skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Many of you are probably looking for jobs right now. And we all know how frustrating it is to go through interviews and not get any feedback for all the time you invested. That has gone on for far too long.

So we built a free tool Feedbat (www.feedbat.com), where you can exchange feedback with employers after interviews. We hold your feedback for ransom so that employers have to give you yours before they can view theirs.

Hope it helps you get back on track in these tough times. Please feel free to leave comments or suggestions. You deserve your feedback - now demand it!
Monday NYTimes Front Page with Vibrant Colors and Art May 11, 2020
1/4th of Startups in India in Serious Danger Amidst Pandemic
+1 for the Joplin web clipper. I really like using Joplin for notes, especially the command line version.
Covid-19 Boredom: Hackysacks and Open Ended Algorithms vs. Supervised Learning
That so few are even asking this question in insane to me.
Economic effects are still going to exist. This is a tautology. What matters is the change or trade-offs in effect from taking one course of action or another.

We have over 20 million unemployed (probably a significant undercount) through a self-inflicted lockdown in just a couple months. Leading economic experts such as the US Secretary of the Treasury and Chairman of the Federal Reserve have warned strongly of “permanent economic damage” if we continue the lockdown. I would speculate this lockdown is firmly ushering in the next era of “essential” mega corporations and the utter destruction of small business.

And in New York, the majority of new cases in the last few weeks have been from people “strictly observing social distancing.”

Like focusing a laser increases the energy that can be brought to bear on a single point and magnifies the overall effect, so too can highly targeted common sense measures save more lives than this “utter bullshit” general lockdown.

I’ll give the specific example again. While we’re doing ~30k tests a day nationwide, we still haven’t tested every nursing home patient and worker. In fact, NY Times reports many nursing homes have not gotten access to barely any testing at all, even for their recently deceased. So a sub-population of 1.3 million residents is bearing 35% of total fatalities (in 14 states it’s more than 50% of all fatalities) and this lockdown diverts massive resources and energy away from saving those lives.

Do I have that right? 0.4% of the population has seen 35% of the total deaths? Over-represented by 87x. By the way that’s an undercount because only 33 states actually break out data for nursing home deaths. But instead the political response is fear mongering, preaching a new normal, and shaming people who go to the beach.
I am 34, and people always say I look 23. In my last job, upon meeting me, people asked if I was a student (intern) or just graduated.

It was nice. I can't grow facial hair though so I have no choice. What worries me is when I'm 45, I'll look like the world's oldest 30 year old or something.
There are a decent amount of row houses that go for sale under $1m in sf proper. They aren’t in nice areas or worth buying except as investment/rental properties. I don’t see many people buying them. It’s mostly investors. Most single family homes I see with home owners moving in are closer to $2-3mil.
> If lock-in is successful it may very well look like it was unnecessary.

Absolutely. This is the curse of most public health programs, and indeed a lot of public programs in general: when they work correctly it looks like they're not needed. The Covid pandemic has just shoved this process front and center rather than leaving it in the background.

HN readers, of all people, should remember the Year 2000 bug: we heard dire, almost apocalyptic predictions of the havoc it could wreak; we spent extraordinary effort and money scrambling to fix as many date-handling bugs as we could find across countless systems and software packages; then the year rolled over and... nothing much happened. But, of course, the end state of "the Year 2000 bug was vastly overblown" and the end state of "all our painful work paid off and saved us" were effectively identical. So it is with the lockdown.
> Looking at the original article, it looks like he continued associating with skinhead groups in his time in the military

He refers to associating with these groups in the past tense, in his 1992 testimony (at which time he was 19). As I stated, the evidence corroborates Patton's explanations that these activities were limited to his teenage years.
My uncle works there and he would disagree with your characterization
Yeah! I have to wonder how that flanging that kicks in at ~12sec is achieved. (Same signal slightly delayed? Another voice?)
(Found the program ... no longer fluent in sight-reading 8080 hex though!)
its more than 25 years old.

