skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> why we haven't openly branded certain members of congress and the current administration traitors and dealt with them appropriately is beyond me.

What is "appropriate" for "traitors"? Execution? Prison? Being stripped of their rights, including the right to participate in the democratic process?

You see, the irony is that alleging vague subversive activity from your political enemies and then dealing with the "traitors" like this subverts the republic, turning it into a new oligarchy. It's a very banana-republic suggestion.
"This is a major failure of free and open source"

I agree. So many developers would simply like to sell their open source product so customers can run the product themsleves. It's simply impossible.

It's ironic that so many SaaS businesses are built on open source - a model that gives users even less control.

My recommendation is for developers to consider the 'source-only' option: you charge customers for your product and provide the source code. The code is not open source, but it still gives your customer flexibility to adapt the product to fit their needs.

There are successful examples of independent developers making a full-time living using this model, some even publish their source code on GitHub but rely on the honesty of their customers to not redistribute the code (examples include Kirby CMS and Craft CMS).

By the way, the GNU Project (supported by the Free Software Foundation) has never updated their advice on selling open source software to reflect reality. They still advise developers to charge for support or documentation (deeply unpopular with developers and customers). Or charging for distribution of software. This might have made sense in an era of software CDs and dial-up internet but make no sense in a era of broadband and GitHub:

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html
Have you studied the actions of the Irish government in the decades after independence? The "economic war" with Britain caused economic collapse of it's 'merchant class' and it was undertaken to directly support tenant farmers.
My answer to that would be down to whether you're judging yourself (imposter syndrome and self worth and competency) or judging the amount you don't know (objective assessment of the field and what's left to learn).

For those not familiar with Dunning-Kruger, it's the cognitive bias where people overestimate their ability when they have little knowledge. But on the flip side, the more knowledge you have, you can end up underestimating your ability. Which, in this case, can look like imposter syndrome.
I mean, at least they allow sideloading at all, which is more than can be said for that other App Store ecosystem. Still hoping the EU will force Apple to allow sideloading on iPhones, but I’m not super optimistic.
I don't see how putting Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon under the control of the US executive branch would solve the problems of accountability and them needing to deal with the laws of multiple nation states.

If one wants to subject these corporations to regulations, than it seems one should propose regulations. Putting them under the direct purview of a government does not magically make them start working in the best interest of the people (of which nation?). Nor does it mean that they are automatically accountable; see for example the NSA if you want examples predating the current administration.
As an expert witness, I would be expected to present evidence that the code is wrong in a way that produces scientifically-invalid output. If instead I produced a bunch of nonsense about how the code would be in my opinion more efficient if it ran on multiple cores, that would be strong evidence that I failed in my task and was blowing smoke to cover it up.
Absolutely true. You have to decide where your priorities are, and what you’re willing to sacrifice.

My point was the simpler one that having kids in of itself doesn’t hold you back.
Until sufficient evidence is provided supporting one way or the other, we do not know whether our current understanding of physics is sufficient for understanding consciousness. You are claiming that it can't, so you now have a burden of proof which you, at the moment, cannot fulfill, and therefore your claim is unjustified.
The thermostat he describes is not stateless, the key phrase is "When the temperature is too high by some amount" (emphasis mine) -- the thermostat will turn on outside a particular range.

This matches my understanding of a simple thermostat, is it wrong?
they need to defer to the experts of software development.

I, as a software engineer, wouldn't try to design an epidemic model, i would defer to experts. Epidemic experts shouldn't be writing the implementation of their model, they should defer to the experts.

Also,
"It’s you, the software engineering community, that is responsible for tools like C++ that look as if they were designed for shooting yourself in the foot. It’s also you, the software engineering community, that has made no effort to warn the non-expert public of the dangers of these tools"

that's a bit much. if someone buys a lathe, gets it home, flips the switch and tears off an arm are machinists to blame?
I'd like to point out I've met a lot of software engineers that subscribe to two in reverse. "This domain area of expertise is much easier than programming, ergo I am qualified to solve it."
While imposter syndrome might be uncomfortable, I think its generally trait that helps someone become a good developer.
By realizing you don't know everything you are more inclined to continually improve your knowledge.

I think teaching and writing are also good ways of getting over it. Once you explain a concept to people you will know you don't have gaps in your knowledge to arrive at a working understanding.

I think of it as a feeling everyone feels at some point if they care about doing a good job. If you never feel it, you are probably playing it too safe and aren't growing as fast as you could be as a result.
That's a nice fantasy world you live in.

