skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Swing-state Republicans warn Trump’s reelection is on shaky ground
The engineers at Google, YouTube, get al are no more qualified to gatekeep COVID information than any other layman. People are only rooting for this censorship because at the moment it agrees with their politics.

Case in point: for multiple periods of time the WHO and CDC were in conflict regarding mask advice. YouTube's official policy was to remove anything that contradicted WHO guidelines. Should they be dictating whether the CDC or the WHO is more credible?

Do we really want tech bros at FAANG to have that kind of power?
Holopix50k: A New Benchmark for Image Super-Resolution and Depth Estimation
The quickest decision is random number generation. Should people go with that? Governments across the world had loads and loads of time.

> 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.

If you have a once in a century crisis, and still are thinking about saving some millions, while being sure your crisis response will be above billions, your policy is already flawed and not much can be done to help you.
You're asking a scientific question. To answer it you'd need to do difficult things like read scientific papers, understand epidemiology well enough to determine whether their models made sense, check their past outputs against real epidemic outcomes (accounting for the fact that national policy changes really matter). In short, you'd have to do exactly what the scientific community does all day, not just glance at some software and make loud claims.

This is much more difficult than reading a Git issue tracker, so obviously the critics have nothing to offer us here.
These types of stylesheets are sometimes referred to as Base Stylesheets.

In practice, I've found its good to roll your own at some point, so you don't have to spend time undoing someone elses.
Svelte, why so much hype?
When I access Google News, I get it in Norwegian, with news from Norway, even though I live in Denmark (they don't support Danish news). I use a browser with English language settings. I'm interested in getting world news, not something country specific.
It's definitely not swampy, its quite dry. I looked up rainfall levels and its also not an arid climate like I thought. Much of the rainfall is concentrated in large storms, it doesn't rain very often. Much of the local vegetation is drought tolerant, succulent and cactus.

Houston is swampy because of the coast. Austin is dry and not very humid, like Dallas. The wind often comes from the deserts out west.
Dividends would have been taxed. “Stock buy-backs are just...” leaves a lot out, enough that one might wonder if it were intentional.
Yes! I’ve heard of the “plus-minus-equal” learning concept. You need someone with more knowledge to learn from (your plus), someone at the same knowledge to work through problems with together (your equal), and then someone to teach (your minus) so that you can be sure you’ve truly mastered the material.
IMO land is a horrible investment to sit on, they have acquisition costs, you have to pay annual rates to hold them, they're non revenue generating that as a result can't be claimed as a tax deduction (in Australia at least). They've also been depreciating in value lately, not a great short-term investment.

Better to invest into the Stock Market index until another opportunity opens up.
Laughable nonsense, and especially glib when there are lives on the line due to the question of competence/lack of it.

One thing I'm surprised not to have seen yet - as a MSc Geographic Information Science grad - is criticism of the methdology from a GI science aspect. And the question that I have is: where is the proof that this model's results are in any way representative of reality? Surely Professor Ferguson - before releasing results that have the potential to turn economies upside down, and with thousands of lives at stake - would have run this against some real world data to validate the model. Or not? If not, why should we listen to anything he says ever again?
Portability of random number generation in C++ is also described in this blog post: http://anadoxin.org/blog/c-shooting-yourself-in-the-foot-4.h...
This has downstream implications for global stability. Much of that money comes from Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia, who need investment returns to replace dwindling oil revenues. Revenues which prop up an extremely generous entitlements system that has kept the royal family in power.
That is a reasonable problem statement and proposed solution, but the problems with software engineering go very deep. That is why so many software projects fail outright. Just as we acknowledge that aviation engineering has different risks and constraints from basic tool building so we all need to understand that at least for now and likely for some time software development will be inherently messy and risky for all who dare it.
Are you sure your idea of fairness is right?

Consider Mongolia, perhaps they want to match EU employment standards but can't afford do. What are they suppose to do?

Suppose a democracy decided on different employment standards, should EU ban imports from US due to EU having higher standards of employee and environmental protection? How big does the difference have to be?

Does your free trade "fairness" account for the advantages US gets from being a global center of finance?

For disadvantages Vietnam has from being a recent colony and having a devastating war?

Does a country with loads of natural resources, or elderly population, or struck by natural disaster change the calculus?

