skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They were wiring large amounts of money to people in Oklahoma rather than their own state. That there is no effort put into preventing fraud, which was guaranteed to happen, is down to negligence of the state government. Part of that is on the voters who allocate tax dollars in an idiotic fashion whenever given the chance.
Almost all US states have now eased restrictions and with barely a test and trace program among them (maybe some programs in the Northeast, but where else?).

And if California is truly waiting for testing capacity, they may be waiting a long time because their rate of testing is extremely low compared to places that have opened up. New York has twice the per capita testing as CA and they have already began opening up parts of the state (despite being hit many times harder by the virus). Even NYC is about to hit the criteria for some reopening. Meanwhile, LA announced they would continue their lockdown until August. That sure sounds like they are on a "wait for a vaccine" plan.

The European nations that have eased restrictions have higher per capita testing than most US states. But they do not all have robust test and trace programs. Denmark opened up weeks ago, including many schools, but only last week announced a test and trace program.
> Compilers know it's const

I can still assign to it. Sure, you can argue that if the code is complex enough that you might accidentally do that without it being obvious, then the code should be simplified or split up, but that's besides the point. If its const, the compiler will complain, if its not, it will silently let me. Nobody can write ideally-factored code all of the time and following good consistent practices helps. Also, I hear arguments like that all the time, but so much of actual real-world shipped code breaks these "rules", so I'd rather be pragmatic and choose a style that improves otherwise imperfect code.

Its also as much a hint to future me that the variable is intended to not be modified.
Sure I could have rephrased it along the lines of "you have the invaluable blessing of children, and surely that's more important than a 15% pay rise?".
I wish there was a way to upvote something 10x once a month here. This would be the post I use that on.

When I was writing my book my editor asked me to remove any writing about mistakes and changes I made in the project for each chapter. I had a bug that appeared and I wanted to write about how I determined that and fixed it. They said the reader wants to see an expert talking, as if experts never make mistakes or need to shift from one tact to another.

But, I find I learn the most from explanations that share how your mental model was wrong initially and how you figured it out and how you did it "more right" the next time.

That's really how people build things.
Maybe it's not 100% relevant to your case, and maybe you've already seen it, but just in case:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/02/13/the-iceberg-secret...
RSS seems to me to have use cases far beyond website updates, if it was extended a little.

Event syndication. Say that I'd collect the event feeds from a load of cinemas, music venues I like around the world, why not, plus those of musicians. I want my RSS-based events reader to narrow down the date field to be this weekend, location to be my town, and ticket field to be available, and why not price to something I can afford, while I'm at it? Bam, everything I could dream of doing this weekend, no Facebook and using a slightly modified version of a two-decade-old tech.

Similar functionality for shopping.

Why couldn't RSS be extended to something like this?
For sure, I should have expanded that I only meant to say Hindi is a good gateway for learning Sanskrit today when most Sanskrit is represented most similarly to Hindi. There’s a lot more resources for Hindi than Sanskrit and IMHO it’s the fastest path.

I wasn’t speaking for historical accuracy or commenting on other languages.
Meanwhile banning coffee roasts and pieces of outerwear because they sound vaguely like the name of scary-looking guns.

I feel like there's just so much in the state now, we need mandatory sunset on anything like this.

Review of legislation and rules/regulation should be routine, rather than boutique, and each time we should be called upon to make a positive case for each rule.
So maybe a combination of RSS and Brave?
Ehh... Firefox can open them just fine, as can GIMP, as can (apparently) my OS's image thumbnailer. (Though oddly enough not my OS's image viewer.) Support isn't universal, but it's certainly not a proprietary Chrome format.
You only need a certain level of vaccine effectiveness in order to reach herd immunity and reduce the spread of the virus. Even a 50% effective vaccine might also reduce the overall danger of the coronavirus if you do end up catching it as well.

Frankly speaking, the idea that opening up will somehow fix everything isn't true. People are still going to be afraid to go to public places, and we have multiple examples of cities or areas that decided to open up too early getting slammed by a second wave of infections (See: Hokkaido, Texas).

So yes, in this case it's a 'moving goalposts' situation because our knowledge and way of dealing with the coronavirus evolves over time. That's the entire point of slowly opening up with a viable test infrastructure. If you don't adjust as the situation evolves, then you get hit with a second wave making the lockdown pointless and prolonging the economic effects. Especially if people start suing local businesses when they get sick for not following the guidelines.
In 1936? Sorry, I don’t remember that.
Torpedo them down there
What? Any movie with Dom DeLuise in it is a great movie!
Do you have a moment to talk about our Lord and Saviour, Erlang/OTP?
Health insurance companies will try to kill you for profit.