In reality the "continuous maintenance" you tout is continually deferred, kicking the can down the road (no pun intended). The Volcker Alliance estimated that we have a total of over $1 trillion in deferred maintenance as of last November [1]. The Department of Interior alone quoted $16.4 billion in deferred maintenance on their infrastructure at the end of 2018 [2], which is about 80% of their annual budget [3]. The infrastructure of cities, states, and other federal departments dwarfs that of DoI.

[1] https://www.volckeralliance.org/sites/default/files/attachme...

[2] https://www.doi.gov/ocl/deferred-maintenance-backlog

[3] https://www.doi.gov/sites/doi.gov/files/uploads/fy2020_bib_a...
Are the Hong Kong protests still happening? Or did everyone stay at home during the pandemic?

It looks like the situation is now "punchup in the legislature, but everyone is wearing facemasks": https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/3084822...
Does that have feature parity with DjangoREST?
My brother made an app to help people remember to wash their hands when they get home. Simple. Free. No ads. Very minimal. Tracks location locally but doesn't collect it or make any network calls. Google denied him from publishing to the app store until he removed all references to Coronavirus or COVID-19.

I only downloaded it because he's my brother but I now realize how helpful it is and it's frustrating that potentially helpful apps are getting banned when they're not even attempting to profit.
So I spent a couple of months and developed a little tool called WhatsApp (2009)
That same "sinister genius" has and is still playing out in our elections right now.
US 5G manufacturers are already screwed due to US spectrum allocation, according to this DoD report.

https://media.defense.gov/2019/Apr/03/2002109302/-1/-1/0/DIB...

TLDR: US spectrum allocation forces US 5G suppliers to design products primarily for the mmWave portion of the spectrum, which suffers from more technical problems such than the sub-6 GHz spectrum that Chinese products are using. The reason why the US didn't allocate more sub-6 GHz spectrum is because those frequencies are used by the US military.
How are app stores on Android technically hindered? I thought except the additional step for installing them, there is no difference in ability?
Hmm... Well deserved, or a poor security choice for Android? The vulnerability appears to be that any app can overwrite an APK downloaded to external storage with a FileObserver. How is that not pathologically bad security on Android's part?

> Any app with the WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permission can substitute the APK immediately after the download is completed and the fingerprint is verified. This is easily done using a FileObserver. The Fortnite Installer will proceed to install the substituted (fake) APK.
> It really is just a job.

I'm not seeing the problem with that. You'll never have full freedom to work on whatever you like and get paid for it.

Seems to me the salaried job approach will give the developer less freedom compared to the patronage model, as you say, but it also has advantages. It introduces corporate/organisational resources, so you won't have to personally fund your test server, and hopefully there will be competent management, etc. In practice I imagine it means better job security too, and at the risk of being circular, it's just more likely to happen and to pay you properly.

> the dev will only get paid to work on aspects that advances the employing corporation's interests

True, but compared to the work just never happening, that's still a good thing.

If you instead rely on patrons, you're still beholden to someone else's interests. This takes us back to my first point: you can never have total freedom to work on what you want, and get paid for it.
> Is it nothing more than mass, charge etc. or is it something else?

It's more like chairs, beds, phones, cars and people. Consciousness is emergent from the environment. We learn to interpret visual stimulus by seeing, we learn to interpret sound by hearing, we learn how to relate to the world by being in the world and having consequences to our actions. Our brains grow on the rich sensations they receive from the body, world and the other people. Looking for the mystery of consciousness inside the brain is a mistake, we should look at the whole game instead. The brain is just doing the learning and acting part, but the game is much more.
I will personally pay for a professional review of the next model the British government uses to guide lockdowns. Cost problem solved.
A Big Data Look at the Covid-19 Economy Finds It’s Bad but Not All Bad
This screencap just about sums it up: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EVMnSzMUYAMW4n8?format=jpg

It's not often you see an image and immediately think "yep, that'll be in some history book in short order". Just utterly divorced and a sign of a _very_ healthy society...

If you can't see it: An image with "Dow's Best Week Since 1938" on a graphic while breaking news declares "More than 16 M Americans have lost jobs in 3 weeks"
> Any such model ought to have been independently reviewed before it is ever used for real policy decisions. Policy analysis is awash in models but no one ever really checks them. Going forward, health policy makers should ask for and disclose independent validation of any model before using its results to make recommendations of any consequence.

That's ignoring the time-limited nature of a virus response. "No decision" is itself a decision. Delay has a real cost, and using a potentially imperfect model is simply using the best information at hand.

I think everyone would agree that the ideal is to have well-documented, thoroughly-tested, easy-to-use, and bulletproof models to inform public response to every emergency. However, those models can't be built instantly, and that kind of bulletproofing is not directly relevant to the day-to-day research work aided by such models.