Is this a robust rule you would like to see implemented, or is it just justifying current politics?
I chuckled when I saw the author of this article. Many years ago I was a scientist (PhD student) writing code in Python, but wanted to use features in Mathematica like symbolic integration. Turns out Mathematica has a C API that lets you send Math expressions to it and evaluate them. I wrote a clunky Python interface and shared it with Konrad Hinsen, who looked at it and suggested an elegant recursive object representation of Math objects in Python that led to automatic conversion between Python and Mathematica, massively simplifying the code and making it more elegant. I got slightly better at software engineering that day.
If you like appstores you have to like censorship as well. Welcome to the future of the World Not so Wide Web
I think it's a backwards-compatibility thing. Browsers take BC extremely seriously, even when it comes to UX. Changing the unstyled look of different elements could break a legacy site that didn't give those its own styles.
So for the crime of treason, you advocate death — or at least five-year prison sentences with $10,000+ fines — for various not-explicitly-identified Trump administration members. That's cool and edgy, I guess. But, well....

It's almost like our Constitution spells out how "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort." https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articleiii

It's almost like James Madison knew from experience there'd be someone who would float this type of proposal, and so codified a rebuke into the supreme law of the land, some 200 years in advance.

(Postscript. The obvious next step is for you to change your mind and stop saying these random members are committing oligarchycrimes and say instead that Trump himself is giving "aid and comfort" to our enemies in Russia. I'm sure there's some lovely jurisprudence to be had getting that laughed out of the courts and wish you the best of luck.)
It doesn't seem like fraud when they are still delivering an actual pizza; that's basically just leveraging a sale. It becomes more dubious when they aren't delivering the finished good.
While I appreciate the sentiment, we can probably both see why one person offering to solve the problem for one study isn't a solution to the systemic problem.

Private funding poses all sorts of issues. Surmountable issues, but still issues once individuals are paying for reviews at scale.
Well, even if, the tool doesn't come with a warning. Real-life tools come with them.

(The question is, what kind of warning would be useful on a programming language? C/C++ perhaps should come with a booklet about pointers, but other than that, I can't think of any but one: "WARNING: this is a tool for extreme clarification of thought; if you're confused about your subject matter, your project will produce wrong results. As you write code, take steps to verify your understanding of your problem domain.")

More importantly, our industry is spending a lot of time and marketing money on convincing that everyone can code, that it's just a matter of picking up a JavaScript tutorial and pressing F12 in the browser, and you too are now a software developer. These two views are in direct opposition to each other.
> that's some free market bubble nonsense

You're asking to understand a different perspective. I'm trying to offer that perspective.

> most people can't "just move" and just "pick another uni"

No, but they can weigh the cost of living in e.g. Manhattan versus Queens versus upstate. And they can weigh the cost ex ante of a private university versus community college.

Housing and education have high lock-in. But there is a degree of competition and choice with respect to incurring their costs. That doesn't exist with taxes, which makes some people more cautious about them.
Another one here: https://www.cssbed.com https://github.com/ubershmekel/cssbed
The defaults inherit, so changes to the default made by a browser (or indeed a browser user) can cascade through to other sites.

Probably part of this CSS is something like reboot or reset which will try to paper over the remaining differences between different browsers, I think the browsers probably are converging in that regard but IE11 and backwards compatibility still make them necessary.
There has never been a better time to launch a digital product
if you had a large detached home in my city neighborhood, yes, it would be far more valuable. it wouldn't be more valuable than all the rowhouses you could have fit on the same lot though.
Eh, having children is kind of your literal biologic imperative. Pushing my blood on for another generation, having some sort of legacy and living on in people's memories postmortem are all things I value. Any random company that would drop me like a sack of potatoes if they needed to for whatever reason comes second to family for me, and I don't even have kids.

That being said, the engineers I know who have kids use it in one of two ways. They either try to use it as leverage for a better WLB to spend more time with their families (or, if they're not the world's best parent, to take a vacation under the guise of caring deeply for their kid), OR they go full on cut-throat sociopath career mode to enable the best life (financially) that they can for their family. Then there's the wildcard option: company doesn't care at all about your new priorities and nothing changes. That's when you brush up your resume and try to find somewhere with a management team made of human beings instead of lizard people (or the aforementioned career sociopaths).
Christopher Alexander arrived at a similar conclusion, in his later works, albeit from a radically different direction.
Glitches in A.P. Tests Online Add to Students' Worries
In other news, people also think they’re better drivers than their neighbors, have smarter children then their neighbors, and are better looking than their neighbors.

It’s a well-known bias: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Wobegon#The_Lake_Wobegon_...
Simple and Powerful UDFs for SQL stream processing
I'm trying to be charitable on this code base issue, and the institutions will need to accept they need to be able to bear more scrutiny on the inputs to policy recommendations.