Anyway, I upvoted your comment because I feel that you're giving good, or at least useful, advice. The fact that is is good advice kinda sucks. But that's not your fault. It's just the way it is.
Few things comes to my mind if you are moving from NodeJS to Deno:

1. Deno lacks the library eco system which is required to build a production level app today. I am not saying it cant be done. Just think of the different third party service integration modern application has to do, their maintainance and testing by individual vendors or open source contributors ! Blogs mentions few DB driver libraries, i highly doubt they are as mature.

2. Deno's security model overly hyped at least i see it this way. In last few version of NodeJS, many security flaws have been addressed, see their changelog if you dont believe me. But most importantly, security flaws with native JS is handled by V8 which is common to both NodeJS and Deno. On top of that, most of the libraries and frameworks in NodeJS during their various releases sorted out many security issues in their code. If someone is still doubtful they can use eslint-plugins for sanity and security checks in their JS files. Adopting Typescript also helps if you cant live without types.

3. Learning curve to adopt new SDK for Socket API, File API, System call API etc. I don't think NodeJS falls short significantly anywhere, in fact it provides more and those APIs have been relatively more battle tested over the years.

4. Irrespective of using NodeJS or Deno, following a BDD/TDD practices to ensure sound test coverage of your business use logic still remain the most promising tool to make, break and refactor your codebase.
Yes. Data is the key. You can’t automate and employ AI without harvesting data. That’s one of the reasons all this is being consolidated. Farmers are too fragmented to act together to generate and provide data that Ag AI/ML needs. There is no need for privacy if the same companies that own and run Everything.

This is what happened with Monsanto. First it was round up and other weedicides. Then they said we will sell you the seeds that is round up ready. And then they convince farmers what to grow and what inputs and fertilizers to buy. And then what to grow and how to much to grow per season. And soon the same investment funds will own the land too.

https://www.farm-equipment.com/articles/14150-consolidation-... : this sums it up. It’s a tad dated and more consolidation has happened since.

[..] The five companies currently seeking to combine their business enterprises — Dow + Dupont, Bayer + Monsanto and Syngenta, which is to be acquired by ChemChina — together would hold a 78% stake in the ag chemicals segment of the industry. It could put them in a position to squeeze out the remaining competition.[..]
A prediction for 1.1 billion years in the future:

> The Sun's luminosity has risen by 10%, causing Earth's surface temperatures to reach an average of c. 320 K (47 °C; 116 °F). The atmosphere will become a "moist greenhouse", resulting in a runaway evaporation of the oceans.[65][70] This would cause plate tectonics to stop completely, if not already stopped before this time.[71]

Would somebody be able to ELI5 the connection the Earth's average temperature and plate tectonics?
i'll concede taleb's math might be better than his writing, but i'm not convinced his reasoning from it is sound. and yes, his fund is likely a hedge in a larger strategy, but one success is hardly indicative of predictive power. we'd need millenia of data to even get a sense of that (note that snake-oil salesmen also rely on not easily falsifiable claims).

> "Fear in ignorance is good if the possibility space you're ignorant of contains catastrophic consequences."

sure, a fear of the unknown is baked into the limbic system, but herein is the crux of our disagreement: what fear is and is not, what's catastrophic and what's not, and the magnitude of "contains" relative to preparation and response.

fear is a cascading physiological process that triggers our fight-or-flight response (lizard brain), causing physical and emotional degradation, and shutting down our rational brains. fear retards our ability to think and act appropriately. unless the threat is something imminently immediate, like an oncoming car, fear can easily overwhelm our response with misjudgment (hoarding, for example).

concern and caution--cousins of fear--are frontal, intellectual processes built atop the limbic. these, along with diversity of thought and appropriate communication, can lead to reasonable responses to non-imminent threats. this is what we should lean into, not fear.

the mistake with covid (and 9/11, etc.) is not recognizing the difference.

covid is trending toward 5% of yearly US deaths. certainly concerning and worthy of serious response, but not civilization destroying. that's the right context to couch our reactions.
Reminds me of this great article on writing a fast mergesort:

http://pvk.ca/Blog/2012/08/13/engineering-a-list-merge-sort/
The classism in this comment is thick enough to cut with a knife but anyway.

Can you not see how the problem here is clearly not with the unemployed folks, but with the fact that they're unable to make a living wage by actually working?
See also from 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10657034
Isn't it the opposite? If LZ4 is optimized for decompression speed as you say, then you would want to use it when you read many times, the same file, very fast.

From a quick read, ZSTD looks more about saving space while keeping reasonable speeds, both at write and read.