I used to have a neighbor who lived across from me in 1997 who was a designer of spy satellites, and i used to ask him questions about capabilities as he washed hid car and would wash the window in one direction for affirmative, another for negative.

he intimated they could literally read a license plate from orbit in 1997
Qmap.pub is the site where they get their news, let's stop the site from spreading lies. They will be completely in panic, let's see them their corona.
Interesting scenario, I wonder if turning off the power would would work considering their business is solar and battery production.
> ... by 2018, ISOC was sitting on a pretty large ongoing revenue stream in the form of .org registration fees. However, ISOC management felt that having essentially all of their funding dependent on one revenue source was unwise and that actually running .org was a mismatch with ISOC’s main mission. Instead, they entered into a deal to sell PIR (and hence the .org contract) to a private equity firm called Ethos Capital, which is where things get interesting.

This sounds like a rather shortsighted decision, to give up a very reliable source of recurring revenue because you'd rather only have multiple smaller sources of revenue... why not both?
I don't own any smart bulbs, but yeah -- this is a good example of a case where using a microcontroller is probably reasonable. I can't imagine people enjoy paying >$25 per bulb, and there's evidence that users are willing to put up with some truly appalling UX to get those things connected [1].

Amusingly, the most reliable smart outlet I own runs Linux on that MediaTek SoC I linked above (~500 MHz MIPS, 32MB RAM). I mean, power is definitely not a constraint when you're an inch away from the prongs, right? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[1] https://www.belkin.com/us/support-article?articleNum=116178
I've been using PasswordMaker for years for this and been quite happy with it.

https://passwordmaker.org/passwordmaker.html

On Chrome the extension you want is PasswordMaker Pro (not paid, it's just a name). It allows you to save profiles for different domains and saves them wherever it is Chrome extensions save data.
Why not start testing randomly chosen asymptomatic people?
> is it controversial that a graphical tool can emit performant code ?

No. But it's controversial to claim that a graphical tool can do maintainable code.
Being unable to afford food and a place to live, yet being well above the poverty line.

This link provides more detailed information: https://www.irp.wisc.edu/resources/how-is-poverty-measured/

“ The Census Bureau determines poverty status by using an official poverty measure (OPM) that compares pre-tax cash income against a threshold that is set at three times the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963 and adjusted for family size.”

Regarding my definition in the previous comment, I’m unable to find my original source. Sorry.
Research from Facebook: A Social Search Model for Large Scale Social Networks
There’s a train outside my front door that will drop me off at the front of UCSF. But that’s about 10 stops away and requires a transfer. If one doesn’t mind the bus, there’s one that picks up in front of my door and drops off at the hospital (the bus stop is even closer to the main entrance than the parking garage!)
Maybe it could be done by checkm8 exploit?
Hand wiring a mechanical keyboard.
I see the listing has a unicode problem EinstÃrzende Neubauten
While I somewhat agree (WA also has a silly slideshow alleging to be a dashboard with no goals on it) NY has completely failed it’s residents, while the Western Pact states have not.

I suspect the reality is these goals are nonsense and just provide a false sense of security.
Background, Complication, Questions

Also referred to as SCQA. Situation, Complication, Questions, Answers.
What you saw was the cold start procedure for a completely uninitialized machine -- manually enter a short bootstrap loader of a dozen instructions or so, just enough to load a longer one from whatever I/O device was handy. A lot of machines had this kind of start procedure -- if there's a large row of switches on the front panel, that's probably what they were there for.

(Core memory would retain its contents without power, so if you were absolutely sure nothing could possibly have disturbed that initial bootstrap routine since the last time you toggled it in, it might still be there. But a lab minicomputer of that era, probably didn't have any memory protection at all, so that's a pretty big "if".)
> I find it mildly amusing that this work is being done by mathematicians rather than theoretical physicists.

