'll gravitate toward companies that create privacy-centric services for their users.

Not likely. The privacy-compromising services will be cheaper and will outsell anything else, so there's a lot more money in violating privacy than respecting it. As a result those services will have larger R&D budgets and objectively better product offerings.

People won't pay for privacy, so they don't actually care about it. We get what we pay for, and don't get what we don't pay for. Until and unless customer behavior changes privacy will keep getting thrown under the bus.

Same goes for security, as evidenced by the extreme success of Zoom in spite of it being a security dumpster fire.

Customers care about UX, UX, UX, UX, and UX.
My doctors are using Zoom (via MyChart, so I assume many are using the same); one of my wife's providers is using Google Duo.
Facebook's problem is that a subscription fee would drastically limit adoption and prevent them from monopolizing the social graph. They see more potential to make money without charging users directly.
Quoting from their test tool:

By submitting this form you consent to us emailing you occasionally about our products and services.
As a scientist, but not a technical expert in this field, I felt that this article read pretty straight forward. Though I will admit that there could be added clarity for a more general audience (pretty much all work can).

> is the definition of the word "strain" really the important point you want to communicate?

I think in the author's case, yes. If you are unfamiliar with the subject you learn some nuance about the subject and the terminology used. A basic understanding of the science should have already clued you into that viruses don't replicate perfectly, so the reader should question at what point a change constitutes a new strain. The author answers this question in the beginning.

> A virus strain is an isolate with a different biological property, such as binding to a different receptor, or having a distinctly different stability at higher temperatures, to give just two of many possible examples.

So we learn simply that the different isolate has to have a new biological property. More akin to having a third arm rather than a difference in skin color.

The author circles back to this with a clear example:

> The most recent offender is a preprint claiming that SARS-CoV-2 with an amino acid change in the spike glycoprotein (D614G) increases the transmissibility of the virus.

> Until proven otherwise, their emergence is likely due to the founder effect. Let’s say a virus with D614G emerges during replication in a person’s respiratory tract. If viruses with that change infect the next person, and the next, and so on, then the D614G change will predominate. The change is simply __a single nucleotide polymorphism of little consequence.__

I do think here the author could have strengthened their argument by noting what the founder's effect is.

> (via wiki) the loss of genetic variation that occurs when a new population is established by a very small number of individuals from a larger population.

So the author gives a reasonable assertion for this observation. We then apply Occam's razor and we have the author's thesis. (He should have stated this explicitly)
Sometimes my old code is “why did I over engineer this, it’s so hard to trace through”

Other times it’s “I think I really nailed the dev UX on this.”

These days I’m prioritizing more on conveying intent and proper use by name, location, and signature. And it seems to be supporting me back over the last two years oh my current codebase.
I think it's a bit easier for businesses to reconfigure to change the essential job and make it easier for robots. E.g., a business can put guide wires in the concrete. I can do the same in my yard... but I'm not going to do it in my house.

Perhaps this is because the business is already slave to its function. The exact separation and makeup of businesses reflects efficient ways to split up problems and integrate with other businesses. It's possible to refactor that given a robot that can perform a certain kind of action that is not directly equivalent to one person's job right now.

But my home is my home, it serves me, I do not serve it. For instance, one could imagine redesigning clothing to make robotic cleaning and folding of clothing feasible. I'm not going to do that! But redesigning PPE for that process in a hospital is not at all unreasonable.
People just don’t want to pay for social networking platforms. We’ve been conditioned to think that these things should be free.
I agree, you combine that with memories of March 2009. Everybody is hoping that we have hit bottom already and there is nowhere to go but up.
This never happens to me.
One thing I've noticed is that I'm using not only Emacs but other editors, I really like Org-mode for notes and cider-mode for Clojure but I find myself switching to other editors including vim and VS Code when doing other tasks.

Perhaps something like Spacemacs but built around CUA-mode with a nice default theme and menus will win people to the platform.
More accurate comments that way, isn't it. Nothing sadder than the optimistic comment from before implementation, which took the regular twisty path towards correctness in the corner cases. More of a risk for the higher level methods than the little "DRY" functions that do something relatively functional.
Guidance for Implementing the Opening Up America Again Framework
Yeah, I didn't want to list everything.
I happen to think offensive shaming language is always more divisive. It also conveys less information and sparks less interesting discussion.
Well first, you don't seem to understand how herd immunity works. That 70% you quote is only a useful number when there isn't an active epidemic. With an active epidemic you get significant overshoot.

If we dropped all mitigation efforts, you should expect this to infect something like 95+% of people before effectively dying out. The amount of overshoot is going to depend on how widespread the infection is.

Second, you can develop immunity without the bad effects of actually getting the disease (ya know, like a fucking vaccine). Saying that we need xx% of people to develop immunity doesn't mean that we need xx% of people to get this deadly disease.
People instinctively know the value of something when asked to part with their money. :D

Yet they still spend their time on it. Huh.
Cache invalidation is not about effectively caching immutable values (where FIFO or least recently used may be valid solutions) but about the problem of caching mutable values, the hard part is ensuring correctness without having to clear all caches everywhere whenever something changes.

Properly ensuring that when a value changes (and thus any cached copies become invalid) then every place where that value might be cached properly and timely invalidates [that part] of the cache, because otherwise other parts of the system will see stale/wrong/conflicting data which generally results in 'fun'. And it appears everywhere from memory reads in a single multicore processor (where one core might change a variable that the other core has cached) to globally distributed data storage systems with eventual consistency to state shown on the user's screen as the underlying data is getting mutated by someone/something else.
Solar and wind are less than 1% of world energy consumption and not expected to grow substantially.

Citation needed, as I was unable to find a source that backed up any of these claims.

in fact Thorium and fusion might be more likely to happen.

What signs point to that?
This! Become part of people's routine.
> If you have an unlimited budget, you could manufacture something that looks just like a vintage 6502

In 2020, If I have a hobbyist's budget I can manufacture something like that. It wouldn't stand up to intense scrutiny, but to the casual observer there wouldn't be a noticeable difference.

Not taking away from your point, but showing that it's even easier to hide electronics than most people think it is.
I know, that's what I'm trying to say: it's not true that CEOs are "almost but not quite" legally mandated to maximize profit or shareholder value. The law says plainly that they are not.

"All but" is handy phrasing if you're trying to create the impression that something you prefer is true. If you don't prefer it, I think that using that phrase is like shooting yourself in the foot rhetorically.

I think it's more constructive to point out that such a mandate does not exist (regardless of what some shareholders seem to believe), and there are good reasons it doesn't.