Both R and Python are taught in highschool and undergraduate courses for scientific data analysis. Ferguson and other scientists did not need software engineers. A free co-op student, or to have spent the three weeks learning a language that met the needs of the level of abstraction he was working at would have sufficed.

The culture that enables that code as described to be acceptable for policymaking is one that intentionally produces complex black boxes that obfuscate risk and attribution, and to launder decision accountability through technology. I've seen this in other institutional code as well.

However, while the policy recommendations that resulted from his model may (or may not) have saved tens of thousands of lives, it did so at the risk of losing the credibility to do it again.

Deflecting blame to nebulous software engineers is disingenuous and serves mainly to exacerbate the suspicions of reasonable people, and further polarize those most harmed by the policy response.
Good software development is missing from most academic promotion tracks. "Research Software Engineers" are a recently new thing, which is an admission that academics are not very good at software engineering and supports the notion that they can't reasonably be expected to be experts in two disciplines.

There is a large amount of software being written by non-software engineers (most of it is Excel) so I think it's probably constructive to say that the solution lies elsewhere other than expecting academics to become software engineers. If that sort of requirement is in place it would be hard to argue against software engineering being a chartered engineering discipline with liabilities and qualifications which would be very disruptive to a lot of the industry.

It is worth remembering that academic code sharing is rare in and of itself. This reaction is likely to cause other academics to shy away from publishing their code. Perhaps giving them an opportunity to make their mistakes public so that more skilled engineers could help before the credibility of their results is used to justify drastic government policies would be better?
Do I think I’m better at social distancing than my neighbors? Yes. But when I’m asked to rate my neighbors, I immediately think of the one neighbor I always see out socializing on the street. I don’t think of all the neighbors I never see, presumably because they’re hiding out at home. A form of availability bias is coloring my perceptions here.
I disagree, I don't think payer-side things are why healthcare is expensive, but payee-side things (hospitals, pharmacy benefit managers, docs, and the choices that flow from them) + obesity/T2D. I think this is pretty clear from where the money goes and why people in the US need so much healthcare in the first place, and that hamming about insurance is 95% a canard.

If you think you can replicate the healthcare success of [pick your model country] without also replicating their obesity rates, doctors salaries, amount of testing and prescriptions, etc, you will find that who pays for it all is the least of your concerns. As Americans consider it, we probably have too much "healthcare", not too little.

Others have spent far more time than me on this if you're interested: https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2020/01/31/i-created-a-pr...
Having gone through a PhD program myself, this smacks of truth.

In the PhD program I went through, it was predominantly populated by foreign students and Americans whose parents paid for their undergrad (like me). Unlike in the United States, foreign college graduates typically don't have a massive amount of debt to pay off. When you graduate college and owe $35-120k in student loans, deciding between "lets get a job with actual pay" versus "lets make essentially no money for another 4-8 years" is a very easy question to answer, and it doesn't favor going to grad school.

If you're American, your options are (1) very cheap undergrad, which makes it more difficult to go to grad school, (2) large amounts of debt, which makes it infeasible to go to grad school, or (3) have had your undergrad paid for, which is inaccessible to most.
No, your analogy is definitely the most ridiculous thing here.
Same issue at 120 Hz, the drone had no chance against the wind. Confused me up until reading your comment.

Works fine after setting refresh rate to 60 Hz. (Btw, amazing how bad scrolling looks at 60 Hz after getting used to 120 Hz! Never noticed it before nor did I think it could matter...)
BBs are a way for companies to return money to investors when they don't know what else to do with their cash.

That’s called a “dividend”. A dividend is taxed, however. I’ll leave the rest as an exercise for the reader.

What you want to do is create an artificial incentive for not returning the capital, which will lead to its suboptimal allocation.

I truly don’t know what to make of this comment. On the one hand, we are all being mansplained on how stock buy-backs works, yet not one mention of the word “dividend”.
If it's just modifying a string literal I suspect most would just search for that string and have little trouble even if the work is outsourced. Perhaps within a certain set of requirements there are modifications you could ask for that are not trivial and could be done in fifteen minutes but I think this is pretty hard in the general case and depends a lot on code quality.
For real? Now I understand.
Nowadays there is Aurora Droid that solves the curation question:

Aurora Droid supports F-Droid-like repos, you can have multiple selected, and they may include proprietary applications.

All usual issues with Android's security getting in the way still applies though.