How so? This is very common. Math and theoretical physics are heavily interdisciplinary, and arguably the distinction between mathematicians and theoretical physicists is not as stark as most people would seem to think. At the highest caliber, the difference between a mathematician who works on physics and a theoretical physicist who works on math is a paper difference.
But none of that matters. You have x number of people, you need y number of tests. Just because it's harder to do doesn't mean you need to do it any less.
We don't save logs of who hits us, but we watch who hits us. It's not bots. But good thinking.
EVMS critical care Covid-19 management protocol [pdf]
NSA next?
As an advocate for science, I'm fine with this. They're going above and beyond to protect workers vs Home Depot or other "necessary" businesses. There needs to be scientific, evidenced-based approach, not some "Obey" approach
That case involved quarantine of individuals, not a generalized shutdown of almost all businesses.
Edtech CEOs peer into the industry’s future
Yes, it's more of an intrastate disagreement with this particular infectious disease.
Yes ESLint didn't exist when I set up this project and I confused it for JSLint.
Show HN: Jhall – A JavaScript Alternative to Dhall
All of them?

I was generally a terrible college student...in general.

I was capable, but I wasn't focused, I just wasn't ready, so I dropped out and managed to wiggle my way into the tech world due to the dot com days.

20 years later I took a coding camp and found myself focused and absolutely enthralled that someone was going to teach me a thing. There were some other older / formerly poor students turned enthusiastic students too.

I wish I could go back to college as I think I'd get so much more out of it now compared to the past.
Ok, I’ll try to send you some stuff this week. Python/Go/Rust is easily doable.
I still doubt about how TPM is durable against attackers.
I enjoyed the recipe scaling abilities of Gourmet: https://thinkle.github.io/gourmet/

You can also filter and search by ingredient, but that might be somewhat simplistic depending on what you had in mind.
> Priced at $18,500, it also costs about half as much as the current average sales price for a new passenger vehicle

Well, it is significantly more limited than most new passenger vehicles, both in terms of how many people/things it can haul and its safety when sharing the road with vehicles that are on the road today.
Elon genuinely seems to have some pretty severe impulse control problems. He’s continuously creating liability & credibility problems for what, internet points?

Let’s say that he’s right, it’s time for factories to open and he genuinely takes every step to protect his workers. And what if a worker gets sick anyways and sues? Could he really convince a jury that he took it seriously, after all the dumb things he’s said about the situation on twitter?

He would’ve been better off not weighing in on the situation before the shut down orders came down. Now that he’s a business owner hoping to re-open he has some stake, but he trashed a lot of his credibility before the shut down for no obvious benefit.
Sorry this was me mixing up JSLint and ESLint
How do you know? Not doubting you, just curious as to how you figure out if a request is from a bot or not.
Same for me for history. I didn't hate it, but I find history much more interesting since high school. A big change for me with respect to history of science and technology was reading Thomas Kuhn's "Structures of Scientific Revolutions".
I completely agree, it depends on your expectations.

With the caveat that it's not a one-way trade-off of "better" vs. "good enough for the expectations". If your customer calls you and says "My industrial CNC controller crashed and ruined a $20k prototype, is this my fault or yours? Here are the logs." and your answer is "the browser was running bad javascript that locked up too many threads for too long so it stopped counting the encoder for 20 ms", they're going to tell you that a servo amplifier has no business doing any of that stuff.

Some devices do need to be on the Internet and should therefore be running general-purpose operating systems. They may need to interact with other devices that run real-time operating systems (or bare metal, like the Teensy). Some IoT devices try to bridge the gap. Knowing and deciding which side you're on is critical.