Adding research capacity to ensure that governments have a stable of well-researched, thoroughly-vetted models for emergencies would be a great thing, but it would also be quite expensive. Keeping any single model up to spec might be the job of 1FTE (so an additional ~$150k/grant/yr -- large for a research budget but small for a government), but that would have to be multiplied by every area where the government might possibly want research-informed decisionmaking on short notice.

> Even if the documentation, coding, and testing problems were fixed, the model logic is fatally flawed, which is evidenced by its poor forecasting performance.

That sounds like a great scientific criticism! Model validation is the cornerstone of research on computer models of things, and finding a poor forecast opens the door to many great research questions.

But without that further research, "poor performance" sounds a (loud) note of caution, but isn't necessarily fatal. The leading-order problem is to understand why the model performed poorly: was it improperly calibrated with information known at the time (such as if the virus behaves differently than assumed)? Was there some out-of-sample feature of the forecast that the model would not expect to do well on (e.g., low death rates in an open society because everything was shut down for severe weather anyway?) Is an overall trend correct but the timing in error?

"Flawed," I think, can be easily shown, and this should probably be expected in a research model. "Fatally flawed," however, is a stronger claim that must pass a greater burden of proof.
AGH omg I've needed this. I'm connecting a few Digimesh nodes to Arduinos, Macs, and RPIs. Sometimes I just need to reproduce a problem by sending the raw transmission again a few times. I've used minicom, but it's a "little too much" tool for the job.

On OSX I haven't been able to get screen to work properly, not sure why; I've just used minicom.
I'm not familiar with website development to know whether you're being sarcastic or not. Is it actually a good thing?
As long as you ignore minorities and/or non-straight people.
1. pgAdmin
2. DBeaver
3. Navicat
4. DataGrip
5. OmniDB

This article breaks down the pros and cons, features, and pricing for each of the top PostgreSQL GUI tools: https://scalegrid.io/blog/which-is-the-best-postgresql-gui-2...
Despite being classless, I still got a Flash of Unstyled Content FOUC) when I load one of the themed pages on Firefox for Android (technically Fennec F-Droid).

So classless does not mean lightweight, perhaps?
I never really understood universal basic income until this crisis. Many people really need this basic income now. So you could print money and give it to them, but ideally I guess you need to replace that money from the tax base. But it would be kind of silly (and inefficient) to give out a basic income to everybody and then ask for it back from the poor people who need it. So the only way it works is if you tax the rich people and then give everyone a basic income -- however the basic income that rich people get would necessarily have to be less than the money they paid in taxes to pay for it. So... essentially you are taking money from rich people and handing it to poor people.

I mean, I can understand why rich people would be against this idea. The whole thing about being rich is that you can take a few dollars from everybody and get rich. But the reverse could be quite painful. Take a whole whack of dollars and give a few dollars to everybody. It appears to break the "get rich" thing... Until you realise that poor people will spend that money (i.e. give it back to the rich people). Ford hired private investigators to make sure the people he was paying minimum wage to were going to spend it. Ford was a smart guy (Nice guy?? No idea, but definitely smart).

I really think that if you want fly the idea of rich people funding the improvement of society, you need to link it back to them getting richer. Otherwise, without a revolution, I don't think you're going to get anywhere. They can spend quite a few dollars lobbying government before they get anywhere close to spending what they would need to spend to improve society.
Yes it is, March was the low point for the markets. They're up pretty big this quarter.
I think actually teaching people is a great way of getting mastery at something. If you teach people and they get good results you can be confidant you know enough about the subject.
USPS has pensions covered! :-/ though that is 0 taxpayer dollars.
In America hospitals and emergency rooms are required to treat you.
Dual licensing: for an open source library that some businesses will want to distribute with their closed source product, use GPL 2 which doesn't allow that. Then businesses will pay for a commerical license from you that does allow it.

It doesn't affect open source users; though Stallman doesn't like it. Projects using this kind of idea are berkleyDB and ghostscript.
Here is the first study[0] which correctly looked at the combination of HCQ with zinc sulfate ionophore, as per the original theory, which originated from a Dutch researcher who predicted the mechanism by which HCQ was shown to be in vitro effective against SARS and/or MERS. Further, this is the first study I've seen which gave the trial drugs early as recommended based on the mechanism of action.

HCQ cocktail was floating around the internet long before Trump tweeted about it and the media politicized the treatment by bending over backwards to prove Trump wrong, even at the possible expense of passing up a promising treatment.

Every single study before this linked NYU study either administered HCQ alone, and/or waited until patients were critical - but none of that stopped the smugness and eagerness with which the trials were reported on as proof that HCQ doesn't work.