Overall Aurora Droid is still miles away from a "proper" store, because there is no payment, there is no user feedback (so apps are still ordered by last updated or name...), and I don't think the author plans on adding such features (Because it also requires backend work). That's still a nice update to F-Droid original app.
Declarative shell scripting using Rust native bindings
This phrase is a pejorative for Communists; it is more or less equivalent to the term 'commies' in English.

EDIT: Please don't downvote me for contributing relevant facts to the discussion. I do not support censorship.
https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novdec-2015/bloom-and...

>What, then, is the missing piece? A major factor that has not received sufficient attention is the role of public policy. Throughout most of the country’s history, American government at all levels has pursued policies designed to preserve local control of businesses and to check the tendency of a few dominant cities to monopolize power over the rest of the country. These efforts moved to the federal level beginning in the late nineteenth century and reached a climax of enforcement in the 1960s and ’70s. Yet starting shortly thereafter, each of these policy levers were flipped, one after the other, in the opposite direction, usually in the guise of “deregulation.” Understanding this history, largely forgotten in our own time, is essential to turning the problem of inequality around.

...

>Sometimes referred to by its supporters as “the Magna Carta of Small Business,” Robinson-Patman prevented the formation of chain stores even remotely approaching the scale and power of today’s Walmart or Amazon by cracking down on such practices as selling items below cost (a practice known as “loss leading”). The legislation also prohibited the chains from using their market power to extract price concessions from their suppliers, Similarly, the Miller-Tydings Act, enacted by Congress in 1937, put a floor on retail discounting, thereby ensuring that large chains headquartered in distant cities didn’t come to dominate the economies of local communities. This did not prevent innovation in retailing, such as the emergence of brand-spanking-new supermarkets to replace small-scale butcher shops and green grocers. But into the 1960s, these and similar laws would ensure that no supermarket chain would control more than about 7 percent of any local market.
This is an outcome most startups pray they are lucky enough to see.
Good Lord.

>> A more accurate portrayal of the situation

By which measure? Because:

>> Ireland of the time was a state

No, no it was not, it was under direct rule of Westmminster as part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain & Ireland

>> most of the landlords [..] at this time were Irish

In that _some_ were born on the island of Ireland? Like the earl of lucan[1] who owned some 63,000 acres - is that what we mean when we go with the 'irish did this to themselves' narrative?

>> they were operating within an economic system were these actions made sense

Words actually fail me. Yes, i suppose it probably did make sense to those who were making money, yes.

>> But governments of the 1840s simply didn't have the scope of action available to a modern government, or the necessary vision of their role to accompany that.

This is ridiculous, The British government spent less than half a percent of the GNP at the time on relief for ireland, Lord Clarendon called it a 'policy of extermination'. The truth is that at best the british government at the time was not concerned by what was happening, at worse they saw it as a catalyst for change to tighten their grip.

I hold absolutely no truck with those that claim the great famine to be a genocide, but this 'ah well, actually if you look closely, you'll find the irish did it to themselves' is even more irksome.

[1] http://www.askaboutireland.ie/reading-room/history-heritage/...
Even though people have been forced into accepting memory bloated turds like Electron apps, they can only be cheaper, not better than native apps.
Or did you mean "responsive" ?
The way I see it, a well-funded and very popular entity tried to bypass Google’s stranglehold (and high taxes) on app distribution. Even they ultimately failed to maintain independent distribution.

They probably invested quite a few engineering hours to devise a solution, as there’s a lot of code / Google services that need to be replicated. It’s unsurprising to me that there were some bugs in this code, and I think generally companies that respond to bug reports and issue patches should be commended.

Where I would disagree is if you are claiming that we should be treating Google Play akin to a low-level cryptographic library in the vein of a “don’t ever roll your own” approach. Allowing independent software distribution is usually considered a positive differentiator for Android. For this to be a viable distribution channel it’s actually extremely important for large and popular entities to be using side loading in order to build recognition and trust in its use. Ideally it results in open-source sideloading frameworks and best practices that the larger community can build upon.
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23219427
Show HN: A minimal blog template using eleventy
That's the most biased opinion imaginable by an astroturf group. There's no information on who they are, but the article currently on their front page is by Toby Young, who is a Spectator/Quillete guy and to be found backing almost all stupid ideas within British politics. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/This-lockdown-may-kill-m...
Deploy and manage Kafka on Kubernetes with a declarative installer
FBI finds al Qaeda link after breaking encryption on Pensacola attacker’s iPhone
The company buying back their stock had to buy it from someone though and that person who sold it is going to pay a tax on any gains from that sale.
China backs fair review of Covid-19