And I think the best answer to pennypinching on the BOM is to separate your concerns into separate devices/apps. Make the CNC HMI handle the Internet connectivity. Give it one NIC that hooks up to the Wifi, let it run whatever Javascript you want. On a separate NIC, talk whatever flavor of industrial protocol you prefer on the machine. Do not bridge the two. In the servo amp, use a bare-metal/RTOS microcontroller. That device doesn't need to be burdened with Linux, and in fact is made worse by it: Let it be what it is and no more. In 20 years, it should still run reliably, regardless of whatever newfangled holographic VR HMI is loading in motion profiles.
This seems like not a lot more than an ad for an app (free to download then $29-$59 for the upgrade).
Why should it be incumbent on Tesla to suffer the county's mistake? The county can try to enforce it if that's the path they want to take.
What is the absolute number? Eg 27*0 is still 0 (note I'm not suggesting it's actually 0)
This man is a genius. Businesses put food in my stomach not government. Thank god.
GitHub Stars Are Overvalued
> which NASA now hopes can be outfitted to look up instead of down

Ah! Long ago I had a (then) gf who was a Gamma ray astronomer. For part of her PhD she worked at Livermore labs. I couldn't have lunch with her because the section she worked was classified.

I asked her about it and she said that she did astronomy, and there were a lot of amazing gamma ray physicists there, but they were worried that anybody who could build or operate such a telescope could probably turn it to point down, which they very much did not want.

I still wonder if she was pulling my leg.
Yes to all of your "Did you knows". I also have family in the central valley.

If your point is that mega commutes are inversely correlated with income, I agree, but not sure what that has to do with the public health policy coordination by counties during the pandemic.

The epicenter of every major outbreak of this disease is in dense urban areas like the Bay Area, so Alameda county is right to coordinate primarily with neighboring high density counties.
That book elicits extremely strong feelings on both sides of the economic spectrum, expect a lot of poorly explained downvoting from here on downward.
Firing someone if they don't do something is not forcing them. It shouldn't raise to duress in my opinion.
>I think they record whatever HTTP transactions you trigger, so they can be played back when triggered in the replay.

That could be a useful history for circumventing forced usability reductions when a site 'upgrades' but doesn't change the request structure and/or doesn't deny access/EOL a previous API version but just hides the old interface after a makeover.

For example: I would love to have a recording of sessions from the previous version of ESPN's html fantasy football interface with a record of request to see if I could roll my own so to speak.

(ESPN ruined the usability of the site by rewriting it in some Javascript framework hoping to annoy users into app conversions last year.)
And there's many good cars too (Corolla, Civic, etc) that you can get around the same price here in the US...
The other major uses of JavaScript were hover-over-button effects, and scrolling text in the status bar
Ask HN: Evidence based nootropics book recommendations?
I am looking for an evidence-based book on nootropics, the different categories of smart drugs, how they work, and their history.

Unsure where to start as most of the books in my searches lack depth and read like a self-help book.

Thank you in advance
A smart crawler.
Everyone expects startup pitches to be over-inflated and over-confident. Because something is wrong (e.g, the entrepreneur is dispassionate) if they aren't. Which sets up this "they have to be full of themselves, but it's meaningless and no measure of their true ability" situation. It's odd.
Gandhi was brown, and his policy of civil disobedience was essentially based on the premise that a government only derives its legitimacy from the will of the people to be governed by it. Leading to the act of mass civil disobedience.
Depends on what you think he’s performatively shrugging about, profits or risks to his workers. The context makes it pretty clear that they were talking about legal risks to the workers, while you’re referencing profits.
The OEMs website has much better detail and pictures [1].

[1] https://electrameccanica.com/
Its a common experience, but prior to earned recognition, signaling priority of science over art is trope on the culture.
The Guaranteed Optimization Clause of the Macro-Writer's Bill of Rights
I cover this in my article titled "$HYPED_TECHNOLOGY considered harmful".
I'd say the "bytes" being transferred are very different.

Netflix has a (relatively) small number of large content pieces, and a CDN node would hold the hottest items.

IA has 430 billion individual pieces of data, on average much smaller than a piece of Netflix content.

So each "byte" transferred from IA is "more work" to produce, and less likely to come from some kind of cache.
That's a Tango.

Apparently Sergey Brin had one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commuter_Cars_Tango
If threats to economic well being counted as a bodily threat, US labor laws would look very different than they do today.
Howard Roarke might disagree.
I'm a big fan of that series, mostly because we agree on just about everything. Especially how people tend to get carried away with 'the 4% rule', which is more than a rule-of-thumb than anything.