And I'd assume there are other algorithms that focus only on size, trading speed for it.
When people don't use extra namespaces and everything is consistent, Atom 1.0 works great. And I understand why namespaces exist, but they create this system where each site speaks its own language and that fundamentally undermines the whole point of RSS as this shared way of communicating.
I am amazed at how well these criminals from another country know the details of the systems in the US when we in the US have probably a handful of people who understand the end-to-end line they do.

I am not surprised this is happening. The small offices in each state are responsible for 100s of millions of dollars and they awfully unequipped for it. This is sort of thing that the federal government should do and provide a portal for each state to use so that they can track and do stuff across states to look for fraud. However i don’t know if states rights and separation of duties screws this up.
> for some f'n reason there is no will

Short of overhauling personal identification in the U.S., I don’t see a simple solution. Making unemployment benefits more tedious to claim is politically risky.
Graph Representation in C++
This is a tragic US centric point of view. From an international point of view there are 2 camps: aggressive and complacent. Aggressive means contact tracing every single case. This is only possible with using all the gold standard tools to reduce virus spread: massive testing, travel restrictions, universal masking, and sanitizing. South Korea has demonstrated that this works fairly well even in a democracy even with few social distancing policies. They only recently closed bars.

The biggest dividing line here seems to be masks. Countries whose leaders initially told them not to wear masks are struggling to achieve universal masking compliance. Most seem to have given up on being aggressive and are now having these debates of complacency.
> banning coffee roasts and pieces of outerwear because they sound vaguely like the name of scary-looking guns.

Huh??? Reference?
Not personally, because I’m not 90 years old.

But you’re right that the original purpose wasn’t identifying people, however it was private banks that really latched onto it as a convenient way to identify people and associate debts to individuals.
I imagine that the submitter, like me, might have heard about it from the link a few days ago in

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/12/studies-on-slack/
My friend's desperately needed unemployment funds are frozen because they were requested using a Romanian IP address. My friend has never been to Romania nor spoofed their IP in such a manner. The New York state unemployment website seemingly allows no recourse for this incident. They are now unemployed and unable to receive any income.
I remember a podcast episode [can't remember or quickly find the make or model] where they discuss, in retrospect, why technology or processes may have been designed as shown and demonstrated in film.

One example was The Circuit in 'Logan's Run'. The Circuit is basically a vending machine for companionship with a Star Trek transporter pattern buffer for storage in the back end; you can dial through your options of who is available [as electronically stored in the machine] and pick who you'd like to spend [presumably intimate] time with before that selected person goes back into storage. The order of the availably-stored people appears random, but is it at least for the first option presented?

The main character [a male] appears interested in opposite-sex company [at least at the time of that scene]. The first person that is offered by The Circuit is male. After an exchange of smirks, the main character continues to dial through several more options.

Presuming that The Circuit somehow knows or guesses the main character's preferences, why offer the complete opposite first?

One possible thought offered by the podcast hosts was that The Circuit has some type of logic akin to the following:

"Out of the next 10 people to walk through that door, you must select one. If you do not select any of those 10 people, you must take the 11th person."

... so by doping, seeding, weighting, priming, spoiling, or throwing the first option with a "definitely not what is being sought after by this user", The Circuit nudges the user [the main character here] into thinking harder on the next few presented options.
I skimmed the Eloquent docs[0] but I couldn't see anything that sets it apart from other ORMs. What makes it special?

[0]: https://laravel.com/docs/7.x/eloquent
If your question is influenced by the apparent popularity of this post, in proportion to it's content, the author is a well known long time contributor to HN.

The likely future content of this blog may have more to do with the signal boosting motivation than the content of this first post.
I wonder what the rate/total volume (or detected volume) of fraud is? How does it compare to baseline levels of fraud? The article says the amount of fraud has kept pace with dramatic increase in claims in Rhode Island. If it's just keeping pace, why are we surprised? Do we even need to worry that much? Is the current situation making it easier to commit fraud? Or is it just generating more volume and noise to hide fraud in?
It seems that 5G dissolved your brain. Don't be a sheep and just consume. Think for yourself buddy.
Contact tracing requires that:

a) You give the contact tracing system a complete and accurate history of your contacts.

b) You actually self-isolate when told you've had contact with an infectious person.

The civil liberties crowd will fight tooth and nail against a such that it is not possible to compel b. In the absence of enforcement, the conspiracy theorists will ignore it and the merely lazy will cheat.

Not even a competent attempt at contact tracing is going to work on the American people.
What would a good liveness and readyness probe do for a rails app? What kind of work and metrics would these 2 endpoints do in my app?
Are there similar predictions but on a short time scale. Like from now until 10,000 AD?