If literally anyone other than Trump mentioned the drug in the public eye it would have been correctly treated as a promising avenue - but because it's even vaguely associated with Trump suddenly everyone wants to see it fail.

This HCQ fiasco is a manifestation of further anti-right bias and the fact that this behavior is not just implicitly condoned, but eagerly supported and simultaneously denied by the majority media and majority of commenters online makes it very difficult to have a presence as an independent on the internet. The bottom line is that we have a cheap, safe drug, in common use for decades, with a direct known and proven (in vitro and not in vivo) mechanism, and people are content to ignore all of this or worse, embellish the dangers and downplay the efficacy, just to stick it to Trump. The collective pettiness is unbelievable.

0. https://news.yahoo.com/zinc-hydroxychloroquine-found-effecti...
I wonder why Apple can’t treat apps the same way they treat charging cables? The Apple approved cables are usually a bit more money but I’m willing to pay a few extra bucks because Apple provides a valuable service to me - I know the cable is much less likely to fry my device. Likewise I’d be willing to pay an extra dollar or two for an app that jumped through all of Apple’s hoops.
> the model logic is fatally flawed, which is evidenced by its poor forecasting performance.

Where's the proof the model is flawed? The criticism goes both ways, if on one side the model does not have documentation, it's also fair to say that if someone claims it's "fatally flawed" they need to point out in the code where the issues are.
It's VERY hard to make money with Google AdSense types of programs. The volume of traffic you need is so high that if you're there, it probably "pays" to sell the ads yourself and keep all the $$$. But that's hella difficult.

Almost all news organizations -- they're not bloggers but chances are they're using blogging software (mostly WordPress) -- have figured this out. And they're still not making enough money from advertising. Hence subscriptions. Bloggers can go this route directly with https://substack.com.

Google-owned YouTube's willingness to compensate those who make popular videos has fueled that service's growth and helped it draw a young audience.

The fact that Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have no way of "paying" its top performers, as it were, is interesting. You get paid in eyeballs. In exposure. Since the pay for blogs is usually non-existent, there's some value in the "likes," and most people who envision making money off of their social-media/internet presence need to get a side hustle to their side hustle -- a product they can make and sell.
The rest of the blog goes over tons of solutions, just glance and this is obvious.
I work in the industry (yes, the whole debacle has been fairly entertaining).

From what I've heard, Neumann was 100% convinced that the 16Bn financing round was a sure thing (and the rapid growth was how he positioned himself for it). I don't know whether he meant to ride off the sunset, or (as our ceo put it), rely on the fact that even if the business is unsustainable, tens of billions of cash means that you won't go bankrupt for a long time.
The model is way more granular than that. Have you read it?
From looking at the comments here, it looks like it's very hard to make a living with a large open source project, especially if that project is an end-user application.

Most of the open-source code that I use are small, limited-scope libraries. These appear to come from someone who wrote the library as part of a larger project; and usually from someone experienced enough to make the library "good."

Usually the limited-scope libraries solve a well-defined common problem that many applications need; instead of a unique tool that someone just wants to give away for free.

Alternatively, there's frameworks like Spring that come from consulting companies. These frameworks only become valuable with lots of external users, so it's in Pivitol's best interests to sponsor their framework, which they also happen to be very good at using to write custom applications for paying customers.
IMHO web applications took off because developers learned pretty fast how useful "I can update any time without user consent" is, especially when your software is a buggy mess (or a "MVP" if you like buzzwords) and you need to update every five minutes.
Look, the software engineering community has switched to Rust by now. If you're still using C++, that's your problem. Don't blame us.
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This is similar to my favorite silly theory about dogs. There is only one dog. Every dog you meet is the same dog. Whenever the dog dies, it is re-incarnated as another dog somewhere and somewhen.
Interesting. Do you know if there are rules regarding the POTS line the fax machine is connected to? Surely there are rural areas where the POTS network is just sort of "emulated" by internet connections to the rest of the country/world?
There are loads of people who don’t like Shakespeare (possibly due to being forced to read his plays in school) and that’s fine. Everyone is entitled to their opinion of him.

What is much harder to argue against is his influence on the English language. Shakespeare introduced, into everyday use, a monumental staggering number of words, phrases, idioms, metaphors, and ideas. And that’s just the text of his work. His influence on the institution of theatre and its role in the development of actors is equally staggering.

The comparison with Newton (and his influences on mathematics and physics) is apt.
That has changed somewhat recently (android O I believe?). Now, when an app tries to start an installation, Android will bring you to that app's setting page where you can toggle an option "Allow this app to install other apps" or something along those lines. It's a lot more straightforward than it used to be.

That said, auto-updates are still not possible without root access, I believe.