The thing that's most different about my strategy is that it doesn't have a 'memory' of what your past retirement income was. Put simply, you retire every 3 months. A lot of folks get nervous when I say this but in practice, this is in fact how most people behave.

For example, consider the case of someone who unfortunately retired just before the COVID crash. Strategies that have a 'memory' intrinsically offer some assurance that you'll probably weather the downturn without decreasing your lifestyle very much. In practice, most folks will 'start over' their retirement just to be safe and reset the memory of their prior payments. In my opinion, if you're not going to trust the assurances of a given strategy then what good is it?

Another thing that sets my strategy apart is that it focuses on capital depletion. Most strategies don't have any sort of annuity component and this typically resorts in a binary outcome near the end of the investment horizon -- you're either filthy rich or you went bankrupt years ago (both of these are bad outcomes for me). My strategy is constantly readjusting itself so that you exhaust your savings around 100 years old (or whatever age you set the formula to). This results in better overall effective utilization of savings.

I could go on but those are the two biggest things.
>we need strictly targeted and laser focused protections for the at-risk population

Exactly. And if we had been prepared with enough testing capability and protective equipment, that would have been the way to go. But we were not prepared. So we had to go with plan B. The US is not good at health care. There are consequences for that.
Reserved one :)
30 years later with Hubble still in service, I think I definitely would have taken the 3m mirror(which is >50% bigger than a 2.4m mirror). Couple that with the fact that despite all the cost savings, Hubble's mirror was famously flawed for the first 3 years of its life and required special missions and attachments to fix the problem.
Autonomous System. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_system_(Internet)

An AS is an entity significant enough to be reasoned about at the BGP level.
Hey HN!

I've been looking at tools like dhall[0] over the past week to create more maintainable complex configuration files, and avoid repeating myself.

In any sufficiently sophisticated setup (kubernetes, the serverless framework, in-house tools) I find that configuration files can begin to grow out of control and become a maintenance nightmare, and custom tooling invariable emerges. I was looking into adding Dhall to our build pipeline to drastically shrink our configuration files, but encountered a few problems:

1. Everybody would have to learn dhall, which adds cognitive overhead to the engineering team

2. Installing dhall is an exceptionally involved procedure in our CI/CD pipeline, whereas we're already using JavaScript

So after considering how best to design a JavaScript-esque DSL and parse it without too much overhead, I figured that just loading in standard CommonJS code at runtime would be significantly easier.

I know it's a bit small in scope for a Show HN entry, but I'm certainly getting a lot of use out of it and wanted to share.

I'm always happy to hear constructive criticism and other thoughts on this!

---
0: https://dhall-lang.org/
I have struggled with sleep my whole life. I can't sleep, I'm a light sleeper and I almost always wake up tired. Not long ago I started making massive changes to help myself sleep. I get up early, I don't eat late and no screens a few hours before bed and I'm good. If I'm worried about things, I write out a list on paper so "I won't forget about them".

If I exercise I get better sleep, if I eat a good diet I get better sleep.

Not sure we need an app for sleep. It kinda feels like a solution looking for a problem.
Not that this affects what you're saying and it doesn't necessarily make for a practical srgument, but it sprang to mind.

Do car parts in the supply chain go bad? What about livestock? Like can you literally just keep cattle and pigs and chicken alive longer if demand drops short term?
Most of wikimedia's budget goes towards non-wikipedia related expenses: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/12...
I think you are missing the statistical point I and others are making. If the disease was introduced in a meaningful way in December/January it would be a statistical certainty we would see signs of it (such as nursing homes having huge waves of deaths or total mortality in subregions surging).

I'm not sure what your counterclaim is? There are no samples in America tested from that time period that would show that there was Covid nor is there any statistical evidence that would suggest there was Covid.
Stamina: Scalable Deep Learning Approach for Malware Classification [pdf]