Culture, technology, and geology (and hey, everything else, biology, astronomy..)

I find it hard to try and see what the future may hold, and it seems that is the case since we're at an event horizon of human culture change. Talks of singularity already having come upon us is relevant in terms of predictability to a certain extent, but I kind of feel comfortable to say that humanity will indeed stabilize in at most 5k years, since we're already hitting marginal returns in technology investments. There might be two more singularities that can unlock more unpredictability: AI and biology.
for you. might still apply to others
yeah. My college id number was my social and that was in the 90s. License numbers typically were too.
Lots of the solutions involve something like a national citizen ID program (for an efficient implementation). Done right it fixes tons and tons of problems that cost normal people piles of time and money every year, plus whatever the costs are to businesses and government. But a few political factions—mostly on the right, if you go looking for them, like religious folks who see such IDs as end-times related (yes, seriously), some stripes of libertarian, and the very much real group of people who don't want government to work well—are very against solutions of that sort.
Off-topic, sorry, but could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

You needn't use your real name of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
What's the reasoning for the pushback on track and trace? Concerns about government overreach?
Sounds like issues that can be mitigated with a review system? The land owner can submit ratings on how well the farmer took care of their land. Once it's all on a platform, they can quantify all these things, reducing the farmers down to a set of metrics. Obviously pretty dystopian but this is what I've seen it done on other marketplaces, such as Upwork.
To the contrary, this sort of thing is beneficial to the political class because each side can point to it and blame the other side.

In fact, the worst case scenario for the political class is a well-functioning society with no urgent-seeming problems to be solved because in a situation like that people will start to wonder why we need the political class at all.
I don't want to sound totally econofuturoptimistic, but No, it's not de-skilling in my book. I'd venture robotisation is actually re-skilling or up-skilling. Or in other words: the average education level of the employees after more and more capital flows in, goes up. And automisation / robotisation is nothing new in agriculture. You need a lot less labour, that's true. But that's the trend in agriculture for about 150 years (as far as I understand rice is one of the few crops that's pretty constant in hours per bushel). Modern day large farms are run by a handful of people (and an enormous supply chain on both sides). An example: The Netherlands is a substantial exporter of food, and farming is about 1.5% of GDP. That's astonishing.
thank you for this wonderful rabbit hole into Boltzmann Brains! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain
ParaSail[0] is a parallel language that is being developed by Ada Core Technologies. It evaluates statements and expressions in parallel subject to data dependencies.

The paper ParaSail: A Pointer-Free Pervasively-Parallel Language for Irregular Computations[1] contains the following excerpt.

"This LLVM-targeted compiler back end was written by a summer intern who had not programmed in a parallel programing language before. Nevertheless, as can be seen from the table, executing this ParaSail program using multiple threads, while it did incur CPU scheduling overhead, more than made up for this overhead thanks to the parallelism “naturally” available in the program, producing a two times speed-up when going from single-threaded single core to hyper-threaded dual core."

One anecdote proves nothing but I'm cautiously optimistic that newer languages will make it much easier to write parallel programs.

[0] http://www.parasail-lang.org/

[1] https://programming-journal.org/2019/3/7/
Vanished into Music
You do realize that golang statically compiled binaries contain the go runtime right? So, all the concerns that you mentioned are applicable to go as well, e.g. a golang app may be buggy when built with version X, while another golang app may have GC issue when built with version Y, and yet another golang app would be vulnerable unless rebuilt with version Z. [1][2][3]

Don't drink the Kool-Aid, golang is just a more opinionated and much less capable cousin of Java/JVM. And for many companies, that could be the right trade-off.

[1] https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/golang-announce/mV...

[2] https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/kubernetes-securit...

[3] https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/golang-announce/65...
What is the correct technical term for insects, arachnids and other insect-like organisms?
actually, paying people more in unemployment than they made working is great public health policy for maintaining quarantine, aligning financial incentives with desired behavior. quite shocking that the US government managed to get it done.
For what it's worth, so have I... but unlike you, I recognise Doreen's name immediately (in a positive sense, in case that's in doubt).
The functionality was never polished, and there were some fairly serious technical problems with the implementation due to lack of maintenance, seen often in apparently minor things like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=337897.

I can readily understand why they removed it—it was implemented in what had become the wrong way for such a feature, and fixing it would have taken more effort than they wanted to expend on such a niche feature, and it was starting to hold back other improvements. (Similar deal to why they broke old extensions: they were holding the browser back technically, and a couple of years later I think it was fairly clearly the right decision, painful though it was.)
Looks like it was a mistake: https://nationalpost.com/news/trudeaus-gun-ban-appeared-to-b...